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It could be said that when Messrs. Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy decided to bury the hatchet - figuratively of course, the Wizarding world at large would be unprepared for the chaos and hazards that would occur with their unlikely union. From the moment Draco Malfoy had been born he had been allowed to assume nothing. Lucius Malfoy had seen to that.

The fact that Draco had been so devoid of social discretion as to vomit all over him - in front of his impeccably pure-blooded guests - never mind the blindingly obvious fact that Draco had only been a angelic little darling and at six months old, could hardly be expected to control his bodily functions, Lucius was determined to ensure that his darling son grew up with none of the faults that affected and influenced other humans. He had succeeded.

At seventeen Draco knew little about sex. His early life had been spent under the care of several housekeepers and worldly tutors, and later, at Hogwarts. Since Malfoy Manor was situated in Wiltshire, deep in the English rural countryside, only the most desperate of worldly tutors accepted the situation for long. There were other rigours than the natural. Lucius Malfoy had been extremely intimidating - not surprising - given the fact that he'd been accused of death-eater activities and the succession of tutors who had provided Draco with the most particular of general educations had done so under the strict proviso that muggle authors - especially Ovid - was not to be included among the wizarding classics and that literature was to be dispensed with entirely. Since tutors, and worldly tutors at that, seldom combined knowledge of arithmetic and classic literature, Draco's education proceeded by fits and starts but was sufficiently thorough enough to defeat every attempt by the Ministry of Magic's Department of Education to obtain evidence that Draco's education was deficient.

So, of course, life continued, until Draco reached his seventh year at Hogwarts...when the chaos began...

On the first of September Draco and his father left Malfoy Manor by means of Apparating as a formal means of transport. As Draco clutched his father's arm, he was in a state of high expectation. He supposed his seventh and last year at school would be very eventful. Little did he realise how right he was.

That evening, as the Hogwarts express set off, Draco made his way to a Slytherin carriage dragging his trunk, when he bumped right into none other than Harry Potter. People stared shamelessly. For a moment, stunned by Harry's good looks, he hesitated, then brushed past. Draco Malfoy had not fallen in love at first sight. He had plunged.

And Harry followed suit. One look at the gorgeous young Malfoy and Harry knew he was in love. But if with the couple was love at...well...first sight for the rest of the school year, with Hermione, it was surprise and calculation at the second. Harry's red face and general air of incoherent embarrassment had a profound effect on her, and when, during the journey to Hogwarts he managed to stammer that Malfoy was looking very good this year, Hermione's romantic, matchmaking soul thrilled to the sound.

At seventeen Draco Malfoy was blessed with physical charms well beyond his control and a sexual innocence of mind that was both the fault of his father and the despair of his mother. Lucius had sent Draco to several tutors for instruction in wizard duelling, and the plural was indicative of his father's partial failure to rid Draco of his human faults.

After the first tutor he developed a manic fervour of such pronounced proportions that he decided to become a vigilante. Lucius had removed him precipitately to a less persuasive tutor and for a time, things looked distinctly brighter. Unfortunately, so did the several tutors. Draco's angelic face and sexual innocence of soul had so combined that four tutors fell madly in love with him and Lucius's father, Abraxas, to save their souls, had requested that Draco's disturbing influence be restrained.

Lucius's self-evident argument that he wasn't to blame for his son's attractions and that if anyone ought to be expelled it was the poof tutors cut no ice with Abraxas. And so, Draco continued in ignorance of the facts of sex while acquiring extensive knowledge of those of death. It was left to his bodily functions and his feelings to guide in quite contrary directions in the matter of sex. Imagination played a great part in the love that blossomed between Draco and Harry. Having plunged, they sported like water babies in the lake or frolicked with the giant squid and as each day passed, their passion grew inarticulately. Not inarticulately, but when they spoke during potions their words were matter of fact.

Harry's mind worked practically. To him Draco was an angel of radiant beauty for whom he would lay down, if not his own life, at least that of anything which moved within range of his wand. Hermione followed them to the astronomy tower and found them, whispering together. For a moment she stood and listened. They so seldom spoke in public that she was curious to know what they did say to one another in private. What she heard was both reassuring and disturbing.

"Oh, Draco."
"Oh, Harry."
"You're so wonderful."
"So are you."
"You really do mean that?"
"Of course I do."
"Oh, Harry."
"Oh, Draco."

Under the gleaming moon and the glittering eye of Hermione they clasped one another and Harry tried to think of what to do next. Draco supplied the answer. "Kiss me darling."

"Where?", asked Harry. "Here," said Draco and offered him his lips. "There?" said Harry. "Are you sure?" In the shadows Hermione stiffened. What she had just heard but couldn't see was without doubt nauseating. Either Draco Malfoy was mentally deficient or Harry was sexually more sophisticated, and in Hermione's opinion positively perverse, than she'd ever dreamt. "Isn't it a bit sticky?"

"Oh, darling, you're so romantic," said Draco, "you really are." Lucius wasn't. Having followed his son up to the astronomy tower, he'd listened in shock and disbelief as his beloved son indulged himself in obscene acts with a filthy halfbood. He emerged from the shadows and bore down on them. "That's quite enough of that," he said as they staggered apart. "When you're married you can do whatever you like but no son of mine is going to indulge in obscene acts in the astronomy tower. Besides, someone might see you." Harry and Draco stared at him in amazement. It was Draco who spoke first. "When we're married? You really did say that, Daddy?"

