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Chapter Text

Harry stared at his reflection, brow furrowed, the glasses partially concealing his stare. He had always worn frames much like his father's, but lately he felt the urge for something new. Something that matched the shape his life had taken.
He’d chosen a pair with sharp, rectangular lenses and a slender silver frame.
Life hadn’t left him untouched. He was no longer the wiry boy of his youth.
He had grown stronger. More grounded. But also, more scarred.

The lightning-shaped scar on his forehead was no longer the only thing he carried with him.
It was proof that they could hurt him, but also that he could heal. He had never known anything but survival. There was no room for complaining, no space for hesitation or fear. The kind of courage that belonged to a true Gryffindor.

His time at Number 4 Privet Drive was nothing short of absurd. Who spends their childhood in a cupboard under the stairs? He did. And the strangest part was, he thought it was normal at the time. Because how can you long for something different, when you’ve never known anything else?
He had spent years believing his parents had died in a car crash. Just a stroke of bad luck. He’d long accepted the quiet simplicity of his path.
That changed the day Hagrid stood before him and said, “You’re a wizard, Harry.”
For a moment, life shifted. The darkness, though heavy, was no match for the flood of light that poured in from every crack, overwhelming the shadows with its fierce clarity.
With Hermione and Ron by his side, he felt invincible. And he was. Voldemort was no longer a threat and the magical world was free.
Happily ever after. It sounded like a promise. But to Harry, it felt more like a story meant for someone else.

He had been living for nine years in the old house that once belonged to his late godfather, Sirius. After those few months at The Burrow, surrounded by warmth and noise and ginger-haired chaos, he stayed just long enough to taste what could have been.
But now, he needed to retreat.
He needed space.
Silence.
He had to relearn how to feel.
His house, Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, was hidden between two Muggle homes.
Invisible to everyone. Muggles, and even most wizards. Here, he could be invisible too.
Inside, the place was still a wreck, but thanks to Mrs. Weasley, it was livable.
She had placed cleaning charms in every room, so the house maintained itself.

Hermione had given him a few plants “to make it feel more like home.”
They now sat on the windowsill. One of them seemed to thrive. The others gave the impression they were, like him, waiting for better days.

The talking portraits, endlessly ranting about how the house had lost its honor and shaming him for taking residence, had been banished to the attic.
He didn’t know what else to do with them. Did one just toss magical portraits into the rubbish bin?
He'd once heard that burning them could have unpleasant consequences. There might still be a fragment of a soul clinging to the canvas.

What remained was a bare, cold house with only the essentials. He had left the kitchen as it was: heavy oak cupboards and a grey stone countertop.
There was a table with twelve chairs, marked by life: rings from mugs, deep scratches and dull smudges. Harry saw no reason to change it. He always sat in the same place, at the head of the table, wondering whether the emptiness would ever be filled.
Thank Merlin he was alone, he thought. At first, Kreacher had still been there. But the grouchy old house-elf, with his hunched back and shriveled face, had left once house-elf rights had changed and they were free to come and go as they pleased.

Harry had once tried to charm the massive, imposing chairs in the living room to mold themselves to whoever sat in them, while offering a soft, cloud-like massage.The result had been… mixed.
At first, it had gone terribly wrong. The moment he sat down, the chair collapsed entirely.
The “massage” felt more like the time he and Ron crash-landed Mr. Weasley's flying car into the Whomping Willow. Thankfully, the chairs were heavenly now.

The rest of the living room was hardly worth mentioning. His bedroom wasn’t much better: just a bed, a wardrobe, and not much else. Once, that wardrobe had housed a boggart, long gone now. But Harry remembered it well.
It had transformed into a lifeless Ron and Hermione, collapsed at his feet. He could repel it easily now, of course. Fear, like everything else, had evolved.
These days, his life was made up of work. The thrill and peril of being an Auror filled the void the war had left behind. It was the only path that made sense. And the only one that numbed the noise.
Thank Merlin for the job. Without it, he might’ve drowned in Firewhisky and what-ifs.
Before the Auror department took him in, the line between coping and collapsing had been razor-thin.
Ginny, meanwhile, had taken a job behind the bar at the Three Broomsticks. War had sharpened her, more than growing up in a house full of brothers ever could. He’d watched her shut down drunk wizards with a single flick of her wand and a glare that brooked no argument. She owned the room.
And yet, when the music kicked in, she laughed like she hadn’t seen a battlefield. She danced between tables, flirted shamelessly, made outrageous bets with the regulars. She thrived in chaos.The Firewhisky poured, the bar roared, and for a while, life felt loud and alive. Just... not for him. Not anymore.

She was too much, sometimes. Too bright, too present, too alive.
Once, they'd seemed inevitable. Now, they were ‘friends’. And that was fine.
She didn’t lack admirers. And he didn’t begrudge her any of them.
He got attention, too. More than he wanted.

He turned the faucet, splashed cold water onto his face, and dried it on the edge of his shirt. Then he pulled it over his head, followed by his trousers, leaving them where they fell.
The corridor was dark. His bare feet moved silently across the floorboards. He glanced at the faded silhouettes where portraits once hung. Ghosts of frames long gone, but somehow still watching.
His bedroom door creaked as it opened.
Astra sat by the window and let out a soft “oooee.”
After Hedwig, Hagrid had taken him back to Diagon Alley. Just like years ago, he had bought Harry a new owl.
Astra was different. She had white feathers speckled with gold. She had proven her loyalty time and time again and possessed the rare ability to vanish in flight.
She made little noise, but her presence grounded him. Harry often felt like she saw everything he missed. She would appear without warning during missions, as if she were keeping watch.

His bed was cold. But the blankets were warm and thick. He had money, rewards for his service. But he spent it sparingly.
The blankets were the only real luxury he had allowed himself. Imported from a discreet, wandwoven atelier in the Alps.
Spun from enchanted moon-silk and thestral fleece. Materials harvested only under specific magical conditions. The blankets adjusted to the body’s temperature without the need for spells. They were weighty, grounding, but never stifling. The threads hummed faintly with charmwork, designed to calm frayed nerves and ease the tension of minds too used to danger.

The next morning, the alarm rang precisely at six. His shift would begin in an hour.
He showered quickly, the water just hot enough to wake him up, then brushed his teeth.
He stepped into the Floo, emerging in the sleek Auror offices. He passed through the corridors toward the briefing room. His partner was already there and gave him a nod.
For years now, Nora Blackwell had been his Auror partner. Female Aurors were rare, but if more were like her, Harry wouldn't have minded working with an entire department full of them.
She was fearless, sharp as a curse mid-air, and one of the few people he truly trusted in a fight. Or in silence.
Her husband stayed home with their daughter and adored her openly. The kind of love that wasn’t loud, but steady. Harry saw the joy that radiated from them like warmth from a hearth.
That, he thought, is what life should feel like.

The Head Auror looked tense. This wasn’t routine. This was real. Finally, some action.
He began, ‘Strange things are happening…It’s as if something, or someone, is testing the edges of our world, searching for a way back in.’

Chapter Text

The library of Malfoy Manor breathed with ancient enchantments. Its towering shelves, carved from deep ebony, held not just books, but the weight of generations. Volumes that hummed faintly with magic, their spines bound in dragonhide, basilisk scale, or whispered secrets. Every text had a presence, as if aware it was being watched.

Tucked into a recessed alcove beneath an arched window sat the reading nook. A rare softness in an otherwise imposing room. Velvet cushions in deep green and midnight blue lined the curved bench built into the stone wall, charmed to adjust for comfort and warmth. A low table stood at its center, its legs claw-footed and carved with serpentine detail, surrounded by a semi-circle of tufted armchairs in matching tones. The space was just large enough for a close group to sit with drinks.

Heavy curtains framed the alcove, enchanted to close at a gesture and block both sound and sight when privacy was needed. A discreet tea set hovered nearby, perpetually warm, and a single enchanted fireplace flickered quietly in the corner, casting golden light across the polished floor.
On one far wall, a glass cabinet displayed cursed objects behind layers of protective spells. Subtle, almost invisible, until one tried to reach through them.

It was a room built for power, for silence, and for secrets. And it suited Draco perfectly.
"Are you sure Pansy’s even open to your offer?" Theo asked, skeptical.
"It’s a miracle she still wants anything to do with you after the way you treated her at Hogwarts. Honestly, I would’ve expected her to hex you, not greet you with a smile."
Draco raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. "Pansy knew exactly what she was doing when she showed up unannounced at the prefects’ bath. She used me just as much as I used her."
He paused, the corner of his mouth twitching in dry amusement. "Besides, I pay her a ridiculous amount of money."

They didn’t see him as a villain anymore. Not truly. Not with his mother’s name clearing the path before him like a shield of roses. Narcissa Malfoy the savior in silk.
Let them whisper about redemption and second chances. It made everything easier. People trusted what they wanted to believe. And Draco had always been exceptionally good at giving them just enough to believe in.
"‘So... what time is she coming to try her luck with me?’ Blaise asked with a crooked smile as he leaned back. Draco smoothly slid his wand out of his pocket, twirled it once between his fingers, and muttered, ‘Accio Firewhiskey,’ rolling his eyes.

Theo spread his arms and slowly turned to Draco. “He knows what she’s like, and yet he’s considering it. Fascinating,” he said, his voice dripping with mock awe. Then, with a dramatic sigh, he clasped his hands over his heart like a wounded actor on stage.
“Love truly is the darkest form of self-sabotage. But by all means, do proceed. I live for the tragedy.”

The flames in the Floo began to curl upwards, the green fire growing brighter and more vivid. Pansy stepped forward with a fierce poise, brushing off some Floo powder from her refined skirt suit that radiated classic elegance and modern sophistication. The tailored blazer hit just at the hips, cinched slightly at the waist to gracefully emphasize her silhouette. The fabric, a rich, deep midnight-blue wool-silk blend, had a subtle sheen that caught the light gently with every movement.
The matching skirt fell just above the knee. A discreet slit at the back provided ease of movement while maintaining the outfit's polished charm.
The entire ensemble whispered of taste, confidence, and timeless class. An outfit that never shouted, but instead spoke in quiet, compelling tones of poise and presence.
The click of her high heels echoed on the characteristic wooden floor of the manor.

"Long time no see. Missed me?" She said haughtily.

“Pansy, darling. The prodigal queen graces us at last.” Theo said with a flourish, dipping into an exaggerated bow. “What was the delay? ”Let me guess, making sure the web was perfectly spun, for your next victim?"
He rose with a lopsided grin, eyes glittering with playful disdain. “Or were you simply waiting for the precise moment to remind us all how woefully plain we look in your presence?”

Pansy’s lips curled into a slow, deliberate smile as she stepped closer, heels clicking like punctuation on polished stone. “Oh, Theo,” she said sweetly, her tone dripping with mock affection. “You know I’d never waste time on something as delicate as a web.”
She leaned in, eyes cool and gleaming. “I prefer chains. They’re so much harder to slip out of.”

Theo let out a low chuckle, unfazed. “Chains, is it? Merlin, Pans, remind me never to fall into your good graces. Sounds hazardous.”
Draco sighed. “Remind me why I tolerate any of you.”
Pansy smirked. “Because without us, you'd be left alone. And we both know how much you hate silence.”
Blaise raised his glass lazily. “To chains, webs, and our ever-patient Malfoy.”
The glasses clinked softly, and the mischief simmered on.

In Draco’s eyes, the amusement faded, replaced by a flicker of something sharper, Serious, grounded. “Thanks for coming, Pans. I know your time isn’t exactly cheap. But I need more than your games this time. I need protection.”

He didn’t say from what. He didn’t have to.

Blaise cut him off with a lazy grin, adding, “We all know Malfoy can’t resist his little side projects. Especially the illegal ones tucked away in the Shrieking Shack. It’s practically nostalgic.”
He swirled the drink in his hand like it was all a joke, though his eyes missed nothing.

"You’re still caught up in nonsense. Even with the Dark Lord long gone," Pansy said softly, a hint of something like disappointment tugging at her words. “You just can’t stay away, can you?”
“Once a bad boy, always a bad boy, Pans,” Theo chimed in with a sly grin. “He needs the thrill. Has to remind the world he’s still three steps ahead.”

Draco didn’t smile. “It’s not about the thrill,” he said, voice low.
“The shadows that once lingered in the Shack never bothered me.
“But now… something’s shifted. There’s intent behind them. Hunger. Some even wandered into Hogsmeade the other night, frightened a group of students.” A wry flicker crossed his face. “I’ll admit, it was mildly entertaining.”
Then the smile vanished. “But I can’t have them acting on their own. I need to keep them in line. Control, Theo... is everything. Fear is a tool. until it forgets whose hand is holding it.” 

Draco tapped his fingers against the windowsill, watching the gray sky press low over the Manor grounds. I’ve let them grow too bold. That was the mistake. Power should never forget who summoned it.

Pansy looked him straight in the eye, gaze sharp and unwavering, as though peeling back the layers he so carefully kept intact. She stepped closer.
“I’ll help you,” she said softly, but with an edge that left no room for negotiation. “But on one condition.”
She held his gaze, leaving no space for evasion.
“You tell me everything you know. No half-truths. If I don’t have all the information, the protection I weave into your clothing won’t hold. You’d be nothing more than a mannequin in bespoke armor. And that’s not nearly enough.”

Draco’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t look away. After a pause, he gave a slow nod. “Fine.”

Pansy turned with a practiced grace, her wand steady in her hand. With a swift flick, a measuring tape shimmered into existence, its edges glinting with fine silver thread. It circled Draco methodically, taking exact measurements. Shoulders, chest, waist, sleeve length. Each number briefly appearing in glowing script before fading into the air.

”Tell me I’m not the only one who finds terrifying competence wildly attractive” Blaise let his gaze linger a beat longer on Pansy, then scoffed under his breath. “And to think she goes home to Longbottom. The universe really does have a sick sense of humor.”
Theo looked up slowly, a lazy smile tugging at his lips.
“Oh please,” he said, closing his book with a soft thud. “Neville Longbottom is a walking paradox. Sweet as honey, deadly as mandrake root, and somehow managing to make cardigan sweaters look like battle armor.”
Then, to Blaise with a wink: ‘’Face it, she picked the man who knows exactly where to touch to make things bloom.”

The tape measure zipped past Draco’s collarbone, and Pansy didn’t even glance at them.

“She can hear you, you know,” Draco muttered, dry as ever.
“Of course she can.’’ Blaise said. ‘’She’s Pansy. She hears compliments before you think of them.”

Pansy, still measuring, didn’t miss a beat.“If you two are quite done,” she said coolly, “perhaps the grown-ups can get back to work.”

The tape measure tightened briefly around Draco’s shoulders before snapping back. She scribbled a few notes into a floating notebook that recorded itself in neat, flickering script.

“You’ve filled out since Hogwarts,” she said, almost absently. “Broader shoulders. More muscle. But it’s your aura that’s truly different. Heavier, denser. That means I’ll need lighter materials. Something that moves with your intent rather than drags against it. Moonthread fabric, maybe. And runic embroidery along the seams. Subtle. Efficient.”
She glanced up at him then, eyes sharp.
“Black, I assume?”
Draco arched a brow, a faint smirk tugging at his lips.
“Always.”
Pansy gave the faintest smirk. “Then I’ll see what I can source. But again, one lie, Draco, and I’ll let your own shadows consume you. Understood?”
“Perfectly,” Draco said dryly. “I do cherish our friendship.”

Chapter Text

Finally, a new mystery, Harry thought.

The students who claimed to have seen the shadows spoke in hushed, uneven tones, as if the memory itself clung to their throats.
The shadows didn’t move like shadows should. They glided. Not across surfaces, but through the air itself. Stretching unnaturally, their forms too fluid, too deliberate. There was magic clinging to them. Old, restless, and wrong. The kind that made the air crackle and the wards of Hogsmeade shudder like they’d been touched by something they weren’t meant to contain.
One girl said the world hadn’t just gone quiet. It had gone hollow. As if the air itself had forgotten how to carry sound. Everything around her felt distant, muffled, like she was underwater or sealed behind glass. Even her own heartbeat sounded wrong.
Another boy described how the light began to twist. Lanterns cast double shadows, and shapes stretched in impossible directions. His reflection in a shop window didn’t move when he did, it just stared back. A coldness crept into his bones. Not a chill from the wind, but something deeper. Older. And then came the feeling.That primal certainty of being watched. Not by a person, not by something living, but by something that remembered what it was like to hunt.
One student claimed to have seen it clearly: a shape, long and sharp-edged, almost demonic, creeping closer with each heartbeat.
Then, just as it was nearly upon them, the shadows slipped away. Dissolving into the alleyways, leaving behind only the echo of their presence… and a bitter chill that clung to the air long after they were gone.

Harry leaned back in his chair, the report still open on his desk. Shadows didn’t just appear. Not like that. Not near children. And not in Hogsmeade.
His fingers tapped restlessly against the parchment. This wasn’t the wind playing tricks or overactive teenage imaginations. He knew fear when he heard it. He stood, slowly, eyes narrowing toward the window. Something had returned. Or something new had arrived. And either way, he was going to find it.

Nora was at her desk when Harry walked in, boots casually propped on a stack of case files. She was flipping through a report with one hand, the other wrapped around a half-empty mug of coffee.
“Let me guess,” she said without looking up. “You couldn’t leave it alone.”
Harry dropped the file onto her desk with a quiet thud. “Hogsmeade. Three sixth-years. Shadows moving on their own. Tall, angular, deliberate. That wasn’t an accident, it was a warning.”

She leaned forward, frowning. “So, not just shadows.”

“Not just shadows,” Harry echoed. “Something’s moving with purpose. And it wants us to notice.”

Nora tapped her pen against the folder. “We’ve heard whispers. energy spikes north of the Forbidden Forest. Odd readings near the Shrieking Shack, too.”

“Exactly,” Harry replied. “Whatever this is, it’s testing boundaries. Ours, and theirs.”

She studied him for a moment. “So we dig?”
He nodded.
Nora stood, grabbing her wand and coat in one smooth motion. “Good. I was getting bored.”

The night was sharp and still as they stepped out into the cobbled streets of Hogsmeade. Fog clung low to the ground, swirling around their boots as they moved in step. Silent, practiced, a rhythm built on years of shared instinct.
Nora walked slightly ahead, eyes scanning every alleyway, wand loose in her grip. Harry flanked her left side, a step behind, his own wand hidden beneath his coat but ready. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to.
The village was quiet.
Too quiet.
Shops shuttered. Lights dimmed. Even the air felt wary.

Harry pushed open the door to the Three Broomsticks, the warm rush of firelight and clinking glasses a sharp contrast to the chill outside. Laughter swelled for a moment, then dipped again as the door swung shut behind him.

Ginny was behind the bar, sleeves rolled up, hair pulled into a loose bun, laughing at something one of the regulars had said. She looked grounded, untouchable.
For a split second, Harry hesitated.

Nora stepped in beside him, scanning the room with a quiet, calculating gaze. She didn’t say a word, but her presence shifted the air.
In the back corner, Ron was waving at them over a half-drunk pint, cheeks slightly flushed, while Hermione sat beside him with her arms crossed, halfway through a sentence he was clearly only half-listening to. When she spotted Harry, she stood immediately.
“Well?” she asked before he could sit.
Harry pulled out a chair.
“Students saw something. Shadows, near Honeydukes. Not natural.”

Hermione’s expression darkened. “Like the ones near the Forest last spring?”
“Worse,” Nora said, sliding into a seat. “Ward signatures are fractured. We think it’s testing boundaries.”

Ron blinked. “It?”

“We don’t know what it is yet,” Harry said.

Ginny approached, placing drinks in front of them, her earlier warmth now edged with concern. “One of the third-years ran out of here earlier,” she said quietly. “Said she felt watched.”

Hermione leaned forward. “If the wards are reacting, we should coordinate with Flitwick. And I want to look at the magical residue myself.”

Harry opened his mouth, but before he could respond, Ron cut in. “We’re coming with you.”
Harry blinked. “Ron, this is Auror work.
”Doesn’t mean I’m sitting here while some creepy magical fog stalks students through the village,” Ron said, already pulling on his coat.
Hermione stood too. “If this thing is disrupting ward layers and leaving magical residue, I’m not going to wait for someone to hand me a file.
I’m coming.”

She reached for her wand with the ease of someone long used to being in control, and long tired of waiting for protocol to catch up with danger. Harry sighed. He knew that tone. Knew that posture. Specialist in Magical Protections or not, Hermione Granger didn’t ask for permission.

Nora raised an eyebrow at Harry but said nothing.
Her silence said plenty.

Harry sighed. “Fine. But stay sharp. This isn’t like last time.”
Ron grinned. “When is it ever like last time?”

Harry turned toward the door, but Ginny caught his wrist, lightly, but with that old familiarity that made something in his chest tighten.
“Harry,” she said. Her voice was soft, but steady.
Meant to be casual.
It wasn’t.

He looked at her, and for a moment the warmth of the pub, the voices, the flickering firelight, all of it blurred.
It was just her.
Just the echo of what they used to be.
There were a hundred things he could have said. Don’t wait up. I’ll be fine. This isn’t goodbye. But none of them felt right. 

“You know I have to go,” he said instead, the words dull in his mouth.
Ginny didn’t reply right away. Her hand lingered for a heartbeat longer before she let go, and Harry turned toward the door.

As he stepped out into the fog, the rush of cold air hit him like a wall. Bracing, almost welcome. It cleared his head in the way only cold air could, silencing the noise inside for a moment.
He moved forward because that’s what he did. What people expected. What he expected of himself.

It wasn’t about saving the world anymore. Not really. It was about doing the next right thing. Keeping his feet under him. Staying steady, even when the weight hadn’t fully lifted.
Some days were heavier than others.
But tonight… Tonight the air felt different. The threat was real, the path uncertain, and somehow, that made things simpler.
In moments like this, he remembered who he was.
Still, a part of him hoped no one looked too closely.
Hoped they wouldn’t see the parts of him still frayed at the edges.

But his wand was in his hand. His friends were behind him.
And for now, that was enough.

Nora had already slipped outside. Hermione pulled her cloak tighter, clearly irritated. “This is exactly why I flagged the instability in the outer wards. We’re always two steps behind when we wait for a clear threat.”

Ron jogged to catch up, fumbling with his coat and nearly walking into a post. “Right then, cursed fog, flickering wards, and no idea what we’re walking into. Classic us.”
Hermione shot him a look, half exasperation, half amused familiarity.
That old rhythm between them still surfaced at times, even years after they’d let go of trying to make it more than friendship. They’d tried, once. Briefly. But war had a way of changing the shape of closeness, and love, real love had proven harder to hold onto in the quiet that followed.

He gave her a crooked grin. “Hey, I didn’t say I wouldn’t go charging in, I just like to mark the moment.”
They moved down the street together, the mist thicker now, curling between buildings like it had a mind of its own.
Somewhere behind them, a door slammed shut, too fast, too hard.

Hermione pointed upward. “Notice that? The wards over Hogsmeade. They’re vibrating. Not visually, but magically. There’s a push from something external.”
Ron blinked. “You can see that?”
“No,” she said, exasperated. “I can feel it. Honestly, Ron, did you even review the ward signatures I sent last week?”
“I skimmed them!” he protested. “I remember something about… resonance fields? Maybe a squiggly line?”
She gave him a sharp look, and Ron shrugged. “Look, as a field responder for the Department of Magical Creature Control, I spend most of my day chasing Nifflers out of vaults and talking down panicked garden gnomes. My job doesn’t leave much time for theory. It’s more… react first, clean up later.”

Harry snorted but stayed focused.

The mist thickened ahead, near the alleyways between Honeydukes and Scrivenshaft’s. There was movement there. Too smooth to be the wind, too intentional to be coincidence.

Then Hermione stopped short.

“Wait,” she whispered. “That’s not just residue. That’s an active magical signature.”
Ron peered into the fog. “Brilliant. Any chance it’s a friendly magical signature?”

Hermione tightened her grip on her wand. The four of them moved forward, boots silent on the damp stone. Every lantern flickered as they passed, casting nervous shadows that danced too slowly to be natural.

“I don’t like this,” Ron muttered. “The air feels… wrong.”
“It’s pulsing,” Hermione murmured. “There’s magic in it.”They turned into a narrow side street behind Scrivenshaft’s, and that was when Harry froze.
A figure stood halfway down the alley, half-sunk in shadow.

Draco Malfoy.

He didn’t lean this time. He stood straight, tense, one hand hidden beneath his cloak, his eyes sharp as a blade under moonlight. The mist seemed to curl around him like it recognized him.

“Malfoy.” Harry called out.

Draco didn’t move at first.

Then, slowly, he stepped into the half-light, and for a moment Harry just looked, really looked at him for the first time in years.

He wasn’t the wiry, sharp-featured boy from Hogwarts anymore. Malfoy stood tall now, broad-shouldered beneath a dark, tailored coat that moved like second skin. His posture was poised, deliberate, like someone who knew exactly how he was perceived and used it to his advantage.

Even the way the mist curled around him felt theatrical, like it obeyed his presence.

There was still something undeniably Draco in the way he held himself. Chin high, gaze unreadable, defiance woven into his silence. But the edges had changed.
What once was arrogance had hardened into control.
And what had been boyish sharpness now cut in quieter, colder ways.
Harry wasn’t sure if it was the years, the magic, or the man himself, but Malfoy had become someone you didn’t underestimate.

Next to Harry, Hermione drew in a small, almost imperceptible breath. She quickly folded her arms tighter across her chest, as if trying to compose herself, but her eyes lingered a fraction too long on Draco’s silhouette.
Harry noticed. So did Ron, whose brow furrowed just slightly.

Draco’s gaze swept over them and came to rest on Harry
“You brought the whole court,” he said dryly. “How very democratic of you.”
Hermione took a step forward. “What are you doing here?”
Draco’s eyes didn’t leave Harry’s. “Waiting. Watching.”
“For what?” Hermiony asked, voice low.
Draco’s expression darkened. “For whatever’s slipping through your wards.”
Behind him, something shifted in the mist. Just for a second. The others turned, but the shape was already gone. Nora drew her wand. “You saw it too.”
Draco’s jaw tightened. “I’ve been seeing them for weeks.”

Chapter Text

The protective coat clung to his shoulders like a second skin, every seam precisely fitted. Pansy had dropped it off the night before with her usual flair. “If you insist on dancing with cursed shadows again, at least look good doing it. And survive, preferably.”
It was weightless, but not empty. Runes pulsed faintly just beneath the surface, concealed to all but the trained eye. Sleek. Durable. Enchanted to resist flame, hexes, and, with some luck, Hermione Granger’s scrutiny.
They approached, the mist parting in tendrils as if recognizing them. Draco didn’t move. He stood tall, composed, one hand tucked beneath his cloak. Not in threat, exactly, but in quiet reminder that he was never truly unarmed.
“Malfoy.” Potter’s voice held that frustrating steadiness, the kind that had once made Draco’s blood boil.

