That Swedish Thing

Notes: This is it.


That Swedish Thing

Hermione felt like she was walking to the gallows.


Telling Draco Malfoy he was going to be a father had never factored into her future plans. For one thing, she had never before even considered mentioning her love to him since she assumed he was still planning on letting her go after they proved his innocence.


Adding a baby into the equation changed things exponentially.


But her math couldn’t be wrong. She hadn’t had her cycle in over two months, and she wasn’t exactly sure which time had done the deed. She had already scolded herself for not being more careful but being in this place, with him and away from the rest of the world, had made her forget herself.


The corridors of the forsaken home echoed with her footfalls as she went searching for him, and she found him where he always was these days: sitting behind the desk in the library sifting through the piles of paperwork stacked there on the surface.


Hermione entered the room silently, but his attention was directed elsewhere. He finally glanced up when the door clicked loudly behind her, and the focus he’d previously given the files in his hand shifted to her once he noted her grave expression.


“What’s wrong?” he asked without preamble, knowing her well enough to tell when something was troubling her.


Hermione ran a hand through her tangled curls and harshly expelled a breath as she collapsed in the chair across the desk from him. Having seen the genuine concern in his gray eyes had taken all the strength out of her and it suddenly hit her how very real this was.


They were taunting fate already, especially since she hadn’t left him when he’d given her the opportunity.


“I have something important to tell you,” she said, her words coming out in a rush before she could lose her nerve, “something that could change our entire future, and I’m not sure how you’ll react. I don’t even really know what I -”


“Hermione,” he interrupted her rambling smoothly, “just tell me.”


She lifted her eyes up from her clenched hands in her lap and met those pools of gray head-on. “I’m pregnant.”


For a moment, neither one of them breathed as the words settled into the air and became tangible. It was the first time Hermione had said the words aloud, even to herself.


Draco’s face lost all color until she was sure he was going to faint, but he grasped the edge of the desk with his hands, his knuckles turning stark white, and pulled himself to his feet with great effort.


Hermione made no sudden movements to distract him from processing this startling news, but she could feel a part of her teetering on an edge.


Almost faster than she could blink, he was standing over her, his eyes bright with intent, and she could feel him poking into her consciousness once more, his mind desperately seeking answers. She relaxed, trusting him to not invade her boundaries, and felt him withdraw almost immediately after.


He smiled then, a smile that was half-hungry and half-satisfaction and one she didn’t understand in the least, before turning on his heel and exiting out the door, the sound of apparation soon following.


Hermione felt something inside her shatter as tears started slipping down her cheeks and she crumpled to the library floor, his silence and his departure cutting her to the bone.


She stayed down there for more than an hour, her hands wrapped tightly around her middle, and felt herself beginning to slip off to sleep as her tears dried on her cheeks.


It was how Draco found her when he returned, her head shaking in restless slumber. He knelt and gently woke her, but when brown eyes rested on him, the body on the floor jerked away from him as quickly as it could possibly move.


“What are you doing?” he asked confusedly, his hand patting his coat pocket as one eyebrow lifted in question.


Hermione studied him warily from across the room, not unlike the very first night he had brought her here, and was unsure what to conclude from his expression. “I thought you wanted nothing more to do with me.”


Widened eyes met her statement and she was thrown into uncertainty, which only increased with his next actions.


He crossed the room until they were nearly touching and descended to one knee, his hand drawing out a small square box neatly wrapped in brown paper and embellished with a red bow.


Hermione covered her mouth to stifle the gasp trying to escape, but it was apparent by the soft smile on his face that she’d been unsuccessful. Her hand reached out and took the package from him and gently removed it from its wrapping.


A princess-cut diamond solitaire was revealed to her eyes and she smiled down at him from where she stood, happy tears beginning to dampen the brown.


“I know it’s not much,” he started to explain, “but the Malfoy jewels are still in Ministry custody.”


She pulled the ring from the box and handed it to him, watching in awe as he slipped it onto her finger. “It’s perfect,” she stated decisively.


Draco rose from the floor and gathered her in his arms, dropping a sweet kiss on her brow. “So, you’ll marry me?”


“Yes.”


His hand gripped the back of her head firmly, his fingers tangled tightly in her curls as she pressed her cheek to his shoulder.


“No matter the consequences?” he asked guardedly and she had the funny feeling that he was testing her, but her answer was sure.


“No matter the consequences.”


They had no way of knowing it would be less than a month before they were torn apart by people who wanted to keep them separate forever.


-


“I don’t know where Malfoy is,” Harry answered.


Hermione felt rage tremble through her body as she tried to keep her wand hand steady. “You’re lying,” she retorted, her fury a deadly undercurrent in her voice.


His green eyes hardened as they narrowed with hatred. “We brought him here in custody, but he slipped away before we could get him locked up where he belongs.”


