reynardo | In which I ficced again.

I was given the prompt for the SSHG Giftfest of

1 - Severus and Hermione are colleagues/friends. A Marriage Law is passed and they are quickly married off - to other people! (Lovely people! Nothing wrong with these people!) The new circumstances cause SS and HG to realize that they love each other. Solve that, I dare ya!

2 - People with horrible hair need to have each other's backs.

This, combined with

No Hermione using a brush on her hair

led to a lot of musing. The hair thing was cool - both

lederhosen and I have long hair, and one has to be very careful brushing it. I quite understood that someone with curly hair would hate having it brushed.

But how to work this?

Luckily it was NaNoWriMo time, so I was geared up for the long write. I've been devouring US politics lately (popcorn at hand), so mixing in some of the ghastliest ideas to give the story a slight horror bend seemed natural. And I've been writing a bit about arranged marriages where the couple quite liked each other and were prepared to make the best of it. Of course, I had to marry Hermione off to someone rather dashing and good-looking. I made a slight error with Severus's partner, though. Years ago I researched as many names as I could find in Harry Potterdom for a fic called It Only Gets Worse, so I reached back into that one and grabbed someone I thought I'd found in the dim distant past of Severus's teaching career. It was only much later that I googled the name and discovered that no, this was one I had made up. Oh well :-)

So I had the partners, the motive (the attempted takeover of British Wizarding Politics by those rather conservative control freaks of the US wizarding world), and the reason why the Marriage Law was instigated so easily (it was helped through by Draco for his own nefarious purposes).

And how to break them all up at the end?

Through honesty.

Each couple knew they liked each other. It just wasn't ... special. And because Heathcote and Hermione had always been open and honest with each other, they could break up and still remain close friends.

It's a little slower than some of my others, and rather wordy, but I felt it had enough meat to make a meal of.

For MyWitch, with my very very best regards. Untangling.