He saw them before they saw him. Figures blurred in the mist, but their cadence was familiar.
Potter, steady and taut like always. Shoulders squared beneath a worn black cloak, dark hair as untamable as ever, glasses catching the low light like twin flashes of intent. The scar was hidden, but it might as well have been glowing.
Weasley, a half-step off balance, all long limbs and open movement, hair like a flare in the fog. His coat looked hastily thrown on, as if he’d come running. He probably had.
Granger. Sharp-edged, focused, already ready to argue. Her stride was precise, her mouth set in determination. Curls pulled back but already escaping in the damp, wand in hand as if she hadn’t let it go since the war.
And then the fourth. Unfamiliar but unmistakable. A woman with the air of a predator.
Tall, composed, eyes scanning like a blade across the mist. Her cloak moved like it knew how to fight.
Auror. Definitely. And not a junior one.
He waited just long enough to be irritating, then stepped into the half-light. Let them look. Let them guess.
He noticed Granger’s eyes on him first. Lingering, too long to be casual. She folded her arms a bit too tightly across her chest.
Good. Let her pretend that meant nothing.
“You brought the whole court,” Draco said, tone dry. “How very democratic of you.”
Granger bit immediately, of course.
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting. Watching.”
“For what?” Potter again. cautious, but not hostile.
Draco glanced toward the edge of the alley, the place where the shadows had moved like thought.
“For whatever’s slipping through your wards.”
The mist stirred. The woman, Nora, raised her wand.
You saw it too,” she said.
Draco nodded. “I’ve been seeing them for weeks.”
A beat of silence stretched out. Tension coiled like rope between them. “And yet you didn’t report it,” Granger said, voice sharp.
He met her eyes without flinching. “As if you would’ve welcomed the collaboration.”
“That was years ago.”
“That’s not the problem.” He let the words settle. “The problem is I have no reason to believe what I share won’t be... mishandled.”
He glanced briefly at Nora. She said nothing, but her expression was far from blank.
Saint Potter stepped in, the so-called peacekeeper.
“If you know something, now’s the time. We’re not here to relive the past.”
Draco exhaled slowly. He didn’t want to. Not really. But there was a pull. Responsibility, maybe, or guilt he refused to name. “The Shrieking Shack,” he said finally.
Weasley frowned. “Seriously? That place?”
“Yes,” Draco answered flatly. “That’s where it started. The first time I saw them. Really saw them. Not shadows flitting about in the fog. Real form. Purpose. The structure there… it resonates. It draws things in.”
“And how do you know that?” Hermione asked, suspicion sharpened like a blade.
“Information you haven’t earned yet,” he replied coolly.
Hermione rolled her eyes. “You’re impossible.”
“And you’re predictable.”
“And you’re both exhausting,” Ron muttered. He glanced at the fog-shrouded alley. “Can we move this along, or should I wait for the tension to manifest physically?”
Harry sighed, clearly used to this. “Let him speak. If he can get us closer to whatever this is, I’ll take the attitude.”
“I’m not giving attitude,” Draco said. “I’m giving direction.” He turned away before they could argue further. The coat whispered around him as he moved, magic woven into every thread. He felt them behind him. Their unease, their unasked questions, the weight of old grudges still hanging in the air.
They had just turned off the main path when a soft crack echoed through the mist behind them. Wands lifted in unison. Four practiced movements, Draco’s slower and far less alarmed. He already knew who it was.
“Bit dramatic, don’t you think?” Theo’s voice came lazily from the edge of the fog, smooth and amused. He stepped into view with the casual gait of someone arriving fashionably late to a party he hadn’t really planned on attending. His coat was half-buttoned, his scarf askew, and yet nothing about him seemed disheveled. It was all perfectly, deliberately off.
“You’re late”. Draco said flatly.
Theo shrugged. “I had to dig this out of a drawer. Pansy insisted I not show up ´naked to a magical crime scene.’ Her words.” He lifted Draco’s coat slightly, inspecting it with mock seriousness. “Not as theatrical as yours, obviously. But subtlety has its charm.”
“And if there’s cursed magic and terrible decision-making involved, I know where to find you.” He gave the group a once-over, hands tucked loosely in his pockets. “Potter, Weasley, Granger. And you must be the famous Nora. Pleasure. Or is this a no-names sort of death march?”
Nora raised an eyebrow. Hermione simply narrowed her eyes. “Why is he here?” she asked Draco, arms crossed again. “Because I asked him,” Draco replied, not looking at her. “He knows more about residual ward feedback than all of us combined.”

Draco almost laughed. Internally, of course. The idea that she, of all people, would question Theo's presence, when the two of them worked side by side at the Ministry. She who followed every protocol like it was gospel… and Theo, who treated rules like vague suggestions scrawled in the margins of life.
“And because I enjoy long, cursed walks in the fog with emotionally repressed war survivors,” Theo added brightly. Ron blinked. “Is he joking?”
“No,” said Draco and Hermione at the same time, which made Theo grin wider.
He turned to Hermione with a spark of mischief in his eyes.
“Relax, Granger. I promise not to recalibrate any of your precious wards without a 37-step consent form.”
Hermione didn’t miss a beat.
“Good. And I promise not to hex you for using guesswork where calibration is clearly required.”
Theo laughed, genuinely amused.“Merlin, you’re always fun at parties.”
“Only the ones with magical containment protocols,” she replied primly.

Theo stepped a fraction closer, lowering his voice just enough. “Tell me, Granger… Since you did these wards. Do they always get that tense when I’m around, or is it just now?”
Hermione arched an eyebrow, not moving an inch. “Maybe they’re just allergic to theatrics and unresolved arrogance.”
“Tragic. I was hoping it was chemistry.”
She rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth twitched. Just barely.
From behind them, Draco let out a low breath. Sharp, like he was about to say something and changed his mind.
“As charming as this is, I’d rather not die while you two flirt over a collapsing ward field.”
Theo didn’t miss a beat. “Don’t be jealous, Draco. There’s enough magical tension for all of us.”
“Jealous?” Draco turned, expression cool and flat. “Of what? Watching you flirt like a Niffler in heat with someone who catalogues rune anomalies for fun?”
Hermione turned to him with a scowl. “I do not…”
“You absolutely do,” Theo and Draco said at the same time.
There was a beat of silence. Then Ron sighed.
“Brilliant. This’ll go smoothly.”

They reached the outskirts of the Shrieking Shack just as the last lantern light from Hogsmeade fell away behind them. The world dimmed, muffled. The air was colder here. Not the crisp chill of winter, but something older, heavier. Like the cold had soaked into the earth itself.
The path that led to the Shack was overgrown and cracked, lined with gnarled trees that leaned inward as if eavesdropping. Weeds sprouted between stone slabs, brittle and blackened at the edges.
The Shack itself loomed ahead, its silhouette familiar yet somehow… altered. The wood was weathered and warped, windows broken but not shattered. As if something had peeled them open rather than smashed them. The boards creaked in the windless air, a sound far too intentional for something abandoned. Magic hung over the place like a second skin. Not protective, not repelling. Just... watching.
Like it recognized him.
They reached the door. its surface splintered, handle half-rusted and crusted with old charms. Draco pressed his palm to the wood, murmured a quiet incantation, and the wards shivered. Something clicked, reluctant. The door swung open with a long, uneven sigh, as if it resented being disturbed.
They stepped inside.
The air was colder, but not from any draft. It was the kind of cold that settled behind your eyes. The floorboards groaned beneath their steps. But not all of them. Some were silent, unnaturally so. Not as though worn smooth by time, but as if their sound had been stolen.
An old mirror hung on the far wall, velvet covering its corners like an afterthought. It didn’t reflect properly. Movements lagged. Shadows appeared where there were none. Draco caught his own image staring back at him, motionless, for just a beat too long.
The ceiling above was thick with cobwebs that didn’t stir, even when the air shifted. One corner was blackened, not from flame. Something deeper. Not burnt. Eaten. It didn’t feel haunted.
It felt occupied.

He knew this house. Not in the way the others did. He had stood here many times before, in quieter nights, beneath the same cracked beams and silent floorboards. When the world outside had looked away. When dark artefacts needed moving, shielding, or simply disappearing. The Shack had always been useful that way: half-legend, wholly ignored.
Dark artefacts didn’t just cast, they resisted. They remembered. They pushed back. They were unstable, unpredictable, and often deeply cursed. But beneath all that, they meant something. Every twist in their design, every flaw in their enchantment, told a story.
Draco didn’t seek them for power. Not anymore. He sought them for the edge they offered. The line between what magic could be and what it shouldn’t be.
To study one was to challenge the limits of structure, theory, and control.
And Draco liked control.
Even when he had to claw it from something that bit back.
It didn’t feel like a hiding place anymore. It felt like something else had claimed it in his absence. Something bigger than smuggled power and whispered trades. Something that had found the same cracks in the wards, and widened them.
Draco inhaled slowly.
It wasn’t fear. Not quite.
But there was a weight in his chest that hadn’t been there before. Something alert. A tension under the skin. Like the Shack remembered him too. As someone who left something dark behind.
He didn’t get scared anymore. Not really.
Fear had burned itself out years ago, hollowed out by uglier things. When he'd learned to move on command, to kill without blinking, to breathe in the silence after a scream and not flinch. When he'd spent his nights doing the bidding of someone who devoured fear like wine and demanded obedience in its place.
No, this wasn’t fear.
This was recognition. Of a place where fear hadn’t left. It had only settled in, grown teeth, and waited.
As a witness.
From behind him, Theo’s voice cut through the silence, too soft to startle, but clear enough to land. “It’s hitting you different this time, isn’t it?”
Draco didn’t respond. Didn’t turn. He kept his eyes on the spiral scorches near the hearth, pretending interest, but his shoulders had tensed.
Theo stepped closer, hands still in his pockets, gaze drifting lazily across the room, though his attention never really left Draco.
“It used to thrill you, this place. You’d walk in like you owned it. Like the shadows knew better than to touch you.”
A pause. Measured. Thoughtful.
“Now you look like you're waiting for them to say your name. Draco shot him a look, sharp and almost amused, almost.
“You done?”
Theo tilted his head, the ghost of a smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth. “I haven’t even started. But I’m pacing myself. Wouldn’t want to interrupt your brooding arc.”
He let the silence hang between them, then added, this time quieter, less performative: “Just… tell me if it’s not just the Shack that’s changed.”
Draco arched a brow, slow and unimpressed.
“If I’m having an arc, Nott, it’s because I keep getting dragged into group quests full of emotionally unstable Gryffindors and undertrained adrenaline junkies who think dueling first counts as a strategy.”
Theo gave a low whistle, clearly delighted. “You say that like it’s not exactly your type.” Draco didn’t dignify that with a response, but the silence that followed wasn’t entirely empty.
Hermione didn’t even look up. “Careful, Malfoy,” she said coolly. “Some of those undertrained adrenaline junkies have survived more cursed sites, magical collapses, and dark creature attacks than most fully trained experts.”
She stepped over a scorched floorboard without hesitation, wand steady as her eyes swept the perimeter. “Survival tends to sharpen the learning curve.” There was no challenge in her voice. Just fact. As if she wasn’t defending them, or herself. But simply stating the obvious.
Theo let out a low, appreciative hum. Draco said nothing. But he didn’t roll his eyes either.
Hermione stopped short. “The wards..”
“Fractured,” Theo said quietly, all humor gone now. “They’ve been tested. Again and again. And they’re bleeding magic.”
“Bleeding?” Ron repeated, eyebrows rising. “Great. So not only is it cursed, it’s leaking. What’s next, is the house gonna vomit hexes at us too?”
Theo snorted. Hermione muttered something that sounded like “very mature.”

Ron shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t usually hang out in magically wounded buildings after dark.”
Nora stepped forward, wand raised, movements precise and silent. Her shoulders squared, weight shifting slightly as her boots pressed into the uneven ground. Not noise, but pressure. Testing.
She swept her gaze across the terrain in slow arcs, cataloguing details: sight lines, cover points..
“Too many blind angles,” she murmured. “Fog’s natural, but it’s helping something. Perfect conditions for ambush.”
She paused near the edge of the porch, head tilting slightly as if listening for something the rest hadn’t noticed.
“Whatever’s out here isn’t hiding. It’s watching. And it knows this ground better than we do.”
Draco’s lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“Speak for yourselves.” He moved a few steps ahead, boots silent on the damp boards, eyes scanning the terrain with practiced familiarity.

“I’ve walked this ground more times than I care to admit. And in worse things than fog.”
He paused at the threshold of the shack, head tilted as the mist coiled around his boots like it recognized him.
“Let it watch,” he said quietly, almost to the shadows themselves. “I’m not the one hiding.”
“Right,” Theo said softly, his gaze following the way the mist seemed to tighten around Draco’s feet. “Because taunting the thing we don’t understand always goes well.”

Hermione’s arms tightened across her chest, her eyes still locked on Draco.
“He’s not taunting it,” she said, voice low. “He’s daring it. That’s worse.”
There was no judgment in her tone. Just recognition. A quiet knowing. Like she’d seen that recklessness before, in other wars, in other people.
Harry exhaled through his nose, jaw clenched. “We stay together,” he said firmly. His eyes never left Draco’s back. “If it answers his challenge, we answer it together.”
Hermione didn’t take her eyes off Draco. Her expression was unreadable, arms crossed tighter than before. “Hermione didn’t take her eyes off Draco. Her arms were still crossed, but her grip had loosened slightly. “It is stupid,” she said, quiet but not biting. There was a pause, just long enough to notice. “But… he knows exactly what he’s doing.” Her voice lingered on the last word a second too long, as if she wasn’t just talking about tactics.
Draco didn’t turn, but he heard her. Not just the words: he knows exactly what he’s doing. but the shift beneath them. The way her voice softened at the edges. The way it wasn’t a challenge. Not this time.
It shouldn’t have caught him off guard. But it did.
There was no triumph in the observation, no smugness. Just a quiet certainty. A trace of something like respect, or worse, trust.
And that landed harder than it should have.
Because trust was dangerous. It required something he hadn’t offered in years.
Still, her voice echoed louder than the wind.
She believed him. Or she wanted to.
He didn’t know which unnerved him more. That she said it… or that he wanted to hear it again.
There was a beat of silence.
Theo’s eyes flicked briefly from Draco to Hermione, a faint crease forming between his brows. Just for a second. He didn’t say anything, but his expression shifted. Less amused, more… observant. Like he'd just noticed something he wasn't meant to.
Harry, still watching Draco’s back, gave the smallest tilt of his head. Something between suspicion and recognition. He hadn’t missed Hermione’s tone either.
Ron opened his mouth, glanced at Hermione, then at Draco, and closed it again. For once, he chose silence over commentary.
And then the wind shifted.
It didn’t whistle or howl. it just…stopped.
A low vibration hummed through the floorboards beneath their feet. Not sound, not exactly. More like pressure. Like the space between things had grown too tight.
Something was bending.
Not time. Not gravity. Something older.
A lantern flickered and died. Then another. The mist thickened, no longer drifting but coiling. Beliberate, unnatural, wrong. It slid across the ground like liquid shadow, swallowing the shape of their feet.
Nora was the first to move. Her wand raised, stance low and wide.
From the far end of the room, or maybe the wall, or maybe the space beyond the wall, came a sound.
A scraping drag, like something shifting against stone and wood. Like claws. Or bone.
Then silence again. But heavier this time. Smothering.
Theo took one slow step backward. “Tell me that was just the house settling.”
No one answered.
The shadows shifted.
Not all at once. But in pieces. Stretching along the edges of the room, sliding along walls that didn’t creak, dancing across corners that shouldn’t hold movement. They didn’t crawl. They slid.
Hermione whispered a spell. It fizzled in her throat before it reached her wand.
The magic didn’t fail. It just… dissolved. Like ink in water.
Draco stepped forward instinctively, shoulder brushing Harry’s.
“Don’t move,” he said, too quietly for anyone outside their circle to hear.
“It’s not looking for a fight. Not yet.”
But it was circling.

The temperature dropped. Not gradually, but all at once. Like a boundary had been crossed.
A shape began to form at the edge of the room. Not a body. A presence. Tall, elongated, sharp-edged and pulsing with wrongness. The shadows bowed around it like water parting around a blade.
It had no face. No eyes.
Something, someone, was about to move.

Chapter Text

She didn’t breathe.

Her wand was in her hand, her knuckles bone-white, but her magic felt distant. Like a tide that had receded too far, refusing to come back in.
Hermione stepped subtly to her left, closing the space between herself and Ron.
He didn’t look at her, but the slight twitch in his wand hand told her he’d noticed. It was an old rhythm between them. Solid. Familiar.
To her right, Harry hadn’t moved. Not a muscle. His stance was taut, ready. But she could see the tension in his jaw. The way he always got just before doing something reckless.

Ahead of them, Draco stood closer to the thing. Of course he did. She should’ve called him back. Should’ve hissed his name, told him to wait, to stop being an arrogant fool and let someone else take the risk.

But she didn’t.

Because, Merlin help her, some part of her knew that whatever was lurking in that twisting mist, it saw him differently. Not as prey. Not as threat. As... one of their own.

The room felt wrong. Not cursed, she knew cursed. This was different. This was aware. And the shadows… they bent around Draco like smoke to heat. As if they recognized something in him.
Then everything began to shift.
Not with a crash. Not with a scream. But with a breath.
The air thickened first. Subtle. Almost imperceptible. Like the moment before a thunderclap. The kind that made the hairs on the back of one’s neck rise in quiet protest.
The light didn’t dim, but it bent. Angles became soft, like reality had grown bored of holding its shape. Shadows curling too far, too deep. Hermione’s voice, mid-chant, wavered for half a second. Just long enough for Theo to glance at her, eyebrows furrowed.
“Did you feel..” he started.
Then Ron swore under his breath. “The floor. Did it just… move?”

Hold formation, now!” Harry Shouted.

They all paused.

And that was the mistake.

In that silence, the world listened.

And then it exhaled.

A low vibration began under their boots. Not loud. Not violent. Just constant, like an ancient engine waking up after centuries of sleep.
It hummed up through their bones.
Dust lifted from floorboards without wind.
One of the broken windows began to rattle softly.
Only one.

Harry’s eyes darted to the mirror.
The surface shimmered like water touched by breath.
Then his scar. I hadn’t burned in years, tightened. Not with pain. With memory. Something familiar and distant. Something hungry.
Nora raised her wand higher, a curse on the tip of her tongue.

But she was too late.
So were all of them.

The shadows didn’t leap. They peeled themselves from the walls like they’d always been part of the wood, the cracks, the forgotten grief soaked into every beam.
One tendril slipped forward. Not fast. Not forceful. Just certain.
Harry didn’t move. Couldn’t.
His breath caught. His wand twitched.

And then…

It struck.

Nora reacted fast. “Flamma Orbis!”
The flare burst in a ring of blue fire. But even that sounded wrong. Like screaming through water.
Still, it worked. The shadows flinched. They recoiled.
Then. Just... adapted.

“Nice shot,” Theo muttered. “Didn’t think the rules still applied in here.”
“Maybe they don’t,” Hermione said. Then came the shift. The mist surged, fast and slick. And went for Harry.
A coil of darkness surged forward, silent as a secret, wrapping around Harry’s legs and dragging him back across the floorboards in one impossible pull. His wand flared, but the light bent around the shadow and fizzled.

“Harry!” Hermione shouted, racing forward. “Protego Maxima!”
But her shield slammed into the shadow like mist into stone.
Harry’s back hit the far wall with a sickening thud. The air was punched from his lungs. Darkness wrapped around his throat now. Tight, pulsing. A soundless scream twisted across his lips. The darkness tried to pull him under, through the gaps between the creaking floorboards.
And then...

Draco.

No hesitation. No warning.
He shot forward like a blade, his coat flaring behind him as runes along the hem ignited. Sigils Hermione didn’t recognize, burning silver-blue with purpose. The magic rippled outward, not resisting the dark, but unraveling it.
This wasn’t defensive spellwork. It wasn’t taught at Hogwarts. It wasn’t listed in any Ministry-approved grimoire.
This was severance. Ancient, precise, and meant to break bonds no one else even saw.
The shadow screamed, into the magic itself. The tendril around Harry writhed, then snapped, like something sentient being torn loose from its host. It didn’t vanish. It collapsed, folding inward, the air around it distorting with the sound of magic fracturing.
The darkness recoiled from Draco. No, from the coat. The enchantments woven into its seams flared again. Not protective. Punitive. Hermione saw it now: Pansy hadn’t just sewn spells into fabric. She had built a warded weapon disguised as clothing. And Draco wielded it like a second skin.

She felt the spell he cast, with intent. Magic not bound by Ministry categories. It didn’t stun, or shield, or destroy.
It cut.
A clean, surgical break between shadow and victim. And then, for a fraction of a second, Draco staggered. His eyes clenched shut. Shoulders hunched. One breath. Shallow, tight. Like something had been pulled through him to fuel the spell.
When he opened his eyes again, they were rimmed with silver light. Fading. Fractured.
Harry dropped.

Hermione was already moving. She caught him before he hit the ground fully, her knees slamming into splintered wood. Her wand pressed to his temple.
“Harry. Look at me.” His eyes fluttered. Unfocused. Alive. And something in her cracked.
Because for all her composure, all her knowledge and certainty and relentless control. This was the truth: she didn’t know if she could do this again. She didn’t know if she had it in her. War had cost them so much. And now the world was whispering of another storm.
She didn’t want to be brave anymore. She just wanted her friends alive.
But she steadied herself. There would be time for falling apart later.
She spoke the spell “Praemendo Corpus” and let it sink into Harry’s skin. The blue glow spread across his chest.
The room didn’t like it. The walls trembled again, as if even the air wanted to resist healing.
Behind her, Theo was cursing under his breath. “What are these things?”
“Not just remnants…” Nora said, her voice tight.
“They’re watching now,” Draco muttered, still at the edge of the room.
Theo grimaced. “Like a child tasting pudding for the first time.”
Ron’s voice cut in, low and tense. “Then let’s make sure it chokes on it.”

Hermione looked around. The group was battered, breathless, but still together. Just barely.
Ron stood with his feet braced apart, his jaw clenched tight. His spells were wild now. Less structured than before. More heart than precision. He shouted "Protego Maxima!" with raw force, the barrier flaring golden before cracking under the pressure of something unseen. Another shadow lunged, and he reacted without thinking, casting "Confringo!" in a wide arc. The explosion didn’t hit the creature directly, but it disrupted its shape. Made it flicker, hesitate.
The shadows didn’t bleed. They shivered. As if pain meant nothing, but interference annoyed them.
Theo had gone quiet. Too quiet. Normally, he'd be cracking jokes, rolling his eyes, baiting Ron just to stay amused. But now there was a sharpness to him. A focus. She could see it in the way he moved, a flash of his wand followed by spells that didn’t belong together. "Glacius." Then "Oppugno." Then something she didn’t recognize, syllables warped and unfinished. The air hissed around him.

Every spell he cast now was experimental. Improvised. Dangerous. A calculated gamble.
And the shadows reacted differently to him. Where they recoiled from Ron’s brute-force spells, they studied Theo’s. Slowed down, shifted. As if they didn’t understand what he was doing. And didn’t like that.
A gust of unnatural cold curled around her legs. The floor creaked.
Draco stood slightly apart from the others, his wand steady, his face unreadable. His movements were clinical, almost quiet. No shouted incantations, just precise flicks of his wrist and spells cast under his breath. Old spells. Subtle ones. Wards meant to suppress magical feedback, sigils drawn mid-air that shimmered before vanishing into the wood. The shadows hesitated near him. Not afraid, but wary.

Nora moved like a blade. Controlled, relentless. Every spell she cast was sharp-edged, meant to wound or delay. "Incarcerous." "Fulgaris!" "Reductum Totem." Her spells didn’t just strike, they dissected. One of the shadows split down the middle and reformed with a high, brittle screech that didn’t come from any throat. Her eyes narrowed, lips barely parted, breath visible in the cold.
The shadows began to change. No longer mindless, they started circling. Testing. Moving like smoke that had learned to think.
Something old shifted in the Shack's bones. Not quite sound. Not quite silence.
Hermione’s heart pounded. Whatever they were doing, it was working. Or it was provoking something worse.
Possibly both.

She tightened her grip on her wand. They were running out of time.
Hermione’s hands trembled as she guided Harry upright. “We’re moving. Now.”
“North corridor,” Ron said, pointing. “There’s an opening.”

They ran.

Ron at the back with a shield. Theo flanking left. Nora breaking barriers with flash spells. Hermione guiding Harry with silent precision. Draco brought up the rear.
He didn’t speak. But he stayed close enough to catch the shadow if it lunged again.
And behind them?

The dark didn’t chase. Not immediately. It lingered. And watched. Like it had tasted something new. And wanted more.

Chapter Text

He came back slowly.
Not to pain.
Not exactly.
More to the memory of pain.
The echo of it etched so deep in his bones it didn’t need to be present to be real.

There was a pressure in his chest, like magic had tried to unravel him from the inside out and had given up halfway through.
Everything inside him felt... wrong. Misaligned. Stretched.
His eyelids were too heavy, leaden with the weight of sleep he hadn't chosen. His throat was raw, dry as parchment, like he'd screamed or swallowed fire. Or both. Each breath rasped up through his lungs like it had to ask permission.

Sound came next.
Muted at first.
The distant hum of enchantments.
A faint chime.
The low whoosh of magical ventilation.
And under it all, the steady pulse of containment charms, ticking like a second heartbeat in the floor beneath his bed.

Then. Light.
Too much of it.
Not sunlight. No warmth. Just a cold, sterile brightness, humming faintly with disinfecting spells and structured silence.

St. Mungo’s.
He didn’t need the floating diagnostic charts or the dull ache behind his eyes to tell him that. He knew that ceiling. Smooth, white, spell-cleansed so many times it no longer reflected reality. Just efficiency.
There were voices nearby, muffled through layered wards. Footsteps, careful and deliberate. The rustle of parchment. The clink of potion bottles being set on metal trays.
A sharp magical current brushed over his skin. A scan. He flinched instinctively, but the movement was weak, like his muscles hadn’t remembered how to obey him yet.
He tried to lift his hand.
Failed.

His magic fluttered inside him, like a bird dazed against glass. Alive, but disoriented. Disconnected.
What happened?
Images flickered in his mind like broken pensieve fragments: shadow moving where it shouldn’t, a cold that didn’t belong to any season, Hermione’s voice calling his name. Urgent, sharp. And before that... Draco.

Harry blinked. His lashes stuck together. He was alive. That much he could piece together.
“Hermione,” he managed, though it came out more breath than word.
“Harry.” Her voice was immediate, grounding, like the first real thing in a room full of static
She leaned in, her hand warm and steady on his. “You’re alright. You’re safe.”
Ron was there too. Closer than expected, hunched on a bench that looked like it would collapse under his knees at any second. He looked like he didn’t quite know what to do with his hands, so he’d crossed them tightly. A defense posture he hadn't used since sixth year. Which only made him look more tense.

“Bloody typical, that,” he muttered, not looking directly at Harry. “You finally take a break from playing hero, and the fog tries to eat you.”
Harry blinked. “I… what?”
Ron shrugged, rubbing the back of his neck. “One second you’re yelling at us to stay in formation like some bloody field commander, and the next you’re being dragged into the floor like a sack of cursed potatoes.”
He finally looked over, brow furrowed just slightly. “Don’t do that again, yeah? We’ve had enough near-death experiences for one lifetime. Yours especially.”

Nora appeared in the doorway just then, sharp as ever. Her dark robes were immaculately pressed, and her hair was pulled back into a no-nonsense knot that dared anyone to comment on the bags under her eyes.
“He’s stable?” she asked, already scanning the floating charts above Harry’s bed. Hermione nodded. “Vitals are consistent. He’s lucid.”
“Good. I’ve filed the preliminary report, told the press nothing, and told your fan club even less,” she said, directing the last part toward Harry with a raised eyebrow. “Call if anything shifts.”
She turned as if to leave, then hesitated. Her gaze returned to Harry. Sharp, assessing. She took a few steps closer, folding her arms.
“You did good,” she said, voice gruff.
Harry opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off with a look.
“I’ve just finished scraping a dragon handler off a cursed barn door. My tolerance for overconfident idiots is very, very low today. Don’t make me add you to the list.” There was a beat of silence. Her jaw clenched. Then, quieter: “But still. You did good.”
And just like that, she turned on her heel and strode out, her boots clicking sharply against the tile, cloak snapping behind her like punctuation.
And then she was gone.

Harry let his head fall back against the pillow. His limbs felt too heavy, his magic still far away, like it was watching him from behind glass.
“What… happened?” he murmured. “I remember, trying to cast, and then… nothing worked.”
“The magic didn’t obey,” Hermione said softly. “It twisted. And then it turned on you.”

