and another thing

“You’re space dust, Darrow,” crowed Mickey, and while he would have liked to have taken offense, Jack Darrow was too narrowly focused on the truth of Mickey’s claim to dwell upon the utter glee it brought him. Later, if Jack could aspire to such lofty concepts as later, he might spare a moment to tend to that casual devastation. Presently, he fired a warning shot past Mickey’s head to stop his swaggering approach. Jack’s back was to the airlock, the access panel just beside him. He had no doubt he could drop Mickey before he got within ten meters of the panel, but he knew Mickey wasn’t alone, at least not really.

Vesta Station hallways were locked up so tight with surveillance, you’d have to take a spacewalk across the asteroid herself to find a solitary place to piss. There was Commonwealth tech, bolted right out in the open to the bulkheads at even intervals throughout the station. Then there were the wartime relics from the time when Mars was free and Vesta was neutral, and every known power in the solar system was watching Ceres and Vesta through their own illicit comms networks and clenching their assholes. Jack wasn’t alive then. Jack’s grandparents weren’t alive then, but the receivers remained in their original working order in the hermetically sealed slums of Vesta Station. There were powerful families, too, who maintained their own networks, and who had the kind of influence required to, say, remotely open an airlock.

The pulse pistol was only good at close range in atmosphere. Any further than twenty or so meters and the pulse dissipated into a non-lethal jolt. Mickey glanced over his shoulder, presumably to watch the pulse crackle and die against the steel wall.

“I don’t wanna kill you,” Jack said, even though he’d already come to terms with the fact that he was probably going to.

“You sure about that, Jackie?” Mickey asked, tilting his head at Jack. “Because from where I’m standing it looks like all you ever want to do is get me killed.”

“That’s not - “ Jack started to say, and then he stopped. The arm propping up his pistol relaxed a little as his eyes shot to the ceiling and he ran through the facts as if counting.

Fact. It was Jack who stirred up trouble back on Mayflower Ganymede. But that was when Jack was just a skinny kid with pimples and Mickey had been a grown ass man, and he should have told Jack there were right people and wrong people to hurt.

Fact. Jack escaped to live it up with the marines while Mickey stayed behind to make amends with Station Security and the gangs. He was ruined after Jack. What little influence he had managed to acquire, as Mickey told it, was ripped from him and he spent the next decade scraping by as a low level toady. Meanwhile Jack was puddle hopping around the system, playing with next gen toys of war and eating Commonwealth food for every meal, often three times a day.

Fact. Mickey was living some semblance of a life when Jack tracked him down after the marines. And Jack fucked that up when he’d fixed his eye. He’d let slip that Mickey loaned him the money for the eye when Mickey himself had debts, and once again Jack found himself leaving the Mayflower Ganymede in a big hurry. This time he did not leave Mickey behind.

Fact. Today, now, after five relatively uneventful years on Vesta Station, Jack was up to his eyeballs in it again. The eldest Barsavi boy was lying in an emergency medical bay three dozen levels above his head at that very moment, out of his mind on sedatives and painkillers, broken. The Barsavis were the wrong people to hurt and Jack had hurt the little crime prince with uncommon thoroughness.

“Well, fine. On some subconscious level, yeah, I probably do want you to die,” Jack said, idly scratching his beard with the muzzle of his pulse pistol. You couldn’t argue with a track record like his. “But I don’t want to fry your noodle right this second, so get out of my way.”

“You know I can’t,” said the old man, shrugging.

Jack knew he couldn’t. They had an audience. If he let Jack escape, he was dead. If he tried to take Jack down, he was dead.

“Come with me?” Jack asked.

“You know I can’t,” Mickey said again, wistful now. Jack knew it was a ridiculous suggestion before he said it. Mickey was too old, and he was spaceborn. There was no gene therapy for Mickey. There was no gene therapy for most of the kids who grew up in the Mayflower Ganymede reactor chamber. They grew old and brittle so much faster than the giants who were raised on the surfaces of the planets. Spaceborn died as young men and women. Jack couldn’t deny this reality because he used to share in it. He’d said it because he felt like he was supposed to, a gentlemanly bit of ceremony between old friends. He’d said it because he wanted Mickey’s permission to kill him in cold blood, and now he had it.

