The Mystery Wife

The trip up the eight flights of stairs to the Headmaster's office had to have been the most excruciatingly uncomfortable, silent five minutes or so of Draco Malfoy's eighteen-years-and-climbing existence.

What was he to say, after all, to Severus Snape, his new lady wife? 'Sorry my parents seem to have gone off the deep end' didn't seem to cover it. And as utterly furious as Severus looked, speaking didn't seem like a particularly wonderful survival plan.

The door to the Headmaster's office shut behind them, finally, mercifully, and Severus Silenced it and Warded the living hell out of it. The moving spiral staircase took them upward, and up, and still Severus didn't say anything.

They reached the top of the stairs. Severus stormed into the office, picked a little whirring silver contraption up off the nearest table and hurled it against the wall with a roar. It shattered.

"I'm not sure which of them I want to kill first!" he shouted.

Albus Dumbledore's portrait winced. "And here I had thought to congratulate you both," he said.

A lightning-fast spell sent Dumbledore scurrying for another portrait, as his own was jangling with a Stinging Hex.

"I was free," Severus said softly, dangerously. "Free of you. Free of the Dark Lord. Master of my own fate, finally, for perhaps a month. And now Lucius has trapped me in the Marriage Laws. They are binding, Albus. I cannot undo them, short of killing Draco."

"It was done without our even being there," Draco said quickly. Talking may not have seemed like a good survival strategy, but not pointing that out seemed like even less of one. He didn't fancy dying. "The Marriage Laws can't be binding if they're sworn to by proxy, without our knowledge or consent, can they? Maybe if we were underage, I suppose, but we're bloody well not."

Dumbledore pursed his lips in thought. "On the one hand, unfortunately, the old laws are still on the books, and there is a great deal of power in being the paterfamilias of a pureblood family. Draco is, unfortunately, very much at the mercy of his parents' choice in this matter. On the other hand, Severus, you have been fully and officially pardoned. It would be possible for you to abandon the identity of Sevanna Prince, and return to being Severus Snape."

"I have already made the change, Albus," Severus growled. "A potion of my own invention. A full-on sex change, irreversible save for occasional shots of Polyjuice. And Octavius Prince, my uncle, does indeed have the authority of my paterfamilias. Unless I kill him, of course."

"Severus," Dumbledore said severely, "that is no longer an option, for you."

"Killing you was hard. Killing Octavius, on the other hand, would be easy."

"Precisely why you must not even think of it. No backsliding. You promised."

"What the hell do you propose I do instead? I've been bought and sold as a Malfoy brood mare!"

Dumbledore barked a laugh, and Severus' glare sharpened.

"There are a fair few advantages to the situation, you know," said Dumbledore. "You were going to have to spend the rest of your lives together regardless. You're obviously attracted to one another. You're highly compatible, I suspect. Many another marriage has been arranged with far less chance of future happiness."

"Happiness?" Severus said incredulously. "In what way has our happiness been considered, do you imagine? Draco is eighteen years old, hardly ready to be trapped in a marriage to me! He has just graduated!"

"Younger than he are happy fathers made," Dumbledore misquoted deliberately and cheerfully.

"Thank you, Lady Capulet, and go to Hell while you're at it."

"Actually, I grew up with the expectation that I'd be married right out of school," Draco drawled, rather irritably. "I don't see what my age has to do with this. Any time people want to stop whinging on about my extreme youth is fine with me, thanks very much."

Severus shot him a glare that would have melted lead. "You were surely not expecting to have to marry an old woman, straight out of school. Much less the Bat of the Dungeons." He folded his hands behind him and began to pace restlessly. "Honestly. What can Lucius and Narcissa have been thinking?!"

The change hit him swiftly, his skin bubbling like hot wax and shifting again from male to female, and he/she was so distracted that she barely paused in her pacing to acknowledge the discomfort.

"Wow, she's hacked off," Draco muttered under his breath, then raised his voice. "How bloody old do you think you are, anyway? You're not even forty. And as you are now I doubt you could get anyone to believe you were thirty, if it weren't for that glare. Oh, yes, you look positively decrepit. Potter must have been making those 'Wow' noises out of sheer horror. Shall I get you a cane?"

"You will undoubtedly need to!" Sevanna railed. "You may joke about this, but in a few short years, it won't be funny! When I truly am old, and you are not, and you should have many good years before you, and you're forced to spend them catering to an old woman's whims... and don't you even think I would tolerate your having an affair, no matter how discreet! I would kill you both!"

