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Chapter Text

“You want me to what, now?”

The look he receives lets him know that he heard correctly the first time. The familiar face in front of him makes no motion to repeat himself.

“Respectfully, sir,” Draco says, in a not-so-respectful tone. “If I try to do what you’re asking me, you might as well kill me now. You’ll get the same result.”

More silence stretches between them. It’s a conversation in itself, a charged silence, the air thick with annoyance on both sides, as neither of them wishes to be having this discussion. In the end, Draco breaks eye contact, glancing away with a huff. He knows he’s behaving like a brat; he can analyze this regression later. Preferably accompanied by a glass of wine.

“This has been postponed as much as possible, Draco,” he says, and that deep voice resonates in Draco’s mind just like it did so many years ago.

“I didn’t survive the bloody war to be Stupified to dead by Potter in his doorstep,” he counters, looking around at the other portraits, searching for support. More often than not, Phineas says a few words of encouragement. Today, however, his portrait sits empty.

Useless.

“Harry won’t harm you,” comes the ominous voice of none other than Albus Dumbledore.

Great. Just what he needed, for him to get involved in his affairs.

Draco decides he might as well argue with another dead Headmaster today. Why not?

“Professors,” Draco pleads to the portraits of Severus Snape and Albus Dumbledore, currently and forever hanging in the office of the Headmistress of Hogwarts. “The last time Potter and I were in the same room together was during my trial, ten years ago.” A pause. His eyes dart from one portrait to the other. “He will not help me. Frankly, I’d consider myself lucky if he doesn’t hex me on the spot.” Draco is almost sure that Dumbledore chuckles after that.

He hadn’t thought it would come to this. After all he’d done, he’d believed he could fix this on his own and then get the bloody hell away from the British wizarding world.

Snape looks at him with a familiar, tired look of disgust, some part of him trapped in the afterlife, still dealing with Draco’s problems and Potter’s repercussions. Some might say, karma.

“We have tried other alternatives and found nothing of value,” Snape says gravely, crossing his hands beneath his cloak with that infuriating air of superiority. “If you are willing to live the rest of your life without trying this, then be my guest,” he spits, the last three words sharp and deliberate, like the final notes of a symphony.

The need Draco feels to roll his eyes is juvenile. He clenches his left fist, jaw tight. He’s tense all over. He wants to scream at Snape like he’s sixteen again.

But there’s no one to blame but himself now, is there? It’s all his fault, every last decision.

Shortly after the war ended and the good guys got to write the ending, people like him were cast out and forgotten. Good riddance, Draco had thought, seventeen, traumatized up to his ears, and just wanting to bugger off to France for five or fifty years, away from anyone who would ever associate his name with Vol— The Dark Lord.

But of course not. The Malfoys had been summoned by the Ministry to answer for their actions. As they should have been, Draco knew, but what a nasty experience.

Lucius Malfoy, long-time blood purist and known Death Eater, could no longer claim he’d been under the Imperius curse. His trial was short; his sentence, life in Azkaban. The end.

Narcissa Malfoy, née Black, blood-purist sympathizer, had never been proved an active member of the Dark Lord’s followers like her dead sister. She had the great fortune of being defended by the Chosen One, who testified that she refused to identify his body as dead, because he was very much alive, despite the Dark Lord’s best efforts. Harry Potter said that, had she not lied to Voldemort’s face in front of his entire army, the tide would have turned, and The Light would have lost the war.

After that magnificent speech, (one Draco doubted Potter wrote himself), the Wizengamot had little choice but to pardon her other inactions during the war. She’d promptly buggered off to France and stayed there, an excellent plan, in Draco’s opinion. Narcissa Black, no longer Malfoy, that bond broken the moment she stepped out of the courtroom and into her solicitor’s office to arrange a swift divorce, Lucius absent from negotiations as he was already tattooed and rotting in his cell.

Draco Malfoy-Black’s fate had been a coin toss, a roll of Merlin’s dice, as his entire life had been since the moment his cloaks were green.

Many said to make an example of him: failed murderer, pathetic Death Eater, coward at every turn, choosing not to do the Right Thing.

Others, fewer, said he’d had no choice. Just a boy, they said. Under duress, raised to believe the lies reinforced by the Dark Lord in his own childhood home.

Draco had resigned himself to the same fate as his father, another set of matching tattoos and side-by-side cells.

But then Harry-bloody-Potter had stepped in again, settling his life debt to Narcissa with another speech (again, almost certainly not written by him) and Draco had been spared from Azkaban. He gave us the time we needed to escape the Manor before Voldemort arrived, he had said. No pleasantries or lies about Draco’s character. Just the fact that he had been so stunningly tongue-tied that the prisoners the Malfoys held were able to escape with the help of their former house elf.

A slap on the wrist, a year of house arrest, and a mountain of “reparations fees” later, Draco was left alone in the same Manor where the Dark Lord had lived, haunting the halls with nothing but the ghosts of his unhappy childhood and miserable teenage years for company. He dedicated his time to no good, rummaging the halls and drunk arguing with the portraits, practicing his Bombardas on what he was sure were family heirlooms and cursing objects that were not already cursed.

And that was the last time he’d been in the same room as the wizarding world’s savoir.

Now, at twenty-seven, he was being told to go to Harry-bloody-Potter’s house to look for a solution to his current predicament.

Or:

As Snape so helpfully suggested, to the ancestral Black home. Toujours pur and all that.

Back in McGonagall’s office, Draco continues his staring contest with two dead men.

“Fine,” he deadpans after what feels like a lifetime or a heartbeat. “If Potter kills me, which is a very real possibility, I hope this is the last time I have to set foot in this godforsaken school.”

He turns and leaves without another word, having reached his daily quota of being an insolent prat to dead people.

It’s dark outside, as it had been when he arrived, so he can leave Hogwarts unseen.

He decides he doesn’t want to go back to the Manor just yet. Not ready to deal with reality, he heads straight for the apparition point. Procrastination, he’s found, is an excellent Muggle term, and one he’s put to good use lately.

A loud crack announces his arrival somewhere within Nott Manor. Even after years of visits, he doesn’t quite recognize where he’s landed, some east-wing room, perhaps. He heads instinctively for the opposite wing, towards Theodore Nott’s chambers.

Draco hadn’t been close to Theo at school. Theo had been quiet, didn’t laugh at Draco’s jokes, didn’t cheer for him at Quidditch. Their fathers had been Death Eater comrades, and so they’d been expected to be friends, but only one of them had had the good sense to keep his head down and avoid involvement. And the other had been, well, Draco.

Still, during Draco’s house arrest, Theo had sent an owl, a rare gesture from a rare bloke, offering quiet empathy, calling the trial a “dog and pony show”, and recognizing that Draco had had no bloody choice.

Over the last decade, after an awkward reintroduction, they’d grown close. Friends. Yes, Draco could admit that now: friends.

Reaching Theo’s door, Draco knocks once and barges in. He has no time for politeness; misery loves company.

Theo startles awake, dark eyes flashing as he fumbles for his wand. Thankfully for Draco, Theo doesn’t have the reflexes of a war veteran.

“What the fuck, Draco?” he mutters into the dark.

Draco wonders if he’s going to hex him. Theo only casts a quiet Lumos. Disappointing.

“What the fuck, indeed,” Draco mutters, dragging himself to a settee and collapsing gracelessly.

Theo stares at him, exasperated, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Are you currently dying and couldn’t bear to do it alone? Or are you already dead and haunting me in my sleep?”

“I’m as good as dead, just so you know. Dumbledore’s sent me on a suicide mission.”

A sardonic laugh escapes Theo. “It was the other way around last time, wasn’t it?”

Draco tilts his head. Not entirely wrong.

“He thinks I might find something that helps fix… this,” Draco says, gesturing to himself.

Theo’s expression softens, because Theo, curse him, is a good friend.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it? You’ve not had a lead in over a year. Even the smallest lead is something worth exploring,” Theo says, his voice calm.

“Yes, except that he thinks I should look for answers in my mother’s ancestral home,” Draco sighs. Before Theo can ask, he clarifies: “As in, the house of the last Black heir. You know, that mad cousin who got himself killed by my equally mad aunt? That cousin who left that house to Potter in his will.”

There. Said. Now his problem is their problem.

Silence stretches between them until Theo mutters, “Well, fuck.”

After a long pause, Theo asks, “So… are you going to pay Potter a visit, then?”

Draco exhales, shoulders slumping. “I suppose so.”

Chapter Text

Three Years Ago

Draco had never been blessed with the gift of good timing, that much he knew. In fact, his timing was, more often than not, utterly shite.
That night in first year when he’d landed detention alongside Potter and his gang? Bad timing.
That day Potter decided he wanted to try something other than Stupefy and nearly killed him in a girls’ lavatory? Abysmal timing.
Being born into a family riddled with bigotry and prejudice that led to the downfall of not one, but two ancient magical bloodlines? Catastrophic timing.

In other words, Draco was well used to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It didn’t even surprise him anymore.

But being in your own home, minding your business, and somehow still becoming the victim of fate’s sense of humor? Honestly, give the bloke a break.

He’d woken up like any other day, that is to say, hungover. He’d taken a bath, cleared his thoughts of whatever idiotic choices he’d made the night before (with a wank, naturally) and descended the stairs of his beloved home, only to find his mother waiting for him in the foyer. The shock alone sobered him faster than a Pepper Up potion.

He tried to smile at her. Failed. Offered her a grimace instead, which earned him a sharp look of disapproval.

“What are you wearing, dear?” she asked, planting a feather-light kiss on his cheek. He hadn’t spared much thought for his appearance that morning, or most mornings, to be fair. She, however, was immaculately dressed. She’d abandoned black cloaks the moment Lucius had been carted off to rot in Azkaban and now favored pastels. Merlin’s balls, was she tanned? Bloody France. “How are you still in your pyjamas at this hour, Draco? Didn’t you get my owl?” Her tone sharpened into a scold.

Draco hadn’t the faintest clue whether he’d received an owl from Mummy dearest. These days, he was making it his mission to avoid communicating with almost anyone. Solitude suited him. Unfortunately, that clearly wasn’t on Narcissa’s agenda.

“Well, do go and get dressed,” she said, shooing him with her delicate hand, brows knitted together. “They’ll be here any minute now, and we need to look presentable.”

The first words Draco spoke that morning were not his finest, but in his defense, he was profoundly confused, particularly given he hadn’t even known he’d be seeing his mother that day.

“Wh—well… who?” he croaked, his voice raspy.

Narcissa huffed in a most uncharacteristic fashion, which, against all odds, sparked a flicker of amusement in him.

“Are you an owl, my dear boy?” she asked in that deceptively sweet tone that only worked on people who didn’t know her. “Is that why you’re sleeping through the day and sporting such ghastly dark circles? Who, Draco? The Greengrasses, that’s who.”

What the actual fuck?

“Daphne is coming?” he asked, still rooted to the spot as Narcissa waved him away. “I haven’t heard from her since before the war. We weren’t even friends.”

“It’s her sister who’s coming, along with their mother,” Narcissa said, more impatient than ever. Draco blinked at her, still foggy, wondering whether he was in fact still drunk. None of this was making sense.

“With her mot—” The realization struck him like lightning, draining every drop of blood from his face. “Mother, please, for the love of Merlin, tell me they’re here to see the new tapestries,” Draco said, limbs heavy, feet rooted. Judging by the look she gave him, Narcissa clearly thought he was hopeless.

“Yes, dear,” she said with an almost saccharine tone. “Young Astoria is coming with her mother to see the new tapestries, as they’ll be hers in the near future. Now, do be a darling and go get ready.”

Draco gaped at her, hungover forgotten.

“Mother,” he stuttered, like a newborn fawn finding its legs. “Mum, I will not be meeting anyone today. Or any day, for that matter. I’ll go into hiding if you make me. And I’m certainly not going to sit and have tea with a girl I’ve barely spoken to while you and her mother negotiate the terms of my marriage.”

There. He’d said it. Almost convincingly, too, as though he were the master of his own destiny. Once, as a boy and into his early teens, he’d assumed he’d marry a pureblood witch, procreate dutifully, and continue the noble line. Then a deranged megalomaniac had clawed his way out of death and ruined everything: his life, his dreams, his family. Then the war. He’d nearly died more times than he cared to count, in both sides and in neither, and naively thought that afterwards, he’d finally be free.

But Draco Malfoy had never been the master of anything in his life. Why start now?

“But of course you will, dear,” Narcissa said coolly, that same unflinching look in her eyes, the one Draco imagined she’d given the Dark Lord when she lied about Potter being dead. “You’ll go to your room, get dressed, and wash that godawful stench of Firewhisky out of your breath. I didn’t come all this way for you to throw a tantrum like a spoiled child.”

“But I am basically a child, Mother!”

“You’re turning twenty-five in a few months!”

“I didn’t have time to grow up during the war! I’ve the emotional maturity of a prepubescent! I want to get married about as much as I want to Crucio my own arm!” He was shouting now. When had he ever shouted at his mother?

If Narcissa noticed, she didn’t show it. She blinked once. Twice. Calm as ever.

“If you’re quite finished,” she said, her voice steady, “I’ll say this only once: you are not just any young man, Draco. You are the head of this family. Everything you do, or fail to do, affects others. I’ve given you years to sulk, managing things from abroad, handling the family business while you wasted our gold on cheap alcohol. It’s enough. You have the family legacy to uphold.”

The retort slipped out before he could stop himself.

“Which family, Mother? We don’t even share the same last name anymore.”

She recoiled as though he’d struck her. A flash of anger lit her eyes before she stepped forward, tilting her head up at him. Oddly enough, it was Draco who felt small.

“The Blacks have been part of this world for a thousand years and will be for a thousand more,” she said coldly. “Make no mistake, Draco. Whatever love I had for your father died the moment he put you in danger, and I refuse to carry his name or his cursed legacy. This is your chance to change the path of this family, my family. Not me. Not Lucius. You.”

Well. Sod his life. Sod his name. Sod the blasted legacy. He just wanted a break.

But Narcissa wasn’t having it.

“Now,” she said, composure regained, “would you please get ready so we can woo those two lovely witches into marrying into this family?”

Draco’s shoulders slumped. He turned and left without another word. None came to mind, anyway.

Well, of course the meeting went exactly as expected. Mrs Black and Mrs Greengrass chatted non-stop about everything and nothing, as though the last decade had been some collective fever dream. Their children, seated on opposite sides of the room, stared at one another in thinly veiled horror while their batshit mad mothers carried on without a care.

Draco found himself feeling a surprising pang of sympathy for Astoria, perched primly opposite him, clutching the lapels of her rather posh cloak like a lifeline. Glossy dark hair, darker eyes, pale as a bloody ghost, he couldn’t tell if she was terrified or simply in desperate need of one of his mother’s French holidays to get some color in her cheeks.

A pretty girl, he thought idly. Nice to look at, if only her hands would stop trembling. He assumed she had a pleasant smile, but that was a wild guess, given she hadn’t even attempted so much as a grimace in his direction. She was too terrified to meet his eye.

The visit ended before Draco could even begin to contemplate what the fuck was supposed to happen next. Not that it mattered, Mother knows best, or so the saying went.

If someone had asked him then to name Astoria’s mother, he wouldn’t have had the faintest clue. What had they even been talking about? The weather, most likely. The impending union. Utter nonsense. Before he knew it, Narcissa was on her feet, elegantly waving their guests off and discreetly elbowing him in the ribs to prompt a farewell. He didn’t move.

“That went well, dear,” Narcissa said, catching his forearm to secure his attention.

“Did it?” he asked sincerely, because honestly, he couldn’t tell.

“Yes. The girl just needs some time to grow accustomed to the idea.”

“That makes two of us,” he muttered under his breath. Narcissa, naturally, did not dignify that with a response.

“You will go to Gringotts and select some rings from the vault,” she continued, brisk as ever, “so that we can decide which one you’ll present her with. Diamonds, yes, but nothing ostentatious. She’s quite a delicate girl. And no emeralds, that would be far too obvious.”

Oh, good. He had been worried that his right to decide was being completely revoked, but apparently, he was being granted the honor of choosing the engagement ring. Small mercy.

He decided it was safest to simply go along with her for the time being. Yes, he could go to Gringotts. He could even pick out a ring or two. And while he was at it, he could withdraw enough gold to survive a season (or ten) in exile, returning only once his mother had come to her bloody senses.