“Yeah, I do,” said Jack on a regretful little sigh. He leveled the pistol at Mickey and put a pulse blast directly between his eyes. Mickey was brain dead before he hit the floor, falling with exaggerated slowness in the station’s low gravity. Airlock warning chimes began gently ringing in the hallway and Jack flashed a mirthless smile at the camera in the corner before sprinting down the corridor and through the slowly closing hatch door.

"Þú lítr út eins og fífl."

"In the common tongue, if you please, kind sir," Prince Roen said.

"I said you look like an idiot," Brynjar said again.

"If I may," Roen said.

"If I may, you look like an idiot, kind sir," Brynjar repeated a third time.

Prince Roen straightened from his ludicrously deep bow. His dark hair nearly brushed the canopy of the command tent when he chose not to slouch. Roen was brushing up on polite words and Brynjar was supposedly helping him somehow by observing and insulting. Roen allowed it because they were alone in the tent and he personally agreed that the polite words were idiotic.

"My esteemed opponent," Roen said slowly, syllables running together a bit awkwardly in his foreign accent. "Please do me the honor of meeting me in mortal combat."

"Don't say please," Brynjar said with disgust. He was better with the language than Roen. "It's begging. It's ..." He gestured at the air like it should drop the correct word into his palm, but nothing came. "Grátbiðja," he finally said.

Roen looked aghast and that was how the men found their fearsome prince, mouth slightly agape and staring at his little half brother. They looked nothing alike. Brynjar was blonde and slight and pale and Roen took more after their father and king. He was fighting stock -- broad and muscled, deeply scarred from battle and marked with tattoos commemorating his victories. He was the son of a concubine, as were all his brothers, but he had been elevated to prince through his own achievements in battle. Brynjar was weak and smart and Roen protected him in exchange for his wisdom and his company.

The men who came into the tent were Roen's captains. They were influential men at home and they were all old and predictable. He needed their swords and spears but he did not care for their company. The captains all looked after their own small forces which, when combined with Roen's own retinue, composed the prince's invading army. The captains spent the majority of their time spinning their prince's whims into logistical reality. There were only three present, but there were nine in all.

"Please is begging," Roen said to the three captains.

"Only sometimes," said the eldest of the captains. He was silver haired and his face was deeply lined. "Sometimes it means other things."

"Like what?"

"It is difficult to explain in the common tongue," said the captain apologetically.

"Very well, in Gardic."

After the captain finished explaining the seemingly endless uses and connotations of the word, Roen was more horrified than he'd been at the start. His dark blue eyes were even wider with outrage. "I have said this word many times."

"Yes, Your Highness."

It was plain to Roen, based upon the blank stares the captains (and Brynjar) were all carefully adopting, that no one would be taking responsibility for letting their prince amble through the camp casually begging his men for food and drink, or to accept his food at drink, or to move out of his way. Begging. It inspired him to fury, but then so did everything in the unbearable heat of a southern continent summer. It'd been winter when they landed on these foreign shores months ago and they blissfully sacked town after town through winter and into late spring. Now it was late summer, they were far from the cold sea and it was miserably hot. Roen couldn't bear to wear his furs in it. No one could, but it meant that men walked around without the signs of their station draped across their shoulders. This led to misunderstandings, which led to deadly brawls. Roen himself had to thrash a man who treated him rudely because he didn't recognize the prince without his signature white bear cloak. He understood the man was still recovering with the physicians.

"Why have you not said this before?"

Brynjar shrugged. "I only just found out, myself."

"I only just found out, myself," Roen mimicked. Brynjar didn't even speak with an accent. He sounded like a spoiled southern noble. He made pretty music with his words. He had obviously known and been anticipating telling Roen during a moment just like this one. He was a troublesome brat like any other baby brother, thinking himself exempt from the prince's wrath on account of being so dear to him. He was mostly right, but every now and again Roen needed to restore balance.

He crossed the command tent in two steps and backhanded Brynjar across the mouth. He'd seen it coming after Roen took the first step and by the second he had set his jaw to prevent any unfortunate tongue biting incidents. He took his punishment without flinching. Roen had taught him that when they were both younger, when Brynjar still lived with his other half siblings in the enclave. He'd been undersized and clever then, too, and it didn't sit well with Roen that he would likely die at the hands of one of their larger brothers or sisters.

