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With a Little Help From My Friends
Chapter 7
By Kinsfire
With a Little Help From My Friends
Chapter 7
The explosion was immediate and intense. Parkinson (I have never called that creature by his first name unless it was unavoidable) shot to his feet and screamed "Outrage!"
Before he could get any further, Harry said in a tone that would have scared me had it been aimed at me, "Show me a rule that states that a seat must be taken by someone other than the one that a seat holder chooses. There are laws against current criminals sitting on the Wizengamot; curtailed rights for those who have been convicted of a major crime but have served their time; and there are laws about the legal age at which a person may take their seat, hence my wife Narcissa taking the Malfoy seat for her son Draco Ananias Malfoy until such point as he is old enough to sit on the Wizengamot himself, which I believe is June of this upcoming year, some eight months away."
"So you now control one in every seven votes of this council," Parkinson said testily.
"Two points. One, I control only my own vote. I chose people whom I am certain that I can trust to vote my other seats. At least this way, they can vote their own consciences on an issue, which might well disagree with my own views. I would hope that they would talk to me first, so that I can understand their views, and they understand mine, but if they truly vote their consciences, they can vote against me with those proxies. If I wanted a block that voted together on all issues, I'd either have kept them all myself, or done like Voldemort did and form his own party. I'd imagine that Riddle doesn't take well to people voting differently than he'd like." My darling stared at Parkinson for a long moment before adding, "Oh, and my second point? Thank you for dropping your complaint about my wife taking the Slytherin seat. By stating that I control one in seven votes, you allowed that it was my right to place whomever I wish in my Wizengamot seats."
Parkinson was vibrating, and others were laughing - at him, much to his annoyance. Angelique's husband was not a Death Eater, to the best of my knowledge, but that did not mean that he did not sympathise with their aims.
"If there is no further business?" Albus Dumbledore asked into the room once the laughter had died. With a bang of amazing finality, the October meeting was closed.
- - -
"He'll not like what happened today," Harry said. "He's going to go after quite a few of his followers before he decides that it's time to come after me." We were in our quarters back at Hogwarts.
"Have you any idea when he might try this?" the Headmaster asked.
"I suspect November, at the next Wizengamot meeting. He'll wish to make a point."
"And you knew this?" Minerva asked, slightly hysterically.
"Actually, yes," Harry said. "I didn't say anything, because the Headmaster likely would have found a reason to prevent my manoeuvring in that arena." He looked to the man. "Do you deny it?"
Albus Dumbledore looked thoughtful for a moment before saying, "In all honesty, I likely would have attempted to convince you to try another course. The recent past shows me, however, that I have made mistakes in judgement where you are concerned. I think that I both mourn and admire that you are taking the fight into your own obviously quite capable hands."
"You support this madness?" McGonagall asked.
"Is it madness?" the Headmaster asked. "After all, he has now created a situation where we have every reason to believe that Voldemort will be at a specific point on a specific day. That gives us a month in which to plan for the battle that will undoubtedly ensue."
"It will be the last one," Harry said. "I don't want to have to kill him, but the reverse is just right out."
"I should think so!" Hermione said hotly. "You have two years of schooling left!"
"I have something far more important than that to keep me alive," he replied with an indulgent smile as he gently brushed a thumb down her cheek, making her blush deeply. He turned to me, and the look in his eyes made me breathless. "I will no longer allow that madman to control my life. It ends now. It ends so that I can enjoy being married to two wonderful women."
We all had rather blurry vision at that point, and the Headmaster was not ashamed to admit it to be so.
The next month was busy for my husband. (I'm sorry, but that is just such a wonderful comment to say for me. Husband. I am finally in a love match after all these years. No matter that he is literally young enough to be my son. If I am a pervert, then so be it.) On top of his school work, he was now training to face Riddle.
A note before I go further. From this point on, I will call him by his name, not his self chosen title. My husband has more of a claim on the title of 'Lord' than Riddle ever did. I may be a pure-blood, but more than anything else, I am a proper Slytherin. I respect ability and ambition above all else in a person, and Riddle is not a person deserving of respect. Fear perhaps, but not respect.
We realised that Riddle had somehow developed a method of loosing his soul from his body. What we needed to do was rebind his soul to his physical body, so that when the body died, the soul would remain housed long enough that it would end up going where it belonged — either to whatever exists after death, or into nothingness. Perhaps he had finally begun the process that would allow for the successful creation of the Horcrux. If so, the knowledge needed to be destroyed.