“Yes, Mother, of course,” he said, offering a polite nod to drive the point home. “I’ll ask Nott to come along...he’s got better taste in jewelry than I do.”

“Splendid,” she said, patting his arm twice before sweeping away.

Yes. Fucking splendid.

Chapter Text

Draco Malfoy had reached that particular stage of life where he was fairly certain the universe had taken a personal dislike to him. Not just a casual, “Oh, it would be inconvenient if things went wrong for him” dislike, but full-blown, persistent, gleeful malice. He was also fairly sure that today was going to be worse than yesterday, which in itself was a miraculous achievement.

Theo Nott, naturally, looked perfectly content. He had perfected the art of leaning against things (mantelpieces, doorframes, Draco’s patience) with the lazy poise of someone who had decided life was a spectator sport.

“So,” Theo said, voice dripping with mock sincerity, “if you’re so desperate to marry a pureblood, maybe we should just… marry each other. Quick, painless, mutually convenient. We could even do matching rings, if you fancy.”

Draco blinked at him. For a fleeting, horrifying moment, he actually considered it. Perhaps, in some universe, one where he’d truly surrendered to despair, that was easier than the nightmare looming over him. Theo would, at least, be tolerable company. There’d be snide remarks, long silences, and the occasional intervention when Draco inevitably self-destructed. But then reality intruded, as it always did. “I’d rather not,” he said flatly. “Mother wants grandchildren. Preferably ones that won’t set the drapes on fire or start quoting Potter.”

Theo smirked faintly, clearly enjoying the image of a toddler Malfoy in Gryffindor robes. “Fair enough.”

Draco ignored him, spine rigid, and exhaled sharply. “Now, are you coming with me to Gringotts or not?”

Theo tilted his head, as though the suggestion were both tragic and amusing. “I really don’t think—”

“The sooner we find something acceptable,” Draco hissed, “the sooner I can go back to pretending my life is not a complete shitshow.”

Theo arched an elegant brow. “Or, wild thought here, you could simply… not. No ring, no fiancée, no impending doom. Revolutionary, I know. You could even move to Albania. I hear the Dark Lord left it in poor condition, but with lovely views.”

Draco spun on him, eyes a little wild. “You think I want this? You think I enjoy being here like some…some desperate—”

“Yes,” Theo interrupted, entirely unruffled.

Draco’s throat tightened. “I don’t want her. I don’t want this. I don’t want Mother to have to detach herself from another Malfoy. Least of all me.”

Theo’s eyes softened a fraction. Barely. “Right. Well. In that case… let’s get it over with.”

The journey to Gringotts was unpleasantly familiar. Diagon Alley had managed a semblance of recovery since the war, but its cobblestones still carried the ghost of fear and ash. Draco, of course, caught sight of every shopkeeper who glanced at him and then quickly away. Reputation, he thought bitterly, was more indelible than Dark Marks.

Inside Gringotts, the air was cool, sharp, and metallic, like a place that actively disapproved of human warmth. The great marble hall gleamed, rebuilt after the war’s chaos, but the faintly scorched smell lingered. It was the scent of grudges.

Theo gestured lazily towards a jagged scar across the ceiling. “That dragon Potter and his merry band liberated, it caused considerable mayhem. Gringotts had to rebuild half the ceiling while you were under trial. They were… less than pleased.”

Draco’s jaw dropped slightly. He remembered whispers, yes, but he’d dismissed them as Potter-esque exaggerations. “I assumed the rumours were embellished. You’re saying he really flew out on a dragon?”

“They did,” Theo said blandly. “It was catastrophic. Also spectacular.”

Draco muttered something dark about Potter and improbable heroics. His hand flexed against his robes, as if willing himself not to hex the memory. Theo looked far too entertained.

The goblin escort met them with all the enthusiasm of someone who’d rather be soaking their feet in dragon’s blood than dealing with a Malfoy. Without a word, he led them down into the bowels of the bank. The cart ride was as violent as ever, and Draco spent most of it clinging to the sides and cursing the life choices that had brought him there. Theo, naturally, lounged as if it were a scenic Sunday walk.

Finally, the cart screeched to a halt before a vast iron door etched with the crest of the House of Black. Of course. It would be this vault. Draco’s stomach sank like a stone into the pit. The goblin pressed clawed fingers to the lock. Ancient wards shivered, hissed, and parted with a reluctant groan. The door swung open, revealing the kind of wealth and menace only a family like his could hoard.

Inside the Black Vault, the air was thick with the scent of old gold and something darker still, an undercurrent of ancient, coiled magic that pressed against the skin like humidity. Stacks of coins glimmered, boxes perched on ornate shelves, and jewelry winked from shadowed corners as though daring someone to try them on. The place hummed with an almost petulant impatience, as if it knew someone would inevitably be stupid enough to touch the wrong thing.

Draco scowled at the sheer opulence. “Right. Let’s get this over with. Look around for rings, pick one that won’t make her hex me on sight, leave.”

Theo raised a brow.

“You think I enjoy this?” Draco demanded, his voice sharper than intended.

Theo gave a languid shrug. “Honestly, you’d be better off pretending to. The alternative is me watching you sulk for hours. Tremendous fun for me, mind you. Less so for you.”

The search began.

Draco moved between velvet boxes and heavy caskets, his irritation mounting with each. Diamonds the size of knuckles, sapphires deep as night skies, emeralds that practically sneered with aristocratic pride. All dazzling. All wrong. Every ring seemed to scream obligation rather than choice. His fingers lingered too long on a sapphire circlet before he snatched them back, as though scorched.

“This is futile,” he muttered.

Theo leaned against a pillar, examining his fingernails with excessive interest. “Not futile. Just tragically comic.”

Draco’s hand brushed against something shoved halfway under a shelf. A small, plain box, unimpressive to the point of insult. No gleaming wards, no sinister hum, no discreet goblin note reading certain death if opened. Just… a box.

Because of course. He touched it.

A sharp sting sank its teeth into his fingers. He jerked, but too late. A bead of blood welled bright and hot. Reflexively, he brought it to his mouth, licking it clean, not noticing the faint shimmer curling like smoke around his wrist.

“Bloody hell,” Draco muttered. “Universe, would you kindly take a day off?”

Theo’s mouth opened, likely to say something cutting. He didn’t get the chance.

The vault shivered. Magic hissed like a fuse, a crackle of sparks erupted, and a pop echoed against the gold-laden walls. A curse uncoiled, fast, vicious, red, snapping towards them like a striking serpent. Before Draco could flinch, another spell cut through it, precise and unyielding. A ward shattered, fizzled, and died.

The doorway was suddenly occupied.

Hermione Granger stood there, wand raised, eyes sharp. She had moved without hesitation, as if her body had remembered the rhythm of war. No panic, no flinch. Only competence. The kind that made Draco’s skin crawl with unwanted recognition.

Of course she’d survived. Of course she’d turned herself into someone formidable. Draco had always known she would.

She lowered her wand fractionally, scanning the vault with that unsettling, calculating stare.

Theo, remarkably, was first to speak. “Granger,” he said politely, though his tone was brisk, almost businesslike. “Or is it Weasley now?”

A pause. Hermione’s mouth curved, though not in humor. “It’s Granger.”

Draco’s lips moved before his brain could stop them. “Good. You’re better off.”

The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush him. Theo, wisely, said nothing.

Hermione tilted her head. “What exactly are you two doing in here?” Her tone was calm, clipped. Sharp enough to draw blood if handled carelessly.

“In my family’s vault?” Draco shot back, voice dry as bone. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Theo lifted both hands, palms up in mock surrender. “Just… vault maintenance. Routine. You wouldn’t understand.”

Her eyes flicked between them, narrowing. She looked like she’d pieced together entire wars from fewer clues.

Draco, with a surge of bitterness he couldn’t contain, added, “I’m doing something I don’t want to do, and it’s all somehow Potter’s fault.”

Her eyes glinted, not surprised, not sympathetic, merely assessing.

“Well,” she said after a pause, “luckily, I don’t give a damn. Just don’t destroy the bank.” She turned, and disappeared into the corridor as swiftly as she’d arrived.

Theo exhaled slowly, with a little chuckle. “She’s the one to talk.”

Draco stared at the doorway long after it had emptied. His chest felt tight. His wrist itched. The shimmer of magic had sunk deeper now, weaving itself unseen.

He ignored it. As always.

“I hate her.”

By the time they stumbled back into the marble atrium of Gringotts, Draco’s nerves felt like they’d been boiled, strained, and hung up to dry. The vault had been its usual cocktail of trauma and temptation, and now his wrist prickled with a faint irritation he kept ignoring in the way one ignores ominous chest pains leading to a heart attack. Theo, of course, looked as though he’d merely been on a mild shopping errand.

“Next time,” Theo murmured as they passed the goblin guard, “we should just steal a ring from a Muggle jeweler. Less curse-breaking, more customer service. Probably free champagne.”

Draco gave him a withering look, but his retort withered even further when his eyes landed on the figures waiting near the entrance.

Granger again. Of course. Because the universe wasn’t done tormenting him. She was standing with a tall, broad-shouldered ginger whose presence radiated steadiness. Hair tied back, scar slashed cruelly across his face, sharp eyes softened only by something Draco could only describe as tolerance.

Bill Weasley.

And Draco remembered.

The night of the tower, the way Greyback had prowled like a beast straining against his leash, the way Draco had stood frozen, unable to act, too cowardly to stop anything. He remembered Dumbledore falling, the Dark Lord’s satisfaction, and the sick triumph of the moment that curdled instantly into guilt. Bill Weasley had been mauled that night. By Greyback. By association, by inaction; by him.

Theo noticed Draco stilling. “Oh,” he murmured, clocking the scars, the set of Draco’s jaw. “That Weasley.”

Hermione was speaking quietly to Bill, gesturing towards the bank. Something in her stance was lighter, easier, as though she trusted him in ways Draco couldn’t imagine being trusted. Bill listened, then said something that made her snort softly, not cruelly, but the kind of weary amusement born of old friendship.

Draco hated the sound of it.

Hermione’s gaze flicked up, inevitably catching him. Her expression didn’t shift, but something unreadable passed through her eyes; recognition, distaste, maybe the faintest gleam of hatred.

Bill’s eyes followed hers. They landed on Draco, assessed him, and cooled a fraction. Not hostile, not overt, but guarded. Protective.

Draco’s mouth went dry. He wanted to sneer, to summon a cruel remark, something cutting enough to slice through the tension. But the words withered before they could form.

Theo, mercifully (or perhaps sadistically) spoke instead. “Charming reunion. All that’s missing is Potter, a banner, and a round of applause.”

Hermione rolled her eyes heavenward, as though praying for patience. “Not everything revolves around Harry, Nott.”

“Try telling him that,” Draco muttered before he could stop himself.

Bill’s gaze sharpened. He didn’t speak, but the weight of it was worse than words. It said: I know who you are. I know what you let happen. And I’ll never forget.

Draco forced his chin up, spine stiff.

“Come on,” Theo said lightly, steering him towards the doors with the smooth efficiency of someone who knew when Draco was seconds from collapse.

As they stepped into the daylight, the sun should have felt warm, cleansing. It didn’t. It only highlighted the cold knot in his stomach.

“You recognized him,” Theo said quietly as they made their way down the steps.

“Of course I did,” Draco replied, voice brittle.

Theo didn’t press. He didn’t need to. The silence between them was heavy enough.

Back at the manor, Draco collapsed into the study chair with all the grace of a man being executed. The cushions swallowed him, but no amount of upholstery could soften the day pressing down on his shoulders. He wanted Firewhisky, a long nap, and preferably a world in which Granger did not exist to haunt his vaults.

Theo helped himself to the decanter anyway, pouring with the ease of someone who firmly believed in what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is also mine, provided you don’t hex me.

“So,” Theo said casually, stretching out like he owned the room, “tell me again how you want to marry Astoria.”

“I don’t,” Draco replied flatly, staring at the ceiling as if it might provide an escape hatch.

Theo swirled his glass, the amber liquid catching the light. “And your mother?”

Draco scowled. “Would rather I stopped breathing than embarrassed her. Which remains an option, frankly.”

Theo tipped his glass in salute. “Favorite thing about your life right now?”

“That it will eventually end.”

Theo blinked. “Bloody hell. You’re in rare form tonight, mate.”

Draco shot him a look. “What do you want me to say? That I enjoy being paraded like breeding stock?”

“Would’ve sufficed,” Theo said dryly. He leaned forward. “Biggest regret?”

Draco’s throat constricted. He hadn’t meant to answer. He shouldn’t answer. But the words slipped anyway, treacherous and unstoppable.

“Not accepting his offer.”

The silence that followed was glacial. Theo stilled, glass halfway to his mouth. His expression didn’t change much, it never did, but the air in the room thickened. The truth had weight, and Draco had dropped it carelessly, like an heirloom shattering on marble.

Before anything could be salvaged, the door opened.

Narcissa Malfoy glided in with her usual poise, every line of her figure honed into elegance. Her eyes sparkled with the kind of maternal delight that made Draco want to crawl into the floorboards.

“Oh,” she said, gaze sweeping the small pile of rings laid on the table. “You’ve been busy, darling.”

Draco shot upright, spine aching with the effort of composure. “Of course, Mother. Wouldn’t want to disappoint you.” His smile was thin, stretched taut over something darker.

Theo’s eyes flicked towards him, sharp, warning. Careful.

Narcissa drifted closer, her fingers brushing over the collection of rings like a queen inspecting tribute. “Which one do you prefer, Draco?” she asked, voice sweet but edged with steel.

And then it happened.

Draco opened his mouth, and the truth surged out, raw and uninvited. “None of them. I don’t want any of this. I would rather kill myself th—”

Theo moved faster than thought. Wand up, spell cast.

“Stupefy.”

Red light hit Draco square in the chest. Darkness folded over him like a cloak.

When Draco woke, his skull felt as though it had been cracked open and used to host a particularly rowdy Quidditch match. He bolted upright, disoriented, fury already brimming.

“You— you fucking stunned me?”

Theo, seated with his feet up on Draco’s desk, didn’t even flinch. “And what the fuck was I supposed to do? Let you confess your soul to your mother like a lovesick poet?”

Draco gaped, words tangling on his tongue. He tried for righteous fury but only managed a strangled noise.

Theo raised his glass in mock toast. “You’re welcome.”

Draco groaned, flopping back onto the couch with the weight of a man surrendering to fate.

“This day,” he muttered, “could not possibly get any worse. And yet, I suspect the universe has a few more tricks tucked up its sleeve.”

Theo sipped his drink. “Oh, it does. It always does.”

Draco closed his eyes, resigned.

“Also,” Theo added with infuriating calm, “I may have had to throw a little Confundus  at your mother.”

Draco’s eyes flew open. “You did what?”

“Relax. Just enough to make her forget your little outburst. She’ll be fine.”

Draco stared at the ceiling, muttering under his breath. “I always knew I was going to hell.”

Theo smirked faintly. “Good news, then. I’ll be saving you a seat.”

Draco groaned again, dragging an arm over his face, and this time he meant it when he thought: The universe hates me.

Chapter Text

Draco Malfoy stands in the rain, staring at a row of Muggle houses, and wonders when exactly his life became this pathetic.

He is supposed to be looking for Number 12 Grimmauld Place. At present, the bloody house doesn’t exist. Just a gap between 11 and 13, and him standing on the pavement like a tourist who’s misplaced his hotel.

Brilliant.

He shoves his hands into his coat pockets, jaw tight. “Only a Malfoy,” he mutters, “would break into Potter’s life and call it strategy.”

He glances up and down the street. Ordinary Muggles hurry by with umbrellas, giving him the usual suspicious look reserved for strangers who loiter in respectable neighborhoods. He doesn’t care. He mutters the family name under his breath, presses blood from a neat slice on his finger to the stone step, and waits.

The air tightens. Houses groan. Number 12 forces itself into existence with the grace of an unwanted guest muscling into a group photograph.

It’s grotesque and proud. Narrow windows glare down at him. The door sits like a clenched jaw. The wards ripple under his skin, recognizing enough of him to allow entry, and disapproving all the same.

Ugly. Properly Black. And, damn it, well-made.

Draco almost respects it.

“Of course,” he mutters. “No sunny little cottage. No cheerful gate. Just this miserable pile.”

He reaches for the knocker. A crack of Apparition splits the air behind him.

“What the fuck—”

The voice is sharp, familiar, too close.