These years later, Roen understood what a fool he'd been. Brynjar didn't need anyone's help to do exactly as Brynjar pleased. When he was just a baby princeling and lavishing his care upon his baby brother, Roen had fancied himself a generous old sage bestowing charity upon a disadvantaged youth. He now strongly suspected that Brynjar had targeted Roen as an ally who was strong enough to thrive but not ruthless or smart enough to actually do it. Together the two men made a single, unstoppable royal. Roen had the title and the glory and Brynjar had whatever Brynjar wanted, which tended toward books and solitude and a rare tumble with a pretty captured maiden.

That left Roen to the business of managing a campaign of war. This wasn't his first, but it was by far the grandest. The king intended to take the entire nation and hold it. He'd raised an army larger than Roen had thought possible, given their starting numbers. Stormgard was an island of ice and rock in the far north. They had no agriculture to speak of, no trade partnerships. They were a people who lived at the edge of survival; they relied upon fishing and raiding for their livelihood. It shouldn't have been possible to amass such numbers for their invasion. Clearly not all of them were even from Stormgard. It had to have cost a fortune that the king did not have.

Brynjar gingerly touched his mouth and tried not to smile at Roen. He was still proud of his prank and obviously felt it was well worth the bruise, but he knew better than to grin in open defiance in front of the captains. He would only weaken Roen's standing if he did that, and the whole point of Roen was his strength. That strength had grown to more than just his physicality. Roen was known to be fair. He often set aside his ego in order to deal rationally with lesser men. He forgave insults when they were properly addressed instead of holding grudges. He generally trusted men to act as men and they generally made their best effort to rise to his expectations.

If he hadn't struck Brynjar, he'd have heard about it later. From Brynjar.

"There is a prisoner who is asking to see you," said the silver haired captain.

"I am not in the mood to speak," Roen said dismissively. It was true. He wasn't in the mood. Sometimes he was, and then he would go with his captains to the great hall.

The great hall wasn't especially great, but it was one of the few wooden structures in the war camp. It had been erected first. They had now been stopped for months on the king's orders while Roen's uncle made preparations to the northeast. As tended to happen when men were left idle too long, the camp had grown into a community with buildings and friendships and feuds. Roen's responsibility was to manage the camp and hold the ground they'd gained in winter. It was laughably easy; these soft southern people had barely put up any resistance at all and there was more than enough food and drink to make his army as fat as the southerners if he wanted.

"You will be," another captain said with a toothy smile. Ulf.

Roen very much doubted that. He had more southern gold than he knew how to spend, thanks to the tributes he'd collected along the campaign. At the end of the war Roen would take what lands he was owed and actually wanted, which he anticipated to be minimal. And the southern women were weepy, sniffling, frail things who wailed for mercy when he claimed them as spoils of war. He loathed crying. The prisoners could have nothing of interest to him.

"I will not be," Roen said confidently, but Brynjar stepped in to convince him.

"We may as well go," his little brother said. "It's nearly dinner."

"It's nearly dinner," Roen repeated. He liked the musicality of that phrase. "Very well. Ple -- " Roen stopped and scowled. "Lead the way, kind sir," he said.

Brynjar laughed as they all exited the tent and headed to the great hall. "You don't have to say 'kind sir' every time, either," he said, smiling.

Draco Malfoy apparated into Flourish and Blotts with a soft pop and found it rather more crowded than he’d expected for a week night so near closing time, particularly with the spitting wet snow outside. He learned while waiting to pay that there had been a reading by some local herbology luminary, with wine and some sort of honeyed confections whose scent still lingered in the air. It was an astonishingly well attended event considering Draco had never heard of said luminary and in fact managed to forget their name before he completed his purchase. It was evidently winding down and the guests put on their winter layers and ambled toward the front door just as Draco was preparing to leave, himself. They flowed toward the exit without bothering to finish their conversations, so that as they walked they said long, slow goodbyes and moved in great awkward cluster of three and four and the exodus predictably bottlenecked near the front. The departing witches and wizards so thoroughly gummed the works that Draco found himself unable to disapparate due to the risk of splinching an innocent bystander whose elbow was pressed firmly into his hip. He allowed himself to be jostled out the door with the others, where they dispersed in all directions, leaving Draco feeling faintly violated and in need of a shower.

On the street Draco noticed that the smell of honey was not, in fact, emanating from the bookshop. It was stronger now, outside on the street, and it wasn’t honey at all. It was less cloying than that, but still sweet and perhaps faintly floral. Forgetting himself momentarily, Draco stood scenting the air while fat feathery snowflakes smacked wetly against his hair, his mother’s book forgotten under his arm.