Hermione pressed the wand point harder into his neck as she prepared to execute a particularly painful curse when the answer came to her.


The key.


Draco still had her Ministry key, which meant Harry was telling the truth.


Hermione surveyed her former friend with a loathing she normally reserved for people like Voldemort. She gnashed her teeth together and felt her anger still bubbling under the surface. “I should still kill you, just like you did to my child.”


Harry gazed back at her coldly. “I did what I thought was right. All of it.”


Hermione felt like laughing and crying over that response, but she was still too angry to do either. “That’s always been your own special sin, hasn’t it, Harry? ‘The path to hell is paved with good intentions.’”


Then, the self-righteous savior of the wizarding world pierced her with his green eyes, his seriousness palpable. “He raped you.”


“No, Harry,” she countered, “I let him. Even the first time, I let him.”


The young Auror was speechless at that, and Hermione used the moment to make her way to the door, an inner strength she didn’t know she possessed keeping her going. Before she fully exited the office, she stopped and spoke her parting words over her shoulder.


“Don’t look for me. If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”


Then, she disappeared, and Harry had no doubt she was telling the truth.


-


Over ten years later, Harry entered his office every day and faced the evidence of his guilt.


After that day when she walked out without looking back, he hadn’t seen her in the flesh since because he was certain she would keep her word, but he kept a memory book filled with clippings and such of every time she was mentioned somewhere.


Less than six months after her memories resurfaced, the first article appeared. It was an announcement in the Daily Prophet that Ms. Hermione Granger had become Mrs. Draco Malfoy and was already expecting their first child.


Harry was the only one who knew besides the doctor he’d employed that it’d actually been their second child since he’d kept most of the details from Ron, even now.


So, he’d been one of many in the wizarding world who watched as they grew closer and more in love, year by year, as a nearly perpetual fixture in the society pages.


Just two weeks ago, he’d cut out a new clipping stating the arrival of their fifth child. Harry felt like she was constantly trying to replace the first one, even if she didn’t know it.


It had become an obsession for him over the years. He started his morning every day with the ritual.


Harry would get up in the morning, eat his breakfast, get ready for the day, and then head over to his office. Normally, he got there hours before anybody else, but there were the occasional occurrences where he would bump into somebody who’d been working extra late.


He’d empty out his inbox, and whatever work that needed to be done for the day would be set aside as he set the five publications he subscribed to on his desk and went through them word-by-word, page-by-page.


Some days he would find a large article, or maybe even multiple ones, on the latest happenings of the ever-growing Malfoy clan, and some days there would be nothing at all.


On those days, when there was nothing at all, his eyes would drift to the picture sitting on the corner of his desk. It had been taken during a party after Voldemort’s defeat and the two of them were laughing, Harry’s arm was thrown over her shoulder, and they looked happy. On those days, he would let all the memories wash over him.


He would remember that the sob story Malfoy had used to ensnare Hermione initially had been false.


It had been quite apparent early on that Snape’s story wasn’t consistent with the others, and they soon discovered Bellatrix Lestrange, who they thought had died in the war, had assumed Snape’s identity through use of Polyjuice Potion and had been keeping him captive in his own basement. Maybe their mistake had been keeping the whole affair quiet in returning Snape to his actual self so as not to stir up any more excitement about the war after it was over.


Malfoy had been acquitted then, after Lestrange confessed all under Veritaserum, but no one had seen him since the war until Hermione had gone missing.


Harry would remember the look in Hermione’s eyes when he promised her everything was going to be okay the day they went into the Final Battle. She’d been scared but trying her damnedest not to show it, and Harry had promised himself to tell her everything if he lived. But he’d just kept trying to protect her from the harsh reality of war, even though she’d lived through it.


He would remember Malfoy waltzing into his office while he and Ron were pouring over maps and trying to figure out where Hermione had disappeared to, and had offered to tell them exactly where she was. Harry now knew that Malfoy had felt it was the perfect time to test her loyalties by throwing her back together with her friends, but he sometimes wondered how Malfoy had recalled her memories and how they’d found each other once more after they‘d had her memory wiped.


But, most of all, Harry remembered one memory in particular.


It was the night of the raid on Malfoy Manor. The sky had been so clear, it’d been like black glass with a thousand diamonds embedded in its surface.


He’d been standing in the garden, bodies from the battle scattered around his feet, but he’d only had eyes for the gray-eyed boy standing ten feet away, his form shaking with white-hot wrath, the body of Narcissa Malfoy resting in the great gulf between them.


Harry turned his face away from Hermione’s smiling eyes in the picture on his desk and listened as the Malfoy in his head repeated the same words again that he’d said that night before apparating away.


I’ll find out what you love the most, what you can’t live without, and I’ll make it mine.


No matter the consequences.


Fin

A/N: Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this one and the way it concluded. Please leave me a review if you would. :)