Ron let out a quiet breath. Not quite a sigh. “Yeah. And we need to talk to you. You’ve been slipping for a while now,” he added, eyes fixed on a spot near Harry’s knee. “This time it just wasn’t metaphorical.”
Harry’s brow furrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Hermione exchanged a glance with Ron before speaking again. Her voice was steady, but there was a tightness around the edges that hadn't been there before.
“We’ve seen it, Harry. The way you’ve been withdrawing. Not just lately. For a while. You’re not sleeping. You flinch when people touch you. And when you do speak, it’s like you’re somewhere else.”
“I’ve just been… tired,” Harry muttered. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Hermione said sharply. The words hit the air too fast, too loud. She closed her eyes for a second, reined herself in, then continued more gently. “You were being pulled under. I don’t know where to. But… Draco stopped it. He pulled you out. Before any of us could move.”
Harry looked down at his hands. They were steady now, but he kept flexing his fingers as if expecting them to shake.
“I didn’t even see him,” he said, voice low. “Just… felt it stop. Like someone cut the cord.”
The room was quiet for a beat too long.

Ron shifted in the chair at the foot of the bed, arms crossed tightly. The lines around his mouth were deep. Hermione saw him glance at her, then back at Harry, but he said nothing.
Harry exhaled. “Just…look, I appreciate it. I do. Really. But can we not do this right now?”
His tone wasn’t sharp, but it wasn’t open either. It was final. Defensive.
Hermione didn’t move, her hand still resting on the edge of the bed, white-knuckled. “You almost didn’t make it back, Harry.” Her voice was quieter now. “Don’t you want to talk about that?”
He didn’t respond immediately.
Instead, his eyes traced a crack in the ceiling as if it offered a better explanation than anything he could say out loud. His expression was unreadable. Too calm to be calm.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he said at last. “That’s all that matters.”
“No,” Hermione said softly. “It’s not.”
Ron let out a breath, stood, and started pacing. “You keep doing this,” he said, not looking at Harry. “Pretending you’re fine. Acting like almost dying is just part of the job. Like you’re used to it.”
Harry’s eyes flicked to him, guarded. “I am used to it.”
“That’s not the point,” Ron snapped, spinning to face him now. “It shouldn’t be normal. It shouldn’t be something you just brush off.”
“Ron,” Hermione said quietly.
But Harry sat up straighter now, his mouth set in that stubborn, familiar line. “What do you want me to say? That I’m scared?
The words hung between them, jagged and raw.
Hermione swallowed. Her voice, when it came, was barely above a whisper. “You don’t have to carry it alone, Harry.”
He closed his eyes.
“I know,” he said.
But the way his shoulders curled inward said otherwise.
And that was the end of it, for now.
Then, quietly:
“I’ll send him an owl.”
Hermione looked up. “Draco?” Harry nodded, just once. “Yeah. I should thank him. He… he didn’t have to step in like that. But he did. And I’d rather not owe him something unspoken.” Ron raised an eyebrow. “You sure that’s all it is? Not just you making peace with your enemies again?”

Harry didn’t rise to it. He gave a tired, lopsided shrug. “Maybe. Maybe I’m just tired of pretending we’re all still at war. Some of us are just... trying to survive the peace.” Hermione’s expression softened.
He went on, voice lower. “He made a choice. A decent one. It means something.”

Ron let out a low breath and leaned back in his chair. “Right. So what’s it gonna say? ‘Dear Draco, cheers for yanking me out of the void. Fancy tea next week?’”
Harry cracked a faint smile. “More like: ‘Thanks. I’m alive. Hope the Shack isn’t still cursed.” Hermione shook her head, but there was affection in it. “You’ll write it, and it’ll be awkward and too short, and somehow still sincere. He’ll probably roll his eyes, but he’ll read it twice.”
“Then set it on fire,” Ron muttered.
Harry chuckled. Weak, but real. “Probably.”
But still, even as he said it, the thought of sending the owl settled something in him. Just… a thread, stretched taut across old fault lines.
He was Harry Potter. The peacemaker. The boy who lived, again. Not by prophecy this time, but by the hand of someone who was once on the other side of war. The one who still believed, even on his worst days, that people could be better than they were.

Chapter Text

It started, like most of Ron’s workdays, with the vague but sincere hope that nothing would explode before lunch.
A hope which, experience had taught him, was wildly optimistic.
He was back on duty.
Boots scuffed, wand holstered, slightly crooked as usual, and a large cup of tea. Half-finished and already cold on the desk behind him.
Magical Creature Response wasn’t glamorous.
Most days it wasn’t even dignified. But it was rarely boring.
Today’s case came in with the words: “unregistered hybrids” and “agitated nesting behavior.”
That alone should have been enough to make him turn back.

It wasn’t.

The scene was described as “contained.” In theory.
Which, in Magical Creature terms, usually meant someone had slapped up three shaky wards, thrown some powdered calming herbs into the air, and posted a sign reading: Do Not Provoke. Probably Fine.
Ron arrived at the edge of what looked like a half-collapsed greenhouse, where magic buzzed faintly in the air like static clinging to the back of his neck. Inside, the source of the trouble was already... active.
“Let me get this straight,” Ron said, squinting at the absurd spectacle before him. “You crossed a Murtlap with a Puffskein?”
The wizard in charge, squat, balding, and visibly sweating, nodded so fast his glasses slipped down his nose. “They’re hypoallergenic!”
Ron blinked. “You bred a magical hybrid and your main selling point is that it doesn’t shed?”
“I thought it could be good for children,” the man offered weakly. “Therapeutic. Soothing.”
The creature in question was currently rolling in lopsided circles across the floor, leaving a faint trail of glowing fur in its wake. It looked like someone had magically enlarged a tennis ball, glued a set of tiny twitching feet to the bottom, and grafted half a sea anemone onto its back. It pulsed slightly. Faintly bioluminescent.
Every thirty seconds, it paused, quivered, and let out a noise that could only be described as a foghorn being strangled by a bagpipe.
Ron stared at it. Then at the wizard. Then back at the creature.
“Right,” he muttered. “Definitely lunch after this.”
The hybrid, apparently thrilled by his presence, launched itself at his leg with surprising speed for something shaped like a hairy dumpling.
“Oi!” Ron stumbled, flicking his wand just in time. A repelling charm sparked off the creature’s fur, sending it sprawling sideways with a contented blorp. It rolled upright, tail‑tentacles wagging.
“That is not okay,” Ron muttered.
Laughter erupted from somewhere behind him. Two apprentices from the department, clearly enjoying the show. One of them snorted.
Ron turned his head just enough to glare. “You want to try your luck? Be my guest.”
The creature burbled, part‑hiccup, part‑curse. The rest of the capture was chaos: frantic spells, glowing fur clouds, and one very near‑miss involving Ron’s sock and a particularly wet exploratory lick.

Eventually, the hybrid was secured inside a containment bubble, still spinning gently, apparently delighted with itself.
“Sorted,” Ron grumbled, brushing fluorescent tufts of fur off his robes. “And if anyone ever says ‘hypoallergenic’ to me again, I swear I’ll hex their eyebrows off. Both sets.”

Back at the Ministry, Ron collapsed into his chair with the weight of someone who had seen things. glowing, weird, awful things.

He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling.
He didn’t mind the chaos. Not really. He’d even come to expect it. Oddly comforting in its own way.
But something had been gnawing at the edge of his thoughts for days now.
Something cold.
Familiar.
The Shrieking Shack.

He couldn’t shake the image of Harry, unconscious and flickering with unstable magic, or the way the shadows in that place had curled like they were listening.
And he couldn’t shake the memory of Malfoy, Draco Malfoy, stepping forward without hesitation.
That… unsettled him.

Ron rubbed a hand over his jaw. And Harry wasn’t fine. He was awake, sure. But awake and okay weren’t the same thing. Ron knew that better than anyone. He knew what it was like to crawl out of something dark without wanting to admit you'd even fallen in.
There had been that winter. Cold, endless, and hollow. Wandering alone after he'd stormed off from the tent. The Horcrux whispering in his ear, twisting everything. Regret sitting heavy in his gut, night after night. And even after he'd come back, even after the apologies, the laughter, the war. I had taken months to feel like himself again.
If he ever truly had.

So yeah. He knew the signs.
He wasn’t great with emotions. That was more Hermione’s department. But he understood loyalty. He understood action.

So that evening, he found her pacing near the Department of Magical Law. “We need to help him,” he said simply.
Hermione looked up, startled, then nodded. “I know.”
“I’ve been thinking…” Ron scratched the back of his neck, fingers moving in that distracted, thoughtful way Hermione had come to recognize as him trying to find the right words. “Maybe what Harry needs right now… isn’t another Healer, or mission, or bloody debriefing.”
He glanced at her, then looked away again.
“Not just someone who understands magic. But someone who understands what it does to you when it all goes wrong. Someone who doesn’t need him to explain anything. Someone who just… listens.”

He paused, “Like Hagrid.”

Hermione’s expression softened, but she stayed quiet.
Ron went on, slower now, choosing each word like he wasn’t entirely sure he had the right to say them.
“Hagrid’s always been there for Harry. Since day one. Since the cupboard. Before any of us knew him, before he had a wand, before he even believed in magic. Hagrid saw him. Took him out of that house and made the world bigger.”
He rubbed his palms together, then shoved them in his pockets.
“He never left. Not once. And he never asked anything in return. Not answers, not explanations, not performance. Just… showed up. Steady.”
Ron looked up again, this time meeting Hermione’s gaze.
“Maybe Hagrid should take him out into the Forest. Not for some great revelation. Not for some dangerous beast. Just to be out there. To breathe. Somewhere that doesn’t expect anything from him. Where everything’s alive but nothing’s watching.”
A breath. Then, quieter: “Nature’s probably the only thing that can’t ask questions.”
Hermione studied him for a long moment, something unreadable passing behind her eyes. Then she spoke, with the kind of clarity that made people listen.
“You’re right,” she said, and the words weren’t casual. They were carved, deliberate. “You’re absolutely right, Ron. Hagrid was the first person who ever gave Harry space to exist without expectations. He just… loved him. In that big, bumbling way of his. No conditions. No legends. Just Harry.”

Her gaze returned to Ron’s. “Thank you. For seeing that. For saying it. You still get him better than anyone.” She straightened slightly, like a decision had settled in her spine. “Let’s go talk to Hagrid. See if he’s willing. And if he is, let’s help make it happen.”

They walked the familiar path to the forest’s edge, the scent of pine and damp earth heavy in the air. Smoke curled lazily from the crooked chimney of Hagrid’s hut, and the soft thudding of Fang’s paws echoed against the door before they even knocked.

The door flew open.

“Well, I’ll be, look who it is!” Hagrid beamed, his eyes already glistening beneath wild brows. “Ron! Hermione! Been far too long, hasn’t it? Get in, get in. Don’t just stand there like a pair o’ stunned puffskeins!”

He ushered them in with a warm, sweeping gesture, his massive hand nearly covering Hermione’s entire back. Everything looked exactly the same. Oversized furniture, a kettle the size of a cauldron, and a crossbow leaning casually in the corner like an old friend.
They sat, their feet barely brushing the floor of the enormous chairs, feeling briefly like kids again. Caught halfway between nostalgia and reality.
Fang drooled contentedly onto Ron’s knee while Hagrid clattered around the fireplace, pouring tea into mismatched mugs roughly the size of flowerpots. The comforting smell of over-steeped leaves and something vaguely earthy. Perhaps moss, perhaps a hint of dragon dung, filled the small, warm space.

Ron shifted a little on the too-large chair, trying not to slide forward off the edge. Everything in Hagrid’s hut was just a bit too big, a bit too sturdy.
Hagrid settled into his armchair with a long, creaking sigh. The floorboards groaned under the weight, but no one seemed alarmed. “So,” he said, peering over the rim of his mug, “you didn’t come all this way for me rock cakes.”
Ron glanced at the tray on the table. Indeed, there they were. Rough, jagged little lumps that could probably chip a tooth or anchor a small boat.
Hermione gave a small smile. “It’s Harry,” she said gently. “He’s… not himself.”
Ron nodded, but didn’t speak right away. He looked down at the patch of drool spreading slowly across his trousers. Fang huffed and laid his head heavily on Ron’s knee, oblivious. Ron scratched behind the dog’s ear without thinking.
Not himself was one way to put it. But it was more than that.
“He’s trying to pretend he’s fine,” Ron said finally, voice quiet. “But… something’s off.”
He looked up, meeting Hagrid’s eyes. “It’s like he’s fading out of his own life, piece by piece. Still shows up, still does what’s expected. But there’s no..” he waved a hand vaguely “no fire. No pushback. Not even when he’s annoyed.”

He paused, suddenly aware of how much that scared him. Harry without fight wasn’t just wrong, it was dangerous.
“He barely talks,” Ron went on. “And when he does, it’s like he’s… somewhere else.”“We thought maybe you’d know what to do,” he finished, glancing at Hermione, who nodded with quiet urgency.
Hagrid didn’t respond right away. He simply looked down at the mug in his hands, the firelight flickering across his beard, casting deep shadows into the creases of his face.
Hagrid’s thick brows pulled together. He looked down at his mug, silent for a moment. “I always knew that boy carried more weight than any one person should,” he murmured. “And now with all that’s happened…

He looked up, eyes steady and wild. “I’ll take him out into the Forest. Just the two of us. Let the trees do the talkin’ for a while. There’s peace in the wild, y’know. The kind you can’t find anywhere else.”
He paused, a soft smile tugging at his beard.
“There’s a glade, deep in the Forest, where the moonlight hits just right. Used to go there when I was a boy. When things got heavy. There was this unicorn, silver as starlight. Never skittish with me. Just… was. Breathing. No questions. No expectations. Just peace. That place saved me more than once. Maybe it’s time Harry saw it too.”

Ron said nothing for a long moment. He stared out the window, where the fading light stretched across the treetops. That image of the unicorn lingered in his mind. Stillness without effort, comfort without words.
It felt right. Like something Harry needed.
“Thanks, Hagrid,” Ron said softly. “Really.”
Hagrid waved a hand, suddenly gruff. “Bah. You don’t need to thank me for lookin’ after family.”
Ron gave a short laugh. Family. Yeah. That’s what they were, wasn’t it? Not just Harry and Hermione. Hagrid too. All of them. knotted together by war and pain and stubborn hope. Still standing. Still trying.
The fire crackled, and the kettle gave a soft, approving whistle.

“You know,” Ron said, glancing sideways at Hermione as they walked the winding path back toward the castle, “when we were kids, I always thought Hagrid’s hut was massive. Like, giant-sized.”
Hermione tilted her head, the breeze catching a few curls around her face. “And now?”
“Now it feels small. But solid. Like… I don’t know. Like you could carry it in your pocket if you had to. Or at least carry what it means.”
She smiled, warm and knowing, and looped her arm through his without hesitation. “Maybe that’s the point. Hagrid’s always been bigger than his hut.”
Ron huffed a laugh. “Yeah. Except his chairs. Those are still bloody massive.”
They walked in silence for a few moments, the sounds of the Forbidden Forest soft in the distance. Rustling leaves, the occasional wingbeat overhead, distant creature calls that might’ve unnerved anyone else.

Hermione broke the silence first, thoughtful. “Do you think Harry will let him in?”
Ron didn’t answer immediately. He was thinking about Harry’s face in the hospital bed. How distant he’d looked. Like he was still halfway between here and something none of them could see. Like part of him didn’t want to come all the way back.
“I think,” Ron said slowly, “Hagrid might be the only one he won’t try to protect from the truth.”
Hermione nodded, her gaze distant. “We all forget how heavy it is to be Harry Potter. Even now.”
Ron watched her for a second. He could see the weight she carried too. The questions always turning behind her eyes, the responsibility she never quite put down. Brilliant, driven, always one step ahead and somehow still worrying about the rest of them.
“You know,” he said, nudging her lightly with his shoulder, “you were the first to notice it. That something was wrong, you told me months ago that he was different.”
“I just pay attention,” she murmured. “Yeah,” Ron said softly, “that’s the thing. You always do.”
She looked at him then and gave him a small smile that didn’t try to fix anything, just acknowledged the moment. The way she always had.

The last rays of sun disappeared behind the trees, the sky blurring into twilight.
A breeze tugged at their robes, carrying with it the scent of pine and earth and old memories.
Ron felt something settle inside him. Not a solution. Not yet. But something steady. Like the promise of a path.

Chapter Text

Hermione stood at the gates of Malfoy Manor and, to her own surprise, felt no tremor in her breath.
Once, this place had been laced with panic. Stone floors echoing with Bellatrix’s laughter, her own screams still clinging to the corners of memory. But now? Now it was just a house. Heavy with history, yes, but not stronger than her. She wasn’t here for ghosts.
She was here to thank Draco Malfoy.

Not that he’d make it easy. He was still… Draco. The sharp tongue hadn’t dulled entirely, and his posture always seemed ready for judgment. But there was something else beneath that veneer now. Something steadier. Intellectual. Mysterious. She wasn’t sure when it had shifted, but she felt it keenly. And she wanted to understand it.
The wrought-iron gates opened without a sound, and the gravel path wound its way toward the imposing manor. Tall windows stared down at her, reflective and unreadable.
Hermione smirked. Let them watch. I’ve walked into darker places and come out standing.
She reached up to knock, but the front door opened before her hand touched the wood.

“Miss Granger!” squeaked a voice so cheerfully high-pitched that Hermione startled.
At the door stood a house-elf. Female, judging by her delicate features and the large lavender ribbon tied in a dramatic bow between her ears. She wore a soft green tunic stitched with tiny silver stars and a pleated skirt that swished as she bounced excitedly on her toes. Her eyes were wide and luminous, sparkling with such delight it was as if Hermione had just delivered her a personal letter from the Minister of Magic himself.
“I am Pipsey!” the elf announced, in a voice so shimmering and high-pitched it was as if a bell had giggled. She executed a curtsy so deep and theatrical that her nose did brush the floor, twice. Before she sprang upright with the energy of a firework contained in a teacup. “It is an honour, a radiant, celestial, unparalleled honour, to welcome you to the resplendent abode of Master Draco!” she sang, arms outstretched like she were presenting a royal ballroom instead of an old stone threshold.
Hermione blinked. The elf was beaming at her with eyes the size and shine of starlit puddles, her entire body vibrating with delight. A lavender ribbon floated somewhere above her head, as if enchanted to follow her movements like a halo on a sugar high.
“I…thank you,” Hermione managed, caught somewhere between amusement and mild concern.
“Oh, the pleasure is all mine, Miss Granger! Truly! You bring such intellect into the manor. Such spark. I felt it before you even reached the gates. My ears tingled. It’s always a sign.” Pipsey clutched her hands to her chest, as if overcome with emotion. “Shall I take your coat? Offer you moonflower tea? Or a restorative misting of lavender essence? No? A gentle shoulder chant? I’ve memorized three.”
Hermione raised both eyebrows. “I… I think just the coat will do.”
“Ah, of course. Practical! Brilliantly so!” Pipsey accepted the coat as if Hermione had just handed her the Philosopher’s Stone wrapped in vintage lace. “This way, Miss Granger. Master Draco is in the library, as usual!”
As the elf fluttered ahead, because walking didn’t quite cover it, Hermione followed, the corners of her mouth twitching upward. Pipsey was chaos wrapped in satin.

As they passed beneath a vaulted archway lined with sconces that flickered with silvery-blue flames (which Pipsey insisted were “ethically-sourced moonlight”), the elf turned suddenly, walking backward now, eyes bright with delight.
“Oh, and I must say, Miss Granger,” Pipsey whispered, as if confiding a sacred secret, “you remind me so much of my dearest friend.”
Hermione blinked. “Oh? And who’s that?”
“Luna,” Pipsey sighed dreamily, as though the very syllables were made of stardust. “Miss Luna Lovegood. The first human to ever make me a daisy crown and insist I wear it to tea. She said my ears were exactly the right shape for joy.” She twirled once, the hem of her skirt catching a breeze that didn’t exist.
Hermione stopped mid-step. “Wait, Luna’s your friend?”
Pipsey nodded with solemn pride. “We met at a Crumple-Horned Snorkack awareness rally. Such important work. She was singing to the banners. I was humming to the banners. And suddenly, friendship!” She tapped her temple knowingly. “We send each other postcards through enchanted dandelions. They’re very private.”
Hermione’s eyebrows couldn’t go higher if they tried, but her smile softened. Of course Luna knew a house-elf who wore enchanted glitter and offered shoulder chants.
“I was just thinking of writing to her,” Hermione murmured, mostly to herself. Pipsey lit up like a chandelier. “Oh, do! She adores letters”.
And with that, she skipped ahead again, humming a tune.

She followed the hall, fingers brushing the polished banister. A few portraits whispered as she passed. She caught her own name, some curious glances. She didn’t care.
She found him seated in a high-backed armchair by the window, a thick book open on one knee, firelight flickering over the sharp planes of his face. One leg crossed over the other, fingers absently tapping the spine of the book. He looked up the moment she entered. His expression didn’t shift much. Just a subtle lift of one brow. Typical, Hermione thought. Effortlessly composed, as though he’d been waiting for her without waiting at all.

The posture was almost lazy, but there was precision in it too. Every movement controlled, curated, like he couldn’t quite help performing, even when there was no one to impress. Or maybe especially then. And yet… There was something different now.
The light touched him differently, or maybe she was just seeing more than she used to. The angles of his face were older, sharper, but no longer brittle. There was weight behind his stillness. A sort of quiet calculation that wasn’t cruel anymore, Just deliberate.
Her eyes flicked briefly to the book in his lap. Untranslated runes on the spine, frayed binding. Something obscure, possibly illegal, and definitely fascinating. Of course he’d be reading that. And of course he wouldn’t bother hiding it. She straightened, forcing herself not to smooth her coat or clear her throat. He might not show it, but she knew he noticed everything. All right then, she thought. Let’s see what you’ve become.

“Granger.”
“Malfoy,” she replied just as evenly.

A pause stretched between them. Curious, but not cold. She offered a small, genuine smile. “I came to thank you.”
He closed the book without marking his place. “For what?”
“For Harry,” she said simply. “For what you did in the Shrieking Shack. You didn’t have to help. But you did.”
Draco looked at her for a long moment,as though weighing not just her words, but her tone, her stance, her presence.
Finally, he gave a half-shrug. “He’s had worse days.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s your version of accepting gratitude?”
“Would you prefer a dramatic bow?”
“I’d settle for basic acknowledgement.” That earned her a slight curve of his lips. Too faint to be called a smile, but it lingered.
She took the seat across from him, studying the lines of the room. “I also wanted to ask… about what you saw in the Shack. What you think is really going on.” His expression shifted. Quiet, shadowed.
But he nodded once. “All right,” he said. “But only if you bring biscuits next time. My house-elf is entirely too enthusiastic about everything except baking biscuits,”

She raised an eyebrow, amused. “Biscuits, is it? That’s your price for revealing arcane magical secrets?” Draco gave a languid shrug, the ghost of a smirk playing at the edge of his mouth. “I find food to be a better motivator than fear.”
Hermione let out a soft laugh. “I have to admit, I wouldn’t have guessed you’d end up with a house-elf like Pipsey. She’s…” She searched for the right word. “Unapologetically whimsical.” Draco leaned back slightly in his chair, swirling the drink in his hand. “She’s absurd,” he said dryly.
“She sings while she irons my shirts. With harmony.”
Hermione tilted her head, a smile tugging at her lips. “And yet you keep her.”
“She insists on staying,” he said, as if that settled the matter. Then, with a glance that was almost reluctant: “She reminds me not everything has to be sharp edges and contingency plans.”
Hermione blinked. That wasn’t the answer she expected. “I suppose I assumed your ideal house-elf would be more… grim and efficient,” she said.
He arched his brow. “I tried that once. He reorganised my entire inventory alphabetically by wand movement. I couldn’t find anything for three weeks.” Hermione snorted. “So now you’ve settled for chaos wrapped in ribbons.”
“She prefers the term ‘aura-enhanced domestic synergy,’” Draco replied, deadpan. Hermione grinned, sinking a little deeper into the chair. Somehow, against all logic, the conversation felt easy.

“And biscuits,” she said, half to herself. “Noted.”
Draco raised his glass. “Don’t underestimate them, Granger. The right biscuit can move mountains.”
Draco leaned back into his chair with that signature Malfoy grace, so perfectly measured it bordered on dramatic. And swirled his drink like he had something philosophical to say about gravity.

“I’ve gone to the Shack a few times,” he said. “Mapping out magical residue. What’s left. What’s...leaking through.” Hermione arched an eyebrow. “Leaking?” Draco nodded, like a professor indulging a promising student. “It’s saturated.
Memory soaked into the walls and never dried. Spells stick. Some bounce. And sometimes, when you speak aloud, the room remembers who said it first.”
“Legacy magic,” she said slowly. “Spell echoes. Possibly inherited bindings.” Draco chuckled. “See? Most people hear that and assume I’m hallucinating. You, on the other hand, draft a thesis.”
“I’m not most people,” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“I know,” he replied. Simply. And somehow that felt like more than just acknowledgment.

Then, quieter, almost reluctant: “There’s a hidden passage in the basement. The stone’s wrong. Older. Or maybe just pretending to be. It hums.” She leaned forward. “You went in?” Draco glanced toward the fireplace. “Only partway. The deeper you go, the more it reacts.
Spells glitch. Light flickers. And something down there is... watching. Not hostile. Just very, very aware.”
“A warded entity?” “No,” he said. “More like a house with its eyes closed.”
Hermione felt a chill crawl up her arms. It was beautiful, in a disturbing way. The kind of metaphor that made your brain itch.

Then he added, “I was going to tell Potter…But I didn’t.”
Her eyes sharpened. “Why not?” Draco gave her a look. “Because then it would become a Ministry issue. Contained. Sanitised. Mishandled by well-meaning bureaucrats in awful robes.”

His gaze flicked to a dark alcove. Hermione followed it instinctively, and her breath caught. A warded glass cabinet. Inside, a collection of artefacts she had only ever read about. In Restricted Section footnotes or Department of Mysteries files. A breathing book. A wand that looked like it had cursed itself..
Not hoarded. Curated.
She turned back to Draco, who was watching her carefully. “You were always good at looking the other way,” he said. “When it mattered.”
”Hermione lifted her chin. “And at knowing when not to.”
He gave her the barest smile. “Exactly.”

Then, lighter: “That bag of yours is still an illegal extension charm, by the way.”
“And you have an entire illegal library,” she shot back. He grinned. “Touché.”

Something warm fizzed beneath her ribs. Then he leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees, voice low and teasing: “Tell me, Granger, are you sure you’re not in the wrong House. Because your artefact identification score today was alarmingly high.” She narrowed her eyes, a flush creeping up her neck.
“I’m exactly where I belong.”
He didn’t argue. Just looked amused. And intrigued.

Before either of them could say something reckless, a sharp pop echoed from the corridor. “Oh good,” came a smooth voice. “You’re both still clothed. That saves time.”
Blaise Zabini, of course. Coat draped elegantly over his shoulders, scarf trailing, looking like he’d just stepped out of a fashion editorial about cursed heritage and casual debauchery.
Theo followed with coffee and the expression of a man rethinking his life choices. “This doesn’t look like work,” Theo said flatly.
“Unless it’s a very specific kind of negotiation,” Blaise offered. Hermione resisted the urge to throw something at them.

Then, without warning, Pipsey reappeared. With tea. For her aura. Complete with notes of cardamom and courage and whatever else Pipsey had channeled from the spirit realm.
Hermione took a sip. It tasted like a hug wrapped in research.
“There are no biscuits,” Pipsey announced with great ceremony, “but I have revolutionised the very concept of the cracker. Prepare your palate.”

The crackers were oddly shaped, slightly floral, and absolutely delicious.