The bookshop door jangled and a few stragglers left down the street and Draco breathed deep, wondering at the familiarity of the aroma. It seemed to stir in him some latent memory that wouldn’t quite surface and he felt compelled to chase it down and tease it free, remember its secrets. It was a good smell, he thought with that other distant part of him, who rarely thought in terms more complicated than good and bad and mine. He might have remained there transfixed for several minutes more if not for the next moment, when a last departing witch stepped out of Flourish and Blott’s and brushed past him and he knew immediately that it was her who smelled like that, like she needed him.

Draco swayed dangerously on his feet and only became aware he’d reached out for the witch when he closed his hands around empty air, thank Merlin, and she breezed on by without a single glance in Draco’s direction, like she had no idea he was there. It was obscene, an omega out in public during her heat, but that’s what she was. He’d never met an omega in the flesh and yet he was certain of this fact, the way his father had told him it might be if he were ever so lucky as to encounter one. Draco knew, his body knew that the young woman disappearing down the darkened street was for him, that she would fit around him like a custom fit and she would be lucky, no, grateful to be looked after by him.

As much as he physically ached to chase after the omega, as prettily as her pheromones sang to Draco, his gut still twisted with revulsion. For himself, for his consistently black fucking luck. Of course, it would be Hermione fucking Granger who, without sparing him a single thought, left Draco wrecked and aching in the middle of Diagon Alley. She couldn’t have been anyone else, he thought bitterly. Anyone other than the girl he’d chosen to torment through 6th year, who he’d allowed to be tortured, for fuck’s sake. Anyone else and he’d have called after her, introduced himself, charmed and cajoled and name dropped his way into a date. But that wouldn’t work on Granger; she knew him too well. She saw him for the sniveling little shit he used to be, not the man he was trying to grow into. She’d take one look at him and laugh, as if he’d be the idiotic one, chasing after an unmated omega, out all alone after dark in her fucking heat.

Draco realized with faint, distant horror that he was, in fact, chasing after an unmated omega out all alone after dark in her fucking heat. He hadn’t willed it, but his feet no longer seemed to require his permission to glide along stealthily behind Granger, his rational mind tucked away someplace safe while he was tugged along by her gravity. She wasn’t for him, of course she wasn’t, but could he really be expected to let her walk away from him smelling like she did? He imagined peeling back her winter layers to see if she looked as good as she smelled and felt a primal sense of yes reverberate down his spine. Fuck, he wanted her, but he thought he could also content himself on just this, skulking in her wake until she was somewhere with a door and a deadbolt and no alphas in scenting range. He could be fine just knowing no one else was having her, he thought, even if he wasn’t.

He went on like this much longer than he intended to, considering he hadn’t meant to follow her at all. He listened to her block heels hammering the pavement, wondering how she could stand it, how she could possibly not know her heat was upon her, but surely Granger couldn’t possibly know. She’d never be this stupid, would she? He could laugh. He could burst into hysterics. He was losing his mind. He could have a taste - a small one.

He was snapped back from the brink of madness quite suddenly by a shift in the wind. There was fear suddenly, mixed with the offensive musk of another alpha. Ahead, Granger’s small form darted right into an alleyway and a larger, faster form followed after her. Draco broke into a sweat and launched into a sprint after them, his vision skewing red at the edges, instantly enraged.

“They’re doing it out of spite,” Lucius snapped. “They’re doing it to *punish* us for the past, as if this prison isn’t doing a perfectly adequate job.” He paced behind his bars, eyes wild. It was Sunday, which meant Draco went with Narcissa when she visited his father in Azkaban.

The two un-incarcerated Malfoys watched the tantrum unfold with their customary deferential silence, but in truth the ritual had lost a little something of its potency with its chief performer behind bars, wandless and in desperate need of a spa day. Well, at least Draco felt that way. A sidelong glance at his mother indicated she was, in fact, affected. She twisted her hands in her lap, she pressed her mouth into a flat line and she generally exhibited all the hallmarks of an appropriately vexed and sympathetic wife. Draco drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair and managed not to sneer.

Nothing was being done to his father. Nor his mother, for that matter. It was being done to him, Draco, as usual. Honestly, it was a poor reflection upon his powers of perception that he ever harbored any optimism for his future in the first place. It was different for his father, he thought, who had a frame of reference with which to torment himself. Lucius had known prestige and power and autonomy for almost his entire life and the loss of them was ruinous. He was a shadow of the cold, collected predator he once was. He hardly had any dignity left in him.

