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One: The Wedding

The Greengrasses lived in a vast house which was so covered by ivy that it was nearly impossible to make out its regal gray stone. The front of the manor was shaded by a very large willow tree, but behind it there was a rose garden and a lawn of perfectly manicured grass onto which the sun could shine freely.

Today, though, there were unusual additions to the back garden. Several rows of silver dinner chairs were arranged so as to allow an aisle in the middle, which led up to a green archway that appeared to be made solely out of ivy similar to that which covered the house.

At exactly one o'clock that afternoon, guests seemed to arrive out of nowhere: popping into existence in the shade of the front willow and then being led by young men in black dress robes to be seated in the sunny back yard. After about a half hour, when everyone had been shown to their appropriate chairs, five wizards stood up in front of the archway. Four were rather young, and one was very old.

The elderly wizard raised a gnarled hand and, with a wave of his wand, the sound of a full pipe organ emanated almost eerily from the archway. Immediately all of the guests, who had previously been murmuring among themselves, fell silent and turned in their seats to see the first bridesmaid, smiling as she made her way down the aisle.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen of the house there stood a frantic little elf and the remainder of the wedding party, all very nervous. "Go, Pansy!" shrieked the youngest of them irritably, pushing the witch towards the back door.

"I can't go out like this, I-" but she was cut off by another shrill yell as the door was open and she was forced through it, the sash of her rather putrid green dress disappearing just in time so that it did not get caught in the shutting door.

Astoria watched Pansy out the window until she saw her take her place next to the ivy arch, and then quickly stepped out the kitchen door, which her father had opened for her. She clutched her bouquet of roses so tightly that her knuckles were probably whiter than the flowers; in fact, she was thankful that the sun was in her eyes and so she couldn't really see the bridesmaids, minister, and groom's party as she walked toward them.

At the end of her walk she was able to catch the groom's dark eye and smile for just a moment, but as she took her place next to the arch he, and everyone else, had eyes only for her sister.

Admittedly, Daphne did look quite lovely—or at least as lovely as she had always been—as she picked her way on her father's arm to the front of the congregation. Her shiny blond hair was piled very high on top of her head, and her gown was flowing out behind her angelically. Astoria thought that she noticed a certain smug look on her sister's face at all the attention she was receiving. Nonetheless, she felt a rush of affection towards Daphne, who was, at this moment, the only one present who was staring intently at the groom.

Daphne reached her ivy arch, kissed their father, and turned to face the aged minister.

The day was hot and the ceremony droned on: They were gathered on the old Greengrass land… two stately and pure wizarding families were being joined by a union of love… they ought to remember the great examples set by their predecessors, also married here…. After the first twenty minutes or so Astoria's head was swimming in the afternoon heat, her feet ached uncomfortably in her dangerously high heels, and the sun beat down mercilessly on her hair, a few shades darker than her sister's and just barely brown. After ten more minutes, which seemed like several hours, Blaise Zabini was taking Daphne Laurel Greengrass to be his wife, and Daphne Laurel Greengrass was taking Blaise Zabini to be her husband, and they were bonded for life.

It was a relief when Astoria realized that everyone had started applauding politely, and she joined in as heartily as she could as she watched her new brother-in-law kiss her crying, beaming sister. It was even more a relief to her when the guests were told to rise, and their chairs flew away and resituated themselves around many polished oak tables on a stone floor which had been temporarily magicked a few yards away from where she now stood.

The whole arrangement was shaded by a slightly transparent green awning, suspended magically in the air, and Astoria made her way towards the head table, eager to down a glass of pleasantly cool champagne.

However, as she sat at the long rectangular table at the westernmost end of the pavilion she realized she would have to wait even still, for the extremely old wizard was now talking in his wizened voice, introducing the members of the wedding party. She forced herself to stand for a moment and smile as he said, "Astoria Greengrass, sister of the bride and Maid of Honor," but as she sank back into her chair her face receded into its heat-induced stupor. In fact, it wasn't until her plate covered itself in roast beef and her champagne glass had refilled itself not once, but twice, that she finally felt contented, if still very bored.

Her eyes raked the crowd of purebloods catching up with old friends and distant cousins. She was looking for a familiar face, any friend from Hogwarts, but most of the younger guests were from her sister's year, and she had no desire to go back to being Daphne's tagalong younger sister, as she had been known in their days at school. Sighing, she went off among the crowd, talking briefly with a few acquaintances here and there until she felt she had been away from her table long enough to return to it. Once there she struck up a conversation with Tracey Davis, a bridesmaid who was also using the table as a haven, for she was avoiding her apparently clingy boyfriend.

