Title: Families of Blood and Families of Choice: A Brief Look at Creating the Back Story of an Unlikely Pairing
Fandom: Harry Potter
Content Notes: Choose Not to Warn
Author Notes: This was begun as just looking at two characters and their ideas of family, and is still mostly that, but it ends with my reasoning behind a pairing that I would generally say wouldn't work without adjustments to both characters involved. It also is very specific to one of my AUs, of which not a great deal is posted to AO3, and what is posted elsewhere is in the process of being edited.

Summary: Two cousins who have different ideas on what makes family, and how those two ideals intersect to pair off two once-enemies - Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy.

For my alternate universe With the Purest Intentions, one of the major elements in my world-building is family. Families of blood, families of choice, and how the two intersect, particularly in the case of the extended Black family.

I began the AU with a single story that has yet to be finished, and is currently being edited. Order of the Phoenix had not quite come out yet, and JK Rowling had not released her version of the Black Family Tree. When Order of the Phoenix came out, I made some minor adjustments to the story, and therefor to the AU, but for the most part, I kept the premise and the plot.

For this, I began three generations before Sirius, and began building connections to the other pure-blood and half-blood families that were already familiar from canon. Most of the names and characters I've since forgotten, but the ones that I remember, and keep writing with and about are an aunt for Sirius named Morrigan Black (no, she's not supposed to be me despite the similarity of name choice. I wouldn't want to be her if you paid me), and an aunt for Remus who is Morrigan's first cousin named Merideth Gray.

Morrigan is the oldest of her siblings, and she is a role model for her niece Bellatrix, though rather a bit more functional than Bellatrix (relative sanity, however, is an interpretation I leave to the reader). She is also very determined that she will pass what she owns through one or another of her nephews - when Regulus dies, she keeps a much closer eye on Sirius, even though she thinks as poorly of him as he does of her. To her, blood-family is everything, beyond politics, beyond law, beyond the morality that society wishes her to conform to. She will go to any length, including the darkest and bloodiest of magic she knows, to ensure that she has family to continue the Black name.

She will also do whatever she thinks is necessary to protect those among her family less able to take care of themselves. When Narcissa is old enough to be married, and choices are being considered, Morrigan is the one who suggests Lucius Malfoy. Both because he is already a supporter of Voldemort, as she is, and because she knows he has a healthy fear of what she will do if he mistreats her niece. Particularly since Narcissa, in this AU, is not mentally stable.

The other example of that is her taking in her cousin Merideth, who has a degenerative disease which effects her magic, her body, and her longevity, and leaves her in need of a constant companion.

Merideth, by contrast, cares less about the blood connection of family, and more for the family of choice, and the affection and love that ties it together. For her, the most important family is the one she's built around her since she was eleven. Her cousin Morrigan, her friends Tom Riddle, Minerva McGonagall, and Henri Merdeux. The younger wizards and witches who were willing to do more than just fight for Tom's cause, like Lucius Malfoy, Severus Snape, and Alice and Frank Longbottom (yes, they're part of the Order, and no, they aren't spies. Someone needs to tell Tom when he's being an idiot and hiring people with bad ideas on how to make life better).

When Hermione becomes entangled in this, Merideth is the first to call her family, despite the worries others have, and despite Hermione's fear and worry and confusion. She is the one who encourages the youngest generation to make connections not just among others who are part of Tom's followers, but to those outside, because a larger family means a greater chance of everyone being taken care of. She is even the one who helps Bellatrix's daughter find a place among those who stand for everything that Bellatrix hates, because for her, family is about helping those you love do what they want to do with their lives even if that means they are on the other side of a political and ideological divide.

Merideth, later, adopts Hermione as her heir - which means, for this world, that Hermione now has the same legal status as any pure-blood, even if socially, she wouldn't be considered such among all circles. And it is both her building of a family of choice and Morrigan's desire to see the continuation of family of blood that brings about the orchestration of Draco and Hermione as a couple, much to the consternation and sometimes horror of the two involved. They hadn't quite adjusted to the idea that the other was a person who might be worth just being not-enemies with before others decided that arranging a marriage was an excellent idea.

That it eventually works out is another essay - or more, it's a story that I will eventually finish editing and then finish writing and post.