“She terrifies me,” Blaise said, nibbling one.
“I’m in love.” Theo nodded. “She tried to reorganise my sock drawer once. Magically. I didn’t stop her.”
Hermione found herself laughing. And then, just for a second, she caught Draco watching her. Like he’d forgotten what her laugh sounded like.
Talk turned back to the Shack.
Blaise, surprisingly, offered the most insight. “It’s anchored,” he said, gesturing vaguely.
“Static memory locked in stone. Something is keeping it in place.”
“A tether?” Hermione asked. “Or bait,” Blaise said, eyes flickering.
“Whatever it is, it’s not done feeding yet.” Theo muttered something about cursed buildings and psychological warfare.

Draco, serious again, met Hermione’s eyes. “We contain it. Quietly. Just us.” There was a pause. Then Theo sighed. “If we die doing this, I’m haunting your guest bedroom.”“No,” said Draco. “Blaise gets the guest room. You get the wine cellar.” “Reasonable,” Theo nodded.
Then he turned to Hermione. “Are you always this calm around unregulated magic?” Hermione smiled. “I find that panic rarely improves results.”
“A woman after my own heart,” Blaise said. “If I had one.”
Draco rolled his eyes, but his expression had softened.

When the room quieted again, Hermione felt it. That strange, circling energy. Unnamed. Unspoken. Like something just beginning to wake.
And for the first time in weeks, she didn’t feel alone in it.

Chapter Text

The library had fallen quiet again.
Theo and Blaise had left not long after Granger. Blaise had tossed one last remark over his shoulder about the “undeniable energy” in the room, paired with a smirk.
Draco had chosen, quite consciously, to ignore.

And Theo, ever the chaos-cloaked aristocrat, had excused himself with a muttered complaint about needing to get home before his enchanted curtains tried to strangle the neighbor’s Kneazle again.
Ridiculous. As usual.
But what lingered wasn’t the absurdity. It was her response. She’d paused in the doorway. Just enough to be noticed. “Mine only ever attacked post owls.” Dry. Unbothered. As though owning a semi-feral magical creature with a vendetta against the postal service was just... part of life.
And then Theo, without missing a beat, had replied, “Then you trained yours better.”
She hadn’t laughed. But her lips had twitched. Barely. Just enough to catch Draco’s attention. And hold it.
He sat in his chair, thumb running absently along the rim of his glass. It wasn’t just her wit. It was the way she didn’t flinch. Not here, in this house steeped in shadow and residue. She hadn’t recoiled from the cursed objects, hadn’t hesitated near the darker corners, hadn’t drawn back from him.
The faint scent of her tea still clung to the air. Cardamom and something sharper, rosemary? Pipsey had brewed it herself, placing the cup with a faint, knowing nod that Draco had pretended not to notice.
Trust Pipsey to distill a person’s entire essence into a single brew.

He was still thinking about that when the elf reappeared, silent as always, holding a folded blanket in one hand and a tray of lemon-scented liquor in the other.
“You are brooding again, Master Draco,” Pipsey said, voice soft but pointed. “I’m sitting,” Draco replied. “Brooding while sitting,” Pipsey clarified. “You make the air heavy. I will need to open the windows.”
“Don’t.” Pipsey sighed. An impressive feat for someone only two feet tall. She vanished the liquor with a flick and replaced it with the tea from earlier. A fresh cup. Still steaming.

“You brewed it again.”
“I remember what people like. It helps me judge them.”
Draco arched an eyebrow. “And your judgement?”
“Better than yours,” she said vaguely. And then left with a pop.
A tapping at the window interrupted the quiet.
He rose, opened it, and let in Potter’s owl. The bird landed with the gravitas of someone far too used to important messages and self-righteous missions.

Draco untied the note.
No flourish. No greeting. Just Potter.

Draco,

I heard you were the reason I’m still alive.
Thank you.
I’m not sure how to say it better than that, but maybe we can talk.
You’ve been in the Shack more than anyone.
Tell me what I missed.

Harry

Draco read it once. Then again.
There was no posturing in the words. Just honesty, clumsy but deliberate. Space, even. An invitation without pressure. And something else.
An opening.
He didn’t owe Potter anything more than what he’d already done.
But he found himself thinking not about Potter. But about the mirror.
He glanced at the shelf near the floo. The old containment spells woven into the wood. The mirror was very shortly stored here, but its memory still had a way of pressing in. Especially at night. Especially since it had begun to respond. To feeling.

He hadn’t told anyone. Not properly. Except Blaise. One firewhisky laced evening with too many silences and not enough lies to hide behind.
“If something’s reacting to magic that shouldn’t exist anymore,” Blaise had said, eyes unusually sharp, “then either you’ve built yourself a private hell… or you’ve accidentally tethered one.”
Draco hadn’t laughed. That had unsettled them both.
He reached for parchment. Not the expensive kind. Just the edge of an old ledger, torn and smudged. He dipped the quill. Wrote.

Potter,

Don’t flatter me. It’s unbecoming.
I didn’t save your life. I happened to be in the right place with the right instincts and an unfortunate sense of responsibility.
Anyone with a wand and a spine would’ve done the same.
Or should have.

D.M.

He sealed it. No wax, no sigil.
The owl, predictably unimpressed, waited just long enough to snatch the note and vanish into the dark.
He stood there for a moment longer. Then sat again, letting the stillness wrap around him.

Pipsey reappeared minutes later, barefoot and humming to herself, a tea tray floating behind her like it had been convinced rather than commanded. She twirled once, completely unnecessary, and set the tray down with a flourish that made the steam rise in spirals.
“I made you something grounding,” she chirped, pouring the tea into a cup that looked suspiciously like it had never existed before now.
Draco raised an eyebrow. “It’s glowing.”
She beamed. “Only a little.”
He accepted it anyway, because fighting Pipsey was like arguing with moonlight. You’d only exhaust yourself, and she’d still be dancing in circles around you.
“You’re going back to the Shack,” she said, plopping down beside him.
“Yes.”
“Mmm.” She plucked a cracker from the tray and tapped it twice on his knee. “And will the clever one be going with you?”

Draco didn’t look up. “If you mean Granger…she doesn’t usually wait for permission.”

“Oh, I like her,” Pipsey said dreamily. “So many layers. Sharp edges, but a warm center. Like a very determined cracker.”
Draco snorted, just barely. “She talks too much. Reads everything. Has opinions about everything.”
Pipsey popped the rest of the cracker into her mouth and spoke around it. “And you hate that, obviously.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but your eyebrows twitched when you said ‘everything,’ and that’s your tell.”
Draco looked at her, unamused. “You’re insufferable.”
“I’m insightful,” she corrected brightly. Then, more softly, “And you’re not as annoyed as you pretend to be.”
He looked away, jaw tight. “She’s not part of this.”
“She’s already part of this,” Pipsey said. “She changed the room just by standing in it. You noticed. Don’t lie.
He said nothing.
Pipsey left with a pop.
Draco took a sip of the tea, scowled at how good it was, and muttered to no one: “Bloody elf.”
But he didn’t stop her, either.
Narcissa Malfoy didn’t knock. Not here. This had once been her house in name and influence, and even now, in her self-chosen exile to the west wing, she moved through its halls like a queen inspecting a kingdom she had no need to command.
Draco didn’t look up right away. He didn’t need to.
“You sent a letter back to the boy who lived,” she said. “I did,” he replied.
A rustle of silk. The faint scent of white heather and something sharper. Verbena, perhaps, trailed behind her as she approached him. She didn’t sit. She rarely did unless invited.
She watched him for a long moment, head tilted just so. “You’ve been quiet.”
Draco gave a faint shrug. “That tends to happen when there’s no Dark Lord and half his fan club breathing down my neck.”

She didn’t smile. But the corner of her mouth curved, just slightly. “You only drink cardamom when something’s bothering you. And you’ve let Pipsey rearrange the library without complaint.”
“That was a tactical surrender,” he murmured.
“You don’t surrender unless you’re distracted,” she said. Then, after a pause:
“And you’ve been speaking with Granger.”
He glanced at her, expression unreadable. “Briefly.”
“Mmm.” She drifted toward the mantle, fingers ghosting along the edge. “She’s very sharp. Purposeful. I imagine she doesn’t give you much space to deflect.”
“No,” he admitted. “She doesn’t.”
Narcissa hummed, not disapprovingly. “I expect that’s why you’re still talking to her.”
He didn’t answer.
She turned slightly, looking at him not as his mother, but as someone who had survived war through observation.
“Be careful with clever women, Draco. Especially the ones who see through you. They rarely leave things untouched.”

“She’s inconvenient,” he said, almost to himself. But there was no heat in it. Only something that sounded like… interest. Maybe even admiration.
Narcissa turned fully to face him now, her expression unreadable, sculpted in stillness.
“Inconvenient,” she repeated, as if tasting the word. “Yes. The good ones usually are.” She stepped closer, the silk of her robes whispering against the stone. “Just be certain, Draco.”
“Certain of what?”
“That she doesn’t become a weakness.”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue. He knew better.
Then, after a beat, her voice softened. Just enough for him to hear the shift beneath it.

“But if she does…”

She adjusted a fold of his sleeve as if it mattered.

“…let it be the kind that makes you harder to break.”
She lingered a moment longer, then added, almost absently,
“Your father never understood that difference.”
Draco’s gaze flicked to her, sharp and searching, but she didn’t elaborate. She simply turned. The line of her spine straight as a blade.
“I hope you do.”
And with that, she left.
Draco sat still for a long time after she left.
Just listening to the silence Granger made feel a little less empty.

Chapter Text

He was better.
Not perfect, not quite himself, but whole again. Mostly.

The spells had taken, the potions had cleared the worst of it, and the Healers at St. Mungo’s had finally relented.
He signed his release parchment amid solemn nods and quiet warnings. As though he’d ever listened to that before.

It felt good to be outside again, even if the air tasted different.
He emerged from St. Mungo’s. A quill shop owner stood quietly with an owl on his arm, handing out leaflets about magical handwriting therapy. Nearby, a witch in Healer green sat knitting what looked like a therapeutic creature plush. Long-bodied, serpentine, meant to comfort spell-trauma patients.
Harry pulled his hood lower and slipped away through the staff exit, before anyone could meet his eyes.
He made it three steps into the alley before a paper hit his chest. Thrown with irritating precision by a delivery owl that clearly hadn’t been told to leave him alone. The bird gave a smug hoot, then vanished into the overcast sky.

Harry caught the Prophet mid-slide and almost threw it in the nearest bin. But something, habit maybe, stopped him
He unfolded the paper like a formality.
There it was. Page three. Rita Skeeter. Still venomous. Still unrelenting.

From Chosen to Changed? Inside the Vanishing Act of Harry Potter"
Once hailed as the symbol of hope, Harry Potter has all but disappeared from the public eye following a reported incident near Hogsmeade. Witnesses describe Ministry interference, restricted access, and silenced staff at St. Mungo’s. What is so dangerous they won’t let us see?
Sources inside the Ministry (anonymous, of course, as they always are) hint at “unusual magical trauma” and a “psychological freeze response.”
Potter himself has made no statement. No photograph. No proof of stability. Should the wizarding public be concerned when their most iconic Auror becomes a ghost in plain sight?
We remember the lightning scar. But perhaps it’s time to ask what’s behind the eyes.

He set the paper aside without comment.
Less than twenty-four hours later, back at Grimmauld Place, the ink still faintly smudged on his fingertips, the words lingered louder than he wanted to admit.
The time between passed in fragments: a quiet Floo back under Ministry cover, a few nods exchanged with Nora that said nothing and everything, and a night where sleep came in shallow fits, broken by images he couldn’t place. The shadows from the Shack didn’t haunt him directly. But they echoed. In the corners. In the way his wand felt heavier. In the way his breath stalled when the silence stretched too long.
And here, within the cold, creaking bones of 12 Grimmauld Place, the silence pressed too tightly around the walls.
The wards hummed low, like a warning he couldn’t decipher.
He moved from room to room, steps echoing sharper than they should. The paper was gone. Vanished to ash in the fireplace. But the headline lingered in his mind like a splinter:
From Chosen to Changed?
He didn’t have an answer.
But the silence seemed to be forming one for him.

Hagrid arrived.
No warning. No announcement. Just the sudden creak of floorboards, the scent of damp earth, and his familiar voice:
“Good. Yer outta that blasted hospital. Place never suited yeh anyway.”
Harry looked up. There stood Hagrid with a bizarre bouquet. Thistle, heather, and something that might have been still moving.
“I didn’t bring flowers,” Hagrid said, unnecessarily. “Figured yeh’d rather have somethin’ that bites back.”
Harry smiled, genuinely.
Hagrid didn’t ask how he felt, nor did he comment on the bruises that still marred Harry’s collarbone or the way his fingers trembled in the breeze.
Instead, he said softly, “There’s a nuisance in the forest. Nothin’ dangerous, just… unsettled. Thought yeh might want to come.”

Harry blinked. “You want me to help you with a nuisance in the Forbidden Forest?”
“Well,” Hagrid shrugged, making the floorboards groan, “could ask an intern, but they don’t know a puffskein from a knarl. And you’ve always had a knack for things that live in the dark.”
It landed somewhere deeper than pride. So Harry agreed. No press, no forms, no strategy sessions. Just the forest. The way it used to be.
They moved through moss-covered roots, ancient branches shielding them. A squirrel darted away like a fumbling spell. “Yeh sure yeh up for this, Harry?” Hagrid’s voice rumbled behind him.
Harry nodded. “I need this.”

They passed enchanted traps on the eastern edge, half-forgotten by the Ministry but still pulsing faintly with intent. Hagrid muttered as he disarmed them one by one, giant hands surprisingly deft.
Harry crouched beside him, fingers brushing the moss-softened runes. “These are old,” Harry murmured, crouching low as his fingers brushed over the moss-softened runes etched into the trap casing. “Some of them date back to the Second Task.”
“The Triwizard days,” Hagrid nodded, his voice grave. “Back when they dumped ye in the Black Lake and told ye to save what yeh’d miss most. Traps went up all through the forest around then. Precautions, yeh see. Didn’t want anything wanderin’ out or in while the champions were bein’ tested.”
Harry remembered. Cold water. Gillyweed. The distant echo of mermaid song. And the weight of time pressing down as he searched the depths.
“They built half these spells in a rush,” Hagrid continued, disarming another trap with a flick and grunt. “Layered ‘em over old magic. Some never came down proper. The forest didn’t like it. Still don’t.”
Harry nodded slowly. It made sense. Of course the Forbidden Forest would remember. Magic clung to memory. Especially the kind forged in fear.
Beneath the gnarled roots of the Whomping Willow, far enough from the swing of its branches to feel safe, but close enough that the air still thrummed, they found them: a family of ash wisps.
Harry’s gaze flicked, just for a moment, to the knot in the bark. The one that stilled the tree, the one that once opened the path to the Shrieking Shack.
It looked the same.

Then the wind shifted, and the wisps stirred.
Pale flickers of charred-air magic, like embers that had forgotten how to burn. They hovered low, threading through the roots, their movement slow and cyclical, as though orbiting a memory too fragile to name.
“They're grieving,” Harry said without thinking. He didn’t know how he knew, only that the pull in his chest said it was true.
Hagrid nodded. “Lost their anchor, maybe. Could’ve been a lightning strike or a spell gone wrong. They cling to trees with memory.”
The Whomping Willow loomed above them, motionless for now, but its branches hung like limbs in mourning. Harry stepped a little closer to the wisps, careful not to disturb the earth beneath them. The air was warmer here, strangely so, but laced with something brittle, like smoke that had grown tired of rising.
He watched one of the wisps spiral upward and then sink again, as if remembering the idea of flight but not the purpose of it. The magic didn’t feel dark. Just… frayed. Like it had loved something once, and hadn’t known how to stop.
“Do they feel pain?” he asked quietly.
Hagrid was crouched nearby now, one massive hand brushing over the moss with surprising gentleness. “Dunno if it's pain like ours. But they remember somethin’. it's like holdin’ on too tight to the wrong bit of a dream.”
Harry swallowed, his throat dry. The crack in the bark that led to the tunnel was visible now. Half-hidden beneath the roots, like a scar. His mind drifted again.
“They’re not the only ones still clinging,” he said, more to the roots than to Hagrid.

The biggest wisp drifted toward him then, just for a moment. It hovered at chest level, as if studying him. Then, gently, it passed straight through him. Cold, but not cruel.
A memory brushing against another memory.
Hagrid stood. “Come on. Let ’em be. They ain't dangerous. Not unless you try to tear 'em loose.”
Harry nodded, but he didn’t move right away. He wasn’t sure who was grieving more. Them, or him. The boy he used to be, the last time he stood by this tree.
Harry extended a hand. Slowly. Palms up, wand still holstered.
One wisp hovered near his fingers. It didn’t touch, but its light pulsed once, a soft, smoky gold. Then another followed. And another.
Together, they drifted upward, swirling through the tangled limbs like fireflies mourning dusk.
He stepped back.
“Handled quietly,” Hagrid reminded him. His voice was low, almost reverent. “Like McGonagall asked.”
Harry nodded. It hadn’t been a mission. Not really. More… a witnessing. A moment that didn’t need fixing.
“She’d said they weren’t to be disturbed. Only understood. Ash wisps didn’t respond to force. They responded to presence.“
He glanced once more at the drifting lights as they disappeared into the canopy.
No headlines.
No heroics.
Just grief. And space enough to let it breathe.

A few minutes later, as the light thinned between the branches and the hush of the forest deepened, a figure appeared.
Not from the path ahead, but from between two leaning trees, as if the forest itself had opened a door just for her.

Luna.
She moved with a kind of weightless certainty. pale cloak trailing behind her like morning mist, silver-acorn earrings catching the last glimmers of dusk. Her steps made no sound. Hair braided with forget-me-not blue and a single phoenix feather. Her presence didn’t startle the shimmerlings or rouse the ash wisps. Instead, the magic in the air seemed to shift. Quieter, calmer. Like the forest had been holding its breath and now exhaled.
“Hi, Harry,” Luna said softly, as if they’d only just spoken yesterday. “Hagrid.”
She stepped into the fading light like she belonged there, the forest parting around her rather than resisting. The edge of her cloak brushed a cluster of moss that seemed to brighten under her touch.
Hagrid blinked, momentarily thrown off. “Didn’t think anyone else was cleared today.”
“I’m not cleared,” Luna replied lightly, as if that were entirely beside the point. “But the forest was sighing this morning, and I thought someone ought to listen.”

Harry didn’t argue. He couldn’t. Something about her presence, quiet but unmistakably certain, pressed gently against the unease in his chest, like a hand steadying him without needing to hold on. The ache in his ribs seemed to lessen. Even the air around them felt a shade warmer.

“You’re steadier now,” Luna said, tilting her head as she studied him. Her voice was calm, not surprised, just quietly sure. Harry raised an eyebrow, caught between amusement and wonder. “How do you-?”
“You used to lean,” she said, cutting gently through the question. “Like your heart outran your feet. Like you were always chasing something only you could see. Now… you’re more balanced.” He didn’t know how to respond to that. Not really. But somehow it made sense. More sense than all the Healers’ assessments, more sense than Skeeter’s articles or his own mirror-staring questions.
He looked at her then. Luna Lovegood. Strange, radiant, and serene as ever. But not untouched. No longer the dreamy girl drifting through Hogwarts in butterbeer-cap necklaces. There was something rooted in her now. A depth beneath the softness. She hadn’t changed so much as grown inward, into herself.
And Harry felt, perhaps for the first time since waking in St. Mungo’s, like the world had room for him again. Like he didn’t have to fight for air.
They wandered onward.

“So,” Harry asked, voice quiet, almost reverent, “what do you think the forest was sighing about?”
Luna didn’t answer right away. She stopped beside a cluster vanishing ivy, fingers brushing over the curling leaves as if asking permission.
Then, turning to face him, she frowned. Not confused, but sad. “It’s mourning,” she said softly. “Not for death, exactly. But for dissonance. For imbalance. Too many spells cast in haste. Roots scorched without apology. Wards broken and rewritten without asking.”
She touched the bark of a nearby tree, fingers resting gently on the grooves of ancient knots. Her voice dropped a note lower.
“Magic forgets nothing, Harry.”
And he felt it then, in the hush between the branches. Old spells, half-spoken and long-faded, still murmuring in bark and stone. Not loud. Not screaming. Just… there. Like whispers behind the silence. Like stories carved into the marrow of the forest.

He paused mid-step, gaze drawn to the forest floor. The moss looked undisturbed, and yet…There were scars. Not physical ones, but magical. Lines of wrongness that shimmered just out of sight. As if something had forced its way in, left a stain, and vanished without closing the door behind it.
Luna glanced over her shoulder at him. “You feel it too, don’t you?” she asked quietly. “That hum beneath everything. Like it’s watching. Waiting.”
He hesitated. The words felt dangerous. Sacred. But true.
“Something about it feels… familiar,” he admitted. “Like the Shack. Like that day. Like something was bleeding through and couldn’t be stopped.”
Luna nodded solemnly, her expression unreadable but unwavering. “There are places where magic holds memory. Where time thickens. But some of what lingers here… it doesn’t belong to the forest. It wasn’t born here.
Luna’s gaze didn’t waver. “Like what’s left when something evil dies… but doesn’t fully go.”
Harry’s breath caught in his throat. The trees rustled softly, but not from wind. “Like horcruxes?” he asked, his voice rougher now, lower. “Like remnants.”
The air around them thickened. Not hostile, but aware. Charged. Harry swallowed. “So you think it’s connected?”
“I think some places carry echoes. And I think some echoes are louder than others.”
She turned then, slow and graceful, continuing deeper into the trees as if her words hadn’t just shifted the air around them. As if the forest hadn’t just felt more alive, than it had moments before.
Harry followed, every step a question he didn’t yet know how to ask.

They moved through a stand of twisted birches, their bark pale as bone, before entering a moss-thick clearing where the light fell strange. Like it filtered through memory instead of leaves. And that’s where they saw them.
Tiny flickers of movement among the roots. Eyes blinking in curious rhythm. Wood-sprites.
No taller than Harry’s wand, the creatures resembled miniature tree spirits: bark-skinned, with leafy ridges along their spines and fingers like brittle twigs. They darted in and out of hollowed roots and between patches of enchanted lichen, chittering in a language older than spellwork.
One paused mid-scamper to examine Luna’s hair. Its head tilting once, twice, before reaching out a cautious limb to touch the Phoenix feather.
It gave a single, satisfied click, then vanished with a flick of leaves.
“They’re drawn to Phoenix feathers” Luna said dreamily, without looking down. “It makes them feel seen. Less judged.” Harry tilted his head. “How do you even know that?” “They told me,” she said simply, as if it required no further explanation.
Behind them, Hagrid snorted softly. “Little nuisances, sometimes. Got a whole colony behind me hut. Built a nest inside me rain barrel once. Took me three weeks to get the smell out.” He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “Won’t go near Buckbeak, though. Too proud, probably.”
Luna smiled. “They don’t like creatures who’ve brushed against death and kept the memory.”
Hagrid blinked, then let out a soft, “Huh,” as if that made perfect sense.

They moved on, stepping carefully through underbrush that shimmered faintly with dew and latent magic. The trees shifted subtly around them, the light thinning, until they came upon a glade that shimmered with delicate pulses of color. Blues and golds. Silver where shadow met air.
Shimmerlings. Dozens of them.
Tiny, dragonfly-like sprites with lantern-shaped wings that refracted light like oil on water. They hovered between tree trunks, darted through beams of sun, and left faint trails of glowing dust in their wake. One peeled away from the group and floated down, delicate and hesitant. It landed on Luna’s open palm without fear.
It glowed softly. A quiet, steady light.
“They glow when they feel safe,” she whispered. “When they know you’re not pretending to be calm. They feed on silence. The spaces between sound. The honesty in stillness.”
Harry stood transfixed, watching the creature’s pulse flicker across her skin like a heartbeat made of starlight. For a moment, the noise inside him, the guilt, the pressure, the fragmented thoughts…faded. Something soft stirred within him. Not joy, exactly. Not yet. But peace. The seed of it.
Hagrid stepped closer, slower than usual, his heavy boots muffled by moss. Even he seemed quieter here. “Don’ see many this far south anymore,” he murmured.
He looked around, voice lower now. “Used to be whole glades of ‘em, back when the forest didn’t flinch so much. Before the war. Before…” He trailed off.
Before everything, Harry thought. Before the scars they’d all stopped acknowledging.
One of the shimmerlings brushed past Hagrid’s arm and flared briefly, then zipped away. Hagrid smiled, beard twitching. “Still got it.”
Harry let out a soft laugh. Luna didn’t. She was watching the shimmerling on her palm, her expression full of something deeper. “They like you, Hagrid,” she said. “Aye,” he replied, rubbing at his neck. “Even magic’s got a soft spot for stubborn old fools.”

They lingered in that glade for longer than they needed to. No one spoke for a while. The shimmerlings circled lazily around them, weaving trails of color through the air.
And in that hush, Harry realized: the forest wasn’t just a place of danger and shadows. It was also a place of memory. Of healing. Of listening.
And maybe, just maybe, that was exactly what he needed.

Eventually, the shimmerlings began to drift higher, their lights dimming as twilight deepened. One by one, they vanished into the trees like fading memories. The glade exhaled a final sigh, and silence settled in again. Not heavy this time, but peaceful.
Hagrid cleared his throat, the sound oddly delicate in the stillness. “S’pose we should head back. Fang’ll be wonderin’ where we’ve gone off to.”
“Or he’s eaten your firewood again,” Luna offered mildly.
Hagrid groaned. “Don’t even joke. Took me four hours to get the splinters out last time.”

They began the walk back. As they neared the edge of the trees, with the last golden light filtering between the trunks, Harry glanced sideways at the two of them. Luna, with her thestral-threaded cloak and serene certainty; Hagrid, broad and warm, his presence as grounding as the roots beneath their feet.
“We should do this again,” Harry said.
“Oh, we will,” Luna replied, as if it were already decided. “The forest likes routine. And it likes you. I think it’s glad you’re listening again.”
Hagrid gave a satisfied grunt. “Wouldn’t mind the company. Too many days it’s just me and Fang, and he never wants to hear about shimmerlings.”
They stepped out into the open air, and behind them, the forest rustled once, as if in agreement.
And for the first time in weeks, Harry didn’t feel like he had to be anywhere else.

Chapter Text

The biscuits had come out better than expected.
Not that Hermione ever doubted her abilities, of course. She had followed the recipe with surgical precision, added a few choice enhancements, and tested the dough for structural integrity with the same focus she once used on spellcraft.
The result: golden brown edges, soft chewy centers, and a scent so rich it practically summoned people from the corridor.
Cardamom-honey biscuits, studded with shards of candied ginger and just a hint of sea salt on top. She’d browned the butter first. Obviously. To give them a deeper, almost toffee-like base. And instead of regular sugar, she’d used muscovado, which gave a molasses warmth that curled around the tongue. Each one was topped with a delicate crackle of sugar and just a whisper of orange zest.
The entire box smelled like the bakery section of heaven.

And she baked them for Malfoy.
Not because she owed him anything. But because he knew things. About the Shrieking Shack. About what had happened there, and what still lingered. He’d been dodging her questions with practiced ease, shifting topics and raising eyebrows, but she could see it. The way his hand twitched when the place was mentioned. The way he looked away just a second too long.
So she baked. Because no one ever stayed silent long in the face of something warm and homemade. And if butter and sugar could soften his answers, then so be it. It wasn’t bribery.

She took the floo to the Manor library, not bothering to send word ahead. He’d said she was welcome any time. Which she assumed extended to biscuit-bearing visits.
What she hadn’t expected was the sound of laughter.
Warm. Familiar. A little tipsy.
She stepped out of the fireplace and paused.

Pansy Parkinson was curled into a velvet armchair, legs tucked up beneath her, wearing something silky and wine-colored. Her hand was looped casually through Neville Longbottom’s arm, who sat next to her on the settee, relaxed and utterly at ease. Blaise Zabini was perched near the window, cigarette in one hand, glass of amber something in the other, while Theo Nott was half-reclined on the floor, dramatically lamenting the decline of magical tailoring standards.
Draco sat in a high-backed chair near the fire, drink in hand, expression unreadable but not unwelcoming.