They stayed there until dusk, when all the older guests began apparating away, so that only Daphne's and Blaise's closest school friends were left. Tracey, who was good with a wand, quickly changed the regal music tinkling from the green awning to something channeled from the Wizard Wireless, someone else conjured a bottle of firewhiskey and shot glasses, and everyone raised their voices by more than a few decibels. Deciding that she could be spared the chaos that was about to unfold, Astoria rose from her seat, downed the last of what must have been her fifth or sixth glass of champagne, and found her sister.

"Daphne!" she shouted over the din, and her sister whirled around, smiling giddily. Much of her hair had fallen out of its ornate arrangement, which made her look younger, but no less beautiful. "I'm going to turn in, alright? Congratulations!"

She made to leave, but Pansy Parkinson, who was visibly drunk, seized her arm probably more roughly than she had intended. "Oh, 'Storia! Stay!"

"No, I- I really must be going!" Astoria grabbed the half empty bottle of champagne out of Pansy's hand, and the other girl had seemed about to object before she was pulled away by someone faceless. Or at least, they seemed faceless, for Astoria then realized that her vision was rather blurred around the edges.

Shrugging it off, she tried to make a quick escape, but it was with much hindrance and many calls of "Don't leave us, Baby Greengrass!" that she made her way up towards the house. She was about to stumble in the back door when she realized that if her parents or Poppi the elf saw her with half the bottle of champagne they would surely take it away from her and insist she go to bed. So instead she turned to the rose garden.

She dropped down at the entrance into the garden, so that she was sitting half on the gravel walkway and half on the grass of the lawn, and collected her voluminous green skirts about her. After a moment she remembered why she hadn't gone inside in the first place, and with fumbling fingers tried to uncork the bottle, but soon gave it up for a lost cause. She pulled out her wand and sent the cork flying out so quickly that zoomed several feet away. Frowning, she looked down at the golden light of the party below as she took an impressive swig of champagne.

She stayed that way alone for a long while, or at least, by the time she noticed the pale young man making his way up the hill towards her there were somehow only five or six centimeters of drink left in the bottle. As he came closer she realized two things at almost the same moment: She was slumped sideways onto the bush to her left and was also very, very drunk.

Though she immediately sat up and placed the champagne bottle, which she had been holding rather tightly to herself, down on the stones behind her, the closer he came the more Astoria believed, with a sinking feeling somewhere down inside her, that if by some miracle in the morning she remembered this encounter she would not ever be able to look back on it without cringing.

"Hello," said the vaguely familiar voice of Draco Malfoy, as he dropped down unceremoniously next to her, "How are you?"

"Sleepy." She realized that it was a rather stupid thing to have said just after it had come out of her mouth, and the part of her mind that was still functioning properly was absolutely horrified.

Astoria wondered if his laugh was malicious or not, but decided that she would have her entire lifetime to –hopefully not– embarrassedly recall this scene, so she really ought not to worry about it at the moment. "Why are you here?" This, besides being quite rude, was also a rather stupid thing to have said, and she tried to qualify it by gesturing down at the glow of the party below them and saying, "and not there?" Then she realized that that too was a rather stupid thing to say and resolved to keep her mouth shut.

She wasn't surprised at his silence, and was a little startled when he answered her thoughtfully a few moments later. "This is the last hurrah for us, I think. It's sort of like a last common room party. Soon we'll have outgrown them." He paused for a second. "I think I already have."

Even in her impaired state Astoria knew exactly what might have made Draco Malfoy grow up faster than the rest of the Slytherins in his year, though it thankfully didn't occur to her to say anything about it. "I'm sorry," she said, and, feeling that inadequate, laid her head onto his shoulder. The voice of reason, buried under deep fuzziness in her consciousness, was screaming that it was a highly inappropriate thing to do, but this was just another action she was resigned to balk at for the rest of her life.

She wasn't sure how long they sat in silence, watching the shadows of her sister's friends, a darker green on the pavilions awning. Time was doing funny things, Astoria noticed, though for some reason at that moment she didn't particularly mind.

Finally, she absentmindedly reached for the bottle of champagne behind her and took a long sip, wiping her mouth on her hand and her hand on the skirt of her dress.