“—are you doing here, Malfoy?”

A wand digs between his shoulders. He freezes, hand still on the knocker. Slowly, he raises his palms, his own wand pinched between two fingers.

Hermione Granger stands in the rain.

The years have suited her. Not in the pretty sense, not softened or gentled, but honed. She looks like someone who has spent a decade walking into impossible situations and coming out the other side. Capable, efficient, dangerous. Her hair is dragged back without care, her coat practical, her eyes sharp enough to cut.

“Evening,” Draco says lightly. “You look well. I’m breaking and entering. Very on brand, wouldn’t you say?”

Her eyes narrow. “Turn around.”

He does, deliberately slow.

The hex slams into his thigh before he can breathe. His leg buckles, pain ripping down his side, and he grips the iron rail to keep upright.

“Bloody hell, Granger!” He grimaces through his teeth. “Not very fucking honorable, hexing a man in the back.”

“Honorable?” Her voice is pure venom. “That’s rich coming from you, Malfoy.”

He breathes once, concedes with a nod. “Fair.”

“Leave,” she orders. “Now.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, and you will.”

“I need Potter.”

Her wand doesn’t dip. “Why?”

“To gain access,” Draco says carefully. “To look for something inside.”

“What something?”

“That’s between me and Potter.”

“Then you’ve wasted your time.”

“I’ll wait,” he says.

She stares at him, incredulous. “You’ll wait. On the step. Until Harry comes home and hexes you into next week.”

“Preferably sooner.”

“You are insufferable.”

“Yes.”

Her nostrils flare; she looks like she’s one curse away from finishing what she started. Instead, she flicks her wand.

A silver otter bursts from the tip, bright against the rain, streaking off down the street.

Draco watches it vanish. His lip curls. He doesn’t know if it’s meant for Potter or not, but he doubts his evening is about to improve.

“Charming,” he mutters. “Summon the cavalry. Why not.”

“Shut up,” Granger snaps, wand never wavering.

Draco sighs, rain dripping from his collar, and wonders, not for the first time, why he didn’t just stay at the Manor, drink himself stupid, and let the world carry on without him.

Because he can’t. Because he’s run out of options. Because he is, apparently, a masochist.

“Fuck my life,” he mutters under his breath.

The house creaks behind him, as if it agrees.

Rain spiders down the railings. Granger doesn’t move. The wand at Draco’s spine may as well be a nail driven into the spot where bad choices live.

“Put the wand on the step,” she says.

He lowers his left hand and lets his wand drop onto wet stone. It looks small there, indecently naked. He toes it across the flag, towards the hedge. The wards hum again, the house prickle-frowning at the indignity. Good. Let it be offended. They’re kindred spirits.

“Hands where I can see them.”

He lifts them, palms open. “You can knit me a scarf while you stare,” he says, because if he stops talking he’ll start thinking, and that helps no one.

“Try silence,” she says.

“I did. It’s overrated.”

“Why are you here?”

“To speak with Potter.”

“About what?”

“Access.”

“To what?”

“The house.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s something in it I need.”

“What?”

“That,” Draco says, “is between me and Potter.”

Her jaw tightens. “What the fuck does that even mean?”

“It means I will speak to him, or no one.”

“He’s not here.”

“Then I will wait.”

“You won’t.”

“I will.”

She moves around to face him fully, close enough that he can see the rain stitched into her lashes, the chill brightening the knuckles around her wand. She has a professional’s stillness now, the sort curse-breakers and Aurors and Healers develop: a body learning how not to waste an ounce.

“Is this a threat?” she asks quietly, and the quiet is worse than the hex.

“It’s a stubbornness,” Draco says. “Think of it as cultural.”

“You’re trespassing.”

“Correct.”

“And refusing to explain.”

“Also correct.”

“And you expect me to call Harry.”

“I expect you to make the efficient decision,” he says. “You won’t trust anything I say. You might trust him. So call him.”

“Harry doesn’t need this,” she snaps, finally letting some volume out. “He does not need you cluttering up his evening with whatever mess you’ve stepped in.”

“Sweet of you to curate his calendar,” Draco says. “And yet, here we are.”

She could hex him again. She thinks about it. He can see her counting the spells she’s allowed to use on a man kneeling in the rain and deciding more than once to be better than him.

“Last time I saw you,” she says, “you were a taking a piss with Nott in Gringotts. And what—now you stroll onto his step like a bad thought and expect—what, exactly?”

“A conversation,” Draco says. “On the topic of houses.”

“Don’t be clever.”

“It’s all I’ve got left.”

Her nostrils flare. “No, it isn’t.”

He almost smiles. “You’re right. I’ve also got terrible judgement.”

The rain thickens, a curtain between them and the street. A black cab passes, hiss of tires on wet tarmac. The driver glances at the gap between houses and sees nothing. Lucky bastard.

Granger flicks water from her sleeve and, because part of her is bone-deep procedure, asks, “Anyone else knows you’re here?”

“No.”

“You came alone?”

“Yes.”

“Idiot.”

“Frequently.”

She studies his face as if she can audit it for fraud. Something in her eyes shifts, not sympathy (she is beyond that with him), not curiosity exactly, but the grim interest of a professional confronted with a puzzle she didn’t ask for and now resents.

“I should call the Aurors,” she says.

“You absolutely should,” Draco agrees. “And explain that Malfoy is loitering outside a house that doesn’t exist asking for a chat with the national treasure you’ve refused to call.”

“Don’t be a prat.”

“It’s structural.”

“Did you think this would work?” She gestures loosely: him, the door, the rain.

“I thought it might,” he says. “On the grounds that if something is truly dreadful, it occasionally succeeds.”

She huffs. “That’s not logic.”

“It’s Black family planning.”

Another crack of Apparition would be nice, anyone but who he thinks it will be. He can handle a Dementor at this point. Or a dragon. Dragons are honest.

Instead the rain keeps being rain, and Granger keeps being Granger: controlled, furious, so very tired underneath the iron.

“Why now?” she says.

“I’ll tell Potter,” he says.

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d prefer to keep breathing on one lung rather than no lungs.”

Her gaze flicks down his thigh at the damp growing through cloth where the Stinging hex bit. “That can be arranged.”

“I know,” Draco says, and lets it sit there like a thing he won’t pick up.

She swallows, jaw working. Then: “Ron.”

He blinks. “Is that a hex I’ve not heard of—”

“I’m calling Ron,” she says, and sends a glittering otter into the wet street.

Draco snorts. “Lovely. The committee expands.”

“Shut up,” she says again, and he miraculously does. For three whole seconds.

“Granger,” he says then, because even he knows when to push and when to steer, “tell me to go, and I’ll Apparate to the end of the street. Tell me to return in an hour, and I will. But do not pretend you’re going to solve this by hoping I’m a mirage. I’m very real. Unfortunately.”

“You always were,” she says, and there’s enough history inside the words to buckle the step.

They stare at one another and loathe the ways they are both still themselves.

The next crack of Apparition is close and clean. Ron Weasley lands half a pace behind Draco’s left shoulder, just out of easy hex-line with Hermione, the way you do when you’ve been trained not to shoot your partner by mistake.

He takes the whole scene in with one sweep: Malfoy kneeling, Hermione freezing him in place with a look, the house glaring down like an aunt with opinions.

“What,” he says, not quite a question, not quite a sigh.

“Caught him trying the door,” Hermione says.

Ron lifts his chin at Draco. “Evening.”

“Weasley,” Draco says, and is surprised to hear something like relief in his own voice. It’s always easier to be despised by more than one person; it distributes the load.

“You breathing for a reason?” Ron asks him mildly, which is impressively threatening for a sentence that could be about the weather.

“Debatable,” Draco says.

Ron’s eyes flicker, cynicism and curiosity in equal measure. Then he looks at Hermione, not at Draco. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” she says.

“You’re furious.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Stay like that.”

They do not smile. That’s not what this is. But Draco feels like he’s walked into a kitchen where two people have learned to pass every object between them without looking. He is the third person, and the objects are knives.

“We’re not calling Harry,” Hermione tells Ron. “Not for this.”

“Excellent,” Draco says. “I’ll wait for a decade.”

“Shut it, Malfoy.”

Ron keeps his voice level. “If he only wants to talk to Harry—”

“He doesn’t get to want anything,” Hermione snaps.

“Sure,” Ron says. “And yet here he is.”

“Because he’s a bloody narcissist who thinks he can stroll into a life he helped ruin and dictate terms.”

Draco tilts his head. “I can hear you.”

“Good,” Hermione says.

Ron scratches the bridge of his nose, then tucks his wand away long enough to fold his arms. Calm. Anchored. “What does he want, exactly?”

“Access,” Draco says. “To the house. To what’s inside.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell Potter.”

Ron waits. He has an excellent wait. You can feel it weighing you down, like wet wool.

Hermione snorts. “He thinks being coy will make us fetch Harry like spaniels.”

“It’s already made you send for him,” Draco says, signaling that Ron with his chin. “Progress.”

Ron’s glance is pure warning. “Careful.”

“Of what,” Draco says. “Your temper? Please. You just told her to stay angry. I’m doing my part.”

This earns him a brief, reluctant twitch from Ron’s mouth, not a smile, not today, but the muscle remembers how.

Hermione refuses to find anything funny. “If we call Harry, it will be because we decide he should be here. Not because you demanded an audience.”

“Fine by me,” Draco says. “Write it however you like on your daily report.”

Ron leans his shoulder against the post, body blocking Draco’s line inward without looking like he’s doing anything at all. “You’re bleeding on the step.”

“I’ve had worse,” Draco says.

“Good,” Hermione says.

“Thank you,” Draco replies, because he has no shame left, apparently.

Time elongates. Rain drums. Somewhere a fox makes the rude noise foxes make when they’re certain you don’t deserve to sleep through the night.

“Here are your options,” Hermione says at last, crisp as a clipped wand-movement. “One: leave. Two: I stun you and have you levitated to the curb where you can experience the romance of London drainage. Three: you give us enough to decide if Harry needs to be here.”

“Option four,” Draco says. “You call him because you already know he will despise my voice less than you currently do.”

“No,” Hermione says. “Try again.”

He takes a breath to lie. The breath stalls. It hangs in his throat like a stone in a stocking, and there it is again, the truth grinding its gears behind his teeth. Don’t you fucking dare, he thinks at it, because negotiations are not helped by involuntary confession. He clamps his jaw, feels the heat gather under his tongue.

“Having trouble?” Hermione says.

“Indigestion,” Draco says smoothly. “I’m allergic to rain.”

Ron watches him too carefully to buy that. “He’s straining,” he says to her, low.

“Let him strain.”

“Or,” Draco says, every syllable dry as kindling, “you call Potter, and we get on with this without the scenic route.”

Hermione lifts her chin. “Harry does not need more drama.”

“He has children,” Ron says simply, and that, more than anything, is the sentence that tries to put Draco back on the step he came from. He hadn’t even bothered to check. He hadn’t wanted to know whether the savior had a kitchen calendar, a school run, a stack of leaflets about Quidditch clubs. He didn’t come here to bruise himself on proof of other people’s futures.

“Congratulations to him,” Draco says, because he can still be vile without lying. “Imagine the bedtime stories.”

“Shut your—” Hermione starts.

“Harry is not your answer,” Ron says over her.

“He wasn’t mine the last time either,” Draco replies. “And yet here we all are, still orbiting one exhausted man’s address.”

Hermione’s mouth goes thin. “I won’t let you use him.”

“As what?” Draco asks, voice gone cold. “A library card? I’m not here for his sympathy. I’m here because Black stone remembers Black hands, and this house keeps its secrets. If there’s something in it that touches what I’m dealing with—” his throat tightens; he forces air through it “—he has the right to know I looked.”

Ron and Hermione look at each other again, the silent, practiced talk. It’s not agreement; it’s considering.

Draco presses while the door is open. “If you refuse,” he says, quiet now, “I come back anyway. Every week if I have to. I stand on your step until the neighbors call the Metropolitan Police and you have to teach a detective why the number twelve was shy that day.”

“God, you’re exhausting,” Hermione says.

“Yes.”

Ron tips his head. “He’s not bluffing.”

“No,” Hermione says. “He doesn’t have the stamina to bluff.”

This is almost funny. Draco does not risk it.

“Fine,” Hermione says at last, bitterness crisp as apple skin. “We call him. If he says no, you Disapparate and never touch this step again.”

“If he says no,” Draco says, “I do as I’m told. I am capable of that. Occasionally.”

“Debatable,” Ron mutters.

“Shut it,” Hermione tells them both, and sends a Patronus like a thrown knife into the wet dark.

Draco’s stomach does the uncomfortable tumble that follows a bad idea finally catching a breeze.

“Is the whole bloody Order coming?” he asks, because someone has to say it.

“Depends how loudly you fail,” Ron says.

Two cracks of Apparition follow within a beat of each other, then a third like a low note.

Ginny Potter neé Weasley first, chin up, eyes hawk-sharp, wand already where it needs to be. Bill Weasley second, stillness of a craftsman, gaze going to the seams in the stone, the places wards like to sit and sulk. And then Harry Potter, who does not need to be first to be the center of anything.

Draco expects to feel the old tug, that aura of doom clinging to the boy-who-lived-as-habit. It isn’t there. The war is not sitting on Potter’s shoulders anymore. Something else is: age that isn’t very old, responsibility that is, a weight that chose him and that he chose back. He is still, and everything in the rain pivots around that stillness.

“Malfoy,” Harry says, stopping at the edge of the step like he won’t gift Draco a single inch of the threshold. His voice is low, controlled, a thing with reins on it. “You have ten seconds to convince me not to put you in the street.”

Draco, who walked here ready to die on a doorstep because it seemed tidy, finds the ten seconds unusually short.

“I need access,” he says. “To the house. To what’s inside it. It touches something only you and I can… broker.”

Ginny’s eyebrow flicks. “He sounds like a bad contract.”

“Most of my life was a bad contract,” Draco says, and is annoyed to hear himself say it.

Harry doesn’t look away. “Why now?”

“Because I’ve run out of road.”

“Not an answer,” Harry says, ruthlessly reasonable. “Why here? Why me?”

“Because it’s your house.”

“Not good enough.”

“Because it’s a Black house,” Draco says, forcing the next steps down his throat like medicine. “Because if I need a chance of finding what I’m looking for, it’s here. Not at the Manor. Not in France. Here.”

“What are you looking for?” Hermione asks, because she will always focus the microscope on the subject when the men start posturing around the slide.

Draco shakes his head. “Potter.”

Harry doesn’t sigh. He looks at Ron. Ron looks at Hermione. They speak a whole paragraph with no sound.

“Talk,” Harry says finally. “And if I think for one second you are trying to drag me and mine into old filth—”

“You’ll what,” Draco says. “Stun me? Throw me into the street? Write me up? Please. The worst thing you could do to me is ask me to stand here looking at your faces for one more minute than I have to.”

Ginny’s mouth twitches; she doesn’t let it become anything. Hermione takes a half-step forward. “Offer something. You don’t get to demand. Not here.”

“Money,” Draco says at once, because it is the language his world learned first. “Name a figure.”

“No,” Hermione says, clipped.

“Favors,” Draco pushes. “You name them.”

Ginny: “We don’t want anything from you.”

Bill, almost apologetic: “And if we did, it wouldn’t be that.”

Draco stares at Potter. “Information,” he says, and that word has weight; it did during the war, and it does now, just shaped differently. “Dark Arts. Artefacts that shouldn’t exist. Places no one cased after the amnesty. Things only people like me can walk into without drawing a crowd. I can’t lie, and I won’t waste your time. Use me.”

Harry’s face does something subtle and unhappy. “You think I want to drag that through the door and feed it to my children?”

“You could feed it to your job,” Draco says. “Or to the DMLE. Or to the black box you all keep your horrors in. Pick a slot.”

Ron’s voice slides in, curt but still calm. “Why now, Malfoy?”

Draco swallows. He means to say something clever. The clever thing packs its bags and leaves. He tries to tell a version of the truth that is neatly dressed and speaks softly. It refuses to come.

Sound catches in his throat like a fishbone. He grimaces and tries to cough it out. Nothing. Heat builds behind his tongue. Breathing becomes an ambition.

“Something wrong?” Ginny says, not kindly, not unkindly. A statement.

“Leave him,” Hermione says. “He wants to be theatrical.”

