26 Chapter - 26 : Schemes Part - 3

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There was an honest pang in there, saying that, as he had been planning out a campaign for netting himself Hermione. Harry honestly considered the girl to be prime future bride material.

He had many reasons for this, ranging from the sentimental, she was the first girl who was truly kind or thoughtful toward him, to the Machiavellian, she was the smartest witch in their year, and as such a tremendous asset.

But, also the proverbial: best friends make the best spouses.

Still, whatever the reasons (and they were many, more than he'd bothered to catalog, really), they hardly mattered anymore, as he had a debt of honor he had to be repaying to Luna for that article - not that he expected to suffer doing it, Luna was almost as nice a catch, and it was still early enough to let Hermione down gently.

"Not yet beloved," Luna giggled, noting and pretending not to note emotions playing out on his face, spelling out his thoughts as though he'd spoken them aloud. He concealed them well, but hadn't had her years of practice. Most wizards tended to rely on magic to shield their minds and forgot about body language. Still, her own plans could get modified in reply. "I can't wait to see the look on Draco's face when he realizes he doesn't have a name."

"What's that mean?" Harry got yanked back to present scheming, out of lost thoughts over defunct plans with Hermione.

"Like I said before," she shrugged, "there are different levels of pureblood. When the marriage is dissolved then Draco looses the Malfoy name, unless you're willing to take him into the Black family then he drops to the lowest rung of the pureblood pecking order."

"So what am I then?" Harry asked. That was something Tom's memories did not address, but had to have been talked over by important people in the proper circles in the meantime. "I thought since I was a half blood that..." he trailed off upon seeing her smile.

"You're different," Luna said with a grin. "You're a wild card, one can insert you into any level without too much difficulty. One must remember that you are not simply Harry Potter, you are also 'the-boy-who-lived' and that is a title that carries quite a bit of weight."

"I see, so where do we start?"

"You're going to need at least one mistress," Luna mused, changing her plans on the fly to improve her chances of staying Harry's bride and not getting pawned off onto Sirius. She could still see the pang in Harry's eye over the loss of his Hermione, and decided not to come between him and that, when it could only cost her in the long run to do so. "I've worked up a short list of possible candidates but the decision is of course yours."

"Why do I need a mistress?" Harry demanded, wondering why Tom hadn't researched this, before an answer came to him: Voldemort had sacrificed his sexual organs as part of one of those rituals to gain immortality - symbolism was important to magic, and by destroying his ability to replace himself in the circle of life during powerful magical rites, he got to extend his own place in it indefinitely, theoretically.

Actually, all he'd gotten was an ageless state that paired nicely with the 'return from death' option from his horcruxes. Neither worked terribly well without the other, as old age was one of the few deaths a horcrux couldn't save you from, a soul having only so much duration for staying 'in life' as it were, and once that time limit was up, when the natural span allotted to a man expired, his horcruxes would ordinarily just die of old age with him.

Being ageless got around that nicely. But it wasn't very good to be immune to the march of years only to get knifed in the back, either.

All of the magical routes to immortality had loopholes like that, it was the reason they didn't have hundreds of dark wizards cluttering up every den and alley. So Tom had doubled up, thinking to get around that by using strengths of one style of dark immortality ritual to cover the weaknesses of his other.

But that was why Tom Riddle hadn't been terribly interested in forming a dynasty - he'd never intended to leave anything to anyone, because he'd never intended to go!

So he'd paid no interest to how to form a proper magical family of his own.

"Social standing," Luna explained, drawing Harry back from his instant of contemplation. "You don't actually have to do anything with her... or him I suppose, but you need to maintain at least one to show that you can afford the expense."

"What about you?"

"It's tolerated so long as I'm discreet and wait until after your heir is born," Luna replied. "It's accepted after your heir has a heir of his own, why do you ask?"

"What?"

"Oh Harry, I wasn't planning to have a boyfriend on the side. You don't have to worry about that."

"Then why do you want me to have a girl on the side?" Harry demanded.

"I told you," Luna sighed in exasperation. "Social standing. You'll look like a saint if you marry poor Loony Lovegood, you'll look like an idiot if you don't have someone on the side to keep you relaxed."

"Why should I care about social standing?" Harry said with what Luna thought to be an adorable pout.

"Because like it or not you are an icon," Luna explained. "If we can provide you as an alternate to Voldemort then I'm sure we can get at least a few of the families to side with you, if we can start a credible rumor that one of Voldemort's grand parents was a muggle or something along those lines then we may be able to lure a few families away from his side. None of that is possible if you don't go through the correct motions."

"Why?" Harry, for all of his memories, still had very little experience, and the rapid flip-flops of topic she was so adept at kept mildly confusing him.

"Because the more people on our side the faster this war will end in our favor," Luna said in exasperation. "The less we have the faster it will end in their favor."

"No," Harry scratched his head innocently, "I mean why should we start a rumor that one of Voldemort's grandparents was a muggle?"

"Because it'll make him less palatable to the purebloods," Luna said slowly. "Would you like me to explain that?"

"Why should we start a rumor if we can prove that one of his parents was a muggle?" Harry asked, in the dawning stages of a plan.

"What?" Luna asked in shock.

"His father was a muggle," Harry repeated. "Didn't you know that?"

"You can prove this?" She asked intently.

"Shouldn't be too difficult," Harry agreed. "He told me so himself, one of those times I was facing him, and he gave me enough information tracking down the rest shouldn't be too hard. Actually, here's a little trick he showed me when we were fighting in the Chamber of Secrets last year."

Using his wand, Harry wrote out the sentence, "I am Lord Voldemort." Then, with a deliberately flashy swish of his wand, had the letters rearrange to the name, "Tom Marvolo Riddle."

He pointed to the still glowing letters. "This is the dark lord's birth name. He and his muggle father share the same first and last names. The only thing he got from his mother's side was a distinctive middle name: Marvolo, after his maternal grandfather, but which pegs his mother as Merope Gaunt, a witch who was known to be mooning after a muggle in town, and frequently berated by her poor but pure father for lusting after a rich but magicless boy whose name happened to be Tom Riddle - also the name of a student who appeared at Hogwarts some eleven years and nine months after Tom Riddle, the muggle, who had confused his parents by running off with the witch, went back to his wealthy family claiming he'd been ensnared. Between Hogwarts student records, muggle social services for the orphanage he grew up at, and town records at Little Hangleton, where his parents lived, we ought to be able to nail down every part of this until it's rock solid. The Dark Lord is a Half-Blood, and son of a muggle."

"Oh..." Luna went cross eyed and she shuddered in pleasure. "Harry, you know just what to say to a girl don't you?"

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