"May I?" asked Draco, as he carefully extracted the bottle from her grasp. He took two long swigs from it before placing it on his other side just, Astoria noticed, out of her reach.

There was quiet, broken only by Draco taking another sip from the champagne- and then his sudden laughter. "Good lord, do you remember the pre-Christmas celebration? It must have been my fifth year."

Astoria fought through the champagne induced haziness and found the memory almost immediately. She had been in her third year, and all she knew of the event was that all of her sister's classmates had huddled over a bottle of firewhiskey in a corner, getting louder and louder until they finally began passing out, in bed or elsewhere. Draco, she recalled suddenly, had probably been the drunkest of them all.

She hadn't known him then, in fact, she didn't know him now, but she had always casually admired him from afar. He had been the pinnacle of what a Slytherin should be: pureblood, powerful, and popular. Before that night, she'd always imagined him as very solemn, though after he conjured himself a rather lopsided crown and declared himself King of the Common Room, to much laughter and applause, that image of him had been permanently broken. A sudden thought occurred to her.

"How did you remember it?" She surely wasn't going to remember tonight.

"Oh, I didn't. Crabbe and Goyle filled me in on everything in the morning. Though I think there are some things they missed. They're," he paused for just a fraction of a second and cleared his throat. "Goyle's still slipping me newer and more horrifying details every now and then."

She smiled up at him sadly, "That's terrible," she wasn't exactly sure that she was talking about embarrassing revelations.

"Quite.

"Then again, it's really not, comparatively," he muttered, and Astoria, drunk though she was, was almost sure that it was only to himself. To her horror, she found herself voicing the thought that was exactly the wrong thing to say.

"You didn't really have a choice."

She rolled her eyes up to see his reaction and he was looking down at her. She couldn't read his expression. Was he angry or just shocked? He confused her even further by smiling wryly.

"Everyone has a choice, Astoria," he said, with a hint of irony in his voice. "I mean, nobody forced me to drinkhalf a bottle of Firewhiskey. It was just the thing that was done."

"But what else could you have done?" she asked, squinting at a sudden burst of pain in her forehead.

He thought for a moment. "Stood up for my integrity as a prefect and soon-to-be member of the Inquisitorial Squad and abstained."

Astoria laughed. As the shadows on the canopy below were swimming into each other she tried to collect her thoughts. "If you had done that Goyle would never had let you live it down."

"I'm not going to live it down anyway," he reminded her sadly, just as she felt a horrible lurch somewhere inside her navel. Something hot and acidic burnt just the bottom of her windpipe. The last thing she needed was to make this encounter more awkward by puking all over poor Draco Malfoy.

"Um," she slurred, trying her very best to be coherent through her swimming head, "I think I'm going to go to…" a sudden wave of sickness came over her, and she shut her mouth as quickly as possible. She gagged, but thankfully was able to keep the contents of her stomach, which at this point she suspected consisted mostly of champagne. Why, exactly, had she had the bright idea to get this drunk in the first place? And her bed was so far away, she couldn't imagine walking to the kitchen door, let alone up two flights of stairs to her room.

Ugh, and her new dress was undoubtedly going to get soiled by sick. Daphne would kill her. Of course, it was rather ugly, but it was still her Maid of Honor's dress and her head was absolutely pounding and-

"Astoria?" Draco had spoken, but she didn't trust herself to open her mouth. "Do you think you should go inside?"

She nodded, but didn't move.

Draco fidgeted nervously. "Err… do you need help standing? Or…"

She nodded again and held out her hand so he could pull her up. She felt even more vulnerable than she did embarrassed, if that was even possible. She grabbed onto his arm and stumbled along as he guided her Merlin knew where, making a mental to curse herself later. To her relief, she heard the high pitched squeak of the kitchen door opening, and the even higher pitched squeak of Poppi, undoubtedly reprimanding her.

She slid into a chair. Or was it the floor?

Did it really matter? Her head was splitting as Poppi, the poor thing, squealed, and then Draco said something, and then Poppi, and then Draco, and then the door squeaked open again and slammed shut.

She felt familiar, elfish fingers sliding into hers. "Poppi will bring Miss to bed now," the elf said as soothingly as she could, and then there was a crack, and horrible blackness, and then the comfort of her sheets.

"Miss musn't-" Astoria wasn't at all interested in what she musn't do, and instead allowed herself to fall instantly asleep.