Everyone turned when they saw her.

"Hermione!" Theo grinned, sweeping an arm wide as if she were a long-lost duchess arriving late to court. Pansy waved her over. “Come, sit. Neville, make room.”

“I brought biscuits,” Hermione offered, holding up the tin. Part peace offering, part social experiment.
This was ridiculous, she thought, getting nervous about baked goods. But if this group respected anything, it was food, sarcasm, and surprise tactics. She might as well play to her strengths.
“Sainted woman,” Blaise murmured, already reaching.
They made a circle around her, taking one each with the reverence of a religious rite.

Theo took a bite, moaned dramatically, and flung himself backwards. “I would marry you for these alone,” he declared to the ceiling.
“You’d marry anyone who feeds you,” Pansy said dryly, not even looking up.
“That too,” Theo said with his mouth half full. “But I have standards. Hermione’s biscuits transcend mortal expectation.”
Neville, leaning against the table with casual ease, raised an eyebrow. “Pretty sure that’s the closest you’ve ever come to poetry.”
“I’m evolving,” Theo said, licking a crumb off his thumb. “Food is powerful.”
Hermione didn’t even blink. “Then it’s a good thing I don’t believe in legally binding snacks.”

There was a beat of silence. Then Blaise let out a low whistle somewhere in the background.
Draco said nothing at first. He simply took one. Then, after a beat, another.
She didn’t look at him. Not directly.
But she noticed.
Neville, calm and warm as ever, shifted slightly and patted the cushion beside him. “If this is how you interrogate people now, you’ve come a long way from SPEW pamphlets.”
Hermione snorted. “You say that like I’ve gone soft.”
“Not soft,” Neville said. “Strategic.”
She smiled. He really had changed. No longer the awkward boy fumbling for his wand. There was a quiet gravity to him now. Rooted, unshakeable. No wonder Pansy liked him.

As if summoned by the thought, Draco finally spoke. Low, amused, but unmistakably him. He took another biscuit without looking at her. “They’re… surprisingly excellent.”Hermione raised an eyebrow. “Surprisingly?” He cleared his throat. “Well, you don’t exactly strike me as the domestic type.”
She smirked. “And yet, here you are. Eating your words.”
Draco gave the faintest hint of a smile. “Among other things.”

She sat, legs folding beneath her.
After a few moments of sipping and chewing and playful insults volleying across the room, she leaned toward Neville.
“Neville,” she said quietly, “I have to ask: You and Pansy?” He chuckled. “Didn’t see it coming either.”
“How did it even happen?”
“She got locked out of her flat one night. Her wand was inside. I happened to be walking past.”
“And you let her stay with you?” “I tried to leave her at a pub. She followed me home.” Hermione blinked. “I’m serious,” he said, laughing. “Next morning she made tea, insulted my choice in chairs, and reorganized my greenhouse. I’ve been trying to catch up ever since.” Hermione laughed, too. “You seem happy.”
“I am,” he said. “She’s sharp. Doesn’t let me hide in myself too long. And she’s loyal, even if she pretends not to care. I don’t know. It just works.”

She glanced over at Pansy, who was now using Theo as a footrest. She looked content. Softened, somehow. Maybe war hadn’t broken all of them.
Maybe some had learned to rebuild in strange, beautiful ways.
She looked back at Draco. He met her gaze. Said nothing. But he didn’t look away.
A few biscuits later, the conversation shifted to the Shack.

“I still don’t get it,” Theo said, now sitting upright but draped in a throw like a bored heir trapped in a poorly heated manor “It’s like the place is… hungry. Or haunted. Or both.”
“Both,” Blaise confirmed from the window seat, exhaling a slow stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “Haunted by residual spellwork. Hungry for more. Old places get greedy like that. Especially when something in them knows how to reflect power back.”
Hermione gave a quiet hum. She didn’t disagree, but she didn’t like the ease with which Blaise said it either.
As if he wasn’t theorising, but remembering.
Reflect power back. That choice of words scratched at something in her mind.
Theo leaned over to snatch another biscuit, dramatically dodging Blaise’s ash cloud. “Honestly, the floorboards in there made me feel like we were trespassing on someone’s unfinished thoughts.”
Hermione didn’t respond right away. She was still staring into her cup, frowning slightly. Like the tea might rearrange itself into answers if she focused hard enough.
“Because you were,” Pansy said, threading a needle through fabric without glancing up. Her voice was even, almost casual. “Magic doesn’t just linger in places like that. When you step into it without understanding what was started, you become part of the pattern.” She paused, tugged the thread taut. “Problem is, patterns like that don’t always want to let go.The seams are straining. And you lot walked in with scissors and buttons.”
Theo snorted. “And maybe a few explosives.”
Hermione glanced across the room.
Draco hadn’t spoken.
He was seated in the corner chair, legs crossed, posture perfect, gaze somewhere distant. Somewhere deliberately not in the room.

Hermione’s eyes flicked toward him. Something about the set of his shoulders, the way his fingers tapped once against the armrest and then stilled, caught her attention.
“You’re doing it again,” she said softly. Draco looked over, brow arched. “Doing what?”
“That thing. With your hand. The stillness right before you decide to lie.”
A beat. He didn’t smile, but something flickered in his expression. Amusement, maybe. Or recognition. “Some of us call that thinking, Granger.”
“I’m aware. But your thinking face usually means someone’s about to get misdirected.”
Across the room, Blaise exhaled smoke in a slow, amused spiral. “She’s not wrong.”
Draco leaned back slightly in his chair, tilting his head just enough to study her fully. “You always this suspicious of people who don’t talk as much as you?”
“Only the ones with something to hide,” she replied evenly.
Their eyes held. Just long enough for the others to notice, not long enough to call it anything.

Then Pansy cleared her throat, sharp as a knife being resheathed.
Draco looked away first.
“You stored something there, didn’t you?” Hermione said.
Draco’s eyes met hers. The movement of his thumb stopped.
“I stored something, yes.”
Draco exhaled slowly, the kind of breath that didn’t come from weariness, but from a decision. One he’d been avoiding.
He leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees, fingers laced. “I didn’t steal it,” he said. “Not exactly. But it wasn’t a transaction either.”
The room fell quiet.
Draco glanced at the floor, as if expecting it to open beneath him. “It was three years ago. Romania. A contact sent me. Someone in Knockturn knew I was dealing in… unstable items.”
Hermione arched an eyebrow. “You mean cursed objects.”
Draco didn’t look up. “Yes. Things that whisper, bleed when touched, refuse to be moved unless certain words are spoken. That kind.”
Hermione folded her arms.

“It was winter,” Draco continued. “I was told to meet someone outside an abandoned hunting lodge. Neutral ground, supposedly. But there were wards in the trees. Old ones. Feral.”
Neville leaned forward slightly. “And the seller?”
Draco’s mouth twitched, not quite a grimace. “Didn’t give a name. Never showed a face. They wore a glamour, layered. One of those thick ones that feel like looking through smoke. And their voice was too flat, like it had been stripped of anything human. Male, I think. But… off.”
Pansy paused her stitching. “Let me guess. You didn’t walk away.”
Draco looked up then, eyes sharp. “No. Because the moment I saw it, wrapped in silvercloth, trembling like it was alive, I knew. I didn’t know why. But I knew it was mine.”
“Yours?” Hermione said carefully.
He nodded, slowly. “Not by right. Not by inheritance. It just… recognized me. Or I recognized it. And I’ve learned not to ignore that.”
He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “He didn’t want to give it up. Said it wasn’t ready. That it chose who could carry it. Said it had already shown him things. Wrong things. Old things. Then he asked me what I feared most.”
Blaise muttered, “Always a healthy start.”
Draco ignored him. “I told him nothing. He laughed. Or maybe the magic did. Then he pressed it into my hands. No haggling. No payment. Just said: Let it remember you. It eats better that way.”
Silence. Thick and unmoving.
“And you still took it?” Pansy finally asked.
Draco’s voice was flat. “Yes.”
Hermione narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
A pause. Then, honest:
“Because I already saw my reflection. Before I touched it.”
That stopped her. Stopped everyone.
“The wards nearly ruptured when I tried to leave,” Draco added, quieter now. “Whatever it was guarding that thing… didn’t want it to go. I spent six hours bleeding out hexes before I could Apparate. And I couldn’t cast a memory charm on the lodge. It repelled everything. So I stored it. In the Shack. No one checks that place. No one stays.”
His voice faded. No one rushed to fill the silence that followed. The weight of what he’d said seemed to hang in the room like dust disturbed from old stone . Too much to speak over, too fragile to brush aside.

Even Theo didn’t make a joke.

Then, softly, as if responding to a signal only he could hear, Neville moved.
He reached into his satchel, unwrapping something with the same care a herbologist might use for a volatile bloom. “I think we’ll need this,” he said.
Something mossy and faintly silver stirred in the folds of cloth. It pulsed once, Subtle, not showy, as if acknowledging the tension in the air.
“It’s not a weapon,” he began, fingers still resting lightly against the plant’s mossy stem. “Not really. Whisperroots are used in wand groves and memory sanctuaries. They don’t attack dark magic. They stabilize it. Ground it.”
Neville gesticulated vaguely toward the Shack, his voice unusually steady. “If you drag it into the epicenter, it risks binding to the wrong thing, or being consumed entirely. It needs distance. Perspective, so you have to put it outside the shack.
Theo frowned. “So it’s like… magical grounding wire.”
“Exactly. Only moodier. And probably sentient.”
The others watched as the roots slowly unfurled across the surface, thin tendrils pressing into the grain of the wood.
“They anchor magic that’s spiralling,” Neville continued, voice even. “Draw it back down to the foundation. Think of it like… recalibrating the room. Making it stop fighting you.”
Draco’s gaze flicked toward the plant, his expression unreadable. “And you think it’ll work in the Shack?”
“I think,” Neville said slowly, “that the Shack doesn’t know how to be still anymore. Too many echoes. Too many wounds. The Whisperroot can’t erase that, but it can remind the space how to breathe again.”
Hermione tilted her head. “So it makes our spells more stable?”
Neville nodded. “Less interference. Less rewriting. And maybe, if you're lucky iit dulls the pull of the mirror. Makes it harder for that thing to twist magic around itself.”
Pansy glanced at the softly glowing roots. “And how long does that last?”
Neville gave a small shrug. “As long as the Whisperroot feels safe. If it recoils, you leave. If it leans in… you pay attention. Because it means it´s fixing it.
Hermione didn’t respond right away. She was still watching the Whisperroot, its roots glowing faintly against the tabletop, like veins of moonlight threading through ancient moss. It didn’t twitch. Didn’t lean. Just… waited.

Draco shifted beside her, slow and deliberate, his arms loosely crossed but his posture alert. “We’re not putting that thing in the Shack yet.”
Neville looked up, slightly surprised. “Why not?”
“Because we don’t know what it’s reacting to,” Draco said, voice low but firm. “The mirror, the wards, the echoes... And if it destabilizes instead of stabilizes, we’re not just spectators anymore. We’re participants in something we don’t understand.”
Hermione glanced at him. And this time, when their eyes met, she didn’t look away.
“He’s right,” she said. “We need context. We need to know what that mirror was made for.”
Theo flung himself backwards, one arm draped over his eyes like a tragic poet awaiting doom. “Merlin help us. We’ve reached the ‘academic foreplay’ portion of the evening. Someone fetch me smelling salts and a quill. I feel a monograph coming on.”

Hermione rose. ”Malfoy has access to one of the most extensive private collections of magical theory in the world. If there’s anything written on reflective dark artefacts it’ll be there.”
Draco gave a faint, ironic tilt of the head. “Nice to see someone finally respects the family archives.”
Hermione raised an eyebrow. “Don’t get used to it.”
She turned back to the group. “Give us some time. Then we’ll have real information. And we can make a plan.”

Blaise stubbed out his cigarette, his smile sharp as always. “Looks like homework just got sexy.”
Pansy rolled her eyes. “Everything’s sexy until someone gets hexed.”
The conversation scattered after that, dissolving into low murmurs and the quiet shuffle of teacups. Hermione stood, brushing a crumb from her skirt, and gave a quick nod to Neville before heading for the fireplace. Draco moved beside her without comment, matching her pace.
They stopped just in front of the floo. The flames were already swirling green.
“You’ll look into the bindings?” she asked, gaze thoughtful. “In the meantime?”
He inclined his head. "Of course."
She gave a soft exhale. Not quite relief, but something close.
Then, just as she stepped into the Floo, she glanced back at him, her voice low:
“If it reflects anything at all… I’d like to know what it sees when it looks at you.”

And as the flames rose to meet her, Hermione thought that silence could be the loudest kind of reply.

Draco didn’t answer.

And then she was gone, the green flames swallowing her whole and leaving only the faint scent of cardamom and magic behind.

Chapter Text

It was later than he’d expected.
The kind of late that cloaked the Manor in velvet silence, where even the wards seemed to hum slower. He hadn’t thought she would come tonight. Not after she’d said she had work, nor after the heaviness of the previous conversation.
But she’d sent word just after dusk. “I’ve finished. If you're decent company tonight."
Of course he was.
And now, as the clock in the entry hall struck eight, she was walking beside him again.
No grand pronouncements. No interrogation. Just… walking.
The corridor to the library stretched ahead, flanked by dark stone and flickering sconces. Draco walked beside her. His strides measured, hands tucked behind his back as if the weight of thought required proper posture.

The corridor to the library stretched ahead, flanked by dark stone and flickering sconces.
She walked just slightly ahead, confident, focused, the hem of her coat just brushing his.
Once, her presence would’ve put him on edge. No, not just edge. On alert. She had been his rival in every sense that mattered: intellect, sharpness, precision.

And yet, it wasn’t her brilliance that had once irritated him most. It was that she wasn’t supposed to be brilliant.
Not with her blood status. Not with that muddy lineage. He had been raised to believe power was inherited, not earned. But Granger had shattered that idea before they were even fourteen. And now?
Now, he saw her for what she was: Not brilliant despite her blood. Brilliant full stop. She should’ve been a magical theorist, an Arithmancer rewriting foundational truths. Not some bureaucratic ward specialist chasing after Ministry assignments. It grated at him, how wasted her talents were, shackled to parchment and chain-of-command mediocrity.
It grated at him more than he cared to admit.
Because it was wrong.
Because someone, somewhere, should’ve fought to give her more. Because she’d been reduced to function when she was meant for vision. And because, perhaps selfishly, he wanted to see what she’d become if no one tried to box her in again.
They turned the last corner.
The library doors loomed.

He opened them for her. Of course.
Inside the library, his mother sat in one of the high-backed armchairs near the arched window, framed by a soft afternoon light.
A delicate porcelain teacup rested on the table beside her, steam curling gently from its rim. In her lap lay an old book. Its spine worn, but well cared for.
She held it open with one hand.

She didn’t look up immediately. Just turned a page with a faint rustle, took a measured sip, and said, without glancing away, “I wondered when curiosity would bring you here again, Draco.”
He paused in the doorway, the hem of his coat still damp from the evening mist. Or maybe it was sweat.
Or something colder he didn’t care to name.
Curiosity.
Was that what this was?
He’d told himself it was about research. Information. Strategy.

But it was her voice he’d wanted to hear. Her calm. That unnerving ability to feel at home amidst cursed knowledge and uncomfortable truths.
As if nothing could unseat her anymore.
As if he might be capable of the same, if he stood close enough.
He schooled his expression into something unreadable, let the door click shut behind him, and stepped into the library like he believed his own excuse:
That this visit was purely academic.
And not because her gaze had been haunting him since yesterday.

Then she looked up, her gaze settling briefly on Hermione. There was no hostility there, just interest, and assessing. Followed by something warmer, quieter. Approval, maybe.
“My, my,” his mother said, voice smooth as ever. “Hermione Granger, in my library. Shall I worry?”
Hermione lifted a brow. "Only if you think your books are at risk."
A retort, sharp and dry. He almost smiled. Almost.
But it was his mother’s expression that held him. Not the usual measured politeness she offered guests. No, his smile was different. Soft. Open, in the way only Narcissa Malfoy could be without sacrificing control.
She stepped closer. Her eyes never left him. “I see it,” she murmured. “What this is doing to you. It's not a bad thing.”
His breath caught. Just briefly.

Hermione blinked. “Pardon?”
Draco resisted the urge to turn away. He could already feel the tension tightening across his shoulders. Of course his mother would see it. She’d always seen too much, too quickly. But saying it aloud, here, with her in the room, felt like peeling back a ward he wasn’t ready to lift.
Narcissa turned, gracefully, eyes now on Hermione. “Forgive me. I forget my son isn’t the only one in the room.”
There was a flicker in her tone. Not sarcasm. Regret, maybe. Or something quieter.
Then her gaze changed again. Something behind her eyes hardened. Not cruelly, but protectively. He knew that look. Had seen it aimed at Aurors, at healers, even at Lucius.
She stepped forward, slower now. Deliberate. “I know what my sister did to you. And I won’t ask you to forget it. There are scars… I’m certain.”
A silence fell, dense as fog.
Draco didn’t move. Couldn’t. The air in the room shifted with memory. And guilt.
Bellatrix. Her name was never spoken here, not since the war. But it lived in the stone. In the shadows of this very room.
He dared a glance at Hermione. She hadn’t flinched. She never did. But something in her jaw, the subtle shift of her weight, told him she remembered too.
He wanted to say something. Anything. But the words caught, sharp and useless, at the back of his throat.
So he said nothing.
Because sometimes silence was the only apology that didn’t sound hollow.
Hermione’s voice was steady. “Still there. On my arm. But it’s not the mark that matters anymore. It’s what it gave me.”
Narcissa tilted her head.
“Determination,” Hermione said simply. “And proof I can survive anything.”
Narcissa gave a soft, almost bitter smile. “Then let me say this, Miss Granger: I made the choices I did to keep my family breathing. There were no good ones. Only the ones I could live with. And some days, I still don’t.”

Hermione nodded, neither cruel nor kind. “I understand. That doesn’t mean I excuse it. But I understand.”
Narcissa looked at her for a long time. Then she inclined her head, just slightly. “I’ll leave you to it.”
She reached the door, then turned back.
“Oh, and Draco?”
He looked up.
She smiled faintly. “Don’t take too long to realize what’s good for you.”
Before he could respond, a pop announced Pipsey’s arrival.
“Miss Granger, sir,” she beamed, hopping in place, her ears bouncing. “You brought her into the library! And the air is buzzing! You always make the space feel heavier. But now it’s all light and…oh! It’s the *alignment,* it is!”
Draco groaned. Hermione coughed. “Enough, Pipsey,” he muttered. “Alignment!” the elf chirped. “Like the tea leaves said!”
“Pipsey,” Draco warned. “I’ll get tea!” And she vanished with another happy pop. Silence.
Hermione adjusted a book on the table. “That wasn’t awkward at all.”
Draco stood still for a moment after Pipsey’s departure, his hand still hovering near the table where she'd appeared. The silence in the library thickened, but not uncomfortably.
He hadn’t missed the way his mother had looked at Granger. Open, unguarded in a way she rarely was with anyone outside the family. It unnerved him, slightly. Not because he doubted his mothers instincts. If anything, they were sharper than his own. But because it meant she saw something forming. Something he wasn’t sure he could name yet.
And Pipsey. Merlin, Pipsey. If she started reading tea leaves again, he’d have to place a silencing spell on every teacup in the house.

Draco lifted his wand and muttered, "Noctus Interior." A shimmer passed over the threshold to the library. Subtle, nothing loud, just a nudge of quiet that kept the world at bay. Enough to prevent Pipsey, or anyone else, wandering in uninvited.
He moved to one of the corner cabinets. Black walnut, and opened it with a flick. Inside, nestled between crystal decanters, sat a bottle of deep green glass with a golden stopper.
"Ever had fire-drowned Calvados?" he asked, retrieving two glasses with a soft clink. Hermione raised a brow. "Sounds like something brewed in Knockturn."

"Close. Aged with Salamander breath and goblin-warded oak. Ten years per drop. Illegal to export. Helps me think. Or forget. Depending on the mood."

He poured a small amount into each glass and handed her one. "You’ll manage a sip. If you’re brave." She gave him a dry look but accepted the drink. "Slytherins and their vices." He clinked his glass lightly against hers. "Gryffindors and their judgments."

They drank in silence for a moment. She made a face, barely. But he caught it. The Calvados hit hard, coiled heat that spread like wildfire across the tongue. Still, she didn’t complain.
Draco turned toward the book in front of him, but didn’t open it. His hand rested on the leather cover, unmoving.
“What my mother said,” he said quietly. “About what my aunt did to you. About choices.”
Hermione looked up, watchful but unreadable.
“I never really understood it,” he admitted. “Not then. Not after. And I’ve never said it before. But I should’ve started with this…”
He paused. Jaw tight.
“I’m sorry.”

Her brow arched. “For your aunt’s actions?”

He shook his head. “For mine. For all the things I thought. The things I said. Back then… and long after.”
Their eyes held. Just breath and truth and something brittle trying not to break.

“I let myself believe the worst things about you. Because it made everything simpler. You weren’t supposed to be brilliant. You weren’t supposed to win.”
His voice dipped, lower now. “But you did. Over and over. And now I know the truth.”

A breath.

“You’re not less than me, Granger. You’re not even my equal.”

A beat.

“You’re more. And you always were.”
Her fingers tightened slightly around the glass. Not from offense. From grounding. As if something in her recognized the weight of what had just been given.

“I don’t know what brought you here today,” he added, voice slightly rougher now, “but I won’t insult either of us by pretending I always understood who you were.”
Hermione studied him for a long moment. Her eyes were steady. But beneath that, there was something warmer flickering. A hint of something more dangerous.
“Good,” she said at last. “Then let’s begin where we are now.”
He gave the faintest nod. And something in his chest shifted.
“And now,” she continued, flipping open the book before her, “we figure out how your cursed mirror works before it eats someone alive.”
“Charming,” he muttered, turning toward the shelves.
But he felt it. Not the Calvados.
Her.
Draco leaned forward and pulled a thick, rune-bound volume toward him. Hermione did the same, scanning the index like she was back in the Hogwarts library.
For a while, there was only the sound of turning pages. Of soft sips and muttered notes. But beneath it all, the tension thrummed.
He glanced over the rim of his glass at her. Her brows furrowed as she read, lip caught slightly between her teeth.
She didn’t notice him watching. Or if she did, she didn’t let on.
And he couldn’t look away.
Hermione’s finger froze halfway down a page. Her eyes flicked back and forth, rapidly rereading a paragraph, then tracing the runes inscribed in the margin as if deciphering a puzzle no one else had noticed.
Draco watched her straighten slightly, then lean forward, her posture shifting from curious to focused. Dangerously focused.
“What is it?” he asked, already standing, already knowing the answer was important.
She didn’t respond immediately. Just turned the book toward him and tapped the page with her index finger.
“Theory of Echoed Fragmentation,” she said, her voice low but clear. “An object that has absorbed the magical remnants of a destroyed soul, especially one shattered unnaturally…can become a tether point if it contains reflective properties.”
Draco’s mouth went dry.
She went on. “The mirror didn’t just reflect power. It captured it. Horcruxes weren’t cleanly destroyed, Draco. The fragments, the magic…some of it never fully unraveled. It needed somewhere to go. And that mirror…”
“...gave it shape,” he finished, stunned.
Hermione nodded, flipping the page, eyes scanning furiously. “It would explain everything. The behavioural draw. The residual fear. Why it fixated on Harry in the Shack. He was the original vessel. The tether. But it’s shifting now. The fragments are... looking for something else.”
His pulse pounded.
She looked up. “They’re trapped in it. But not inert. Not silent. Just… waiting.”
And there it was again. That impossible clarity in her gaze. The way she moved through knowledge like it was music, and she was conducting the hidden symphony no one else could hear. As if the world made more sense when she read it.
He felt it snap into place.
Not the theory.
Her.
Brilliant, sharp-edged, impossibly real.
And before he could stop himself. Before the moment could be weighed and dissected, he crossed the distance between them.
He kissed her.
No calculation. No preamble. Just a breathless rush of certainty, of relief, of something that had been building across corridors and silences and sidelong glances for far too long.
For one long second, she didn’t move.
And then she did.
She kissed him back.
It wasn’t restrained. It was the crack of lightning in the quiet after a storm. Something inevitable, finally given permission to exist. When they parted, Hermione was breathless, her eyes wide. Not afraid. Not surprised, either.
Draco stepped back half a pace, heart hammering.
“I..” he started, but she cut him off with a soft shake of her head.
“Don’t,” she said. “Not yet.”
But she didn’t look away. And neither did he.
The air between them shimmered like a ward catching its breath.

Chapter Text

The invitation had, naturally, been delivered by owl. Not any owl. A black one with a silver shiny ribbon tied to its leg, and parchment scented faintly of bergamot and basil.

To Whom It May Concern (and oh, it does),

You are hereby summoned to a meeting of minds, mayhem, and moral ambiguity.
Location: Upper Room, The Three Broomsticks
Time: Precisely when the shadows stretch longest (just after lunch)
Dress code: Wear what you like. But if you bring drama, let it be tasteful.
With reluctant sincerity,
T. Nott

Theo adjusted the collar of his slate-grey coat as he stood at the head of the long oak table upstairs, arms dramatically flung across its back like a painting waiting to be unveiled. He’d arrived early, of course. To arrange the seating. And to make sure he could watch Harry Potter’s expression when he realized exactly who was staffing the bar downstairs today.
Ginny.
Theo had taken the liberty of ordering drinks ahead of time. Not because he expected anyone to drink them. But because it made the table look lived-in. He liked ambience.
The door creaked.
Hermione entered first. Of course. Who else?
Hair wind-tossed in that perfectly imperfect way that made it look like the wind had asked her permission before mussing it. Her coat was half-unbuttoned, hanging open with scholarly defiance, as if fastening it properly would have been a concession to societal expectations, and she was far too busy dismantling magical theory to bother. Her boots echoed sharply on the wooden floor, each step purposeful, like the laws of physics themselves rearranged to make room for her arrival.
And her expression. Merlin, her expression. It was a masterpiece of contemptuous efficiency. Brow slightly furrowed, lips pursed in the universal language of “I am surrounded by idiots, and I will tolerate it, but only just.”

Theo smiled broadly.
Because it wasn’t disdain, not really. It was focus. Precision. That special kind of fury that only bloomed in the minds of those cursed with brilliance. She looked like a storm dressed in parchment and ink. A one-woman manifesto with far too many to-do lists and not nearly enough patience.
He gestured to the chair beside him, the one he’d marked earlier with a slightly off-kilter candle for dramatic framing.
“I saved you the morally conflicted seat,” he said. “Best view of both exits.”
She rolled her eyes, predictably, but sat, just as he knew she would.
And Theo, smug and entirely self-satisfied, filed the moment away for later use. Perhaps in a poem. Or a very tasteful haiku.
Next came Ron, all long limbs, a perpetually disheveled jacket, and the kind of energy that suggested he’d rather be on a broom than indoors. He muttered something under his breath. Probably rude, possibly food-related, and gave Theo a nod that said, “I’m here, I’m tired, don’t push it.” Classic Weasley efficiency. Theo approved.

And then…

Ah. Enter the Hero.

Harry Potter appeared at the top of the stairs like a reluctant protagonist dragged into a sequel he didn’t ask for. Theo watched with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment. Harry’s steps were clipped, jaw clenched just slightly. Not enough for alarm, but enough for Theo to spot it, catalogue it, and file it under delicious discomfort.
And there it was.
The flicker of tension when his eyes landed downstairs. Just a glimpse. A familiar ponytail. Auburn. Moving behind the bar like it wasn’t a symbol of ten years of unresolved emotional geometry. His spine went rigid. His left hand twitched. Subtle, Theo thought. But tragic.
“Potter,” he said smoothly, with the kind of grin that should come with a warning label. “You’re early. Isn’t that bad luck?”
Harry didn’t respond. Not verbally. Just met Theo’s gaze with the flat, unimpressed look of a man who’d survived too many cursed tombs to be fazed by sarcasm. Then, without a word, he took a seat. Deliberately not looking at the window that faced the bar.
Ron, to his credit, followed in silence and sat close enough to act as a buffer, should anyone (read: Theo) feel the need to poke the emotional bear. Which, of course, Theo would. Eventually.