"Spoken like a woman who does not care for her husband in the least, I am sure," Dumbledore interjected dryly.

"Don't try my patience, old man," she said waspishly. "I saw what fighting and love affairs did to my own parents, and I will not... I cannot..."

Dumbledore cut her off sharply. "Sevanna. Draco is absolutely nothing like your father. And witches and wizards do not age as Muggles do, nor is the difference in your ages nearly as challenging as it would be if you were Muggles. Admit it, you never would have sought out your own happiness unless it was thrust upon you like this. You would have utterly hated anyone Draco married, and you would never have known why. Your families have done you a greater favor than any of you currently imagine."

"Excuse me," Draco drawled loudly, the corner of his mouth curving upwards in spite of everything he could do. "I know all this other stuff is probably hugely important, but I really want that first bit clarified for me. The bit about you killing anyone I had an affair with."

Her eyes narrowed dangerously. "I would," she said in a silken purr. "Just so you know."

Draco's smile got away from him entirely. "Alright. I'm willing to admit being young and male and stupid now. Because I'm sorry, but that's hot."

One of her eyebrows climbed. "Hot?" she repeated incredulously. Dumbledore fell apart laughing, back in his portrait.

"Turn it around for a second and look at it, will you? Imagine that I've just threatened to murder anyone you so much as smile at. Which, in case you were wondering, I will. I hate competition. They'd have to go." He leaned back against the wall, still smiling at her. "Would you really kill me, too, or just drag me home by the scruff of the neck?"

"Oh, there would be equal opportunity killing," she drawled, giving him a sideways glance through long, sooty lashes. "Unless you gave me a particularly compelling reason to forgive you."

In his own portrait, Phineas Nigellus Black guffawed. "Give over, Sevanna. Methinks the lady doth protest too much."

"The boy is utterly delectable, dear heart," said a plump, matronly Headmistress with sharp, knowing eyes. "I'd take him and count my lucky stars, if I were you."

Sevanna shook her head, glancing unwillingly at Draco with an unmistakable warmth of interest. "He is a student," she said stonily, the harsh tone and expression belying the eyes.

"Not anymore," the other woman drawled. "He's fair game, as of today."

"Hell, I gladly would have been poached four years ago," Draco snorted in amusement, although he could feel the blush climbing into his face. "That was my big embarrassment last night, you know. I had to confess to how long I'd been crushing on Professor Snape."

More laughter from the portraits.

"We would simply like to see you happy, Sevanna," said the plump Headmistress. "At long last. Some were born happy, some achieve happiness..."

"And some have happiness thrust upon them," Sevanna finished for her dryly. Her eyes lit on Draco. "I am not going to be your Molly Weasley brood mare, you know. It is a well known fact that I do not like children. And when I say I do not want children, I mean I do not want there to be children."

"Did I ask you to?" Draco demanded, appalled. "Bloody hell, why would I want a Molly Weasley? Maybe they should have checked that with you before they arranged this, if they wanted grandchildren, don't you think? Why you've been screaming about me married to an older woman, when you should be screaming about you shackled for life to a wet-behind-the-ears brat with a pair of interfering, manipulative, dynastically-obsessed parents..."

"I should have seen this coming in Paris," Sevanna muttered, starting to pace again. "Lucius' pointed questions about my fertility as a woman...'hybrid vigor,' my arse, this is so utterly humiliating...I really am going to hex him into the ground for this..."

"No, I am," Draco told her dryly. "I'll take Father. You hex Mother. She got you into this in the first place, didn't she? Not to mention that I can't hex my own mother, and somebody's bloody well getting hexed over this."

"Too bloody right," she agreed. "Several somebodies, including my Uncle Octav..."

An eagle owl tapped at the window, cutting her off in both literal and figurative mid-stride. Draco recognized it as Cicero, one of his father's.

"Oh, this had better be good," Draco growled, and went to open the window. "Not that it'll be good enough, but it might save his life... Give it here, Cicero."

Cicero stayed quite perfectly still while Draco untied the message attached to his leg. Sevanna, in spite of herself, Conjured him owl treats and a bowl of water. She looked positively grim.

"Draco and Sevanna," Draco read aloud, "You will by now have read the Daily Prophet, and the announcement of your marriage. You will no doubt be coming after both me and Octavius Prince with blood in your eyes, and we have therefore saved you the trouble of tracking us down separately. You will find all of us, along with your extremely interesting and incomprehensible brother Richard, at Malfoy Manor."