Meanwhile Draco, the actual aggrieved party, had surrendered to the Sisyphean absurdity that was his life and resolved himself to face it with all the good humor he could muster. Admittedly, it wasn’t fucking much. But at least he wasn’t this.

“Do you have something to *say*?” Lucius asked him sharply, with poorly restrained venom.

Well, perhaps Draco wasn’t managing the sneering as well as he thought he was.

“It’s done, we lost,” he said. He didn’t look his father in the eyes, but that was for his mother’s benefit. It made her sick when they bickered, so he tried not to. “It’s three days away; time to start orienting yourself to the new order of things.”

“You’ll sire pureblood children outside of the marriage,” Lucius said.

Draco grimaced and looked up. His father was actually insane. Even if it were true and he could, and even if Draco himself had considered that same vulgar solution. Watching his father plotting to stud him out from the confines of his lifetime imprisonment for dark magical sedition was more than he could stomach. He swiveled his entire head over to his mother and looked at her expectantly, but she said nothing. *Nothing*.

“I’m afraid that’s all the time we have today,” Draco said, standing. “Father. Heartwarming, as always. Mother.” Draco held a hand to her and after a bit of performative hesitation - he even managed not to roll his eyes - she stood and took it and they portkeyed home with his signet ring, charmed with special dispensation from the Wizengamot for these exact visits. He still wasn’t sure how his mother had swung it, which probably meant she’d asked Potter for help. She liked to hide that they were friendly now, as if Draco were the fragile one in the family. The ring was terribly convenient, in any case, and a clever way for his mother to ensure that he kept wearing it, at least on Sundays.

“Draco, dear,” Narcissa said when they were in the manor drawing room an instant later, but he raised a hand to silence her.

“It’s done. We’re getting married, assuming she doesn’t hex me first, which is ... not at all guaranteed. But just stop, please, and let me get to it. There’s lots to decide.”

And for once, his mother left him to sulk in peace.

It had started out as a joke, at least to Draco. He hadn’t even been in England when the news began to circulate about a new piece of legislation concerning the fertility of witches and the security of the future of wizarding kind or some such. Before it was formally introduced, it was barely a footnote in the French papers. His mother brought it up on multiple different Sunday visits and Draco laughed about it, because it was absurd and at the time he was still warmly ensconced in his denial against his destiny as a tragic figure.

Draco finally got around to reading the fine print of the Magical Heritage Preservation and Marriage Act after it was signed into law and he received an owl summoning him to his compatibility testing session. After he read the law, he didn’t laugh about it again, at least not until days later, when he was at the Ministry and they asked him in their polite, sterile way to use his wand to cast the Patronus Charm. He laughed then, darkly. He’d have rather swallowed his own tongue than admit to the test administrators that he couldn’t, but there was no avoiding it.

There was a frenzy of correspondence for a while when all his old school mates started getting matched, until Draco received his results. After that he didn’t feel like writing much anymore. In his initial shock he’d done something unthinkably stupid and told his mother, which escalated rather quickly into telling his father, and then to an appeal, and then an attempted and failed injunction. Draco went along with it all. Of course, he did. Marriage to Hermione Granger. It didn’t even bear consideration; it was absurd for every reason.

Every measure and countermeasure that Lucius could contrive had failed, and a full three months after the rest of his mates had already matched up and fucked off to commence with the marital bliss, Draco had finally reached the end of the plank he walked. He was determined to now meet his fate like a man, insofar as he could do anything like a man after throwing the legal equivalent of a hissy fit over the past several weeks.

He dressed that Wednesday in his trademark black-on-black, more appropriately styled for a muggle funeral than a magical wedding. He let his mother accompany him to the Ministry building, but when she tried to go in with him he argued with her until he was out of patience and snappish and she finally left. He came in through the visitor’s entrance and made as if to sit down to wait, but he was immediately handed a card and swept into a lift that lurched and climbed to speed. Draco had the sense of traveling a very long way in a very short time, then found himself deposited into a nondescript hallway of nondescript doors behind which were nondescript conference rooms. He went to the conference room listed on his card and found it empty, but he was a bit early, after all. He helped himself to the seat at the head of the long, rectangular table and settled in to wait for his bride to be.
 
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