“I don’t,” Draco rasps, because the curse has finally taken the decision away from him. He has never liked being managed. It turns out he likes it even less when his own mouth is the foreman.

“Out with it,” Harry says, and the words snap the last thin wire.

Draco does not shout. He has not shouted in a long time. He speaks as if each word has a weight and he has to carry it in both hands.

“I can’t lie,” he says. “Not to you. Not to anyone. Not to myself. For three fucking years.”

The rain seems suddenly louder. A car goes by, the sound falsely normal.

Hermione doesn’t move. Her eyes are the sharpest thing on the step. “Explain.”

He hates that word. It is the word used by men who want you to lay yourself out on a table so they can decide whether to be generous.

“After the war,” Draco says, forcing pace, “after the trial, after the house arrest, after the rest of you went away and I discovered silence is very loud—I got cursed by one of Bellatrix’s trinkets and now I can only tell the truth. It started with the small ones. Polite ones. A shopgirl asked how a tonic tasted. I tried to say ‘lovely’. I said ‘dragon piss and old pennies’ and she told me to get out. Theo asked if I was all right. I meant to say ‘fine’. I said ‘I’m not sleeping and the house talks at night’ and he stayed and I hated him for it.”

Ron flinches so slightly Draco almost misses it. Not sympathy. Recognition. The way a man’s shoulders sit when the walls at two in the morning are not the walls that exist at two in the afternoon.

“Veritaserum?” Bill asks, reflexive.

“Nothing,” Draco says. “We brewed it, we bought it, we had a certified Healer dose me with the stuff. No change.”

“Oaths?” Hermione says.

“Bound myself to silence on three topics the size of a mountain. Nothing.”

“Occlumency?” Ron puts in, no judgement in it, only the inventory of a professional.

“It slowed the panic,” Draco says. “Didn’t slow the compulsion. Pressure builds here—” he taps the soft spot under his tongue “—and here—” his throat “—and if I try to step around it, it drags me back.”

“Step around,” Hermione repeats.

“Say something adjacent and true,” Draco says. “Instead of the exact thing. It buys time. Not much.”

Harry’s voice edges toward something like impatience. “And Bellatrix?”

“Bellatrix,” Draco says, careful with the name the way you are careful with live wires. “Theo and I built a grid. Runesets associated with her interrogation work. Arithmancy ratios she used when she got clever and hated herself for it. We went through Order reports, DMLE scraps, goblin footnotes. There’s a hinge-scratch in the memory of the vault—Theo slowed it, magnified the frame. It’s her mark. The curse hooks to a vessel. Not a caster. Not a room. A thing.”

“And if the thing is gone,” Ginny says, “the hook stays.”

“It stays,” Draco says. “In me. And I can’t shake it loose.”

Silence, the thoughtful kind. The kind that lets rain earn its keep.

Hermione at last: “Why here?”

“Because if she wrote notes, she’d bury them where only family would know where to pry,” Draco says. “Because the Blacks ruled by mezzanine and margin. Because if there’s a scrap of method, it might live behind a wall in this house. Because I’ve tried all the other places and they said no.”

“What other places?” Bill asks automatically.

“Cemeteries,” Draco offers with a shrug. “Shops where they don’t sell to men who use proper names. The attic in Knockturn where a woman swore she could unspool me and then asked for a tooth. I gave it to her. I still have the same problem and one fewer molar.”

Ron snorts an unwilling, sympathetic laugh. It’s so bleak it’s almost a prayer.

“What about your mother?” Hermione says, and there it is, the line he knew would be drawn.

“Narcissa wants me to be happy on her timetable,” Draco says, dry enough to light. “When I mentioned my timetable, she revised it to never speak of this again. We came to an understanding. She lives in France.”

It is the neatest possible version of a ruin. It is true enough.

Harry listens like a man at the end of a corridor. “And if we say no?”

“I go away,” Draco says. It costs him to say it, and he lets them see the cost. “I am not, contrary to rumor, incapable of leaving when told to leave. I will go. I will come back. I am stubborn and rich and bored and very tired. One of those will get me killed eventually. You can pick which.”

Hermione’s knuckles go white on her wand. “Don’t threaten us with a good time.”

“That wasn’t a threat,” Draco says. “That was a weather report.”

Ron looks at Harry. “Mate.”

Harry rubs his thumb once along the edge of his wand, a motion that looks like nothing and is not. He isn’t a boy. He isn’t quite a bureaucrat, either. He is a man trying to decide which part of himself gets to pilot the evening.

“I don’t want you in my house,” Harry says at last. “Everything in me says that’s the beginning of a bad week.”

“Yes,” Draco says. “It probably is.”

“But,” Harry continues, and the rain seems to lean in, “I want you off my step. And the fastest way to accomplish that might be to let Hermione and Bill pull a thread for one hour while you stand where I can see you and answer every single question we ask without getting clever.”

“Impossible,” Draco says. “I’m always clever.”

“Then it’ll be a short hour,” Harry says, deadpan.

Hermione hasn’t put her wand down. “Harry—”

“I know,” Harry says. “I know.” He looks like a man carving a new line on top of an old scar. He looks at Draco again. “One hour. If I think for a second you’re taking the piss, you’re gone.”

“Understood,” Draco says, and, because he is England’s worst customer, adds: “Do I get a receipt?”

“Shut up,” three people say at once.

It’s nearly funny. Draco lets the corner of his mouth acknowledge the concept and then files it away.

“Not tonight,” Hermione says then, will still iron. “Tomorrow. We do this on our schedule, not yours. You leave now. You come back when I tell you. If you put a toe on this step before then, I hex you until I’m bored.”

“Which will take years,” Ron notes, affectionate and long-suffering.

“Decades,” Ginny says.

Bill looks rueful. “Generations.”

“Charming,” Draco says.

Harry nods once like a gavel striking. “We’ll let you know when. You will give us a way to reach you that does not involve owls stealing jam from my kids’ toast.”

Draco opens his mouth to make a joke about jam and legacy, thinks better of it, and recites an address and a ward-phrase that lets a message through the outer weave at the Manor without tripping anything that would turn a postman into soup.

Hermione memorizes both with a grim little click. “Fine.”

“And Malfoy,” Harry says.

“Yes.”

“If you tell anyone you came here—”

“I don’t have anyone,” Draco says, and, fuck it, lets that land like a stone falling into a well.

Silence, again. A different texture this time.

“Right,” Ron says briskly, as if he has turned a page none of them wants to look at too long. “Meeting adjourned. Off you go.”

Draco looks at the door he didn’t get to knock. At the house that came when he asked it to. At the three people who learned to survive together and are now trying not to make a habit of it in front of him.

“Grand,” he says, and somehow gets his knees under him without making an undignified noise. His thigh files a formal complaint; his shoulder seconds it. He retrieves his wand from the wet, shakes it once, and tucks it away.

No one stops him. No one turns their back either.

He takes two steps back off the stone and onto the pavement. The rain gives him one last slap for luck.

“Tomorrow, then,” he says.

“If we decide there is a tomorrow with you in it,” Hermione replies.

“Story of my life,” Draco says lightly, and because he is who he is and cannot stand to leave a stage without a final line, adds, “Try not to miss me.”

“Fuck off, Malfoy,” Ginny says, quite pleasantly.

He inclines his head to the assembly. “As you wish.”

Then he Apparates, the crack cutting the rain in two.

The last thing he hears, before the street knits itself back to respectable, is Harry saying, in a voice so low Draco can’t tell if he imagined it, “I hate that he’s right.”

Draco lands in the Manor’s dim foyer, the smell of stone and cold and expensive emptiness rising to meet him like an old dog. He leans his head back against a pillar until his skull registers the existence of bone again.

“Well,” he says to no one. “Fuck my life.”

The house does not disagree.

Chapter Text

Draco Apparates into Nott Manor with the special kind of headache you earn from being hexed in the rain and patronized by Gryffindors. The pop of arrival echoes down the east wing, long and empty, like the house itself is sighing at him.

The library is lit the way Theo likes it: lamps low, shadows tall, whisky placed at precisely the reach of a man sitting down to a bad idea. Theo himself is slouched in his chair, long legs stretched out, a book balanced on his knee, the one he’s pretending to read until Draco provides the real entertainment.

“You’re limping,” Theo says, not bothering to look up.

“Granger,” Draco says, easing into the opposite chair with a hiss of discomfort. “She believes in preventive medicine.”

Theo shuts the book with a snap, pinches the bridge of his nose like the news has personally offended him. “Explain.”

He really fucking hates that word.

“Doorstep,” Draco says. “House appears. Granger Apparates. Hexes first, asks later. Weasley arrives, steady as judgement. Eventually Potter. They refuse to want me; I refuse to want them.”

Theo reaches for the bottle. Pours. Draco drinks like it’s a spell keeping him upright.

“And?” Theo says.

“And they’re considering letting me in tomorrow. One hour. With babysitters. And a signed promise not to be clever.”

Theo finally glances up, dark eyes flat with amusement. “Have you ever considered telling the truth without a flourish?”

“I was born a flourish,” Draco says. “Against my will.”

He means it as a joke. It isn’t. The curse doesn’t tolerate melodrama, and there’s that ache behind his tongue again, as if daring him to dress it further.

Theo studies him a long moment. “You’re all right?”

“I’m alive,” Draco says. “It’s not as satisfying as I hoped.”

Theo snorts, small, fond, cruel. “You’ve done worse.”

“I’ve been worse,” Draco corrects. “I am currently… inconvenient.”

“Tragic,” Theo says, and the word is so dry it almost burns.

Draco lets his head thump back against the chair. The leather smells faintly of dust and neglect, which feels about right. “We’re right, by the way. About the purpose. Bellatrix didn’t build a toy; she built infrastructure. Truth as obedience.”

Theo taps a finger against the glass. “A world organized around confession. No resistance narrative, no plausible deniability, no subterfuge. Diplomacy becomes a list of things you cannot avoid saying. She’d have loved that.”

“Delighted,” Draco agrees. “An empire of honesty. Imagine the horror.”

They move, as they always do, to the evidence. Because the past three years have been nothing but listing failures until they sound almost like achievements.

Draco recounts it all with bitter relish:

The Healers who pursed their lips and said, “Fascinating, but beyond our remit.”

The curse-breakers who raised their fees with every rune.

The Dark Arts specialists who smelled of mothballs and pride.

The homeopath with celery water and extraordinary optimism.

The grave.

Theo raises a brow at that one. “You robbed one?”

“It was already robbed,” Draco says. “I merely borrowed.”

Theo scribbles something in the margin of his parchment: pathetic.

They revisit the runes again: the clusters, the 3–1–4 arithmancy rhythm that turned up like a bad penny, the sigil scratched into the hinge that Theo slowed and magnified until it spelled Bellatrix’s vanity. They don’t need to rehearse this anymore, but routine is survival, and if they stop talking about it, it wins.

Theo drafts, neat and surgical, slicing out Draco’s flourishes. His handwriting is annoyingly precise, like the evidence itself.

“Make it readable,” Draco says. “Granger will intercept it. She’ll read it aloud. Assume an audience.”

Theo’s mouth curves. “Excellent. I’ll be unbearable.”

“You already are.” Theo signs it with a flourish designed to irritate Gryffindors. The parchment looks smug even as the ink dries.

Draco lets his head fall back again. “I regret being born.”

“You regret being born every third day,” Theo says. “Consistency is admirable.”

“I was a tactical error at conception.”

Theo doesn’t flinch. “And yet here you are.”

“Attractive at least,” Draco mutters.

Theo glances up. “You’re damp. And hexed.”

“Still attractive.”

“Debatable.”

They drink again. The silence that follows is companionable, in its way is the only silence Draco doesn’t loathe.

The owl arrives like an accusation, wings battering against the window. Draco curses, gets up, unlatches it. The bird sticks out its leg like a creditor.

The note is short, precise, and, damn her, beautifully penned.

Malfoy,

Tomorrow at 5 p.m.

No funny business. Bring what you have found.

—H. Granger

Draco stares at the H like it’s personal.

Theo reads over his shoulder. “Pretty hand. Disappointing.”

“I expected illegible,” Draco says.

Theo’s eyes glint. “She is illegible. The handwriting is a decoy.”

Draco folds the note carefully, as though it might bite.

Theo raises his glass. “Tomorrow, then. Wear something hex-resistant.”

“Your friendship,” Draco says, “is a blight.”

“And yet,” Theo replies, amused.

The house makes him do the blood, the name, the indignity again. Number 12 elbows itself back into being, offended at his persistence. The air squeezes, then snaps; slate shoulders hunch; windows glare as if considering calling the authorities.

Granger is already there when he steps onto the stone. Of course she is. She gives punctuality the tone of a threat. Weasley leans against the rail as if it were made for him. From somewhere just inside the door come voices, two at least, and the soft, horrible sound of someone laughing like they aren’t exhausted.

“On time,” Granger says. It sounds like a reprimand.

“I strive to disappoint,” Draco says.

Weasley’s eyes skim him head to heel, the quick inventory of a man who’s learned to count exits before names. “You brought what you said you’d bring?”

He lifts the satchel. “Evidence, humiliation, and a box no one should have to see twice.”

“Grand,” Weasley says dryly. “All the hits.”

“Potter?” Draco asks, before he can decide not to.

“Doesn’t live here,” Granger answers, cut and clean. “Hasn’t for years.”

Something in his chest that had been braced for impact stands down a fraction and then sulks about it. “Right.”

“This is a meeting house now,” Weasley adds, with a little shrug that covers a decade. “Bit of everything. People come and go.”

A mug clinks somewhere just beyond the threshold, then a low murmur in a voice Draco thinks is Bill’s, and another that might be Ginny’s. He makes out a third timbre and gives up trying to catalogue Weasleys in the wild. It’s like counting redheads at a Burrow wedding: the numbers don’t help you.

Granger steps back just far enough to let him onto the stone but not one inch beyond what she’s prepared to tolerate. “Rules are unchanged.”

“I remember,” Draco says. “If I breathe wrong, you amputate me.”

She doesn’t blink. “Something like that.”

He shifts the satchel higher on his shoulder and tries not to look at the door. Grimmauld squints at him, ancient and unimpressed. The knocker is a serpent, of course it is, its bronze gone the color of old teeth.

“I’m allowed to admire the craftsmanship?” he asks, mostly to annoy himself.

“You’re allowed to keep up,” Granger says, turning on her heel. “Inside.”

Weasley jerks his chin. Draco follows because pride won’t open doors and he has run out of other keys.

The hallway smells of wax and damp and a salt-iron tang he can’t place until memory supplies feathers. It is not cosy. It is proud, and peculiar, and alive with the kind of disdain that recognizes its own.

They take three steps and the wards heave around his shoulders in a prickle that feels like a dozen maiden aunts deciding whether or not to embrace him. They don’t. They settle for tutting.

Draco files that under Everything Is Familiar, Nothing Is Friendly and keeps moving.

A head appears at the end of the corridor, Ginny Weasley-Potter, hair up in a way that says don’t, quill behind one ear, a stack of folders under one arm.

“Hello, Malfoy,” she says, with the kind of cheer that could be weaponized. “You look like you’ve made excellent choices.”

“Thank you,” he says, because he is tired and cannot help himself. “I woke up and chose poor judgement.”

“Consistent,” she says. “Hermione’s in the back room. Bill says he’s found a seam.”

“A seam,” Weasley repeats, with the interest of a man who’s had to repair three trousers this week.

“The house has layers,” Ginny says. “Like an onion that judges you.”

She drifts past, nudging Draco’s shoulder as if to verify he is real and not simply an unpleasant rumor taking physical form. She doesn’t apologize. He is grateful for it. Apologies would imply this is fixable.

“Keep up,” Granger says again, and the corridor obliges by lengthening in a way that is absolutely a trick of perspective and also not.

They pass a door that hums with a ward old enough to remember better days; a portrait that flutters at them and thinks better of it; a table with a scratch that looks like a knife had a tantrum. The place is a museum that refuses to admit it is a museum.

“You keep this as a… what,” Draco says, because the silence is rubbing his nerves raw, “a clubhouse?”

Granger doesn’t slow. “It keeps itself. We use it.” Weasley adds, half a beat later, “Tea’s better here.”

“Yes,” Draco says. “Nothing adds flavor like despair.”

Weasley snorts. “You’ll fit right in, then.”

“Salazar forbid,” Draco says, but he hears the way his voice doesn’t quite manage the scorn it was aiming for.

