This story is a humble gift for Vess, who wrote a winning review for my tale Hermione's Proposition. The prompt she gave me was one I never thought I'd write: the dreaded, oft-written, dazzling, terrifying Marriage Law Challenge! Her only restrictions on the law passed were that it be a mixed marriage law put in place to ensure more magical babies for England. I know there are several variants, whether it be that Voldemort's still in power or it's post-war, or that Snape is a pureblood. There are probably hundreds of MLC fics out there (with dozens of great ones, some terrible ones, and a few really excellent ones which are among the finest SS/HG you'll ever read), which makes writing one a daunting task.

With this in mind, there's really no point in my writing a traditional MLC fic along the lines of the epic MLC fics already out there. I won't come up with anything better. Instead, I have two goals here - to find a new approach to the MLC and to weave a good yarn. Frankly, I'm terrified writing one of these, but I hope this offering meets both goals. So... We're off! I'll warn you all now that updates here will be sporadic until I finish posting Hermione's Proposition.

Disclaimer: What you recognize belongs to Ms. Rowling. I own nothing, make nothing, and intend no copyright infringement.

Chapter 1: In Which Charlie Has His Doubts

Charlie Weasley was a happily unmarried man.

If you were to ask his mother, she would be quick to tell you how her poor boy simply hadn't met the right girl yet, how he was too focussed on his work on the dragon reserve, and that if he would just meet Lulu Rowle's niece during his next visit home, he would move back in a heartbeat and begin populating Somerset with half a dozen redheaded ragamuffins of his own. Somerset or Avon. She wasn't picky. He could even set up his house in Gloucestershire if he so desired, but Staffordshire or Cheshire were simply too far north, even by Floo.

If you were to ask the man himself, he would tell you a different story. He wasn't missing out on anything, doing what he loved in a place that made him excited to get out of bed every morning. His mum could take her nosy intentions and keep them to herself. She could also forget about the kingdom of grandchildren she was already anticipating. During one trip home—before Bill was even married, mind you—Charlie had stumbled upon a stash of knitted baby blankets, booties, and caps tucked away in a storage closet during a stay at the Burrow. There had to be something wrong with that kind of behavior.

Surrounded by lush, overgrown forests in the Carpathian mountains, the dragon reserve had been Charlie's home for about a decade. It was the perfect location to raise and train wild things: laced with deep valleys and rumbling rivers and Transylvanian plateaus, remote and quiet, it was his slice own of heaven. He'd moved to Romania right out of Hogwarts, and he'd never looked back. Oh, he returned for holidays at least once or twice a year, and he always showed up if his family really needed him, but he had no intentions of moving back to England for good.

His last trip back had been particularly eventful. He had heard rumblings of Voldemort's return, of course. Ron couldn't keep a secret during his younger years at Hogwarts, so Charlie had already heard about mazes and chess games and basilisks. Eventually his whole family had thrown themselves in the line of fire. It had almost killed him when he couldn't return to visit his dad in St. Mungo's after that snake attack, so when they called him to join the reinforcements at the final battle at Hogwarts, he caught an illegal Portkey to London in under fifteen minutes and did whatever needed to be done. He'd stayed about a week after Fred's funeral, mostly washing dishes and clearing gnomes from the garden. It made his mum so happy to have another son around. When she made it through her third complete day without bursting into tears at the mere sight of George, Charlie packed his bags and arranged for travel back to Romania.

After his time away, Charlie had been welcomed back by the other dragon trainers.

There were always around two dozen or so working and living there. Maybe half were Romanian, and most of the others were from other places in Europe. Jozef, Peter, and Jana were from Slovakia, while Vuk was Croatian and Stanislau was Belarusian. Jean Luc grew up in Paris, and didn't let anyone forget it, while Anna Rita had come to them from Lisbon. Their ages ranged wildly from eighteen-year-old Ileana to 113-year-old Antonin, and they made a strange family of their own. He considered himself an brother by proxy to Ileana, a girl about Ginny's age who was trying to learn English by stealing his newspapers and cornering him to practice. Her English was probably better than his.

Since he was the only Brit, his contribution to the festivities on the reserve came in the form of a cracking bonfire and some of his brothers' fireworks every fifth of November. Mariana and Sergui, who did most of the cookery for the trainers, always swapped out the stuffed cabbage rolls for shepherd's pie that night.

Some days, he forgot he was English. It was glaringly obvious that he didn't fit in at first. He fuddled his way through the foreign language like a duck climbing mountains. Now, his Romanian was so good that he caught himself dreaming in it.

If anything reminded him of his heritage, it was letters from his family, his subscription to the Daily Prophet, and the rigamarole he went through every five years in order to renew his Romanian long-term resident permit. But not in that order. Thankfully, he had 4 years and 2 months left on this one, so it would be awhile before he had to fill out the patruzeci și șapte de pagini (forty-seven fucking pages) and wait in line for weeks for the Ministry's seal of approval. During that time period, the Romanian Ministry liked to remind its non-citizens of it's ability to kick them out on their arse on a whim by putting restraints on their magic while decisions were made. If he didn't adore the country itself so much—the land and the people and the dragons held there—he would have found another place to live and work.