He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his stomach with all the smug serenity of a man watching his favorite opera begin exactly as expected.
This was going to be fun.

Then, ah, the pièce de résistance. Draco Malfoy swept into the room like he owned the concept of dramatic timing.
His black coat flared behind him with all the menace and flair of a pureblood drama queen in peak form.
Every step echoed with disdain, precision, and something Theo could only call noble irritation. The air shifted as if acknowledging that the drama had finally arrived. Malfoy didn’t enter rooms. He made entrances.
He cast a glance toward Hermione. Brief, sharp, and unreadable. Not long enough to linger. Just enough to register.
Theo caught it.
Didn’t say a word.
But he filed it away. That look wasn’t about strategy or suspicion.
That was interest. Real, inconvenient interest.
And Merlin help them all if it turned into something worse: intent.
Theo didn’t even pretend not to enjoy it.
“Wonderful,” he said, clapping his hands with the kind of delighted finality only someone with a flair for orchestration could muster. “We’re all here.”
He paused dramatically, then tilted his head, one brow arching with theatrical flourish.

“Well. Almost.”
He paused, lips pressing into something that wasn’t quite a frown.
“I thought I’d made it sufficiently clear that tonight might be… pivotal. You know.. Mystical breakthroughs, cursed revelations, maybe a near-death experience or two. The usual."
He gestured vaguely. "Apparently not dramatic enough.”
He gave an exasperated sigh. “Blaise sends his regrets. Something about a rare book auction, a veela, and a promise he refuses to elaborate on. I suspect it involves all three and a minor international incident.”
He rolled his eyes. “Predictable.”
“And dear Neville is currently elbow-deep in dragonweed and memory-moss. Something started whispering back. Pansy’s with him. For moral support. Or maybe to hex the plants into submission.”
Theo gave a solemn nod. “Either way, botany may not survive the evening.”
He lifted a finger. “And Nora? Regretfully detained. A temporal rift, two missing Unspeakables, and the sort of emergency that comes with its own Departmental obituary form.”
A pause. Then he smiled, sharp and fond.
“Still. We’ve got the essentials.”
He gestured at each of them in turn, voice lilting with exaggerated reverence.
“The Chosen One. The Brightest Witch. The Loyal Shield,” he gave Ron a short, respectful nod, “and of course, yours truly: The Unsung Genius. Criminally underappreciated, devastatingly handsome, and…let’s be honest, the real backbone of this operation.”
He placed a hand over his heart, as if deeply moved by his own words.

“And Malfoy,” he added, tone shifting just enough to acknowledge something quieter beneath the sarcasm. “The one who started all this. Or ended it. Depending on how poetic you want to get.”
His gaze swept across the group, and for a heartbeat, the jesting dropped.
“I suppose we might just pull it off after all.”

He looked around the table with a flourish, eyes gleaming like a ringmaster about to introduce the final act. “But fear not,” he declared, voice rich with mock gravity, “we, the slightly dented but dazzling ensemble, shall proceed.”
He paused for dramatic effect, letting the silence hang just long enough to imply importance. Or nonsense. Then, with all the showmanship of someone who’d once given a persuasive speech to avoid a detention (and succeeded), Theo planted both palms on the polished oak table and leaned in. His expression sobered into something bordering on earnest, though the glint in his eye suggested otherwise.
He looked, in that moment, like he was about to deliver a monologue at the Wizengamot. Not as a defendant, of course, but as a particularly eloquent legal consultant who had opinions, color-coded parchment to prove them, and absolutely no regard for the official time limit.
“Right.” Theo steepled his fingers, voice suddenly lower, silkier, like he was narrating a murder mystery in front of a roaring fire. “Crisis mode. But fashionably organized.”
He gestured broadly at the group like a conductor preparing an overture. “We need a plan. A proper one. Not the usual ‘wing it and hope Potter doesn’t die’ approach.”
Harry gave him a flat look. Theo winked, entirely unfazed.
He paced a few steps along the side of the table, coat flaring ever so slightly for effect. “We know what’s in the Shack,” he continued, tone now dropping into a more serious register. “Or rather… what’s beneath it.”
His gaze flicked briefly to Draco, then Hermione. “Our scholarly duo gave me the rundown. Between the ancient runes, the moral panic, and something about magical echo chambers, I pieced together the essentials. There’s a mirror down there. Not just any mirror. An obsidian relic capable of tethering magic to memory. And more than that…”
He turned slowly, expression darkening, voice low now. “Fragments. Horcrux residue. Remnants of the soul of the wizard who made an entire generation fear their own shadows. Voldemort, in all his poetic horror, might have left something behind. Again.”
A beat. A breath.
“You remember it, don’t you?” he asked, voice suddenly quiet. “The way the world felt then. The air itself turning against you. Names you couldn’t speak aloud. The way grief became background noise. We buried friends, burned books, and pretended survival was the same as living.”
Another beat. No one interrupted.
Theo’s jaw tightened just slightly before he inhaled, then smoothed it away with a rakish smile. “And now here we are. A ragtag ensemble of war-touched charmers, about to poke at the ruins of that legacy with very long sticks.”
He raised a brow. “So. What’s the plan?”
Ron made a noise somewhere between a scoff and a snort. “Merlin, Theo. Ever thought about a career in theatre? Maybe write a musical”
But his voice lacked venom. There was a tension in his jaw that hadn’t been there when he first walked in, and his hand was tapping an irregular rhythm on the table.
Draco leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, one brow arched. “If you’re done auditioning for the role of Tragic Prophet Number Three, Nott, some of us are trying to stop this mess from escalating.”
But his voice wasn’t cold. If anything, there was something unreadable behind his eyes. A flicker of acknowledgement. Because Theo was right, and they all knew it.
Hermione didn’t roll her eyes. Didn’t scold. She simply looked at Theo with a softness she rarely allowed in these settings. “You remember more than you let on,” she said quietly. “That matters. Thank you.”
She cleared her throat, spine straightening. “But let’s not romanticize it. Whatever Voldemort left behind. it’s dangerous. Sentient. And if we don’t act now, it could start spreading again.”
Harry hadn’t looked up through the entire speech. Just stared at the table. But when he finally did, his voice was even, calm. Too calm.
“We buried too many already.”

The room went still.

“I’m not doing that again. Not if we can stop it.”
He looked around the table, jaw set. “So no more speeches. We act. Tonight.”
The silence after Harry’s words wasn’t just silence.
It was the kind that pressed in from all sides, thick and absolute. Like the room itself had sealed shut, holding its breath with them.
Theo shifted slightly in his chair, the old wood creaking like it too understood what had just been said.
They were going. Tonight.
And not all of them would be going.
The full weight of it sank in slowly, like a sinking charm cast on their collective gut. No Neville. No Blaise. No Nora. No reinforcements waiting just out of sight. Just the five of them, walking willingly into something that had already tried to kill them.
Theo’s fingers tapped once on the table, then stilled.
He caught Ron’s expression across from him. Not angry, not afraid. Just... resolved. As if he’d known, deep down, this was always where it would lead.
Hermione was stone-still beside him, gaze fixed not on Harry, but on the map in front of them, as if willing it to offer a safer route.
Draco hadn’t moved. His expression unreadable, but the muscles in his jaw had gone tight.

And Harry…
Harry had just taken the room’s fate in his hands and set it down like a challenge. No more speeches. No more delays. Just action.
Theo swallowed once, felt the dryness in his throat, and the spark of something colder settle into his spine.
Then, right on cue, Hermione straightened. Not with bravado, but certainty.
She tapped the edge of the map.
“Then we need a clean route in. And safeguards. I want this written out before sundown.”
And just like that, they all breathed again.
Because if Granger had a plan, then there was still a path forward.
Even if it led straight into the dark

“We need two layers,” she began, fingers already sketching invisible lines on the wood between scattered scrolls and empty glasses. “First: containment. To keep the mirror’s influence from spreading. Second: extraction. If we’re right about the fragments inside…”
“...we need a way to draw them out,” Draco finished, his voice low but steady. “Without waking the rest of what’s inside it.”
“Subtlety, then,” Theo offered, tapping a quill against his lip. “Not exactly your specialty, Potter.”
“I’m not the battering ram this time,” Harry said mildly. “Just the bait.”
Theo blinked. “Oh. Good. Because that makes me feel very reassured.”
Hermione ignored them both. “The Whisperroot is key,” she said. “It reacts to residual soul magic. If we anchor it outside the Shack’s foundation, it might pull the fragments close enough to isolate. Like a lodestone for dark magic.”
“It also bites if you touch it wrong,” Ron muttered.
Hermione gave him a look. “So don’t.”
Ron lifted his hands. “Fine. I’ll wrangle the plant. Again.”
Theo shot him a grin. “You always did have a way with difficult things.”
“Like you?” Ron deadpanned.
“Exactly.”

Draco cleared his throat. “We need two groups. One to stay outside and monitor magical pressure and instability through the Whisperroot. One to go inside and anchor the containment wards, and deal with the mirror.”
Theo frowned. “Right. Because dividing the party always goes well.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Hermione said. “If something goes wrong inside, we need backup ready outside. But if no one’s inside the Shack, we can’t stabilize the source. It’s pulling at magic from the inside out.”
“And if it gets worse…” Harry added, “It’ll start affecting nearby wards, buildings. People.”
Theo sighed. “Fine. Divide and conquer. Let me guess. I’m on the outside team?”
“You’ll coordinate with Ron,” Draco said. “You’ll handle the Whisperroot.”
Hermione cut back in. “Draco and I will go inside first. Lay the base warding pattern. Harry follows after we test the resonance curve. If the mirror reacts…”
“Which it will,” Draco muttered.
“he’ll draw the fragment forward. Then I’ll seal it using this.” She produced a small glass phial with runes etched in gold. “Warded containment. It should hold a fragment if we’re fast enough.”
Theo looked at Hermione. “So let me get this straight. I’m the root-wrangler, perimeter-watcher, magical monitor, and chaos wrangler while you lot play wand-chicken with Voldemort’s leftover soul scrapbooks?”
Hermione gave him a pointed smile. “Exactly.”
Theo clapped once. “Fabulous.”
As the group began gathering their things, Theo lingered, feigning interest in reorganizing a particularly misaligned candle.

He didn’t believe in coincidences, not when it came to tension. Especially not that kind.
He watched as Hermione turned toward the far end of the table, reaching for the Whisperroot schematic she’d annotated with six different colors and what appeared to be actual blood. Though it was probably just red ink.
Draco reached for the same scroll at the same time.
Their hands brushed. Not in the clumsy, accidental way of strangers, but in the too-casual, too-familiar way of two people who had clearly done this dance before. Hermione froze. Draco didn’t.
His fingers hovered for a moment too long. His eyes met hers. Not challenging.
Hermione’s throat moved. She said nothing.
Theo’s brow arched so high he was tempted to fetch a mirror just to admire it.
“Well, well,” he drawled, loud enough to startle Ron, who had just begun muttering to the Whisperroot like it owed him money. “What’s this? Collaborative scroll-handling? Coordinated reaching? Resonance, dare I say?”
Draco let go of the parchment like it had turned hot. Hermione busied herself with rolling it up far too tightly.
Ron groaned. “Theo…”
“Oh, come on,” Theo said, gesturing wildly between the two culprits. “I’m not imagining this. That was lingering touch territory. That was meaningful silence plus eye contact plus micro-expression No. 7 on the Malfoy Emotional Lexicon…”
“I’m going to hex you,” Draco muttered.
“You’re not denying it,” Theo sing-songed.
Hermione cleared her throat, cheeks suspiciously pink. “Focus, Nott.”
“I am focused,” he replied cheerfully. “Just not on the world-ending horror show in the Shack, for a moment. Priorities, Granger. Emotional subplots are the backbone of every decent narrative.”
Draco glared, but it was dulled by something else. A flicker of amusement. Or resignation.
Theo narrowed his eyes slightly, filing the look away. There it was again. That thing that had changed in him. Softer, but steel beneath. Whatever had passed between them, it wasn’t casual. Not anymore.

He clapped his hands once, bright and sharp. “Right. I’ll drop it. For now. But when we all survive, I’m throwing you a celebratory dinner and we will discuss your poor taste in emotionally constipated men.”
The mood shifted as if someone had silently cast a Tempus charm and everyone suddenly felt the weight of the ticking.
No more quips. No more theatre.
Just motion.

Hermione snapped the scroll into a leather tube and slung it over her shoulder with the grace of someone preparing for war disguised as research. Draco adjusted the collar of his coat with a flick that was too sharp to be vanity. Ron tightened the straps on the Whisperroot crate, and Harry… Harry didn’t say a word. Just stood, still and watchful, like a storm memorizing its own pressure.
Theo watched them all, then reached for his flask, took one last swig, and muttered, “In vino veritas,” before tucking it back into his coat. He didn’t need the courage. But it helped soften the edges.
Boots scraped against the wood as chairs were pushed back. Wands were checked. No one said it, but everyone felt it: The next time they sat might be in a different world entirely.
Theo reached the door first, paused, then turned to look at the room behind them.
Candles still flickered. The parchment still smelled of ink and bergamot. It all looked almost normal.
He exhaled, long and slow. “Goodbye, ambience,” he said. “You were too elegant for this world.”

He pushed the door open.

The noise of the pub below hit them like a soft tidal wave: laughter, clinking glasses, the scrape of chairs and flirtation. The smell of butterbeer and old wood. Life. Ordinary, oblivious life.
Ginny looked up from behind the bar as they descended the stairs, her gaze flicking from Harry to Ron to Theo and back again. Her expression betrayed nothing. Not at first. Her hands were steady on the tankard she was drying, shoulders squared like she was preparing to block a Bludger. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t smile. Just raised one brow, cool and deliberate, like she was daring one of them to make it awkward.
Harry didn’t meet her eyes. Not really. Just that half-glance, fleeting and filled with ghosts.
Theo, of course, noticed everything. The way her knuckles tightened around the rim of the glass. The way Harry’s pace stuttered by a half-step. The silence between them was so taut it might as well have been spellbound.
Ginny set the mug down with a quiet thunk and grabbed another without missing a beat.
“Tell Voldemort’s leftovers I said hi,” she said, her tone dry enough to desiccate a desert.
Harry hesitated. Just long enough for it to matter. “How do you know…“
She slid the clean mug onto the shelf with precision. “I have my ways.“
Harry’s brow furrowed, just slightly. In recognition.
He studied her for a moment, as if seeing something he hadn’t let himself notice before. The set of her jaw. The calm precision. The fact that she hadn’t asked. Hadn’t needed to.
“You always do,” he said quietly.
No accusation. No challenge.
Just a fact.
And maybe, a little bit of gratitude.

They turned to go, boots echoing on the wooden floor, the door swinging open with a gust of wind and the faint smell of oncoming rain.
Just before Harry stepped out, he paused. Didn’t turn. Just spoke low enough for only Ginny to hear.
“I’ll be careful.”
Ginny didn’t answer. But when the door closed behind them, she stood still for a long moment, staring at the door like it might hold answers.
Outside, the air had cooled. Late afternoon light stretched long across the cobbles.
Theo shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat and fell into step beside Ron, who was grumbling about root magic and how he didn’t sign up to babysit possessed shrubbery.
Behind them, Harry and Draco walked in near-silence. Two sides of the same knife. And between them, Hermione. Holding the plan.
Holding the center.
Theo glanced skyward as they passed the edge of Hogsmeade, the chimneys giving way to trees, the street lanterns behind them flickering into readiness.
The wind stirred. The ground sloped.
And ahead, in the distance, like a scar waiting to be reopened, the Shrieking Shack watched them come.

Chapter Text

The wind bit at Harry’s collar as they made their way from the Three Broomsticks, boots crunching over patches of frost and damp stone.

He walked in silence, wand at his side, breath even. And yet his thoughts wandered.
Ginny.
She hadn’t smiled. Not really. Not the way she used to when they were younger. Her eyes had held his for a moment longer than they should have. Long enough to register.
She knew. Of course she did. Probably used something from George’s shop. She’d always been clever like that. Fred would’ve loved it.

The thought hit him, sudden and soft, like a bruise he’d forgotten was there. Fred was gone, and still somehow, through Ginny’s quiet cunning and George’s reckless brilliance, the war echoed on in small, useful mischiefs. And for all her sharpness, all her well-placed jabs and stoic control, it meant something. That she still cared.
A breath loosened in his chest. Not quite relief. Nothing so clean. But something had eased. Not healed.
The weight that had pressed behind his ribs, tight and constant since the attack, had loosened its grip. It was still there, but it pulsed less like a wound and more like a bruise now: tender, but no longer raw. As if the silence of the forest had seeped into him, dulled the noise in his chest.
The Whisperroot hadn't yet quieted the mirror, but Hagrid's fire had cracked something open in him. Luna’s voice had filled the cracks with strange truths and sideways wisdom.
He wasn’t himself yet. But he was more than he had been. More present.
The world felt less distant. The colours had sharpened, like someone had cleaned the glass between him and everything else. His limbs no longer moved like they belonged to someone else. He was still tired, yes. Still wary. But when he reached for his wand, it didn’t tremble. And when he looked at his friends, he didn’t feel like an impostor wearing Harry Potter’s skin.
He could feel the ground beneath his boots. The crispness in the air. The tension in Ron’s shoulders. The quiet steadiness of Hermione as she adjusted her satchel.
The way Draco kept glancing at her when he thought no one noticed. Theo, of course, was narrating it all in his head, probably composing their eulogy in sonnet form.
And Harry was here.
Not a ghost. Not a boy-who-lived.
Just Harry. Scarred, tired, real
And ready.

Ahead, the silhouette of the Shrieking Shack rose like a scar across the edge of Hogsmeade, half-sunken into frostbitten grass and old secrets. The wards around it shimmered faintly, a reminder of the last visit. The near-pull, that had almost taken him.
He glanced to his right. Hermione and Draco were already murmuring to one another, she unfolding a scroll, he adjusting the sleeves of his coat with the same precision he applied to spellwork. They were in sync. Unnervingly so.
To his left, Theo was rolling his shoulders like someone preparing for a dance or a duel. Ron stood beside him, arms crossed, eyes narrowed at the building like it had insulted his mother.
Everyone had their place now.
Harry was the bait.

And they trusted a plant.
It was almost funny. He was always the target. The lightning rod. The distraction. But this time, it felt... chosen. Not forced. It was strategy.
Purposeful.
He inhaled deeply, magic humming low under his skin.
Theo turned toward him, eyes flicking down, then up. "Try not to get eaten by sentient mirrors. I’d hate to have to find a new Chosen One."
"I’ll do my best," Harry replied, smirking slightly.
Hermione was laying out the containment marks now, her wand trailing threads of golden light in the air.
Draco walked the perimeter, occasionally adjusting with a muttered curse. Ron and Theo stood farther back, unspooling the Whisperroot with the care one would give a venomous snake. It glowed faintly, green and unsettling, twitching in Ron’s hands like it wanted to bite someone just on principle.
Everyone was ready. Or close enough.

Harry stepped forward, just to the edge of the Shack. The cold was sharper here, the air brittle with tension. The mirror’s presence was a pressure in his skull, like an unfinished sentence vibrating behind his temples.
“Containment spells holding,” Hermione’s voice said from behind him. Low, clipped, sure. “For now.”
Draco moved up beside them, wand already alight with a thin pulse of silver. His jaw was tight. His coat, newly reinforced with protective spells, rustled faintly as he took his place just left of the threshold. “If we wait any longer,” he said, “they’ll press in behind us.”
Harry nodded. “Then we don’t wait.”
All three stepped forward in unspoken synchrony. Crossing into the Shack was like stepping through skin. The wards rippled against them, a shimmer of resistance.
They had been here before. The place remembered them.
Not fondly.

Inside, it was colder.
The Shack’s interior was twisted in ways that made no architectural sense. Angles curved inward. Shadows stretched too far or not at all.
The mirror’s influence had warped everything. Space, structure, silence. And at the heart of it, half-shrouded in ancient dust and tangled magical residue, stood the obsidian mirror.
It hummed. Faintly. Like something dreaming with its eyes half-open.
The floor groaned beneath their steps. Hermione raised her wand again, casting a sweeping diagnostic arc. Sigils flared in response. Runes of binding, decay and memory. Too many layers to be one person’s work. This was legacy magic. Tethered, tangled, left to rot.
And then, from somewhere just outside the Shack, the Whisperroot shuddered.
They felt it first in the soles of their feet. A subtle vibration, like the ground itself had drawn breath. Then a sharp scent cut through the stale air, bitter and herbal, as though the plant had exhaled something volatile. A flicker of greenish-gold light spilled under the threshold of the doorway, snaking like veins across the warped floorboards.
Hermione’s head snapped up. “It’s reacting,” she said, eyes already scanning the sigils again. “We’ve drawn something to the surface.”
Draco moved to the edge of the ward ring, one hand instinctively tightening around his wand. “It’s not just reacting,” he muttered. “It’s reaching.”
The mirror pulsed.
Not with sound, but pressure. A gravitational tug, low and insistent. Like it had registered the Whisperroot’s magic and sensed the bait. And was deciding whether to rise.
Outside, they heard Theo call something out, followed by a curse from Ron.
A sound rose. Not a noise, exactly, but a pressure that buzzed just beneath hearing. Harry grit his teeth. His fingers twitched around his wand.
Hermione muttered something under her breath. Draco was scanning the floor, every line of his posture alert. They were all waiting.
And then…
A deep, dragging pull. Not from the mirror, but from beyond the Shack's walls. A shift in magic. The Whisperroot screamed in pulses of blinding green, the light flashing violently through every crack and beam.

Something had arrived.

Harry turned to the doorway just as the shadows began to move.
Not drift. Not swirl. Move. With intent.
The floor seemed to bend beneath them, the air thinning as though the very room recoiled. “We don’t have long,” Hermione said, voice clipped, breathless. Draco’s eyes were fixed on the mirror now, silver wandlight trembling in his grasp. “It’s awake.”

And outside…

The world howled.

The Shack shook.

Chapter Text

The Whisperroot was screaming.
It thrummed beneath Ron’s boots like a living fault line, its tendrils snapping taut, convulsing in the soil as if it were trying to rip itself free. Light, green, gold, and something sharp as bone-white, flared in ragged bursts, throwing violent shadows across the frozen grass.

Ron stumbled backward, wand already raised. “Theo!”
But Theo was already there, arms stretched over the anchor stones, sleeves scorched from the last flare. “Hold the line,” he snapped, voice a rasp. “It’s reacting to something inside. They’ve triggered the mirror.”
“No kidding,” Ron muttered, teeth clenched. The air had gone wrong again, thinner somehow. Charged. Like lightning was coming but refused to strike.
And then, it hit.

A soundless crack, deep and low, rolled across the earth. The ground beneath them shuddered. Something enormous had woken, and the land itself recoiled.
Ron glanced at the Shack. Its silhouette seemed to warp, as if breathing too deep. The air around it shimmered from pressure. Inside, Hermione and Harry and bloody Malfoy were still standing in the middle of that.
“We have to get in there,” he said, jaw tight, already moving.
Theo’s arm shot out, stopping him. “You break the line, we all go down. The Whisperroot’s the only thing holding that magic from spilling straight through the village.”
“And what if it’s not enough?” Ron growled.
Theo didn’t answer.

They both turned as the light from the Whisperroot surged again, high and sharp and panicked. It was no longer just anchoring. It was pleading.
Something inside the Shack had changed. Something outside was listening.
And the plant, ancient and instinctive, had just realized it might not be the strongest force anymore.
Then came the sound of apparition, sharp and close, and four figures burst through the wardline at the forest’s edge, boots sliding on frozen mud.
Nora was first, hair half-loose, cloak askew, already casting a shielding charm over the Whisperroot without breaking stride. “We felt the surge halfway through the wards,” she snapped. “Why didn’t anyone wait for…?”
“Because someone couldn’t,” Ron said, jerking his chin toward the Shack.
Blaise Zabini landed beside them like he’d walked off the cover of a dueling magazine, coat immaculate, but his eyes were sharper than usual. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, taking in the shaking ground, the split wards, the trembling Whisperroot. “You really didn’t wait.”
“Ginny sent us,” Pansy added, more breathless than annoyed. She was holding something tight against her chest, a containment crystal, already glowing faintly. “Said she had a ‘bad feeling’ and told us to move. Clearly she was right.”

Neville skidded in behind them, soil already on his hands, and dropped to one knee beside the plant without a word. His fingers found the trembling root cluster, calming it with a practiced touch, murmuring low in a language that was probably part Latin, part instinct.
Neville didn’t glance up. “It’s overreacting to something inside. But it’s not fear. Not only. It’s recognition.”
Ron turned to him. “Of what?”
Neville’s gaze lifted at last, distant and haunted.
“Of home.”

The Whisperroot flared again. Green this time, deep and resonant, like a heartbeat echoing through the ground. The wards flexed outward. And above them, the sky bent.
Inside the Shack, the mirror screamed.

Chapter Text

The mirror was waking.
And Draco felt it first in his teeth.
It was a pressure, humming through the marrow of his bones, a vibration that made the air feel viscous.

He stepped closer to Hermione, not touching, but near enough to anchor her if needed. Her wand hand was steady. Her lips moved in rapid silent incantation, feeding the wards in front of them. Golden threads wove through the dust-choked air, but even those flickered now, like candlelight pressed too close to a broken window.
And still the mirror pulsed.

Behind its cracked obsidian face, something shifted. Something slow. Ancient. Watching.
Harry stood at the center, motionless now, wand lowered slightly, his eyes locked on the surface. Not his reflection. There was none. Only darkness. Deep and wide and waiting.
Then…movement.
Not in the glass. Not quite.
The shadows that had clung to the Shack’s corners began to stretch. They slithered forward across the warped floorboards like spilled ink following an unseen incline.

Draco’s grip tightened on his wand. His protective coat, lined with anti-hex mesh and silver-threaded enchantments, suddenly felt too thin.
“They’re reacting to him,” he said. His voice came out lower than he meant. Rough. “To Potter.”
Hermione nodded without looking. “They’re drawn to what’s fragmented. To what remembers pain.”
The mirror rippled.
And then, the shadows lifted.
They rose not like mist, but like something that had been crouching, and was finally standing. Towering. Silent. Their forms weren’t fixed. No faces, no eyes. But Draco could feel their attention. Like being studied by the absence of a god.
A gust of wind cracked inward from nowhere. The containment ring shuddered. The sigils flared white, then red.
“Back!” Hermione shouted.
Draco moved fast, grabbing Harry by the elbow and yanking him a step away from the mirror. Just as the surface cracked…

Chapter Text

The mirror split down the middle, a jagged seam that pulsed. The shadows surged forward at once, no longer curious but ravenous, limbs stretching and folding in on themselves with impossible angles. Magic screamed through the air, warping light and space as if the Shack itself wanted to unmake them.

Hermione barely got her shield up in time.
"PROTEGO MAXIMA!!"

The force of it slammed against her wards like a wave against rock. Her knees buckled. Behind her, Draco anchored the containment spells, weaving threads of silver through her golden lattice, his voice a steady chant in counterpoint to the chaos.
And Harry…

He stood at the eye of the storm, wand raised, face pale but resolute. The shadows converged on him like a tide pulled to moonlight, and she knew, they knew him. Not just as bait. As something familiar. Something wounded.
"GET BACK!" she shouted, reaching for her satchel. Her fingers found the enchanted vial. Designed not to destroy, but to contain.
"Draco, on my mark!"