They reach the back of the house. The temperature shifts by a degree, a draught trying to decide whether to commit. Someone says something that sounds like numbers and ends with don’t touch that, and Draco is abruptly, viscerally aware that whatever comes next will not be dignified.

It isn’t a scream so much as the aftertaste of one. A shriek starts and cuts off, aborted mid-volley as if someone throttled the air itself. Walburga Black, sainted terror of his childhood nightmares, muted into the bad taste of silence.

He shudders despite himself. The portrait always sounded like his childhood told backwards.

Weasley glances over. “Bill’s got a charm on her. Efficient.”

“Put that on a plaque,” Draco mutters. “Efficient at last.”

He puts a hand to the wall because the house is doing that thing again where it breathes like a living thing, and he’d like it to stop. The plaster is cool and stubborn. The bones under it know stories. He can feel them judging him for showing up without a better plan.

“It was a better plan,” he tells the bones. “And then it wasn’t.”

Granger doesn’t dignify that with even a twitch. She pushes open the door with a palm to the painted wood, and the room beyond lights itself as if refusing to be caught off-guard.

It is not tidy. It is not chaotic either. It is the particular mess of people who intend to leave things better than they found them and haven’t yet.

Draco catches himself cataloguing. It’s a habit learned under gentler circumstances and sharpened under worse ones.

He takes two steps in and stops because that is as far as Granger has allowed him to exist.

“Here,” she says, without looking at him, and the word is to the air, not to Draco; the air produces Bill Weasley, whose expression has always struck Draco as kindly in the fatal way of men who smile while dismantling a cursed tomb.

“Malfoy,” Bill says evenly. “You look like you need a sit-down.”

“I need a century,” Draco says. “Sitting optional.”

Bill’s mouth twitches. “You’re in the wrong line of work.”

“I’m not in any line of work,” Draco says. “I avoid the queue.”

“Focus,” Granger says, and Bill, taller, older, certainly strong enough to have opinions, focuses because Hermione Granger said so. It is, Draco realizes with a small fission in his spine, not fear that makes him pay attention to her. It is the sense that she has wind at her back that will crush you if you stand in the wrong place.

“Right,” she says. “Seam here. Wrong resonance through the plaster. Bill?”

Bill nods to a stretch of wall that looks like any other, peeling paint, heritage mold. “Feels like someone promised it never existed.”

Weasley’s eyebrow goes up. “Comforting.”

“Stand back,” Granger says, and for one mad second, Draco does, unasked, purely on instinct.

She lifts her wand. The room inhales.

The blast is clean. Not excessive, not showy, just physics persuaded to remember whose idea it was. Stone complains, dust flowers outward and then settles as if reprimanded. Behind the panel: a pocket of air; a narrow shelf; something thin and black with the mean look of a secret that enjoys itself.

Granger steps into the space she’s made, checks twice with Bill without being asked, then reaches in and plucks out the object with the care of a thief who has decided to be a surgeon this once.

“Found you,” she says to the ledger, with the satisfaction Draco has heard in Seekers and solicitors.

Weasley gives Draco the sort of look you reserve for a lightning storm that insists on joining your picnic. “She’s a menace when she’s after something.”

“She’s efficient,” Granger corrects, but she’s smiling, quick and fierce, in a way that isn’t for him.

He hates it, how their banter fits, how it moves around him without touching him. He hates being the wrong shape in a room that knows its people.

Granger turns the ledger in her hands like a problem that already regrets meeting her and says, “Table.”

The table obliges by being exactly where she wants it. Of course it does. The house may hate everyone, but it dislikes being wrong more.

“Stand there,” Weasley tells Draco, indicating a patch of floor two paces from useful.

“I’m familiar with the role,” Draco says. “Decorative obstacle.”

“Don’t oversell yourself,” Weasley replies, not unkind.

Granger lays the ledger down like a small, explosive animal. The margins, when she opens to the first page not blackened by time or rage, are a familiar vandalism, Bellatrix’s impatient scrawl, ink cut deep, notes that look like arguments with herself and the world.

Draco feels something cold and old slide under his skin. He stands where he’s told, polite distance, and watches the people he was raised to despise read the woman who would have eaten him alive.

Bill clears a section of table with a flick of his wand, parchment sliding neatly into piles. He sets the ledger down as though it might complain about being handled, and perhaps it does.

Granger flips it open to the first page that isn’t blackened into uselessness. It looks like arguments written down because there wasn’t enough skin nearby to carve them into.

Draco has to bite the inside of his cheek to stop his face betraying him. He remembers her voice too well, sharp as glass, sweet as rot, and the thought of her hand still echoing here makes the room feel too small.

“Calibration,” Granger murmurs, scanning with her fingertip. “Compulsion ratios. Spread intervals.” She pauses, lips thinning. “Here. ‘Truth adheres to vessel; breakage disperses unless pinned by blood.’”

The word blood hangs, sticky.

Bill leans in, tracing the line. “She built anchors. Fail-safes. If the vessel is destroyed, the compulsion finds another key. Redundancy. She didn’t want it to end.”

Weasley mutters, “Of course she didn’t. She was a bloody Black.”

Granger shakes her head. “No. She was worse. This isn’t just cruelty. It’s planning.” She flicks to another page, more cramped notes. “‘Secondary compliance: resistant to potion; resistant to oath.’ She knew Veritaserum wouldn’t be enough.”

Ginny lets out a low whistle. “So she made her own. Permanent, self-sustaining. Truth you can’t run from.”

Draco’s tongue moves before he can stop it. “Charming. Imagine a world where every time you try to tell your mother you’re fine, you end up announcing you’re a wreck. Bellatrix would have adored the efficiency.”

Granger’s gaze slices across to him. “Don’t trivialize it.”

“I’m trivializing myself,” Draco says evenly. “It’s the only amusement I have left.”

Bill frowns at the page, tracing again. “She wasn’t just designing for interrogations. This is… larger. If Voldemort had won, she’d have implemented this across entire populations. Diplomacy, trials, everyday life.”

“Truth as obedience,” Draco says softly. “We’ve said it before. Theo and me. She wasn’t just collecting confessions, she was building a world where subterfuge couldn’t exist. No lies, no resistance, no hope. Everyone stripped bare, even to themselves.”

Weasley exhales hard, jaw tight. “Kids with secrets. Families in hiding. Spies. Rebels. All of them exposed.”

“And slaves,” Granger adds, voice clipped. “Slaves who can’t even lie to themselves about the possibility of escape.”

The silence that follows is cold. Not the absence of noise, but the kind of silence you get when the future tries to crawl back into the room.

Draco clears his throat, the curse pressing against his chest like a brand. “She built a blueprint. I thought I was cursed. Turns out, I’m a prototype.”

Granger doesn’t argue. She doesn’t even look at him. She flips the page.

His satchel is still heavy against his leg. He knows what comes next before she says it.

“Give me the rest,” Granger orders.

He slides the folders onto the table: Healer reports with their impotent ‘unexplained phenomenon’ scrawls; curse-breaker invoices that doubled when the problem didn’t yield; his and Theo’s runic sketches, messy, overwritten with Theo’s neater corrections; a vial labelled hinge, slowed. Finally, the inert box, sleek and useless as a coffin lid.

Bill studies it with professional wariness. Ginny grimaces at it. Weasley shifts uneasily. Granger doesn’t look away until it’s clear she’s memorized every line of it.

And then, of-bloody-course, she spots the envelope. Theo’s.

“Give me that,” she says.

Draco tries. “It’s not for—”

But she already has it, the wax seal broken in one flick.

“He wrote it for you,” Draco mutters, sour.

“No,” she corrects, already scanning. “He wrote it for us.”

Her voice is sharp, but she reads aloud anyway, because that’s what Theo intended.

To whom it may concern (and I trust you know who you are):

I’m writing this as if it will be read aloud to a room of hostile geniuses, because Draco has the survival instincts of a mayfly.

You’ll find enclosed: runic clustering, arithmancy ratios, and a magnified frame from the Gringotts memory, note the hinge sigil etched inside the box. Bellatrix didn’t design for interrogation alone. She designed infrastructure: a post-war obedience regime built on compulsory truth. Veritaserum-proof. Oath-proof. Useful even without a caster present. Truth as a standing army.

If Voldemort had won, your Department of Magical Law Enforcement would be obsolete by breakfast. No bargains. No spies. No secret resistance. And for the truly ambitious? I trust that image ruins your tea as it has ruined mine.

As for a solution, I have none you will like. If the compulsion persists when the interrogation ceases, the vessel remains the anchor. Location is irrelevant. The resonance is fixed to the originating container, or (in some trials) to a blood key belonging to the designer’s preferred heir branch. We don’t yet have proof of the second case in the wild. I advise you, nevertheless, to plan for an answer you will not enjoy paying for.

If this is Potter’s house: hello, Potter. I note for the record that I warned Draco not to turn up. If he dies on your step, I expect you to do something tasteful with the body.

—T. Nott

The silence after is brutal.

Weasley mutters, “He’s bloody cheerful, isn’t he.”

Bill exhales, fingers resting on the edge of the page. “Anchors. Secondary keys. He’s not wrong.”

Ginny shakes her head slowly. “That’s…” She trails off.

Granger folds the letter neatly, lays it back down. Her expression is unreadable, which is worse than fury.

Draco breaks first. “He is showing off,” he says. “Don’t mistake it for altruism.”

“He’s being useful,” Granger replies, which coming from her is practically a love letter.

Draco looks away, irritated that it stings.

Bill turns another page, grimacing. “She mapped out contingencies. Redundancy upon redundancy. If one anchor failed, another would catch. This isn’t a spell. It’s a system.”

“A bloody swamp,” Weasley mutters.

“Exactly,” Bill agrees.

Granger leans in closer, eyes narrowing at a particular spiral of ink. “Aleph reversed through Thurisaz,” she murmurs. “She loved that. Interrogation without reagent.”

Draco shivers despite himself. “She left her signature everywhere.”

He glances at Walburga’s muted portrait. The old witch glares with wordless fury, as if she too disapproves of this reading club. Draco bares his teeth at her reflexively.

“You’d hate this,” he tells the canvas. “I’m delighted.”

Weasley grins despite himself. “That’s the spirit.”

Ginny slides past with a stack of notes, shoulder-checks Draco on her way by, and doesn’t apologize. It’s the kindest thing anyone’s done all day.

Granger shuts the ledger with a decisive palm. “Right. We set terms.”

Of course she does.

“Pairs at all times,” she says. “No wand unless I hand it to you. You don’t move unless one of us says. If you try anything—”

“I know,” Draco says. “Preventive medicine.”

Her eyes flick to his thigh as if considering a refresher. “Don’t test me.”

“I’ve learned,” Draco says, very politely, “that you enjoy the practical.”

Weasley huffs. “She enjoys being right. The practical’s a perk.”

“Some of us can do both,” Granger replies, already sliding Theo’s letter into the ledger as if marrying past and present by main force. “We reconvene tomorrow. Five.”

“Another five o’clock,” Draco mutters. “How festive.”

She ignores that. “Bill, I need you on the ward contouring at the annex. Ginny—”

Ginny raises a hand, quill still tucked behind her ear. “On it. I’ll bring the… thing.”

“Which thing?” Weasley (Ron) says, resigned.

“The loud one,” she says, and smiles, wicked and fond.

“Of course,” he groans. “Because what this house needs is more personality.”

Draco tries to keep up with the Weasley taxonomy and gives up. There are too many of them and they all answer to the same name with different smirks.

“Potter?” Draco asks before sense can stop him.

“Not here,” Granger answers, clipped. “He signed off on supervised access. One hour blocks. He has children to put to bed and we’re helping him.”

There it is again, that small, mean little pinch under Draco’s ribs, relief he resents. “Right. Everybody jumps at the opportunity to help Potter.”

Weasley glances at him, something like a warning. “We said supervised. Don’t go soft because Harry said maybe.”

“Not a risk,” Draco says. “I don’t do soft.”

Ginny coughs, very nearly a laugh. “That’s the funniest lie you can’t tell.”

Granger levels her wand at a stack of parchment and it straightens itself or else. “Focus. Ron, doors. Ginny, cover. Bill, with me. Malfoy—”

“Furniture,” Draco supplies.

“Correct,” she says, without looking at him. “Readable furniture.”

“Is there another kind,” he murmurs, but she’s already moved on.

Bill gestures him back from the table as he and Granger lean over the margins again, heads nearly touching in the way of people who trust each other not to blink at the wrong time. Weasley takes the position by the door that says try it, relaxed as a cat who’s seen too many dogs.

Draco stands where he’s told and watches the machine turn. It used to be the enemy, that machine. He remembers what it felt like from the other side, when the Trio were rumors and inevitability, when hope was whispered like a dirty word. Seeing it up close is worse. They are not miracles. They are work. They are tired. They are relentless.

“Schedule, then,” Granger says, quill scratching. “Tomorrow we start with this sequence.” She taps Bellatrix’s spiral, lips thinned. “I want lines to origin if they exist. And if they don’t, I want the absence documented.”

Bill nods. “You’re assuming the worst.”

“I’m assuming Bellatrix,” Granger says.

“Fair,” he concedes.

Weasley clears his throat. “Hermione.” She doesn’t look up. “You promised an hour,” he says carefully. “It’s been an hour.”

Granger’s jaw flexes. The muscles make a decision. “Fine,” she says, closing the ledger like a verdict. “We stop for the night.”

Draco exhales through his nose. It is embarrassing, how much that feels like mercy.

Weasley pushes off the door and jerks his head at Draco. “Come on. I’ll walk you to the step before the house decides it wants a keepsake.”

Draco glances at Granger. She’s already bent over a different page, annotating the margins of someone else’s anger with her own. “Tomorrow,” she says, without looking. It isn’t a question.

“Tomorrow,” he echoes, and follows Weasley out.

The corridor is cooler, the house less intent on breathing down his neck. Walburga’s portrait glowers, mercifully silent under Bill’s dampening charm. The runner tries to trip Draco and thinks better of it; even the flooring has learned.

“Wait,” Ginny calls from the back. She strides up, presses something into Weasley’s hand (a key? a charm? a biscuit? Could be any of the above in this madhouse), and nods once at Draco like she’s just confirmed a hypothesis. “Goodnight, Malfoy. Try not to die between now and tea.”

“I’ll pencil that in,” Draco says.

“Use ink,” she says, vanishing again.

“Incorrigible,” Draco mutters.

“Family trait,” Weasley says, not sorry.

They walk. The wards bristle, then subside; the hall narrows and grows long, then snaps to its true size with a sulk. Somewhere upstairs a door shuts itself with the exaggerated dignity of an old dowager who’s been told the party is over.

“Look,” Weasley says as they pass the umbrella stand that is not, has never been, only an umbrella stand. “About earlier.”

Draco sighs. “Which earlier?”

“You asked why everyone’s willing to help Harry.”

“I didn’t,” Draco says. “But yes. The cult of Potter. Very wow.”

Weasley stops by the door, hand on the latch, and turns with the patient focus of a man who will say his piece even if the roof caves in. “Because he never asks for it,” he says. “Because when he did ask, once, he was asking us to let him go to his death, and we couldn’t stop him. Because he’d do it again if it meant the rest of us got to live.” He shrugs. “That’s why.”

Draco looks away first. “I didn’t ask for your sermon.”

“You did,” Weasley says, not unkind. “You just didn’t want the answer.”

“Very Gryffindor of you.”

“Tiresomely so,” he agrees. “But it’s true.”

They stand there for a beat, listening to the house be itself, which is to say: hostile, dignified, resentful and useful.

“You’re a pain in the arse, Malfoy,” Weasley adds, matter-of-fact. “But as long as Harry says we try, we try. Under rules.”

“Rules I grasp,” Draco says. “I was raised on those. Look how well that turned out.”

Weasley’s mouth tilts. “Come back tomorrow. Five.”

“Fine,” Draco says. “I enjoy repeating my mistakes.”

He reaches for the door; it resists, then opens with a creak he takes personally. The step is wet. Of course it is. London has been waiting all day to be dramatic.

“Malfoy,” Weasley says, as Draco sets a foot into the grey. “You’re not furniture.”

Draco glances back, surprised into honesty. “I am here as a coat rack with opinions.”

“You’re proof,” Weasley says. “Of what she was building. That’s not furniture. That’s evidence. We need it.”

Draco blinks. It doesn’t help.