Let me talk about that for a moment.
The myth of the soul jar known as the Horcrux is just that — a myth. I have studied tomes so ancient that the mere statement of their existence had Hermione teetering on the brink of orgasm. (I believe I stated that I would have been Ravenclaw if not for my ambitions.) If any such research as that required to create a Horcrux had come to fruition, then I would have come across it at some point in my readings.
Harry and Hermione both heard the term and began to giggle uncontrollably, and it took a while before they could explain it to me. They stated that it sounded like the sort of name that a physician in the Muggle world would have come up with. This man wrote books for children, apparently, and that was what set them off. All I could understand of Hermione's comments was a giggled "Horton hears a Horcrux!" which would set her into greater paroxysms of laughter.
Did you know that laughter can be an aphrodisiac for some people? Thankfully, it is for both my mates.
It was in the middle of October that I realised something, and went to speak to Poppy Pomfrey. (I had thought once that Poppy was a nickname, but discovered that it was her given name at birth. Perhaps her parents knew something.)
She ran her wand across me in a standard diagnostic and her eyebrows rose. "I think I am correct in my assumption," I said with a smile.
"So it will be a happy visitor?"
"For me, at least. I suspect that you will know the moment that Harry is made aware as well. We will see about keeping Hermione ... 'inconceivable' ... until she's ready to leave the school." I was smiling as I finished my statement.
Poppy winced at my awful pun, but she was also smiling. "I would imagine that Mr Potter might well get jealous of your child when feeding time arrives, given the meals he was forced to eat during the summertime."
My eyes sparkled. "It did not take much forcing, Poppy. He's male, a teenager, and delightfully heterosexual." I paused. "I'm having a child by a man slightly younger than my own son. And I find that I couldn't be happier."
"Well, it's a child of love, that much is obvious." she sighed. "I would normally be as so many others, and tsk'ing at the fact that a teacher is pregnant by a student. But this is a special and unusual situation." She shook herself and became all business again. With a wave of her wand, a series of pamphlets flew toward us, and she handed them to me. "I rarely need these with the students, but the staff are not subject to the same charms that all the students are." She paused and muttered, "Thank God that Weasley girl chose to remain a virgin until she leaves school. I can already see the beginnings of the Weasley Fertility Curse kicking in, just in the way her figure is forming. She’s affecting girls, for Merlin’s sake!" She shook her head and smiled at me. "Be careful, and I want to see you at least once a month." I thanked her and rather surprisingly received a hug of congratulations from her. "Take good care of our boy," she said with something suspiciously like tears in her voice.
I left the infirmary and headed for lunch, since it was approaching that time, and I was ravenous. As I entered the hall, I was approached by my son. "May I speak with you tonight, Mother?" he asked.
I nodded. "Our quarters at seven."
That night at seven, there was a knock, and Hermione opened the door. "Hello, Draco," she said softly.
He looked at her for a moment and I could see him fighting his father's training. "Good evening, Miss Granger."
She smiled brightly at his response, and I could see that he was struck by what a pretty girl she is when she smiles. He certainly had never been in a position to see that smile before. She stepped aside and led him into the room, and I smiled to myself as he finally let himself look at her as a female, and not through the blood filter his father had installed. He seemed to enjoy the view he was getting.
"You wished to speak to me?" I asked, somewhat amused, forcing him from his contemplation of my wife's absolutely luscious derrière.
Shaking his head, he said, "Um, yes." He bit his lower lip for only a second. "I was ... I thought about what you said to me, and I read the transcripts of the last Wizengamot meeting. I ... I'm loath to admit that I don't know what to think anymore. Even if I ignored everything else, Po ... Har ..." He paused before saying, "I need to get used to it — my stepfather has faced the Dark Lord multiple times and escaped alive. My father was involved in his capture this summer and Potter escaped from the clutches of the Dark Lord yet again. No matter how I look at it, someone that ... Lucius ... states is inferior based purely on the blood running through his system has defeated the Dark Lord on multiple occasions. Har ... my stepfather has every right to the Slytherin seat on the Wizengamot, by combat."
He began to pace. "And if I've been wrong about that sort of thing, what else have I been wrong about?" He turned to Hermione. "I don't ever expect you to forgive the treatment I've given you these years, nor should you with just my word. But I do wish to tender an apology to you, Miss Granger. I was ... I was wrong about many things."