When he returned after Fred's funeral, he explained the unfolding of the events to his friends. They hadn't known if they would ever see him again, since the Daily Prophet had stopped production temporarily, leaving the Romanian papers to get creative in their storytelling. Half his fellow trainers thought he'd have died in the brutality of the battle, and the other half were convinced that he hadn't ever made it to England at all. So he took the evening and traced out the rise and fall of Voldemort over dinner and tzuika, savoring the sweet plum liquor as he proudly shared his family's role in the war.

Charlie knew that it hadn't really been his war to fight. He hadn't been involved for decades as his parents had, or participated in the Order like Bill and Fred and George. He certainly hadn't gone on the run with Harry like Ron had. So while he had wanted to do his part, he felt a kind of disconnect to the country he'd grown up in. He was glad to be back to work.

Now everything just needed to return to normal.

One morning in late July, Ileana began reading stories aloud from Charlie's newspaper.

"Your people are dying?" she asked him, eyes wide as saucers over her breakfast plate.

"What?" he asked. "That can't be right." He snatched the Prophet from her hands and read the headline: Purebloods in Danger.

Sure enough, the article went on to describe how the Pureblood families had risked their own magical abilities by only selecting other Purebloods to tie the knot with. With that level of intermarriage, there simply wasn't enough genetic diversity. There were too many shared limbs on those family trees when there were only twenty-eight families that were acceptable to choose from. Without intervention, the number of Squibs being produced would catapult beyond the number of magical children, and in less than a dozen generations, Wizarding Britain as they knew it would be no more. Scientists and arithmancers alike had confirmed the results. The article ended on a mysterious note, saying that the topic was in the hands of the Wizengamot now.

Charlie frowned. What did that mean? How could the Wizengamot do anything to stop ponces like the Malfoys from breeding themselves into extinction?

He wasn't worried about his own brothers and sister. Bill had married outside of the country and Fleur was part-Veela, so he was safe. Percy would be more likely to marry a girl for her family's status at the Ministry than her blood status, George didn't have a discriminatory bone in his body, and Ron had seemed pretty cozy with a certain Muggle-born witch at the Burrow. Everyone knew Ginny was going to marry Harry someday, and Charlie thought his baby sister would probably be ready to take that step when she turned thirty. Or thirty-five. Or forty.

As for himself? A confirmed bachelor. Charlie wasn't ever going to marry. Not unless he found a girl who liked the smell of dragon dung, didn't mind the long hours, and let him do most of the cooking. He wouldn't complain if she were also strong enough to fell a tree and energetic enough to help him dislocate things in bed.

He handed the paper back to Ileana. "No, that's just political speculation."

"What does that mean?" she asked. "Speculation?"

He grinned, reaching over to ruffle her black curls. "It means you don't have to worry about me, Ileana. I'll be fine."

Over the next few weeks, more stories about the Wizengamot's proposals came out for public scrutiny.

One such option was property tax breaks for intermarried couples, with a Pureblood and a Muggle-born spouse. Another was financial credits for the children of intermarried couples to attend Hogwarts at no cost. Those were reasonable measures, Charlie thought, to encourage citizens to make the choices they preferred without forcing anybody's hand.

He wasn't terribly sure they would work, though. With the notable exception of his family, most of the Pureblooded families in England were wealthy enough not to care about any financial incentives at all.

A proposed set of restrictive laws came out next. These would ban marriages between anyone who shared a great-great-grandparent or closer relation.

After that came the most extreme measure he had ever heard of—a law to ensure more magical babies by demanding that everyone of age that could have children be married and start procreating immediately. There were time limits bandied about as well, whether the law was to go into effect in one year or three, whether the first child needed to arrive within four years or five.

Charlie laughed as Ileana read that one aloud. He tried to reassure her that it would never pass.

"But what if they take you away from us," she cried, tears streaming down her face, "and we never get to see you again?"

"Nah," he said, keeping his response cool and detached. "They'll pass a handful of those tax-break laws. They will never pass a marriage law that makes people start a family. I mean, they've been through a lot there in the last year. No Ministry would ever force people to marry against their will. That's barbaric."

"But what if they do?" she asked.

"They won't."

"But what—"

He clapped a calloused hand over her mouth. "Ileana, slow down. They won't do that. But if they do, my permit is still good here for another four years. That gives me time to apply for political asylum here."

She nodded.

He let go of her mouth and playfully elbowed her in the ribs. "You should be happy. Maybe then I'll finally become Romanian, huh?"

They went on with breakfast as usual, and headed out into the fields with the others to tag a pregnant Hornback. Charlie tried to shrug off his conversation with Ileana, but then thought of everything the Ministry had pulled in the last decade: the establishment of the Muggle-born Commission, allowing the infiltration of Voldemort's supporters, the Minister trying to bribe Harry into a public relations position.

They wouldn't, he thought. Would they?

NEXT CHAPTER: In Which Hermione Declares Her Intentions

"If that's your choice," Hermione continued, "I will always love and support you."

"But Hermione," Ron said, "you need to—"

"No, Ronald," she said, interrupting him before he said anything else. "I don't need to do anything. I am never, ever getting married."