A shadow lunged, too fast…
Draco threw himself in front of her, cloak flaring, a silent hex blasting the creature back in a hiss of fractured darkness. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to.
Hermione uncorked the vial. The Shack screamed.
Wind tore through the broken house, lifting floorboards and splintering beams. The shadows buckled, twisted, tried to flee. The vial drank the magic like a sinkhole, its glow intensifying, shifting from blue to searing white.

"HARRY!" she cried.
He turned, just barely, and threw a single bolt of magic toward the heart of the mirror. The beam struck just as Draco finished the incantation.
Light exploded.
For a moment, there was nothing but heat and sound and white. A pressure that filled her skull, her chest, her thoughts.
The moment the air shifted, Hermione knew something was coming. Not from the mirror. From the door.
A familiar voice cut through the chaos like a whip.

"Out of my way!"

Pansy.

She stormed through the threshold with a force that belonged more to a battle-scarred general than a society darling.
Her hair, usually immaculate, was wild with wind and magic. Her coat flared behind her like a banner. In one hand, her wand sparked with residual energy. In the other…Hermione’s breath caught.

A crystal. But not just any.
A containment crystal.

It pulsed erratically, bright and jagged, throbbing in time with the energy in the room. Its core flickered between blue and violent white, like it was already fighting to stay whole.
Hermione felt the recognition hit her spine like cold water. Of course.
Not a weapon. A siphon.

She’d read about them once. In a book she wasn’t supposed to touch. Crystals carved from magically-neutral quartz, alchemically sealed with blood magic and layered resonance threads.
Almost impossible to create. Even harder to survive using. Most shattered from magical strain. Or from the caster’s own nervous system collapsing under the pressure.
But they didn’t destroy. They trapped. They contained what couldn’t be killed.
And Pansy Parkinson was holding one bare-handed, striding into the storm like she’d done it a hundred times before.
Hermione didn’t have to shout to be heard. She only had to look at her.
Pansy caught her gaze, lips tight, eyes glittering with something sharp and deeply personal.
Of course she brought it.

Of course it was her.
Because this wasn’t something anyone else could do. Not safely. Maybe not even her.
But she was already moving, fast and sure, and Hermione’s heart slammed against her ribs.
She knew what came next.

And she didn’t know if Pansy would survive it.
Pansy didn’t ask for help.
She pushed past splintered beams and tendrils of thrashing shadow like she
belonged in chaos. Hermione followed, knees skidding across the warped floor, the vial still clutched in her hand, glowing faintly now, the protective sigils etched into its surface trembling like overtaxed threads.
The crystal in Pansy’s grip pulsed with unbearable rhythm. Not sound, sensation. It resonated in Hermione’s chest like thunder trying to remember the shape of silence.

“Fuse it with the vial,” Pansy said, not even sparing her a glance. Her voice was raw, tight. Fraying.
Hermione knelt beside her, reaching into her satchel with fingers that shook from adrenaline. She drew out a second vial. Not for containment, but to activate what came next. A compound of Whisperroot extract, powdered mirrorglass, and a single drop of Harry’s blood. It was meant for resonance. For tethering.
“Give it to me,” Pansy demanded.
Hermione shook her head. “If you do it alone, it’ll kill you.”
Their eyes locked. And for the first time since school, Hermione saw past the polish and poison of Pansy Parkinson. What looked back at her now was steady, unflinching, and undeniably brave.
“We do it together,” Hermione said. “No one dies today.”
They placed the items on the floor. The crystal and the vial side by side, within the activation circle Hermione had etched before. Her palm hovered above the vial. Pansy’s hand pressed to the crystal, already slick with blood.

Hermione whispered the first binding spell, ancient syllables designed to link elemental conduits. The light between the two objects surged…
Pansy’s voice joined hers. Sharper, colder, the tone of precision and defiance. As her blood struck the floor beneath the crystal, the Shack reeled.
Magic recoiled like a living thing. And then struck back.
The crystal flared with force. Pansy’s body jolted, spine arching. Her nose bled instantly. Her breath hitched.
Hermione gripped her wrist. “Stay with me,” she hissed. “Don’t you dare…”
But Pansy wasn’t listening. Her eyes were wide, lips parted, as if the air itself had turned against her lungs. The crystal pulled not just from the room, but from her… from her magical core, her life force.

Hermione grounded them both into the rune-lined circle, her voice unwavering now. “Not alone. I’ve got you.”
Draco was already moving.
The moment the loudest scream tore from the mirror, high, guttural. He was at Hermione’s side, silver light blazing from his wand as he slashed through a shadow that lunged for the activation circle.
She didn’t have time to thank him, didn’t dare break focus, but the thought still struck like a spark: He never hesitates.
“Keep the perimeter clear!” Hermione shouted.
“I’m trying, Granger, but your bloody vortex is attracting half the underworld!” he snapped, but his voice wasn’t cruel. It was alive. Furious. Focused.
Another tendril of shadow arched toward the hovering crystal, twitching as though drawn to the raw pulse of magic. Draco struck it mid-air, the hex cutting through it like glass, but not destroying, only scattering. Shadows didn’t die. They just retreated. And regrouped.
“They’re circling again,” he warned. “You’ve got maybe seconds.”
Hermione could feel it too. The containment field trembling like glass under too much heat.
Across the room, Harry was moving like gravity didn’t apply to him anymore.
He didn’t run, he surged. The remnants of the mirror’s pull clung to him, threads of darkness trailing behind his shoulders like ghosts refusing to let go. He ignored them. Focused only on the crystal.

“What do you need?” he asked, dropping into a crouch beside them.
Hermione barely glanced up. “Your magic...”
Harry nodded. Closed his eyes. His wand lowered, pressed flat against the floor, over one of the anchor runes Hermione had drawn. For a moment, just a heartbeat nothing happened.

Then the light changed.
The glow inside the containment crystal shifted, not color, but quality. It stopped flickering. Became something steadier. Deeper.
The tether had found him.
“I can feel it,” Harry whispered. “It knows me.”
“Let it,” Hermione said.
“I am.”

Pansy let out a breath like it had claws.
Her knees buckled, but Draco was there instantly, one hand braced at her shoulder, the other holding the containment line firm with a silent word and a burst of silver sparks. Her eyes rolled back. Hermione grabbed her free hand.
“She’s burning through too fast,” Draco said tightly. “The crystal’s taking more than it should.”
“Then we give it more,” Hermione snapped. “Hold the field, Draco.”
His jaw flexed, but he nodded.
Harry leaned closer. “Tell me when.”

Hermione exhaled. The entire Shack was vibrating now, wood groaning, shadows screaming at the edges of the light. The mirror pulsed with one last desperate jolt. Cracks spiderwebbing outward across its surface like the memory inside was trying to escape.
“Now,” she screamed.
Harry opened his eyes.
And gave it everything.

Chapter Text

The Whisperroot was screaming.

Neville had never heard a plant scream like that before. Not like the high, keening wail of mandrakes, or the rustling distress of a dying vine. This was deeper. This was primal. It made his teeth ache and his bones want to crawl out of his skin. The soil around its gnarled roots cracked with heat and pressure, and the pale tendrils whipped in and out of their anchor lines like something trying to rip free from the earth itself.

He was on his knees beside it, hands flat to the ground, whispering stabilizing incantations as fast as his tongue would move. Latin, Old Gaelic, even a few desperate murmurs in Gobbledegook. Anything to soothe it. To keep the containment stable. To keep them safe.
“Easy,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “You’re holding the line. Just hold it a little longer.”
It wasn’t just a plant anymore. It was a conduit. A boundary. A screaming, pulsing wall between them and whatever ancient, cursed magic was threatening to spill into the world.
Behind him, Theo barked a curse and slammed his wand down into the sigils around the circle. Sparks flared up like a fountain, momentarily bright enough to illuminate the entire clearing. “Pressure’s building too fast,” he shouted, his voice strained. “It’s pulling from the mirror. The crystal must be active!”
“It’s panicking,” Neville said. “The Whisperroot. It knows something’s wrong.”
“We all know something’s wrong,” muttered Ron, who was standing a few feet back with Nora, wand raised, jaw clenched. His eyes never left the Shack.
The wind had turned feral, slicing through the trees, through the wards, through their circle. The air felt… wrong. Splintered, as if reality itself was peeling in brittle layers. Neville pressed his palm deeper into the soil.

“Just a little longer,” he whispered again. Maybe to the plant. Maybe to himself.
The Whisperroot pulsed again. Green. Then gold. Then a burst of white so sharp it cut his vision.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Nora step closer to Ron, shielding her face. “Something’s giving way,” she said. “It’s about to rupture.”
And then it happened.
A single, massive flare of light exploded from within the Shack, flooding the grounds in a blinding burst. It wasn’t heat or wind or sound that followed, but pressure. Like magic itself had just exhaled.

The Whisperroot convulsed.
Then went still.

Neville felt his heart stutter in the silence.
For a beat, nobody moved.

Then Ron swore and bolted toward the door.
Neville was up a second later, legs shaking, throat dry, heart hammering in his chest like a wardrum. He didn’t remember standing. He didn’t remember speaking. But he moved. He had to. He had to get to Pansy.

Theo raised the wards instinctively, shielding them from flying debris as they ran. Overhead, a sharp cry tore through the air.
Astra, Harry’s owl.
She circled once, then dove through a fractured beam in the collapsing roof, her wings cutting through smoke and raw magic like a blade. Her feathers shimmered faintly. An omen, or a benediction.
They burst through what was left of the Shack’s door.

Inside lay devastation.
Shadows peeled from the walls, dissolving in waves of light like ash in water. The air smelled of ozone, scorched wood, and something older. Something that shouldn’t have a smell at all.
Draco was on the floor, kneeling beside Pansy, shouting her name.

“Pansy!”

She was barely conscious. Her skin had gone corpse-pale. Blood trickled from her nose. Her fingers, curled inward, still glowed faintly. Faint remnants of the containment ritual. The crystal beside her was shattered. It pulsed like something still breathing.
From above, Astra let out a short, urgent cry and swept low. Her wings stirred the smoke just enough for the blood on the floor to become visible. Red. Too much of it.
Neville didn’t think.

He dropped to his knees opposite Draco and pressed two fingers to her neck. Still warm. Still faint.
“She’s alive,” he said, steadying his voice. “But she’s crashing. Her core…it’s drained.”
Draco’s jaw clenched, hands fisted, as if fury and helplessness were strangling him both.
Harry stood just behind him, face pale, wand still clutched in one trembling hand. He looked like he’d been hit by a curse and hadn’t noticed yet.
The mirror loomed behind them, broken and hollow. No longer a prison. No longer a gate. Just a husk, gleaming with residual magic like blood on glass. Whatever had stirred within it had left.
Hermione knelt a few feet away, unmoving. Her eyes were fixed on Pansy, wide and calculating in that way she had when possibilities narrowed to a single, awful truth.

Neville moved without waiting for permission. He crossed the floor like gravity no longer mattered, like every step was already decided. “Let me,” he said, crouching low. “You can’t carry her like this. I can stabilize her magic while we move.”
“She needs someone who can read her field,” Neville said, softer now. “Not just hold her.”
Draco looked up. And in that moment, something passed between them. Unspoken but understood. Whatever history lay tangled between them and Pansy, none of it mattered more than the girl lying unconscious between them now.
Reluctantly, stiffly, Draco pulled back. His fingers brushed her wrist once before letting go. A touch that lingered, not of ownership, but of guilt.

Neville barely noticed.
He was already grounding.
He touched Pansy’s neck with trembling fingers, felt the fragile flutter of her pulse. Too weak. Too slow. Her magic was flickering like a lantern underwater. Alive, but drowning.
“Hey,” he whispered, to her, “You don’t get to leave now. Not after all that.”
He slid one arm beneath her shoulders, the other behind her knees, and lifted her into his arms with a tenderness that didn’t match the chaos around them. Her head fell softly against his chest. His heart stuttered.

He didn’t care that the others were watching. Didn’t care that his voice cracked.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured, forehead dipping briefly to hers.
“I always will.”
Neville slid closer and eased her into his arms. She barely stirred, her head lolling against his shoulder like a broken doll.
He murmured a grounding charm under his breath, fingers brushing her sternum, weaving his own magic gently across the flickering remnants of hers. Just enough to anchor. Just enough to not let go.
Above, Astra dipped again, silent and deliberate. Her wing brushed lightly against Pansy’s cheek. Almost like a benediction, before she darted across the room to Harry, perching beside him like a sentinel.
Then Neville stood. Carefully, protectively, and turned toward the open door. The others moved behind him without a word. Hermione rose beside Harry. Ron stepped forward, eyes dark, jaw clenched tight. Theo muttered something too low to catch.

And together, they walked into the aftermath. Into the pale, trembling light of whatever came next.

Chapter Text

The air still tasted wrong.
Metallic, burnt, and just…off. Like chewing on blood and old spells. Not that he made a habit of doing either.
Theo stood at the edge of the room, half inside the Shack, half in retreat. Wand dangling between his fingers, as if it might decide on its own whether to be useful again.
Light bent strangely here. Like the air itself hadn’t gotten the memo that the battle was over.
If this even was over.
Behind him, the others moved with the weight of exhaustion. Neville was cradling Pansy like a knight torn from some doomed ballad, and Theo nearly applauded the aesthetic. If only his hands hadn’t been shaking.
Draco was doing his best impersonation of a statue. Hollow eyes, twitching jaw.

Hermione… well. Hermione was still in motion. Always in motion. Muttering. Counting. Measuring things that couldn’t be measured.

And Potter.
Potter looked like someone had yanked the plug on his soul and left the casing upright.
Theo took one look at him, then at the silent owl perched like a sentinel on his shoulder. Astra. Still as stone, eyes far too knowing. He gave a low whistle.
“Even your bird looks like she’s seen the end of the world,” he muttered.
Blaise stood near the door, hands in his pockets but eyes razor-sharp, watching everything with that calculating stillness he wore like a second skin.

And Nora. Nora was already crouched near the broken sigils, fingers brushing the edge of what used to be a boundary, as if she could read what had happened by touch alone.
Theo cleared his throat with theatrical delicacy.
“Well. That was horrifying.”
Hermione didn’t respond. Not immediately. Typical. She probably needed to catalog the ruins of the universe first.
“Granger,” he said again, this time softer. “What happened in here?”
She exhaled. Finally looked up.
“We trapped them,” she said.
Theo raised both brows, because really.
“Define ‘trapped’. Because that sounds delightfully optimistic, considering the entire Shack just tried to implode on us.”
She stood slowly, brushing her palms on her robes. “I mean it. I’m reasonably sure… we got them.”
Now she had his attention.
“Them?” he repeated. “You mean the shadows. The ones that screamed like tortured dementors and made Harry look like death warmed over?”
She nodded. “Yes. the Horcrux residue“
And for a moment, Theo didn’t have anything clever to say.
“Well,” he said after a beat, “that’s not even remotely terrifying.”
She crossed her arms. “We’ve theorized long enough. That Voldemort’s horcruxes, when destroyed, left fragments. Not enough to be sentient. Just… echoes. Pieces still charged with magic. Dangerous magic. The mirror acted like a conduit. A focal point.”

Theo glanced toward the fractured frame. The air around it still shimmered faintly, like a heat mirage soaked in malevolence.
“And you’re sure they’re in the vial?” he asked. “Not, say… inside Harry’s spleen? Or my left shoe?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “The resonance was complete. The containment circle held. The vial was enchanted with Whisperroot and mirrored dust. It was designed to attract fragmented soul magic. Once the crystal cracked, the tether collapsed inward. I felt it. They collapsed into the container.”
Theo stared at her.
“Granger, you’re telling me you just casually bottled leftover Voldemort.”
She gave a tired, humorless smile. “I don’t do anything casually.”
He barked a laugh. It was too loud. Too sharp. It startled no one.
“I swear to Merlin, if this thing ever breaks…”
“It won’t,” she cut in. “It’s sealed. Blood-magic, old binding runes.”
Theo shook his head, eyes flicking back to Neville.
If Theo were less of a coward. Less brittle and barbed, he’d admit that watching Neville try to anchor Pansy’s soul with a bloody plant made his throat tighten in ways no hex ever had.
Theo exhaled slowly.

A stage full of ghosts, shadows, and saints.

And for a brief second, just one: Theo felt very, very small.

Chapter Text

They stood on the edge of the hill, backs to the ruins. The air was heavy with soot and silence. Hermione held the vial like it might explode if she so much as breathed wrong. Fingers tight, jaw clenched, shoulders pulled taut as if she alone could hold back whatever still pulsed within that glass.

Draco watched her from just a step behind. Not openly. Not obviously. But every line of her was carved into his vision like a mark he couldn’t shake.
In the heart of that madness. Screaming shadows, magic twisting reality, the mirror bleeding nightmares into the air. She hadn’t faltered. Her spells had snapped sharp through chaos. Her voice had been the only constant when the world splintered. And Merlin help him, she had looked utterly terrifying.
And utterly brilliant.

There had been a moment. Just a flicker, barely a breath. When she had stood there with the light of the containment ritual spilling over her, blood on her wrist, her hair wild and backlit by the dying magic. He had wanted to reach for her then. Just… pull her in. Anchor her. Or maybe himself.
But that wasn’t what this moment was for.
This wasn’t safe. Not yet. Not ever, maybe. So instead, he said nothing. His fingers twitched at his side. He fixed his gaze on the horizon and let the words unsaid sit sharp in his throat.
Not now, Granger. But soon.

They had to move. He had to move.
He turned slightly, lifting his chin. "We’re going to the Manor."
Hermione didn’t question it. She simply nodded and adjusted her grip on the vial. The others stirred into motion like clockwork. Wordless. Ground down to instinct.
Because they all knew: if anyone would know what to do next, it was Narcissa Malfoy.
Draco took one step forward. And stopped.

There. Just at the tree line.
A figure.
Cloaked. Watching.
Draco’s magic reacted before his mind did. Every hair on his arms stood up. The shadows might’ve been contained, but something else had slithered loose tonight. Something human. Something worse.

He knew that silhouette.

His blood chilled as memory caught up with recognition.
The man who sold him the mirror.

Draco stepped forward, wand in hand before he’d even spoken. "You picked the wrong night."
The man didn’t flinch. Didn’t move. Just stood there, face half-covered by a hood, but Draco remembered him like oil down his spine. Remembered the way he’d spoken in riddles and vanished before Draco could even register the cost.
Draco raised his wand. He didn’t hesitate. "Incarcerous!" Ropes shot forward from the tip, wrapping around the man’s torso, arms, legs. The figure staggered, finally reacting.
"Petrificus Totalus." A second spell, illegal in strength. Twice the force of a standard Body-Bind. And the man dropped like stone.
The others turned at the sound.
"Draco," Hermione started, but he cut her off.
"He’s the one who sold it to me," Draco said, voice sharp, dry with disgust. "The mirror. He knew."

Theo let out a low whistle. Harry stepped forward, eyes narrowing. "That’s the seller?"
"He wasn’t just a seller," Draco bit out. He stalked over to the frozen man, staring down at the unmoving body. "He tracked me. Waited. Offered me exactly what I didn’t know I was looking for."
"Like a trap," Ron muttered.
"Like a test," Blaise added, voice cool. "And you failed."

Draco didn’t deny it. He crouched, pressing his wand to the man’s bound chest. Wards flared faintly in response.
"You’re coming with us," he said, low and cold. "And if you so much as twitch when this spell breaks, I’ll make you wish I’d left you with the shadows." He straightened, turned back to the others.

"Let’s go."
Nobody argued. Hermione adjusted the vial in her hands. Neville lifted Pansy more securely. And together, with one unconscious prisoner in tow, they vanished into the fold of Apparition, toward the only place left that might have answers.

Malfoy Manor.

Chapter Text

The wards of Malfoy Manor parted without a sound, but Hermione felt the shift like a ripple in her bones.
The moment they stepped through the boundary, the weight of the Shack seemed to slough off her shoulders. Only to be replaced by something colder. Older. The Manor didn’t hum with magic so much as it loomed with it. Intentional. Watchful.
She tightened her grip on the vial. It throbbed faintly against her palm, as if resentful of containment. As if it remembered being free.
The grand front doors swung open before they reached them.
Narcissa Malfoy stood at the threshold, already waiting. Regal, composed, as if she had merely stepped out of a portrait to greet them. She was dressed in deep green velvet, her hair swept up, a silver pin glinting at her temple like moonlight on a blade.

Beside her stood Pipsey, eyes wide and oddly… prepared.
Hermione felt Draco still beside her. Not tense. Not surprised either. “Bring them in,” Narcissa said simply. Not to Draco. Not to anyone in particular. And yet everyone obeyed.
Neville moved first, carrying Pansy with the same quiet reverence that hadn’t wavered since the Shack. He barely looked up as he passed. Ron and Theo followed behind him.

Harry lingered near the edge of the wards like he didn’t quite belong anywhere.

Blaise, somehow untouched as always, walked in silence.
Hermione felt Narcissa’s eyes flicker over her, resting not on her face, but on the vial.
Then her gaze shifted.
To the bound man, floating limply between Draco’s containment spells. His limbs shackled mid-air. Still caught in that moment of stunned horror when Draco’s magic had struck.
Narcissa didn’t blink.
“Pipsey,” she said calmly, “take the prisoner to the west wing holding cell. Silence ward. Magical restraint protocol C.”
Pipsey gave a strange, formal bow. More soldier than servant, and disappeared with a sharp crack, taking the man with her.
It happened so quickly Hermione didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until Narcissa turned, eyes scanning for Pansy.
Without a word, she drew her wand. Steady. And flicked it once through the air. Silver light burst from the tip, unfurling into the form of a snow leopard Patronus. It stood for a moment, graceful and deadly, eyes gleaming with purpose.
Narcissa stepped forward, voice clear and commanding.
“To Elarion Thorne,” she said to the creature. “Tell him we need his help.”
The snow leopard dipped its head once, almost a bow, and then leapt forward, vanishing through the Manor walls with a shimmer of magic.

Neville’s arms tightened instinctively around Pansy. “Who?”
“A healer,” Draco murmured, eyes flicking to his mother. “Specialist in core damage. Works off-record.”
“Trust him,” Narcissa said, this time directly to Neville. Her voice left no room for argument. “He owes the family. And he doesn’t lose people.”
Neville nodded, stiffly. “He better not.”
Near the edge of the hall, Ron had paused beside Harry, who hadn’t spoken a word since the hill. His shoulders still trembled slightly, like some part of the battle hadn’t ended for him.
Ron nudged him. “Mate,” he said, voice low but firm. “You with us?”
Harry didn’t answer.
“Come on,” Ron tried again. “You don’t get to check out now. Not when Pansy nearly blew herself apart, keeping everyone alive.”
That landed. Harry blinked once, then again, and looked up. Like surfacing. His hand twitched at his side. Hermione stepped closer, gently touching his arm. “You did what you had to,” she said softly. “You stayed.”
He glanced at her, dazed. “But I didn’t stop it.”
“You couldn’t,” she said, and her voice was steady. “Pansy could.”
For the first time, he nodded.
Not much. But enough.
Draco stepped forward. Not rushed. Not hesitant either. There was a measured certainty to his movements, as if he’d rehearsed this exact moment in his head, and now it simply… was.
He didn’t speak to Harry. Not right away. Instead, he reached into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled out something small. Barely larger than a Snitch, wrapped in dark velvet.
Hermione squinted. A rune stone.
Obsidian, from the sheen. Enchanted. Old.
Draco held it out, palm open. “It’s a grounding stone,” he said, voice even but not cold. “Attuned to anchor magical overstimulation. Sourced from volcanic stone near Mount Etna. Stolen, technically, but I doubt the goblins noticed.”
Harry looked at it like it might bite him. “It won’t stop the memories,” Draco added, “but it’ll keep your magic from spiraling. I’ve used it.” A pause. “Recently.”
Something passed between them. Hermione couldn’t name it. A fragile, temporary armistice. Or maybe just mutual recognition.
Harry reached out slowly and took the stone. Their fingers didn’t touch, but the space between them softened.
Hermione watched the exchange, felt something shift low in her chest.

Draco didn’t posture. Didn’t gloat. Didn’t expect praise. He simply turned and walked away again, his coat catching a draft like a cloak from an old story.
And just like that, she saw it. Again. That version of him she kept stumbling into. The one who didn’t demand to be noticed. Who did what needed doing and said nothing after.
She hated how much it made her chest ache.
She wasn’t sure when he’d started to matter this much. But he did. In ways she didn’t yet have names for.

“You’re staring,” Blaise murmured as he sidled up beside her, voice pitched low and lazy. Hermione startled. “I was not.”
“Oh, Granger.” Blaise smirked. “You were practically etching sonnets with your eyes.”
She shot him a look that promised murder.
Blaise just raised his hands. “Just saying. If I were brooding and heroically cheekboned, I’d want to know I had an audience.”

From the stairs, Theo’s voice drifted down like velvet laced with mockery.
“Blaise, I swear, if you turn her longing gaze into sonnet number four-hundred-and-bloody-twelve, I’m pushing you off the bannister.”
Blaise smirked without turning. “Admit it, you’d miss the poetry.”
“I’d miss your overpriced wine collection more.” Blaise chuckled. “Fair. But you have to admit. it was a look.”
Theo joined him at the bottom of the stairs, arching a brow. “A look, or The Look?” “The one,” Blaise said, lips twitching. “With the soft eyes and the repressed yearning. Classic Granger.”
Theo huffed a laugh, bumping Blaise lightly with his shoulder as they started walking. “One day, your obsession with romantic subtext will get us all hexed.”
“And you’ll be bored to tears without me,” Blaise replied smoothly.
“True,” Theo said, mock-resigned. “But I’ll have peace. Glorious, narrative-free peace.”
“You’d hate it.”
“I would,” Theo admitted, and Blaise grinned like he’d won something important.
Despite the theatrics, Hermione notices Theo’s gaze kept drifting to Harry.
Not out of concern. Not exactly. It was the kind of watchfulness you used on unstable potions. Not because you feared them, but because you respected what might happen if you stopped paying attention.

The floo flared green.
Out of the emerald flame stepped a tall figure in midnight robes, dusted with pale ash from the Floo. His face was angular, lined but not aged, and his eyes, grey like riverstone, swept the room in a single, assessing glance before settling on Neville and the girl in his arms.
“Elarion Thorne,” he said curtly, as if announcing himself was merely a formality. “Where?” Neville didn’t speak. He just turned, revealing Pansy’s face, and something in Thorne’s expression sharpened.
Without waiting for permission, he crossed the hall in long strides, conjuring a diagnostic charm mid-step. It shimmered briefly in the air above her chest, then collapsed in on themselves, flickering red and gold.
“Downstairs,” Narcissa said, already moving.
Thorne gave her a sharp nod and followed, wand still humming. Neville kept pace, one arm still cradling Pansy, the other hovering protectively just in case.

A few moments later Malfoy's mother had returned to her place in the center of the hall like she hadn’t moved at all. Her hand was outstretched. Narcissa’s eyes were unreadable. “You’ve done your part, Miss Granger. And you’ve done it well. But you cannot carry it alone.”
Hermione looked down at the vial in her hand. It throbbed once, dark and heavy, as if aware it was about to be passed along. “I’m not sure it wants to be touched,” she murmured. Narcissa didn’t flinch. “It won’t refuse me.”
That wasn’t arrogance. That was certainty born of old magic. Hermione stepped forward slowly, fingers loosening around the glass.

“It’s not just shadow,” she said, hesitating. “It’s… residue. From the Horcruxes. I’m almost certain of it.”
“I know,” Narcissa said simply.
Hermione’s breath caught. “How?”
“Because I’ve seen what that kind of magic leaves behind,” she said, and her voice was quiet now. “And I know what it costs.”
Hermione hesitated, then placed the vial into her waiting palm. Narcissa closed her fingers around it without a twitch. No recoil. No jolt. Just… acceptance.
For a moment, neither woman spoke.