“Don’t make it sentimental,” he says. “It won’t fit.”

“Wouldn’t dream,” Weasley says. “See you tomorrow.”

Draco steps out, the door breathing shut behind him with the smugness of an old house that got its way. The street is slick and disapproving. Number 12 bleeds itself back out of view until it’s just brickwork lying about its history.

He stands there a second, satchel heavy, damp soaking into new hexes, the curse quiet only because there is nothing left to try to say.

“I really hate them,” he tells the rain, and Apparates before the night can agree.

Chapter Text

The wards at Number 12 want their pound of flesh. Again. Draco bleeds on the step, mutters the name, and the house shoulders itself into the street like a drunk being propped upright. He finds the resemblance unflattering.

Weasley opens the door before he can knock, the way doormen in nightmares always do: already braced, already judging. “On time,” he says, like punctuality is evidence of a crime.

“Try not to faint,” Draco replies, stepping past. “It’s my one virtue.”

“Congratulations,” Weasley deadpans. “Keep it lonely.”

Inside smells of dust, polish, and old magic—stubborn, clinging, like a smell you can’t wash from your clothes. Grimmauld isn’t welcoming; today it manages merely hostile. Draco calls that progress and hates himself for the optimism.

Granger is waiting in the hall, parchment already stacked, wand stuck behind her ear like a knife saved for later. The years have suited her inconveniently well. She looks like someone capable of anything. Exactly his problem.

“Malfoy,” she says. “Rules.”

Of course there are rules. There are always rules when Gryffindors discover a project.

“One hour. Never alone. No wand. You go where you’re told, you read what you’re given, you keep your mouth shut unless spoken to.”

“Clear as prophecy,” Draco murmurs. “And twice as cheerful.”

“Try me,” she says, and sweeps toward the drawing room as if the corridor has personally offended her.

They’ve been doing this for weeks now, rota on the back of a coffee-stained map: MALFOY (HANDLE WITH HEXES). Bill comes every other day and makes the room smarter by simply standing in it. Ginny glides through like trouble in a good coat. Potter is a tired fulcrum they turn on without looking. Weasley is the buffer that keeps the glass from cracking. Draco is furniture with handwriting.

Today the wallpaper is particularly prosecutable. Walburga glares silently from her frame; he gives her the same look back. Mutual loathing can be company.

Ginny leans in the doorway, arms folded, watching him like a spectator at a respectable accident. “Try not to bleed on the carpet, Malfoy.”

“I’ll do it outside,” Draco says. “For the neighbours.”

Hermione claps once, all business. “Bill, wards. Ron, door. Harry, window. Ginny, stabilize the field. Malfoy…sit and copy.”

“Ah yes,” Draco says, lowering himself with ceremonial dignity. “My contribution: penance in ink.”

A crack of Apparition splits the air, clean and decisive. The room tilts its attention all at once, the way prey animals do when the right predator arrives.

Charlie Weasley steps out of the air like he owns a piece of it.

Insultingly good-looking is the phrase that occurs to Draco, which he resents immediately. Charlie has the kind of face that has been left alone by time out of respect; sun-dark skin, old scars like commas where other men would have full stops, hair that looks like it used to be schoolboy neat and gave up. He carries the aesthetic of catastrophe casually, like a favorite jumper. He moves like someone who used to win matches he had no business winning and then went off to set himself on fire for a living. Quidditch legend turned dragon tamer. Of course.

Charlie doesn’t greet anyone, which Draco finds reassuring. “Object,” he says. His voice has gravel in it.

Hermione is already shoving the Black ledger into his hands. Charlie grimaces. “Loud,” he mutters, eyes narrowing on nothing. “She layered intent until it hums. Nasty.”

“That tracks,” Bill says, respectful and cross at once. “Traceable?”

“Maybe.” Charlie’s gaze darts, window, ceiling rose, doorframe, Draco’s chair, Hermione’s hand. The motion isn’t nervous. It’s navigation. “One line, not to origin. Fractured. Isa under Thurisaz. Permanence without potion.”

Theo, Draco thinks sourly, will be unbearable for a fortnight.

Charlie breathes in, shallow, like the room is too bright for thought. He turns his head toward Hermione and pauses. “You’re running too hot,” he says, unexpectedly soft.

“I’m fine,” Hermione replies, automatically, the way people who are never fine learn to lie by rote.

Charlie doesn’t argue. He steps into her space with the easy confidence of someone who has known her a very long time and sets two fingers above her wrist, not touching at first, then barely there. “Look at me,” he says quietly. “Five things you can see.”

Hermione looks like she wants to sneer. She doesn’t.

“Table. Ledger. Wand. Your ridiculous face. Malfoy being annoying.”

“Good,” Charlie says, ignoring the insult. “Four things you can feel.”

“My feet,” she says, clipped. “My sleeve. The draft by the door. Your pulse.”

“Three things you can hear.”

“Your breathing. Bill’s teeth grinding. The house being a bastard.”

“Two things you can smell.”

“Ink. Dust.”

“One thing you can taste.”

“My temper,” she says.

“Now you’re all right,” Charlie says, and lets go.

The room exhales. Draco, who hated every second of witnessing that, also wants to salute it. Of course the dragon tamer can calm panic like a skittish beast. Of course he says three words and makes the world obey. It suits him. It shouldn’t insult Draco as much as it does.

An intrusive thought, hot and stupid, slides across Draco’s mind before he can bar the door: How many Weasleys has she—

Charlie looks up, and for one brief, surgical second, Draco learns what murder looks like without motion. There’s no wand, no flinch, no tell, just a flake of ice behind brown eyes and the smallest shake of a head. Not a threat, not a warning—just Don’t.

Heat slams into Draco’s face, shame efficiently applied. He looks away so hard he almost pulls a muscle. The curse, for once, spares him an out-loud manifestation. Hermione didn’t notice. Thank every god anyone ever wasted a goat on.

“Object,” Charlie says again, businesslike, as if he didn’t just catch a man in a thought-crime. “Something that soaked. The ledger’s too noisy.”

Hermione’s eyes cut to the satchel Draco refuses to call dear. The box. Useless for months now, and yet he has lugged it room to room like a superstition.

Draco hears his own voice say, “I’ve got it,” because the curse refuses him the pleasure of uselessness.

Ron watches him, not unkind. “You sure?”

“No,” Draco says, and goes to get it anyway.

The box sits in his hands like a complaint that has learned to be dignified. He places it on the table. Charlie doesn’t touch it at first. He circles it like he’d circle a temperamental fire-breather: not quite wary, instead attentive.

“Got you,” Charlie murmurs, almost fond, and then he does touch, two fingers on wood, eyes gone far away.

Bill starts to speak. Harry shakes his head once: no interruptions.

The house doesn’t like this. The air grows thick, a pressure on the eardrums. Walburga’s portrait rattles in its frame and goes mercifully still; the chandelier complains with a single, crystalline note. Hermione’s hand goes back to where Charlie steadied her, as if the ghost of contact is some sort of anchor. He doesn’t look at her. He keeps his gaze on the place over the box where the curse seems to be unhappy about being seen.

“Isa. Thurisaz. Not just permanence,” Charlie says slowly, voice altered by concentration. “Instruction. It’s telling truth how to behave. Not a tool. A system.”

He winces. “She’s a sadist,” he adds, like a man complimenting the engineering of a trap he despises. “Every path circles humiliation before it closes. There’s no straight line.”

“We had that,” Bill says quietly. “Absence mapping shows it.”

“Good,” Charlie replies. “Because I’m not reading a map. I’m reading… resonance. I can’t hold it long.”

“Can you see origin?” Hermione asks, and the corner of Draco’s mind notes, unhelpfully, that her voice is better when it doesn’t try to be nice.

“No.” Charlie’s eyes narrow. “But I can see where origin would hide if it wanted to be clever.” He lifts his fingers. The pressure drops suddenly; everyone inhales like they’ve been underwater. “This is enough,” he says. “One hour, remember.”

“How insultingly punctual,” Draco mutters.

Charlie finally looks at him again, this time without the blade of Legilimency behind the glance. He looks like a man who used to fly for sport and now flies to keep his blood moving. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

“I haven’t slept in three years,” Draco says before he can stop himself.

Harry’s eyes flick up, sharp. Hermione’s don’t. Ginny does him the courtesy of not looking sorry.

“Dragons are easier,” Charlie says to the room, puts two fingers to his temple like a man smoothing a headache, and steps out of the world the way only certain people can. The air closes behind him with an audible no.

Silence after that feels obscene.

Hermione is the first to break it. “All right. We do what he said. We track where origin would hide.”

“Doors, then,” Bill says, already looking at the walls like they’ve lied to him on purpose.

“Tomorrow,” Ron announces. “Before anyone punches a chimney for talking back.”

Ginny nudges Draco’s elbow as she passes, deliberate and small. “Thought crimes are still crimes around Charlie. Consider yourself warned.”

“He read me,” Draco says, because lying has been removed as a human right. “I didn’t…It wasn’t…” He stops. There’s no good end to that sentence.

Ginny’s smile is kind in the way a knife can be kind. “He’s family.”

“Congratulations,” Draco says. “You have so much of it.”

He expects the curse to punish the jealousy in that. It doesn’t. It clocks it as truth and lets it stand there with him, embarrassing and whole.

Harry stands, stretches like his spine hates him, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Right. Before we start prying the house open: quick check.”

He looks at Draco. Tired eyes. No pity. Just an assessment of damage. “You all right?”

“No,” Draco says, and then, because he’s decided not to die of pride, “but I’ll manage.”

“Do,” Harry says simply.

Hermione has already returned to the ledger, spine ironed straight again. The softness Charlie coaxed into existence has been folded and put away. She looks more dangerous now than before. The thought is inconveniently attractive; Draco drops it like a hot coal.

“Back to work,” she says. “Malfoy, copy the Isa variants.”

“Why?” Draco asks, mostly to annoy her.

“Because you can hold a pattern in your head and not contaminate it with wishful thinking,” she snaps. “It’s the one benefit you have.”

There’s something like understanding buried under the insult, and Draco resents her again for being infuriating and correct in the same breath. He takes the notes. He copies.

They work until the tea goes ugly. Not talking to him, and not needing to. Bill and Hermione fall into that maddening, articulate duet (counting, crossing, muttering, erasing), until the architecture of the thing starts to show itself like a skeleton in fog. Ron monitors the doors like he’s waiting to be useful and hates that he isn’t needed yet. Ginny keeps her list WAYS THIS HOUSE WILL TRY TO KILL US (AGAIN) up to date and glamour-changes the title to AND WAYS WE’LL SWING FIRST when the chandelier hisses.

At some point, Draco’s grip loosens on his quill and an uninvited truth slips out, quiet as rot.

“You’re all scared of what you’ll find,” he says.

Ron’s head comes up. “We’re not scared,” he says, carefully.

“You are,” Draco replies. “You’re just better at being scared together.”

Ginny taps her quill against her teeth, considering him like an odd insect. “And you?”

“I’m better at being scared alone,” Draco says. “It’s not a brag.”

Harry’s mouth does a thing that isn’t a smile. “Fair.”

Hermione doesn’t look up. “Keep copying.”

“Slave driver,” Draco mutters.

“Accurate,” she says. “Write faster.”

A small detonation occurs inside the walls, the kind that feels like a cough. Bill’s head snaps toward the mantle. “Settling,” he says to the rest. “It heard Charlie. It’s rebalancing.”

“We’ll crack it,” Ginny says, breezy and deadly.

“We’ll try,” Harry corrects, because he hates promises he can’t afford.

“Tomorrow,” Ron says, like a period at the end of a sentence they all accept.

“Tomorrow,” Hermione echoes, already thirty steps ahead in her head.

“Tomorrow,” Draco says, and hates that the word fits.

He leaves under escort: Ron as ever, hand on the latch, the house breathing its damp breath in their faces.

“At least he didn’t hex you,” Ron observes.

“Charlie?” Draco says. “I’m not convinced he needed to.”

Ron laughs once, unexpected, unsharp. “Don’t think too loudly around him.”

“I try not to think at all around Gryffindors,” Draco says, deadpan. “For safety.”

“Keep practicing,” Ron tells him, and opens the door.

The step is wet. London does pathetic fallacy like a hobby. Number 12 slides smugly out of sight when he steps away. Draco stands under the rain long enough to feel chilled and sensible at the same time.

“Fuck my life,” he tells the weather, and Disapparates before it agrees.

He dreams later, one of those tedious, expensive-feeling dreams where you’re trapped in a room you hate with people you don’t know if you hate, and they keep being competent at you until you want to scream. He wakes up with the taste of ink in his mouth and the understanding that tomorrow will be exactly like today, only more.

He dresses like a man going to trial, and goes.

The next day feels like the last, and the one before that: ink, dust, parchment, resentment. Only the rota changes hands. Bill departs muttering about ward contours; Ginny drops off tea that tastes like boiled nails. Potter arrives late, damp, distracted, looking like he’s just negotiated peace with his children and lost. Hermione doesn’t even look up when Draco enters.

And then Theo arrives.

He doesn’t Apparate with a crack; he slides into the hall with a mild pop, rain still in his hair, pastries in one hand like tribute. He looks irritatingly fresh, robes neat enough to pass for casual, and of course he’s smiling — the kind of smile that suggests he knows all the exits and half the jokes.

“Good morning,” Theo says, even if is not morning anymore, too pleasantly. “I come bearing croissants. Don’t thank me all at once.”

Ginny, who rarely approves of anyone on sight, quirks a grin. “Finally, someone with manners.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Draco mutters, which earns him a glare from Hermione and an amused shrug from Theo.

Ron leans back in his chair, weighing him up, then nods once. “He can stay.”

“Charmed,” Theo says, dropping the bag on the table like he’s already part of the rota.

Bill appears from the far corner, sizing him up the way he sizes wards: serious, deliberate, no fuss. “You’re Nott.”

“Am I not?” Theo inclines his head. “I thought I was.”

“Merlin help us,” Draco mutters.

They settle into the rhythm: ledger open, maps spread, ink pooling. Theo slips into it with disgusting ease, scanning notes at a speed that makes Hermione’s eyes narrow, not with suspicion, but with reluctant respect. He doesn’t grandstand; he suggests, he asks, he charms, he explains without condescension. Within fifteen minutes, Ginny is laughing, Ron is listening, Bill is debating, and even Potter  (bloody Potter) is watching him with something like approval.

Draco hates every second of it.

“Don’t worry,” Theo says cheerfully, catching his glare without missing a beat. “You’ll always be my favorite disaster.”

“Die,” Draco says politely.

“Not today,” Theo replies, biting into a croissant. “Too much work to do.”

Hermione clears her throat, pointed. “If you’re quite finished—”

“We’re Nott,” Theo says, already sliding the ledger toward himself. “But I can multitask.”

The way Hermione stares at him, equal parts annoyance and fascination, makes Draco want to hex the table.

It doesn’t take long for the truths to leak.

Potter asks about the Isa–Thurisaz complexes, the same bloody structures they’ve circled for weeks. Theo explains with grace. Hermione adds precision. Bill checks ratios. Ron jots notes. Ginny sketches a dragon in the margin. Draco watches, resentment sharpening like a whetstone, until his mouth opens without permission.

“You don’t actually think you’ll solve this, do you,” he says.

Silence. Six heads turn.

“You’re terrified you won’t,” Draco continues, compelled, “but you’ll keep pretending until it breaks one of you. Because that’s what you do. You perform competence until it costs blood. And you all pretend it’s fine, because you’ve never stopped pretending since you were children.”

The air goes thick.

Ginny raises her eyebrows. “Well. That’s cheery.”

“Shut up, Malfoy,” Hermione snaps.

“I’d love to,” Draco replies. “You don’t know how much.”

Ron’s voice cuts in, low and steady. “You get used to the truth, mate. Or you don’t last.”

Potter doesn’t speak right away. When he does, it’s quiet. “He’s not wrong.”

Hermione turns on him, fierce. “Don’t start.”

“I’m not starting,” Potter says, rubbing his temple. “I’m agreeing. We’ve been lying to ourselves since we were eleven. Malfoy just… doesn’t have the luxury anymore.”

Draco wants to sneer, wants to spit, wants to own the moment. Instead the curse makes him sigh. “Trust me, it’s overrated.”

Theo sips his tea like the tension is wine. “See? He’s growing. Slowly. Painfully. Like fungus.”

Hermione slams the ledger shut. “Enough.”