Harry entered the room. I knew he'd been listening. "Well, Draco," he said, "you'll need to live up to your new attitudes, you know. No more calling my wife a mudblood. No terrorising the younger years. No going after Ron unless he starts it."
"Harry!" Hermione admonished.
"Be honest, love. You know he's the brother I never had, but damn me if he's not a bit hard headed when it comes to Slytherin and Gryffindor." She nodded with a frown, and he turned back to Draco. "I'm willing to give you a second chance, with no threats to ensure behaviour or whatnot. But please don't think that I'm going to try to be your father in any way, Draco. You're older than I am by at least a month, and I think that we both would find it more than a little weird."
Draco nodded at Harry and then chuckled a moment later. "I'm sorry," he said. "I was just imagining the looks on people's faces if they saw me asking you for a raise in my allowance." Harry looked startled for a moment, and then began to laugh himself.
"That would freak out a few, wouldn't it? If we do it, I can even promise to give you double what I'm giving you now," he finally said through the end of his laughter. "The Headmaster would, of course, twinkle madly and say something pithy about school unity."
"Well, we'll thimply have to admonish him not to take it out on uth if he'th feeling pithy," Hermione lisped with a straight face, although her eyes held the mirth she was fighting so hard to keep internal.
My son stared at her for a long moment before he fell to the floor — literally — as he laughed uproariously. Hermione was looking quite smug, and Harry looked intrigued. Draco finally started to climb to his feet, and looked for another long moment as he saw Harry's hand out to help him to his feet. Finally, my son grasped the hand firmly and accepted the help.
"You know, things went badly a few years ago when some jerk told you to watch out and to hang out with the right kind of people. You were right — you can make your own friends. I just wish that we could start over again." That statement looked as if it cost Draco more than even he would admit.
Harry looked at him, and I was fairly certain that he saw it as well. "Hi, I'm Harry Potter. I'm pleased to meet you."
"Draco Mal -" He stopped in mid-word and looked to me.
"He is your biological father, Draco," I said. "Keep the name. If nothing else, make it something to be proud of."
He nodded and looked back at Harry. "Draco Malfoy. I hope we can be friends."
"We'll see, but we're off to a good start."
Draco looked slightly startled, as if he'd expected something nasty to happen at the last second, and then smiled. "I suppose that I should get back to my dormitory," he said.
"Wait a moment," I said. "I have something I need to tell Harry, and you should hear it too." Harry looked at me, quite puzzled, and unknowingly mimicked Draco exactly.
I found myself actually a little nervous about what I had to say once it was time to tell them. Amusingly, I was also getting mildly horny, but that would have to wait until Draco was out of the room to deal with. Finally, I spoke.
"I went to see Poppy today. I had noticed something, and wanted her to verify what I suspected."
"You're all right, aren't you?" Harry asked, worry obvious. He stepped closer and took my hands, and I could see the fear in his eyes that I was going to tell him something horrible.
"Yes, we're quite healthy," I replied with a smile. He looked blankly at me. "I noticed that my monthly visitor hadn't visited," I said. "So I went to Poppy, and she verified that you are going to be a father, Harry."
His jaw dropped and his eyes went wide, and a few seconds later he dropped to his knees and hugged my midsection. "Hello, little one," he said, even though we both knew that it was nothing more than a collection of cells at the moment. "It won't be that long before you're out here saying hello to your big brother. I love you already." He kissed my stomach lovingly, which sent a tingle through me that made me decide that Harry was certainly going to be getting further practice on fathering children as soon as Draco was safely out of the room.
I looked to my son and saw wistful tears in his eyes. I developed a suspicion that if his mental sea change continued, there would be a day when Harry would be referred to as a father to more than the baby growing in my womb.
"I'll go and let family celebrate," Draco said softly.
"Then I should be the one to leave," Hermione said. "It's Harry's baby, and it's your mother. I'm just a hanger-on in this."
"You have more of a right to be here than I do," he replied after a moment of indecision.
"She's your mother," Harry said. "She's Hermione's wife. Neither is leaving right now. I think we should have a proper celebration, to be honest."
Draco surprised us all with the next statement. "Isn't that what got her into that condition in the first place?" He managed to keep an utterly straight face as he said it.
Harry blinked at my son for a moment before a particularly undignified snort erupted from him. After some cleansing laughter, we spent an hour just enjoying ourselves before Draco headed on his way.