"They've wrapped Richard up in all o' this fratch?" Sevanna cut him off incredulously, her Rs rolling in her ire. "A hostage, no doubt, to prevent me going in there and simply killing them all outright." Her lips thinned. "What else does he have to say for himself?"

Draco read on. "None of this was done with any ill intent. It is simply the most logical solution to a host of problems, from Draco's need for an heir to Sevanna's need to remain near him. Becoming a Malfoy will legitimize Sevanna as well, securing her legal identity in such a way that it will never be subject to question. It is a good and sensible alliance, one that we are all confident you would not have sought on your own, because you were too busy being noble idiots. We are convinced that your best future happiness lies on this path. Your father, Lucius."

Sevanna barked a laugh with absolutely no mirth to it. "Bloody fucking wonderful. So good of them to have cleared it with us first, and decided our futures for us, as we are apparently too stupid to decide them for ourselves..."

"Apparently," Draco muttered, glaring at the letter so he didn't have to meet her eyes. "His confidence in me is overwhelming, isn't it? My stupidity and incompetence extends to not even being able to attract a wife. Oh, yes, I'm incredibly happy. I'm fucking ecstatic. I'd go show him how much, only he has Richard. Damnit, he can't do that... I like Richard."

She sighed, her eyes softening, not that he saw them.

"I like Richard too," she said. "Funny, that." She reached over and tilted Draco's chin back upward, gently, urging him to look at her. "You would not have had any difficulty in attracting a wife, for the record. And Albus is right; I would have utterly hated whoever you chose, or whoever was chosen for you." She lowered her hand again and glanced away, as if the admission had been too much.

"I can't imagine why," Draco said bluntly. "I'm so much younger than you I probably look like a spoiled five-year-old... I mouth off to you all the bloody time... I'm a whinging coward that wants to throw up every time I have to hurt someone... You can't ever get away from me because my mother talked you into an Unbreakable Vow... Oh, and let's not forget, it's my fault you had to kill Dumbledore and turn yourself into a woman and hide for the rest of your life because the public will never forgive you for it."

"In what way is that your fault, precisely?" she frowned. "Did you want to kill Dumbledore, or did a psychopath attempt to drive you to it by threatening your family? Dumbledore never blamed you for the situation, nor did I."

"I didn't much like Dumbledore, though, either," Draco drawled. "And I didn't want my family dead, but I also didn't want to die myself. Oh, and I didn't want you to steal whatever status and power the bastard might have given me if I managed to do it, which I think I told you. Rudely. I have a really clear memory of that incident. I wish I didn't, but I'm not going to rewrite it to flatter myself."

She snorted softly. "Good," she murmured. "Don't. You were sixteen and stupid. Once upon a time, long, long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I, too, was sixteen and stupid. And even longer ago, when amoebas were first snaking their way up from the primordial seas onto the land, Dumbledore was also sixteen and stupid."

"That is indeed a very long time ago," Dumbledore's portrait noted dryly.

"You deserved that, just for leading the 'Snog Now!' Peanut Gallery in chorus for the past week," Draco told him, equally dryly, without looking away from Sevanna.

"Someday you'll have the sense to thank me, dear boy. And as I do give excellent advice, perhaps you should take me up on it, particularly as you now find yourselves married."

"Usually people finding themselves married do so while they're still in their dress robes in an over-decorated hall! With some sort of memory, however nervousness-or-hangover-fuzzed, of having intended to be there!"

Sevanna pinched the bridge of her nose against an apparently impending migraine. "Lucius, Narcissa, what on earth were you thinking?" She sighed, running her hand through her hair. "I have to get to Malfoy Manor. I am going to hex the living hell out of both of your parents AND my Uncle Octavius, and I am going to get my fool brother out of their clutches."

"We," Draco informed her, his mouth set in an obstinate line. "We're going. We'll come back for our things, as I imagine you'll want more than the next five minutes to say goodbye to this place. I suggest we get Richard out first, and then hex."

"Sadly, yes, and that is undoubtedly precisely why Lucius has him there." She turned, swore and spent fully thirty seconds ranting in her utterly impenetrable Yorkshire dialect, and then she marched to the hearth, which burst obediently into flames at her approach. She threw in a handful of Floo powder as if it had personally offended her.

"Malfoy Manor!" she barked.

The flames went green, with rather more alacrity than usual, as if they were afraid of hacking her off any more than she obviously already was.

She marched into them, too-large robes billowing around her, and Draco followed her into Hell.