The chandelier creaks in approval.

Later, when Potter returns from checking the wards, he drops into a chair opposite Draco, looking like sleep in human form. “So. Still don’t believe in anything?”

Draco glares at the table. “We’re doing this again.”

“Yes,” Potter says.

“I don’t,” Draco mutters. “Not anymore.”

Potter doesn’t blink. “If Voldemort had won?”

The curse drives the answer out. “I wasn’t planning to survive either way. But if I had… I’d have been a coward.”

Theo makes a face like he’d rather that hadn’t been said out loud. Ron leans back, jaw tight. Ginny exhales. Hermione doesn’t look at him. Bill closes his eyes, just for a beat.

“Fair,” Potter says.

Draco hates him for it.

Theo shifts the topic back, mercifully. He’s good at that. Too good. He points at the absence maps Hermione and Bill have been obsessing over. “This isn’t just removal. It’s avoidance. She built a system that dodges recognition.”

Bill leans in. “So she’s hiding the pointer.”

“Exactly.”

“Where?” Hermione demands.

Theo smiles. “In the place you’ll hate most.”

“And where’s that?”

“Here,” Theo says simply, tapping the table. “In the house. Where else?”

The silence that follows is heavy enough to crack stone. Even Grimmauld seems to creak smugly.

“Of course,” Ron mutters. “Bloody obvious.”

Hermione starts to argue. Bill starts sketching. Ginny rolls her eyes. Potter pinches his nose. Theo grins like he’s just announced dessert.

Draco, who has had enough, leans back and mutters, “Perfect. Glad to see humiliation is now on rota.”

And for once, nobody disagrees.

Chapter Text

Four months. That’s how long Draco’s been knocking at Number Twelve like a bloody tradesman instead of bleeding on the step for the wards. Improvement, technically, though you wouldn’t catch him calling it that out loud.

He knocks now. No more muttering family names, no more slicing his thumb open to please ancient charms. Just his knuckles rapping against rotting wood until someone inside decides he’s pathetic enough to admit.

Theo, of course, skips the whole indignity. He Apparates straight into the hall with croissants and a smirk, as if Grimmauld Place welcomes him. Malfoy remains contraband; Nott gets breakfast duty. The universe, Draco decides, has never been subtle about who it prefers.

The rota makes it plain enough:

MALFOY — HANDLE WITH HEXES.

The handwriting changes week to week: Potter’s lazy scrawl, Weasley’s blunt block letters, Ginny’s jagged loops, Granger’s vicious neatness, but the sentiment remains: he’s tolerated, not trusted.

The shouting has cooled. In the first month, Granger barked at him daily, Weasley hovered like a prefect with detention slips, and Potter’s questions came like an interrogation. Now the noise has dulled. Hermione saves her temper for cursed walls. Ron doesn’t shadow him so much as glance up occasionally to make sure he hasn’t pocketed the silver. Potter speaks only when weariness outweighs silence. Ginny still bumps him deliberately whenever she passes, just to remind him he doesn’t belong.

It isn’t trust. It’s fatigue. And Draco isn’t sure which is worse.

Still, he keeps coming back.

The drawing room is already alive when he shrugs off his cloak. Hermione has annexed the long table: quills lined like bayonets, parchment spread like maps of battle. Bill crouches near the hearth, chalking runes with his calm, infuriating patience. Ron leans against a doorframe, folded arms making him look as though the wood relies on him to keep it upright. Potter sits by the window, eyes narrowed on wards beyond the glass. Ginny is annotating her list: WAYS THIS HOUSE WILL TRY TO KILL US (AGAIN), doodling cheerful skulls in the margins.

“Malfoy,” Hermione says without looking up. “Copy the Isa runes. Twice.”

“Twice,” Draco mutters, sliding into his designated chair. “How lucky. A sequel.”

Nobody laughs.

He scratches ink onto parchment, Bellatrix’s loops glaring back at him from the ledger margins. The curse hums whenever he considers skipping a stroke. Truth in duplicate. Nothing less.

Theo Apparates into the hall with an offensively neat crack and a brown paper bag. “Pastries for the condemned,” he announces.

Ginny plucks one immediately. “Approved.”

Theo drops into a chair, smug as a cat in cream. “Don’t scowl, Draco. It’ll ruin your skin.”

“I was born ruined,” Draco replies. “Inherited condition.”

Theo winks at Ginny, who actually chuckles. Draco grinds his teeth.

The north arch sulks as usual. Bill crouches, chalk at the ready. Hermione leans too close, impatient to pounce. Potter takes the flank; Ron braces the opposite door. Ginny lurks with her list. Draco, as ever, is herded into the middle, supervised, unarmed, tolerated.

Bill hums under his breath, measuring wards invisible to anyone else. “Staggered layering,” he says quietly. “It wants to be noticed.”

“Relatable,” Draco says.

Bill begins the count. “One…two…”

The wall twitches like a live nerve. Hermione steps forward, wand raised.

The curse rips Draco’s throat raw. “Back!” he shouts. His hand shoots out before he thinks, catching her sleeve and dragging. They stumble together just as the ward lashes outward, a flare of heat that scorches air where her face had been. The smell of singed stone bites the corridor.

The lash snaps back into the wall. Silence drops, thick as plaster dust.

Hermione jerks out of his grip as if his hand is poison. She spins, face flushed with fury. “Don’t you touch me.”

Draco glares back, equally raw. “Would you have preferred a facial reconstruction?”

Ron exhales. “He’s got a point, Hermione.”

“I don’t care,” she snaps. “He doesn’t get to—”

Crack.

A new voice cuts the air. Calm. Low. Infuriatingly steady.

“Still shooting before asking, Hermione?”

Charlie Weasley Apparates into the corridor like it’s a Quidditch pitch: broad-shouldered, leather-clad, insultingly good-looking. The war has given him scars but not weariness; dragons, apparently, keep you fit. He looks around once, takes in the chalk, the scorch mark, Draco’s hand still half-raised, and his mouth curves faintly.

Hermione’s fury doesn’t falter, but something in her posture steadies. Charlie steps close, catches her eye, and holds it just long enough to ground her. The tension bleeding out of her shoulders is almost imperceptible, except Draco sees it.

Of course, Draco thinks, bitter as ash. Another bloody Weasley. Collecting them, is she?

Charlie’s gaze flicks to him. Just for a second. Sharp as a dragon’s. And he shakes his head, small, deliberate.

Draco knows he’s been caught thinking it.

They retreat, shaken. Ginny gleefully adds SURPRISE FACE MELTING to her list, sketching a stick figure with flames for hair. Theo eats another croissant. Bill mutters about recalibration. Potter sits heavily, eyes closed. Ron fetches tea as if muscle memory commands it. Charlie leans against the wall, perfectly at ease, while Hermione stalks back to her ledger, scribbling with more force than necessary.

It isn’t trust. But it isn’t pure distrust anymore either. A limbo, sharp and uncomfortable.

The next morning, Draco knocks as usual. Charlie, of all people, answers the door, mug in hand, hair tousled like he’s just wrestled a dragon and won. He waves Draco in casually, as though Malfoys dropping by has always been part of his morning.

The rota makes Draco pause.

Gone is HANDLE WITH HEXES.

In its place, four scraps, shoved under the pin.

Hermione: No “outer layer only” shenanigans.

Ron: Harry, eat a sandwich.

Harry: Hermione, breathe.

Ginny: If Malfoy dies, I’m telling Mum.

Draco stares. They’ve stopped warning each other about him. Started warning each other about themselves.

He huffs. Splendid. I’ve been replaced by domestic nagging. Progress, apparently.

And with that, he follows the sound of voices deeper into the house that refuses to like him, wondering if anyone ever will.

Potter turns up late, rain in his fringe, Ginny at his shoulder. He looks like a man who’s poured himself back into the day because the day refused to do it for him.

“Dropped the boys at the Burrow,” he says, not quite apologizing. He peels off his cloak and finds the nearest chair with the accuracy of a homing spell.

“They’ll come back sticky with treacle and feral from the orchard,” Ginny adds, faintly smug. “Mum had a tart in the oven before we landed. If we don’t fetch them soon, they’ll stage a coup.”

Ron grins despite himself. “Mum versus children? Children don’t stand a chance.”

Draco sets his quill down. Children. Potter has children and treacle tarts and a family that produces coups over pudding. Draco has ledgers and the sound of his own house scowling. He files the information under useless, irritating and pretends it doesn’t lodge behind his ribs.

Bill clears the end of the table. “All right,” he says, that calm curse-breaker tone that makes even furniture reconsider its choices. “We’ve got the plate. We map its sequence. If we can rebuild a corner of it, we might see where it anchors.”

“Reproduce the geometry in miniature,” Hermione says, already unrolling fresh parchment. “Controlled environment. No live wards.”

Theo props his feet on another chair and sips tea like he’s at the theatre. “Famous last words, that.”

“Shut up, Theo,” Hermione says, on reflex.

Charlie is still here from yesterday, wide shouldered, leather jacket, hair in that irritatingly careless state attractive men pretend doesn’t require effort. He’s at the mantel, half-listening, half-watching Hermione in the way of someone who has made a vocation of not missing when people tip toward breaking. Draco resents the steadiness radiating off him on principle.

He can’t hold the question down any longer. “Why?” he says, loud enough to cut the room.

Potter looks up, wary. “Why what.”

“Why are you helping me?” Draco says. “You could have tossed me into the gutter the moment I knocked. Merlin knows Granger tried. So, why?”

The room gives him that collective stare they do when he’s been gauche enough to voice the thing everyone knows will taste bad. A beat too long and Potter could turn it into a speech. He doesn’t.

“Because if Bellatrix built this,” he says, tired as truth, “it doesn’t stop with you. Because I can’t stand the idea of her still running my life by proxy. And because”, he rubs the bridge of his nose, grimaces, “if I were the one cursed, I’d want someone to at least bloody try.”

Draco had been braced for nobility. He gets practicality. It’s worse. It leaves him nothing to sneer at.

“That’s it?” he asks, because he can’t help it.

“That’s it,” Potter says. “We’re not rescuing you. We’re rescinding her.”

“Fine,” Draco mutters. “As long as we’re clear.”

“We’re very clear,” Hermione says, sharp as a seal on a writ. She lowers her quill over fresh parchment. “Bill?”

Bill positions the tarnished plate on a warded cloth, the way you put down an animal that doesn’t love you. “Same spacing, same sequence. No activation runes. We’re only sketching the cage, not locking it.”

Hermione’s hand moves, precise and angry. Isa’s spines. Thurisaz with that mean little sting. A spiral that thinks too well of itself. Charlie drifts nearer without fuss. Draco notices Hermione’s shoulders ease half an inch when he does. The man is a walking calming draught. Of course he is.

“You sure about this,” Ron asks, not for the first time.

“No,” Bill and Hermione say, in identical tones.

Hermione inks the last curve. The air hums.

It’s a small sound and a large change. Draco knows it instantly, the ache at the base of the tongue, the invisible tug between breath and words. The compulsion uncoils like a cat who thinks it lives here.

“Oh, for—” Ron begins, and then the rest leaps out and lands between them with a thud. “I hated the tent. I hated every bloody second in it. The cold, the mushrooms, the silence, the way you two didn’t look at each other because it hurt too much.” He claps a hand over his mouth like that might persuade it to take instruction for once.

Hermione goes white, then blotchy, and for one awful heartbeat Draco thinks she’ll crumble. Charlie doesn’t move, doesn’t touch, just meets her eyes. Whatever he does without wands or words slides her back into herself. She straightens. The relief Draco feels is disproportionate and none of his business.

“I thought,” Hermione says, and the curse drags it clean, “when you left you’d never come back. And a part of me was relieved. Because at least then I wouldn’t have to watch you die.”

Ron flinches like she slapped him. Then he nods, once, eyes bright. “Right.”

Harry inhales to step in and the compulsion uses the breath for its own work. “Walking into the Forest wasn’t brave,” he says. “It was me not knowing what else to do. It felt like—” His jaw locks. He forces the last word through. “Relief.”

Ginny’s fingers crumple the corner of her list. “I hated you for it,” she blurts, shaking. “For leaving me again. For making me the person who waited. And I hate that the world meets me as your anything before they meet me as me.”

Bill’s turn. He tries to out-stare the curse; the curse is bored by men who’ve survived worse. “Some nights I think Fleur deserves someone whose face isn’t a map of a bad night,” he hears himself say. “And then I hate myself for thinking it, because it insults her to pretend she’s that small.”

No one breathes. Even the house forgets its hobby of creaking.

Theo lifts his mug. “I’m here because I’m loyal,” he declares. The curse has opinions. “I’m here because I’m nosy, because I like watching Malfoy squirm, and because you lot make me feel like my own loneliness isn’t a personal failing.”

“Charming,” Draco says. The absurd urge to laugh proves he is still perverse.

The hour turns mean quickly. It always does when the truth has your throat by the scruff.

Ron again, voice like a wound: “I’ve spent half my life being the spare twin in rooms I wasn’t even in. And I still—” He swallows hard. “I still think about running. Less than I did. But not never.”

Hermione speaks to the parchment, not to anyone. “I obliviated my parents because I was terrified,” she says, each word a cut. “Not just of losing them, but of being captured myself. I wasn’t afraid of dying quick…I was afraid of being tortured, of being raped, of being broken until there was nothing left of me. And I hate that I still carry that fear in every room I walk into.”

Harry’s hand knots in his hair. “I’m so tired,” he says, which is the smallest and worst truth he owns. “I’ve been tired since I was a boy and sometimes I pretend it’s a personality.”

Ginny closes her eyes. “I’m afraid if I stop being strong, there’ll be nothing underneath it.”

Bill’s mouth twists. “I nearly left for Egypt and didn’t because I decided cowardice isn’t a Weasley export. And I hate that I still measure myself with that yardstick.”

Theo tries levity, fails. “I practice not caring about anyone so no one can tell when I do.” The admission lands and sits there, mortifying. He raises his brows at Draco. “Happy now?”

“Ecstatic,” Draco says. His own throat is quiet for once, which feels like a missing limb.

Charlie, who has been silent, steadying Hermione with almost clinical attention, finally exhales, and the curse seizes the moment. “Dragons are easier than people,” he says, voice low, unbothered by his own confession. “They don’t lie. They tell you when they’ll burn you. I like that. I like… quiet.” His mouth tics, the smallest grimace. “Legilimency isn’t a hobby. It’s noise. In crowds, people think directly at me. She—” he nods at Hermione, not looking away from her “, was the first person who learned to drop the volume without being asked. I worried she’d shatter anyway.”

Hermione blinks, as if she’s been handed a fact she wasn’t allowed to suspect. “You, never said.”

“Didn’t need to,” Charlie says simply. “I’m not with anyone. I don’t want anyone. Family thinks it’s dragons. It’s just… me. Quiet is a kind of love.”

Ron barks out a surprised laugh that breaks, then steadies. “That tracks.”

Draco thinks, wildly, so that’s one Weasley accounted for. Or is this a bisexual discovery? Horrified, he shoves the thought away, too late. Charlie’s eyes flick sideways and catch it mid-flight. He actually laughs.

Draco wants the floor to hex him out of existence.

The fear builds like steam. Little experiments turn feral. Ginny, desperate, tries, “Lovely weather,” and instead says, “This house smells like everyone’s worst day.” Ron lifts his mug: “Best tea,” which becomes, “This tastes like pond.” Bill ventures, “We’re fine,” and spits, “We’re frayed and pretending.” Harry says nothing for a full minute, jaw locked hard enough to hurt. Hermione tests a simple thing, “The quill is green”, and it won’t come; the curse waits, ears pricked, greedy.

“Try writing instead of speaking,” Bill says, even as he winces at his own thoughtlessness. “If it’s bound to the utterance, ”

“It isn’t,” Hermione snaps, and the snap is a truth too. “It’s bound to naming. Speech. Ink. Doesn’t matter.”

Her hands start to shake.

Charlie says, quiet as weather, “Breathe.”

She sucks air like he granted permission. Draco watches the line of her throat move and hates the way relief tries to be tender. He files that under absolutely not.

The hour lengthens until it feels like a life. The compulsion nips and drags; truths trip out like beads off a cut string. Draco sits in it like a man left dry by the flood that’s drowning everyone else. He could say something vicious. He doesn’t. For once, he lets the room be wounded without his teeth in it.