As we heard him walking down the hallway, I looked to Harry and said, "For some reason, my fear of telling you of my pregnancy affected me in ... other ways as well." I let my robes fall from my shoulders, giving him evidence of my arousal. His contrapuntal response was well appreciated. "Would my husband care to help me deal with this problem?"
He grinned at me, a grin I had grown used to that tended to make me tingle deep within. It was the look of a man who could likely get any woman he wanted. And it was aimed at me. "Got any vital potions being worked on?" he asked.
"None whatsoever. Why?"
"Well, last year, before ... well, all that crap, I found myself fantasising about using the Potion Master's desk as a surface for making love."
"With who?" Hermione asked in a quiet voice.
"Um, for part of it, it was Cho, but a little later on it got to be a certain other female student," he said.
"Who?" she asked, and we were both surprised to see that she was actually serious.
He smiled. "You have three guesses and one clue. The clue is that she's in the room right now."
Hermione looked at him for a moment, and then blushed. "I know that you love me, but ... I still can't believe that you've fantasised about me."
Something tickled my memories, and I thought for a moment. Suddenly, it came to me. "Actually, Hermione, I find that I'm surprised that I was added to the mixture. If he truly had been forced to choose, he would have chosen you. When he was first dropped on me to heal, I heard him murmuring something, and thought he was hallucinating. I thought he had said something about his knee, but he was calling for you." At her confused look, I smiled and said, "He kept saying 'my own knee', dear girl. He was calling your name."
He was now blushing. "I kept thinking that if I could just get in touch with you, you'd help me make everything right. You always have before."
I don't know whether it was the sentiment or my hormones, but such a heartfelt declaration of love toward her caused me to become even more aroused, perhaps because I knew that he meant it, and could just as easily find something equally as heartfelt and beautiful to say to me. I suspect it was the sentiment that drove my sex drive because she was also rather pointedly stating her own arousal without a word being spoken.
I grinned and opened the door to the Potions laboratory, and the three of us entered, completely unashamed of our nudity. Of course we had no worries, considering that I had placed my own locking charms on the door, keyed only to us, when classes were done for the day. My husband was not the only one who had fantasised about sex on the Potions tables.
"I'll bet you never fantasised about having sex with your Potions professor before," I said with a wicked grin.
"Not until this year started," he replied, pulling me into a searing kiss. My skin was aflame, and he only made the situation delightfully worse as he began to rain kisses down my body. Hermione joined his tortuous onslaught, and I faded sweetly into a delirious fog of happiness.
It was quite some time later before I was sated, and once again I was pleased that my husband had the stamina of a teenager, and Hermione was equally as pleased by the fact. I would not honestly have believed that any male could experience four orgasms in decently rapid succession and still be able to satisfy his partners, but he certainly did. I expected that he’d be in pain the next day, however.
I was correct, but he was still grinning madly at the reason for the pain. He continued to learn fighting tactics while Hermione and I took over the library once the students were gone for the night. Harry often joined us, and Hermione had one of her fantasies fulfilled as well. She stressed the limits of the Silencing Charm I cast, which impressed me to no end.
We were getting perilously close to the time for the next Wizengamot meeting when Hermione located a spell that we realised was exactly what we needed. It was designed to prevent Astral scrying, which is done simply by loosing your astral form from your physical body and going to the target and watching. The charm prevented the scrying by preventing the recipient of the spell (whom I shall hereafter refer to as ‘victim’) from loosing his astral form from his body. Since astral projection is effectively loosing your soul from your body while remaining tethered to it, the spell was perfect.
Hermione had no complaints about how she found it, either. She had been standing at one of the posiums, reading, while Harry played one of his usual games of seeing just what it took to distract her. He’d been fondling her breast with his left hand while his right hand made her squirm delightfully when she found it. She’d said that she likely would have ignored it, but the distraction he provided let her mind run with the spell, and she had realised that it was perfect. She celebrated by wrapping her legs around his waist. He was more than happy to help her celebrate.
The amusing thing was that the charm was ridiculously easy to cast. The infuriating thing was that it was ridiculously easy to deflect. We’d all have to be at the meeting and get him distracted before any of us could cast the spell at him.
And one thing I had learned from Lucius was that distracting Riddle was one of the most difficult things possible.
We would have to, however, if I wanted my baby to grow up in a safe world.
Author Notes:
And so the end game begins...