"I said exactly that," said Lucius. "Harry's guardians and I have decided that you should..." he was interrupted by Harry who, with a gesture of chivalry that so endeared him to Draco, knelt at his future father-in-law's feet and reached out towards him. Lucius recoiled abruptly. Harry's posture combined with Draco's recent suggestion was more than he could stomach. "Don't you dare touch me," he growled and backed away. Harry hastened to his feet. "I only meant..." he began but Lucius didn't want to know. "Never mind that now. It's time you both went to bed," he said firmly. "We can discuss arrangements for the wedding in the morning."

"Oh, Daddy..."

"And don't call me /Daddy/," said Lucius. "After what I've just heard I'm not at all sure I am your father." He and Draco left Harry and Hermione standing bemused in the astronomy tower. He was going to get married to the most beautiful boy in the world. For a moment he looked round for a telescope to hurl out the window to announce his happiness but there was nothing. In the end he took out his wand from his robes and blasted off a spell and gave a shout of joyful triumph.

Then he too went back down to Gryffindor tower, oblivious to a stunned Hermione, oblivious of the fact that he had just woken up the entire school to the spectacle of magnificent fireworks and that in the wake of the noise Professor Snape was vowing to murder whoever woke him up from a very good dream. As the whole school went hysterical and the teachers went mad, Harry sat on the edge of his bed reading his future father-in-law's instructions.

At the end of the end of Autumn he was to marry Draco Malfoy, he was to live in Belgravia Manor House, west Oxfordshire, and start work at Malfoy and Partners offices in London. "That's brilliant," he said when he'd finished reading. "I couldn't have wished for anything better."

"I could," said the mirror, yawning. "I've got to spend the rest of the rest year listening to your adulations."

"Shut it!", snapped Harry. "He's my fiancé and I'll talk about him if I want to..."

"Right, don't get yer knickers into a twist," drawled the mirror sleepily.

Next morning, the headmaster, who had spent half the night searching for the culprit that perpetrated the previous night's horrors, was confronted by the apparition of a grim Lucius Malfoy, who made one of the more awful aztec gods look positively amiable.

"Married? You want me to marry off Harry Potter to your son?" said the headmaster when the senior Malfoy had made known his request.

"I want you to conduct the ceremony," said Lucius. "I have neither the desire to marry my son to your Golden Boy, nor you to marry off your...ah... protégé to my son. If truth be told, I don't want my son to marry the damned boy either, but needs must when the devil drives."

The headmaster eyed him uncertainly. Malfoy's language, like his /costume/, argued an unstable state of mind that called for the services of a medi-witch rather than his own. "Are you sure you know your own mind on this matter?" he asked Malfoy, who had further explained that not only was the marriage was to be kept confidential between himself and the headmaster, but any desperate attempt by the Ministry of Magic to prevent the wedding would be futile.

The senior Malfoy bristled. "I know my own mind, sir, rather better than it would appear you know your own duty. As Supreme Mugwump you are empowered by law to conduct marriages and funerals. Is that not so?"

The headmaster conceded that it was, with the private reservation that in the senior Malfoy's case his arrest, subsequent incaceration and hopefully, death in an isolated cell with soft padded walls were likely to follow rather too closely for his own comfort.

"But wouldn't it be better if you were to wait until the boys are older?" he asked. "Teenage romances tend to be very ephemeral affairs in my experience."

"In your experience," said Lucius, "I dare say they do. In mine they don't. By the time you reach four-score years and ten any romance is in the nature of things is bound to be a ephemeral affair."

"I see that," said the headmaster. "And how does Draco feel about the matter?"

"He wants me to make an honest man of him. An impossible task in my opinion but so be it," said Lucius. "That's what he wants and that's what he will get."

Further argument merely resulted in the senior Malfoy losing his temper and the headmaster reluctantly submitting. "If the fool wants the wedding," he told the deputy headmaster later, "then so be it."

And so it was, as the year came to an end, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy became Mr. and Mr. Potter-Malfoy while Lucius Malfoy achieved his long ambition of restraining his son's disturbing influence to the most improbable person imaginable. The headmaster for his part consoled himself with the thought that whatever disadvantages the young Malfoy might display as a wife, James and Lily Potter might turn in their graves but they couldn't get him. As if to emphasize this latter point he refused to attend the wedding reception, and it was left to Harry and Draco to spend their honeymoon chastely wandering in and about the extensive and beautiful gardens surrounding Malfoy Manor and admiring one another's good looks.

When the christmas holidays ended and the start of the rest of the school year appeared like an unwanted ingrown toenail, only their names and their feelings had changed. Mrs Malfoy found herself closeted with her lecherous husband and prey to his hitherto sexual excesses which had previously been reserved for her before Draco's birth and of late, for his imagination. And in a private dormitry Draco and Harry lay in one another's arms as ignorant of any further purpose in their marriage as their singular upbringings had left them. For another seven days the rest of the school and indeed, the rest of the wizarding world acclimatized themselves to the shocking, and quite frankly, titillating news.

~To be continued~