Then Narcissa turned and walked toward the drawing room, as if she carried nothing more volatile than a wineglass.

But Hermione knew better.

They all did.

Chapter Text

The torches lining the stairwell hissed as they descended, each one flaring to life in sequence, casting molten gold across the stone walls. Theo counted them for fun. Ten steps. One torch. Ten more. Another. The descent into the dungeons was always colder than expected.
Draco moved ahead, silent and composed, wand at his side, shoulders stiff with a kind of poise that screamed of breeding and calculation. He didn’t glance back. Didn’t speak. But Theo didn’t need words to read him.
Draco was coiled.
Not angry. Not exactly. Just ready. Like a sword still in its sheath, but sharpened to the edge of madness.
Theo, on the other hand, felt something else brewing under his skin. It wasn’t fury. It wasn’t duty.

It was... anticipation.
He hadn’t been this close to sanctioned cruelty in ages.
The dungeon door stood before them now. Warded, reinforced, humming with the kind of enchantments the Ministry liked to pretend no old family still used. Draco flicked his wand once, and the seals unlocked in sequence. Soft clicks like bones being set back into place.
The door creaked open.
The man was still suspended in midair, held aloft by the layered precision of Draco’s earlier spells. His limbs dangled like a broken puppet. Awkward, graceless, unhuman in their stillness.
The hood he’d thrown over his head had slipped slightly during transport, revealing the stubble along his jaw, the pale curve of a bruised throat.
But now, under the torchlight of the dungeon, Theo moved forward.
“I want to see,” he said, voice low. Draco didn’t protest. He raised his wand, flicked once, and the hood crumpled away in a whisper of fabric.
The man’s face emerged from the shadows.
Older than Theo had expected. Late forties, maybe fifties. Not worn, exactly, but weathered. Like parchment once expensive, now yellowed with secrets. Thin mouth, a jagged scar across one cheekbone, and cold, sharp eyes that should’ve been unremarkable.
Except they weren’t. Because Theo had seen those eyes before. Just not on this face.

He froze.

Draco didn’t speak, but Theo felt the shift in his energy too. Still poised, still controlled, but no longer indifferent.
They knew him now.
The unrecognizable trader from Hogsmeade. The one who had sold Draco the mirror in the alley, cloaked and distorted. That haze was gone now. The glamours had faded.
This man wasn’t just a seller of cursed objects.

He was someone.

And he had chosen to be unrecognizable for a reason.

Theo stepped closer, letting his gaze drag over the man’s face like a scalpel. “No more shadows to hide behind, hmm?”
The man didn’t respond. But his lips twitched. Just a fraction. Enough to make Theo’s fingers itch. “Careful,” Draco said, quiet but firm. “We need him alive, for now.”
Theo smiled faintly, eyes never leaving their captive. "Rise and shine," he said cheerfully, wand already spinning between his fingers. "Well, don’t rise, obviously. Gravity’s having a day off."
He flicked his wrist mid-sentence, ending the levitation charm with a casual “Finite.”
The man dropped like a sack of bricks.
He hit the stone floor with a sickening thud, limbs still shackled, body twisted unnaturally from the fall. A low grunt escaped his throat. More instinct than pain, but Theo heard it. And smiled.

Draco didn’t flinch. He followed, closing the door behind them with a muted thud. The wards flared once, sealing the room with a faint shimmer of ancient magic.
"We’ll do this clean," Draco said. Not a suggestion.

"Of course," Theo murmured, not bothering to hide the grin curling at the edge of his mouth. "Clean. Efficient. Terrifyingly precise."
The man’s mouth twitched. Maybe he remembered Theo. Maybe he just remembered the pain.
Draco approached, his voice calm and almost bored. "You sold me that mirror. You told me it would respond to magic, nothing more."
The man didn’t answer. Theo stepped closer, wand lowering toward the floating man’s temple.
"He heard you, mate. Rude to ignore a Malfoy in his own basement."
Draco lifted a hand slightly. Theo stilled. "We start with the truth," Draco said. "Then pain."
Theo’s grin sharpened. "And if the truth hurts?"
"Then that’s just efficiency."
The prisoner opened his mouth. And the real conversation began.
“Well,” Theo drawled, circling the prone figure like a cat that had just found its favorite toy again, “if it isn’t Garran Mulciber.”
Mulciber. Not the older one. Dead. This was his nephew. Garran. A known fence for cursed artefacts, specialist in untraceable magical conduits, and a former affiliate of the Black Market circuit during the final months of the war. Slippery, smart, and just dangerous enough to be useful to all the wrong people.
He also happened to be the reason Theo had shattered three fingers and lost twenty-two hours of memory during an acquisition mission two years ago.

Theo crouched low, his wand twirling idly in his hand. “You remember me, don’t you?” he asked, voice light. “You left me with a charm-triggered hemorrhage curse woven into my hippocampus. Took three Healers and one obscenely expensive flask of phoenix tears to make me functional again.”
Mulciber said nothing. But the flicker of recognition in his eyes was all the answer Theo needed.
Draco’s voice cut through the moment like a knife. “You told me the mirror would respond to ambient magic. That it was inert, reactive at most.”

“And you believed him?” Theo said, standing again, voice laced with theatrical disappointment. “Draco. Darling. You’re slipping.”
Draco’s expression didn’t change. “I needed something to locate magical interference. I didn’t expect horcrux residue.”

“You never do,” Theo said, turning back to Mulciber. “That’s the problem with cursed objects. They never come with warning labels.”
Mulciber’s lips parted, cracked and bloodied from the fall, but he still managed a rasp: “It… wasn’t supposed to open.”
Theo’s smile sharpened. “Oh, good,” he said. “Then you’ll love what happens when we open you.”
Theo hummed. Low at first. Almost thoughtful. A childhood lullaby twisted into something wrong. His wand drew lazy circles in the air, the tip glowing faintly with dark intent.
Mulciber twitched, and Draco said nothing. He simply stood to the side, arms crossed, eyes unreadable. Not approving, not intervening. Letting Theo work.
“Oh, come now,” Theo said, tone lilting, “you’ve got secrets crawling under your skin. I can smell them. Wouldn’t it be nice to let them out?”
A soft whisper of magic pulsed from his wand, and the man’s body arched, fingers spasming in their restraints. Not enough to cause damage. Yet. Just enough to remind him that he was made of nerves. That he could break in ways that weren’t visible.

Theo stepped closer, voice now velvet and venom. “You know what’s interesting about Cruciatus variants?” he mused. “The Ministry outlaws the originals, fair. But if you tweak the frequency of the pain and call it Stygian resonance and suddenly it’s just ‘experimental diagnostics’.”
Draco gave a short exhale, almost a laugh. Almost.
Theo didn’t break eye contact with the prisoner. “That mirror sought out Harry’s magic. Did you design that trigger? Or was it a charming little Voldemort leftover you failed to mention in your product description?”
Mulciber groaned, body curling reflexively.
Theo cast again.
This time the man screamed. Short, sharp, involuntary.
Theo smiled, then sang. Something old and lilting. A school song from Durmstrang, perhaps. Or maybe just something he made up on the spot, because the words didn’t make sense and the melody was wrong in all the best ways.
“♫ One for the eyes that see too much
Two for the bones that crack… ♫”

Crack.

Another flick of his wand. Not a bone, not really. Just a sound spell in the man's own skull, making him think something inside had broken.
Mulciber whimpered, panicked now. Not from pain, but from confusion.
Theo leaned down, almost gently. “There it is. That delicious moment where your brain stops asking if this will end, and starts asking when.” He brushed the man’s temple with mock care.
Draco finally spoke, voice low. “Enough. Talk.”
Theo straightened, wand still warm in his hand. “Your turn, Garran. Tell us where that mirror came from. Its real origin. No more half-truths.”
Mulciber coughed. Blood-flecked, trembling. But something had cracked inside him now. Not his body. Something deeper. Whatever resolve he’d clung to was bleeding out between the lines.
“I didn’t steal it,” he rasped. “I wasn’t the first.”
Theo’s wand twitched in warning.
“I found it,” Mulciber continued quickly, “in the ruins of a manor up north. Not listed. Not on any maps. It…” He swallowed. “It shouldn’t have been there.”

Draco took a single step forward, quiet and sharp. “Which manor?”
Mulciber’s eyes fluttered shut. “Black family estate. One of the oldest. Not Grimmauld. Older. A failed branch. Buried in records even your Ministry rats won’t find.”
Theo tilted his head. “What was it doing there?”
“It wasn’t placed. It grew there.” His voice dropped. “There was a vault below the house. Sealed from the inside.”
Draco’s expression didn’t change. But something behind his eyes twisted, like a blade slowly turning in frost.
“And you opened it?” Theo asked, almost amused.
Mulciber laughed, a weak, breathless sound. “Do I look like someone who would open something like that? No. It was already open. The mirror was waiting in the center. Covered in ash. Whispering.”
Theo knelt again, his voice soft. “And you thought it was safe?”
“I thought I could control it.”
“You always do,” Theo said, smile razor-thin.
He rose, turning to Draco. “So. Not just a cursed object. A legacy relic. Old magic. Black magic.” He looked back to Mulciber. “Tell me what else was in that vault. Now.”
Mulciber’s eyes went wide. And that, Theo noted with satisfaction, was fear.
Real fear.
And it had nothing to do with pain.
Mulciber’s eyes flicked from Theo’s wand to Draco’s face. His breath hitched. More from memory than pain.
“There was… more,” he said, barely above a whisper.

“Things I didn’t understand. Things I still don’t.”

Theo leaned in. “Start making sense, Garran. We’re fresh out of patience and long past mercy.”

Mulciber's head lolled slightly against the stone. His eyes unfocused, like the memory itself was heavy. “The vault was circular. Black stone, veined like obsidian. The walls were carved with runes I’ve only ever seen once before.”
Theo didn’t ask. Draco did. “Where?”
Mulciber swallowed. “Your library.”
That caught Draco off guard. His posture didn’t change, but Theo saw the shift. The barely perceptible pause in breath, the glint of calculation flaring too fast behind his eyes.
Theo smiled slightly. “You’ve been to the library of Malfoy Manor?”
Mulciber gave a breathless, bitter laugh. “No. But I’ve been near it.”
Draco stepped closer. “Explain.”
“The east wing,” Mulciber rasped. “Years ago. During the war. Your father… hosted certain gatherings. Private. Discreet. Some of us were allowed further in than others.”
Disgust flickered across Draco’s face. “You were a guest.”
“I was a resource,” Mulciber corrected, not proudly. “A broker. A cleaner. Someone who could retrieve what others didn’t want traced. I never entered the library directly, but I saw the entry sigils.
I copied them.
Studied them.
They matched what I later saw around the mirror.”
He coughed, wet and sharp. “Your family didn’t create those bindings. They inherited them. Like silverware. Or shame.”
Theo raised an eyebrow. “Lovely metaphor.” Draco didn’t speak. He stood very still.
Mulciber went on, voice growing more ragged. “There was more than the mirror…whispers.”
“What kind of whispers?” Draco asked.
“Not speech. Not quite.” Mulciber’s eyes glassed over. “They… remembered. They echoed. The vault remembered pain, blood, binding. The mirror was the centerpiece. I only took it because it called me.”
Theo gave a snort. “Of course it did. Cursed objects always have a flair for the dramatic.”
Still, Draco’s eyes remained locked on Mulciber. “You said the runes matched the ones in my family’s library?”
Mulciber nodded, sweat glistening at his temple. “Same structure. Same root design. Old Black magic. Not just spells. Contracts. Oaths. Binding magic meant to last through bloodlines. Meant to survive its creators.”
“And you think the mirror was part of that system?” Draco asked tightly.

“I think,” Mulciber said slowly, “your family wasn’t the first to try containing it. Just the last to fail without knowing it.”
Draco exhaled slowly. The room felt colder. Theo’s voice broke through the silence, bright and cutting. “So the Blacks made it.”
“No,” Mulciber whispered. “They bound it. Tried to contain it. But even that failed. The vault cracked open long before I got there. Something must have fed it from outside. Something recent.”
Draco’s jaw clenched. “Or someone.”
Theo turned to him, expression unreadable. “What are you thinking?”
Draco didn’t answer. Not directly. Instead, he stepped back from Mulciber and said, “We need to go through the Black records.
Not just mine.
The old ones.
The ones we don’t read, just keep.”

Chapter Text

He didn’t wait for the sound.

Draco had given the order and walked away, steps measured, shoulders squared as if the air pressing down the hallway couldn’t touch him. The stone corridor of the dungeons was colder now, somehow. As if it, too, knew that a breath had been stolen from the world behind that door. Quietly. Efficiently. By his will.
He passed the final set of enchanted torches, their blue flames bowing faintly toward him as if acknowledging something. Not respect. Not fear. Recognition.
Up the stairs. Past the inner wards. Past the points where even his father had once hesitated.
The manor was waiting. He emerged into the hall and let the silence settle around him like a cloak. For a moment, he stood still. Let his pulse slow. Let the shift happen.

Lord of the house.
Guardian of its secrets.
Murderer by proxy.
Not that it mattered. Not anymore.

He walked the long corridor to the drawing room, where the others had gathered. The scent of antiseptic spells lingered faintly in the air. Clean magic, patching, sealing, healing. Someone had brought tea. It sat untouched on a sideboard. Still steaming.
Hermione stood near the window, shoulders tense, eyes trained on something beyond the glass that Draco couldn’t see. She turned the moment she sensed him. Of course she did. She always felt him before he spoke. Like some internal compass that spun when he was near.
Their eyes met.
She didn’t ask.
He gave her a subtle nod. Barely there. But she understood.

Theo’s not coming back up just yet.
Harry sat on the edge of a velvet armchair, hands braced on his knees, jaw clenched. Ron hovered nearby, not quite sitting, not quite pacing.

Neville had taken the far side of the room, where Pansy lay still on a cushioned transfiguration of the chaise lounge. His hand never left her wrist. Even now, he was murmuring something to her.
Narcissa stood beside a tall cabinet, straight-backed and calm, her wand dancing silently as she sorted through old vials and parchment seals. Pipsey hovered at her side, muttering in clipped syllables, no doubt organizing what she considered a medical triage worthy of the Dark Ages.
Draco walked in like he belonged there. Because he did.
Hermione met him halfway.
“Well?” she asked, low.

“He’s dead,” Draco said simply. “Quick. Theo was thorough.”
Her brow lifted slightly, not in surprise, but in assessment.

“And did he say enough?”
“Enough to confirm what we feared. And point us somewhere worse.”
Across the room, Harry met Nora’s gaze. Nothing passed between them, not in words, but the understanding was instant and iron-clad. She gave the faintest nod, almost imperceptible. This would not reach the files. No parchment. No ink. No report.
Some truths weren’t meant for the Ministry.
And they both knew it.
Draco’s gaze shifted to the chaise.
“How is she?” he asked quietly, though the room had already given him the answer.
Neville looked up. His expression was steady, but his eyes were ringed with strain. “Stable. Barely. Her core’s still depleted.
Draco’s jaw tensed. “And she hasn’t woken?”
Not yet.” Neville shook his head. “But she’s holding on.”
“Good,” Draco said. Too flat. Too fast.
He didn’t linger. Just walked over to the cabinet where Narcissa stood arranging bottles with the precision of ritual. She didn’t look up.
He let out a slow breath. “You knew I’d order his death.”
“I knew you’d weigh the cost before you did.” She turned, eyes meeting his without flinching. “That’s the difference between a Malfoy who survives and one who rules.”
He said nothing. Just stood there while Pipsey flitted off to scold a hovering tea kettle. But as she swirled back between him and Narcissa, her voice floated after her like ribboned smoke.
“Ooh, I felt that one shiver through the stones, yes I did!” she chirped, tapping her temple with one long finger. “Like the walls took a deep breath for the first time in years. That man was all frayed edges and foul magic. Clung to the air like damp parchment.”
She paused, peering up at Draco with eyes that glittered. Not naive, but bright with knowing.
“Well done, young master. Sometimes a thing must die so the house can stand straight again. The roots say so.”
And before anyone could reply, she twirled away, arms full of clinking vials, already murmuring to an invisible plant on the windowsill: “No no, not lavender for her. That irritates the core…”
Draco blinked. Narcissa said mildly, “She’s not wrong.”
“Now,” she said briskly, turning toward the next rack of potions. “Help me find something that will wake Pansy without cracking what’s left of her soul.”

Draco exhaled through his nose. And for the first time since the dungeon, he let the tension in his shoulders fall just slightly.
Draco stepped closer to the rack of softly clinking glass. The labels had long since faded, but Narcissa’s fingers moved with confidence, brushing over dusty corks and etched sigils like she was reading Braille in a long-dead language.
“Not the green vials,” she murmured absently. “They wake the mind but burn the pathways.“
He didn’t answer right away. His eyes tracked a vial filled with something the color of mourning silk. Thick and dark, slow to shift.
“You kept it all,” he said finally. “Even the ones from… before.”
Narcissa arched a brow but didn’t look at him. “Of course I did. The war ends, but the magic doesn’t.”

A pause. Then:
“He said the mirror grew in a vault from the black family.”
Now she did look at him. Slow. Measured. Like turning toward a storm you’d long expected but hoped would veer. “He said the vault had cracks in the obsidian walls. That it remembered pain. That it called to him.”
Her fingers hesitated over a vial with a crescent-shaped stopper. “And what did it remember, exactly?”
“Blood,” Draco said. “Oaths. The kind of magic meant to survive its makers.”
Narcissa’s mouth flattened. “Black magic,” she said, the words weightless and yet bitter, like ash blowing through high air.
“Not just spells. Contracts. Bound into bloodlines. It matched the runes in our library.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
He froze. “You knew?”
”That’s a tale for another time.”
Her voice was still calm, but a tightness had coiled beneath it now.

Draco reached out, picked up a vial the color of rust and amethyst. “This one?”She nodded. “That will do. Just two drops. Any more and her mind might pull too hard toward what it saw.”
Draco held the vial in his palm. “What if we’ve already pulled too hard?”
Narcissa looked at him then, eyes clear, silvered by firelight. “Then you do what must be done,” she said softly.

And in the quiet that followed, even Pipsey didn’t speak.

Chapter Text

The air in the dungeon didn’t change once the life left Mulciber’s eyes. Not really. The torches still flickered. The damp still clung to the stone. But something had shifted. A silence, yes. But more than that. A sort of release.

Theo stood over the body, wand still at his side, blood cooling fast on the stones. He exhaled slowly. Not because he needed to calm himself. But because something in him had settled.
He didn’t feel triumphant. He didn’t feel shaken. He felt... correct.
He dusted off his coat, stepped back, and looked at the room as if it might answer a question he hadn’t yet asked.
It didn’t.

“Shame,” he muttered, half to the body, half to the walls. “You could’ve made it interesting.”
He left the dungeon in no particular hurry.
In fact, he whistled.
A low, meandering tune with no real structure. Something he'd half-heard once in a jazz bar near Knockturn and never quite forgotten. It bounced off the stone walls as he ascended, light as fog, and Theo matched his pace to it. Not a strut. Not quite. But there was something jaunty in his step. Almost a skip. Almost a dare.
The portraits lining the corridor didn’t glower. Didn’t jeer. Instead, they watched with narrowed eyes and whispered behind gloved hands and cracked gilt frames.
“Not him again…”
“Too much teeth in that smile.”
“Is he humming?”
“Oh dear gods, he’s humming.”
Theo offered none of them a glance. Just flicked a bit of invisible dust from his shoulder and grinned like a boy with a secret and a box full of matches.
He liked this part. Not the killing, exactly. But the balance it brought. The weight of something tipped finally, firmly, into place.
Justice.

The drawing room was warm with tension and old spells. He entered like a breeze that didn’t belong in a storm.
"Miss me?" he asked casually, one brow raised. Neville looked up first. His hand still hovered near Pansy’s wrist.
"She’s stable," he said. "Just." Theo nodded once. “She always was good at hovering near disaster.” Even Ron huffed a half-laugh.
Draco didn’t say anything, but his eyes flicked to Theo’s. He gave a near-invisible nod. Theo gave one back.
Then he walked over to the window where Harry was standing with his back half-turned. Pipsey was perched on the edge of a side table nearby, whispering something to a dried-out root in a teacup.

Theo didn’t speak. Just listened.
Harry’s voice was low, tired. “She sees things differently. Always has.” Pipsey gave a proud little hum. “Miss Luna sees between. That’s rare. Like old air and new stars, yes it is.”
Theo smirked, arms folded. “Are we talking about Lovegood or prophecy?” Harry startled, then relaxed. “Both, maybe.” Theo leaned on the windowsill. “She’d hate this manor. Too many corners that watch you.”
“Which is why she’d love it,” Harry replied, with something close to a smile.
And just like that, the room softened.
Not healed. Not yet. But slightly uncoiled.
Like something tight had allowed the smallest breath.

Chapter Text

It started with the weight of silence.
Heavy, but not empty. Not frightening either. Just... thick. Like floating in ink. Or being wrapped in velvet that someone had forgotten to remove.
Then a taste.
Something bitter brushed the edge of her tongue. Metallic, spiced, old. It burned, just faintly, like swallowing starlight. Her lips parted without thought, and the rest slid down her throat with a warmth that didn’t belong in dreams.
A voice followed. Familiar. Anchored.
“Just two drops,” it murmured. Male. Measured. “Any more, and she’d claw her way back too fast.”

Draco.

She would’ve rolled her eyes if she’d had control of them.
Instead, sensation returned in fragments. First, the ache. Bone-deep, like magic stretched too thin and trying to settle back into skin. Then the awareness of fabric under her fingertips. Soft. Familiar. Someone had chosen carefully. Of course they had.

She didn’t open her eyes. Not yet. The world was creeping back in, and she wasn’t ready to face all of it at once. But voices helped. They were threads. Tethers.
Neville’s, low and steady, brushing against her awareness like water smoothing stone. Hermione’s, sharper. Worried but buried beneath layers of reason. And Draco again. Clipped. Guarded. But close.

Good.
Let them hover.
Let them think she was still drifting while she took stock. That was the trick, really. Let the world believe you were fragile, so you could return exactly when and how you chose.
And when she did... She’d be ready.
The world nudged closer.
The voices shifted. More present now. A rustle of robes. The creak of leather. The scrape of a teacup against wood.
Time, apparently, was moving on without her.

Pansy inhaled through her nose. Shallow, but definite. The air smelled like antiseptic, wandfire, and someone’s over-steeped peppermint tea.
She grimaced before her eyes even opened.
“Ugh,” she rasped, blinking against the light. “Is that Weasley’s voice I hear? Merlin, I really must be dying.”
Ron, who had been leaning against a cabinet with his arms crossed, raised an eyebrow. “Nice to see you awake too, Pansy,” he said dryly. “Next time I’ll bring flowers.”
Then…
“Merlin’s tits,” Theo muttered from somewhere to her left. “She lives.”
Pansy’s eyes fluttered open. The light stung, but not as much as the overwhelming emotion on Neville’s face. He was leaning over her, hand still wrapped around her wrist like a lifeline.

“You look awful,” she said softly, brow furrowing.
Neville let out a laugh that cracked in the middle. “You almost died.”
“And still,” she whispered, fingers reaching for his, “I’d rather be me than anyone else in this room.”

She pushed herself up slowly. Every muscle screamed, but she didn’t show it. And then pulled him down by the collar with all the strength she could muster.

The kiss landed hard. Desperate. Messy. Real.
Neville kissed her like he meant it, like he’d meant it for ages and hadn’t been allowed to say so. His hand cupped the side of her face, anchoring her in place as if letting go might undo her entirely.
When they finally broke apart, she didn’t let go right away. “Next time,” she whispered against his cheek, “don’t let me be the one bleeding out.”
“No,” he said, voice raw. “Never again.”

A sound behind her.
She turned just enough to see Draco standing with one hand still holding the empty vial. He looked pale. Composed. Dangerous.

“Well,” she drawled, lips curling with mischief, “did you two at least manage a scandalous snog over a pile of forbidden texts, or is Granger still denying the obvious?”
Draco gave her a flat look, but didn’t rise to the bait.
Hermione, however, arched a brow, entirely unbothered. “I don’t need forbidden texts to be interested,” she said coolly. “Though I’ll admit… he does look better surrounded by danger.”
Pansy barked a laugh, pleased.
Hermione turned her gaze briefly to Draco then. Chin slightly lifted, eyes gleaming, and gave a slow, deliberate wink.
Draco blinked once. Then shifted his stance like something under his skin had sparked.
There was a pause.

Then Theo whistled low. “Ladies, please. The sexual tension in this room is making my wand twitch.”
“Gross,” Pansy muttered.
“True,” Hermione replied.
And still, Pansy smiled. Just barely.
Not because she was healed.
Not because everything was okay.
But because she was here.
She was held.
And somehow, for once, that was enough.

Chapter Text

The vial was small. Unassuming. Just a twist of obsidian glass sealed with silver wire and a rune that no one could quite name.
Harry held it between two fingers, like a truth he wasn’t sure he wanted to claim.
The magic inside didn’t pulse or glow. It didn’t hum. But it was felt. Not loud, not violent, but present. Like a shadow pressed against the edge of awareness. Like a memory waiting to resurface.
He turned it over once more in the light filtering through the tall windows of the Manor’s.

Behind him, Nora adjusted the straps of the reinforced containment satchel they got from Narcissa. Quiet. Efficient. Unshaken.
Nora hadn’t said much since the meeting last night, but she didn’t need to. They worked well in silence.
“We ready?” he asked.
Nora gave a curt nod. “The vault’s been prepared. Deep enough that it won’t call to anything else. Quiet enough that nothing will call back.”
He nodded. He didn’t say thank you. Nora didn’t need it, and he wasn’t sure he had the right words for gratitude that ran that deep.

He slipped the vial into the satchel and sealed it with a flick of his wand. The locks clinked shut, glowing briefly with auric light.
As they stepped into the corridor, Harry caught his reflection in a mirror that hadn’t quite been cleansed of its past. He looked… older. Not tired. Not broken. Just more himself. Like someone who had stopped trying to forget and had started to remember with purpose.

Outside, the world was green again. Hogsmeade far off in the distance.
Nora apparated them both to the remote warded site they'd chosen. A cliffside vault reinforced with runes old enough to make even Hermione pause when she saw them last week. The ritual was clean. Sharp. No flourishes. Just ancient magic wrapped around responsibility.
When the vault sealed behind them with a whisper like stone sighing, Harry exhaled. And for the first time in weeks, the tension in his chest didn't return.

They stood in silence for a while.

Then Nora said, “You’re lighter.”
He glanced sideways. “Am I?”
“Yeah. Whatever was coiled around you… it’s loosened.”
Harry didn’t answer right away. He stared out at the horizon, where clouds moved like slow creatures.
“I think I finally believe I don’t have to do it alone anymore.”
She didn’t smile. But she didn’t need to.

Later, they returned to the Manor for a final check-in. Draco and Hermione had vanished into whatever orbit they were now circling, and Harry found he didn’t mind. They made sense in a way that defied logic but felt honest. Like matching scars.
He found Neville in the gardens, hand-in-hand with Pansy. Theo was sprawled under a tree, pretending not to nap, and Ron was in the kitchen with Pipsey, learning to make special crackers from scratch, which Hermione would absolutely mock later.

It felt… good.

As they left, Harry paused at the edge of the Manor’s wards. He looked at Nora.
“I want to go see Hagrid soon.”
“Good,” she said simply.
“And maybe take Luna with me. See some of the forest again. The safe bits.”
“Define safe,” Nora muttered.
He grinned. “With Luna, that’s relative.”
They walked on.
He wasn’t fixed. He wasn’t free.
But he was ready to live again.
The shadows might never stop hunting him.
The dark would always be part of his world.
But he had friends now. Real ones.
And love, maybe.
And laughter.
And for once, the weight didn’t win.
The story wasn’t over. But this chapter was.

And that, Harry thought as they disappeared into the trees, was enough.