Then, like a charm breaking on a distant clock, the pressure loosens. The ache in the tongue withdraws. The air forgets its bad habits.

Hermione moves first, because she always does. “This quill,” she says carefully, “is green.” It is black. The lie hangs, perfectly intact. She laughs once, a sound with edges.

“It lifts,” Bill says, half-prayer. He tries another: “We’re having a lovely time.” No correction arrives. He sags, all scaffold and no building.

“It spreads,” Ginny counters, staring at the parchment like it might jump. “Through writing.”

“It propagates if you mirror the structure,” Hermione says, crisp again, grateful for a problem to be solved instead of felt. “We’re lucky it wasn’t a full sequence.”

“Lucky,” Draco echoes, because he can’t help tasting words for irony.

Harry looks across the table at him, steady, no heat. “We’re breaking it,” he says. “Whatever it takes.” No rhetoric. No banners. Just a decision laid on the table.

“And if we can’t,” Draco says, because someone should pick at the scab.

“Then we’ll have tried,” Harry replies. “And I can live with that.”

There’s nothing to sneer at there either. Infuriating.

Ron scrubs a hand down his face. “Right. First rule: no more practicing curses on the bloody table.”

Ginny, already moving, tacks a scrap under the rota pin with a flourish: NO EXPERIMENTAL CURSES ON THE TABLE. Then, below it, another in a different hand, Theo’s, annoyingly elegant: AND SOMEONE BUY DECENT TEA BEFORE I CONFESS A MURDER.

Bill slides the parchment with the copied runes into a warded folder like he’s putting a rabid animal in a travel crate. “We’ll pull it apart slowly,” he says. “Away from the house. Away from anyone we like.”

“You like me?” Theo asks, delighted.

“No,” Bill says, perfectly grave. “But I’ve grown attached to not filling out your death paperwork.”

Hermione has ink on her fingers. She stares at it as if it’s blood and then wipes it away with brisk magic. “Tomorrow, five,” she says. “We lift the second lid. Properly, this time.”

“And if the house throws a strop,” Ron says, “we throw one louder.”

“Professional,” Ginny approves.

Charlie peels off the wall. “I’ll be here,” he says. No fanfare. Not asking permission. Hermione nods once, a quiet truce. Draco watches the exchange and feels the petty, stupid tug of jealousy try for him again. He steps out of its way.

They pack the room back into a shape that looks like normal. Potter checks the windows, because he always does. Ron stacks mugs in the sink, because someone has to. Bill steals three sticks of chalk, because he is sensible. Ginny adds one last scrap under the rota pin, HARRY: SANDWICH. HERMIONE: BREATHING. RON: BISCUITS. MALFOY: DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING. Theo adds beneath it, CHARLIE: DRAGONS.

“Subtle,” Draco says, eyeing the list.

“House rules,” Ginny says, deadpan.

Ron walks him to the door. It’s their odd ritual now; they don’t discuss it. The corridor smells less like rot and more like tired people. Walburga glowers in sullen silence. The umbrella stand chooses not to trip him. Personal growth all round.

“At least we learned something,” Ron says, practical to a fault.

“We learned to replicate my misery,” Draco says. “Outstanding work.”

“Progress,” Ron insists.

Draco glances back once at the table, at Hermione’s bent head, at Charlie’s quiet orbit, at Potter’s watchfulness, at Ginny’s absurd notes, at Theo’s careless sprawl, at Bill’s patient geometry. It looks like a life. Not his. But a life.

He clears his throat. “Tell Potter the sandwich note is working.”

“Tell him yourself tomorrow,” Ron says, as if it’s obvious.

“Tomorrow,” Draco repeats, because somehow that’s the shape of everything these days.

He steps onto the stoop. Rain has already decided to happen again. Number Twelve breathes behind him, smug and awake. He considers saying something cutting to the weather and decides to save it for someone who deserves it.

“Excellent,” he mutters instead, mostly to himself. “Another day as furniture with opinions.”

And then he’s gone, before the street can disagree.

Chapter Text

Draco has survived a war, two trials, three years of enforced honesty, and one endless parade of Gryffindor moral superiority. Yet somehow, standing outside the Burrow, he feels most endangered here.

The place looks like a bad joke. All uneven bricks and drunken angles, as though each generation of Weasleys dared the next to add something even more absurd. By rights, the house should have collapsed long ago, but it clings together by stubbornness and charm. It tilts, it hums, it breathes. It is offensive in its warmth.

And the noise, Merlin, the noise. Children shriek from the orchard, laughter ricochets down the lane, a ghoul thunders about upstairs. This is no home; it’s organized chaos with a roof.

He is here because, apparently, there was nowhere else.

Hermione had refused to let him into her flat, sharp as broken glass. “Over my dead body,” she’d said, and Ron had seconded her, solidarity painted all over his freckled face. “Because if I say yes, then you’ll feel like you have to, and you don’t,” he told her firmly, as if Draco weren’t in the room.

The Potters’ house was out of the question. Fidelius charm, layers deep. “I’ll be damned if I let anyone in,” Potter had said flatly. End of discussion.

And Grimmauld Place? Impossible. The Black ancestral home carried enough dark magic in its walls to choke them all. Every attempt at studying there turned sour, the wards seething, the air itself resisting. If they wanted Luna’s experiment to mean anything, to get clean readings of what the curse was doing to him, they had to be away from the house’s malice. Away from the place where Bellatrix’s shadow still clung to the wallpaper.

So here they were. The Burrow. Weasley territory.

Theo leans on the crooked gate like it’s his ancestral estate, unbothered. He always did adapt to other people’s spaces disgustingly well.

“You look like you’ve swallowed a lemon,” Theo murmurs.

“I’ve swallowed my pride,” Draco replies. “Much the same taste.”

Ginny Potter greets them at the door, a toddler on her hip and flour on her arms. “Shoes off, don’t hex the ghoul, don’t bleed on the carpets,” she rattles off. “Understood?”

Draco opens his mouth to protest he hasn’t bled indoors in weeks. Theo stomps on his foot. He shuts it again.

The kitchen is unbearable. Too warm, too full, too alive. Bill and Hermione are already bickering over runes at the table. Molly Weasley bustles past, muttering about pastry crusts. Ginny drops her toddler into a chair and hands him a biscuit without breaking stride.

And then there’s Charlie, leaning against the mantelpiece like sin. Broad shoulders, leather jacket, hair kissed by dragon fire. Quidditch legend turned dragon tamer. He grins at them lazily. It’s insulting.

Hermione glances up and scowls. “You’re late.”

“I was hoping you’d expire of impatience,” Draco says.

“Pity,” she snaps, “I thrive on it.”

Ron chuckles. “Some things never change.”

“Oh, I’ve changed,” Hermione mutters. “For the worse.”

Harry, slouched against the counter with the air of a man who’s too tired for anything but honesty, adds, “Don’t forget the Time-Turner year. Third year. Managed more classes than humanly possible, and still had time to slap Malfoy.”

“That was an accident,” Hermione says sharply. “Taking Divination, I mean.”

Theo brightens. “You broke time just to take extra lessons?”

“Of course she did,” Ron says. “She’s Hermione.”

“She’s bloody brilliant,” Harry agrees, but his tone is dry as sand. “And bloody terrifying.”

“She’s both,” Ginny mutters, pulling a tart from the oven.

Draco watches the exchange from the corner, resentment twisting sharp. They speak of her menace as though it’s a fond anecdote. He remembers it as a fist to the face. But here, in the Weasley kitchen, she’s not just terrifying. She’s consuming. She’s smuggled extra notes under the official parchments, ink already staining her fingers. Just like at school. Breaking rules because she must.

Before he can sneer, the door opens.

“Luna,” Ginny says, with a smile.

Lovegood. No, Scamander now, drifts in. Still Luna: hair loose, gaze a little too far away. But there’s something new. A steadiness. She wears healer’s robes, pale blue, pockets bulging with instruments. When she looks at Draco, it isn’t dreamy, it’s clear.

“Hello, Draco,” she says warmly.

He blinks. “Luna.”

“You’ve looked tired for years.”

Theo snorts.

Luna lays out her kit with brisk precision. “We’re going to map your body’s responses. Truths, lies, conversation, silence. Nothing invasive.”

“Marvellous,” Draco mutters. “My degradation, charted.”

“It will help us understand what Bellatrix built,” Luna says, unbothered. “You’re alive, which means it wasn’t designed to kill quickly. But it is harming you.”

The curse wrings it out of him before he can choose silence. “Yes.”

Hermione is already scribbling, muttering under her breath, quill scratching fast. Her notes are neat, ruthless.

“Let’s begin,” Luna says. “A willing truth.”

Draco exhales. “I dislike treacle tart.”

The metal device on the table hums, glowing faint blue. Luna taps it, checks the parchment where spellwork is mapping his pulse, his breath, his magic’s resonance.

“Steady,” she says. “Now: a forced truth.”

The curse digs claws into his tongue. “I wake most nights thinking about the war.”

The device hums harder, green pulses rippling. Hermione mutters, “Heart rate spike… autonomic distress…” scribbles faster.

“Now attempt a lie,” Luna says gently.

Draco swallows. He opens his mouth. “I am—” The curse lashes. His chest seizes, his throat burns, his voice rips itself raw: “I am not fine.”

The device flashes red. Hermione writes furiously, words muttered like a litany: “Respiratory arrest risk, cardiovascular strain, potential neurological feedback…”

Theo leans back in his chair, looking grim.

“See?” Luna says softly to the others. “Every attempt at lying becomes physical trauma. It is why he is exhausted. Why he looks flat.”

Draco bites back: “Thank you, Healer Scamander, for that poetic summary of my decay.”

But Hermione doesn’t look amused. She looks rattled, jaw set, eyes burning.

Luna continues calmly. “Symptoms of depression. Anxiety. Trauma. He cannot soften anything. Cannot use denial or pretence as coping. The curse forbids it. Imagine living three years without the small lies that keep you sane.”

Silence swallows the room. Even the ghoul upstairs goes still.

Draco stares at the table, jaw locked, humiliation thick in his throat.

And then, noise. Children tumble through the kitchen. James Potter sticky with jam, Bill’s eldest clutching a toy broom, Luna’s pale-haired child with solemn eyes. They chatter, laugh, fight over biscuits.

The Burrow breathes with them.

For Draco, it’s a punch to the gut. Family. Warmth. Future. All the things he will never have.

He looks away so hard his neck aches.

Theo, too low for anyone else, says, “You’re doing fine.”

Draco doesn’t answer.

Dinner at the Burrow doesn’t so much happen as occur to him. Plates multiply, voices braid, children stage coups over pudding. Draco stays very still and tries not to drown in it. Being ignored has never felt so loud.

The talk skates past him, as usual, until Charlie points a fork across the table without looking away from his stew. “Go on, tell them about Romania.”

Hermione’s shoulders stiffen. “There’s nothing to tell.”

Ron grunts. “There’s always something to tell. Viktor was, how do I put this kindly, overfunded and underfunny. Never meet your heroes.”

Harry huffs. “Or your Quidditch posters.”

Charlie’s grin sharpens. “He showed you his broom collection.”

Hermione sighs like a kettle about to boil. “Yes. He did. It was… fine.” A beat. “We were a fling. The sort with nice letters and long silences.”

Theo brightens, shameless. “And then?”

“And then,” Hermione says, eyes on her glass, “I spent more time with dragons than with Viktor.”

“With me,” Charlie adds, unhelpfully.

“Because you had dragons,” Hermione shoots back. “And because you weren’t trying to impress me with varnish.”

Ron snorts into his drink. “He tried to race her around a training pitch. She lapped him and corrected his posture.”

Harry sips, dry: “Romance.”

“Anyway,” Hermione says, eager to change lanes, “Oliver was different.”

Theo practically claps. “Oliver?”

“Oliver Wood,” Ron supplies, because of course he does.

Hermione nods. “Handsome. Ambitious. Single-minded. For a while I thought, ” She stops, recalibrates. “I thought I might marry him.”

Theo arches a brow. “And didn’t because…?”

“Because he couldn’t accept Harry and Ron.” No heat, no malice; just fact. “He envied them. He resented that we’re… bound. In ways marriage doesn’t reach.” A small, reflexive smile at the two idiots in question. “I loved him, but I loved them more.”

Silence makes a brief, startled visit. Harry looks into his glass like it’s a mirror he doesn’t trust. Ron fidgets, ears red. Charlie looks like he’d applaud if it wouldn’t get him hexed.

Draco chews slowly and decides he hates the word bound. It sounds like rope and choice at the same time.

“Right,” Charlie says, pleasantly reckless, pushing his chair back. “Outside.”

“Why?”, Draco asks, even though he knows.

“Because children,” Ginny says, already shepherding small, sticky people toward the sitting room. “Because Molly. Because I am not Vanishing scorch marks again.”

They spill into the garden’s cool dark. The orchard hums, hedges lit with fireflies. Potter leans against the crooked fence, lights a cigarette with a wand-tip like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Draco blinks. Of course Potter smokes. Of course.

Ron shrugs at him. “He thinks if Voldemort didn’t get him, cancer won’t either.”

Harry exhales smoke and half-smiles, which is as close as Potter gets to comedy.

Bill, passing behind Hermione, flicks a sting at her back. She arrests it mid-air without turning, snaps it into nothing.

“I’m not returning the favour,” she says coolly. “You’re a father.”

Bill mouths a father to his brothers, amused, then mutters, “She knows she’d lose.”

“Delusional,” Hermione replies, wand already in hand.

Charlie steps into the grass opposite her, grinning wide. “Friendly?”

“Please,” she drawls, smug and terrifying.

The duel ignites. Charlie’s hex arcs, Hermione slices it apart. Her retort spits sparks across his shoulder; he ducks, laughing. He sends another, sharper, and she disperses it wandlessly with a flick of her hand.

They move faster: curse, shield, dissolve, counter. It’s reckless, gleeful, the kind of spar that leaves bruises and laughter both.

Is this how they passed the time in Romania? Draco thinks sourly, arms folded.

“Yes!” Charlie shouts, not breaking eye contact with Hermione.

Draco stiffens. Brilliant. Legilimens. Because he wasn’t exposed enough already.

Hermione catches Charlie with an Aguamenti full in the face. He sputters, dripping, laughing through the spray.

Draco, annoyed with himself, thinks before he can stop it, that maybe he’s little attracted to him, which is bloody inconvenient.

“Also yes!” Charlie bellows, still duelling, still grinning. “But we’re not here for that revelation, Malfoy.”

Theo howls with laughter. Bill nearly chokes. Ron mutters, “Merlin save us.”

Hermione, cheeks flushed with effort, doesn’t falter, she whips her wand again, faster, sharper, and Charlie’s grin only widens.

Draco folds his arms tighter, wishing the garden would swallow him whole.

“Enough fun,” Harry calls at last, stubbing out the cigarette. “Back in. Before Ginny decides to measure scorch marks.”

They file inside to a quieter kitchen; the small Weasleys have been packed off to beds, the pastry has been triaged, and Molly has retreated to knit somewhere she can pretend this family adheres to rules.

Luna’s kit is already waiting on the cleared table: the humming disk, the spell-ink quill, three sheets charmed to map pulse, breath, and magical resonance. She’s shed the last of the dreamy veneer; what’s left is healer: calm, keen, unsentimental.

“Resume,” she says, and it sounds like a diagnosis that has already started without them.

Hermione sits, note-quill poised. Bill takes station at her left, quiet as a ward. Ron posts up near Draco with the absent competence of a man who’s stood on too many doorways. Harry leans against the counter, eyes on everything.

Luna doesn’t ask the same questions as before, she changes the angles, like a curse-breaker pressing different plates until the hidden door creaks.

“Tell me something you regret,” she says first.

The curse obliges, claws already set. Draco exhales. “Not saving anyone when I had the chance.”

The humming disk slides from blue to a serrated green. The breath-chart jitters; the magic-trace spikes like a heartbeat startled by a slammed door.

Hermione murmurs, “Autonomic surge… tonic chest restriction… resonance interference,” and her quill keeps pace without looking at the page.

“Tell me something you desire,” Luna continues, voice as level as a ruler.

Draco tries to think of something clever. The curse is bored of clever. “To be ordinary,” he says, disgusted at himself before the sentence finishes.

The line wavers, a different kind of unrest. Bill tips his head, reading it sideways. “Desire presents as instability rather than pain. Useful.”

“Tell me something you’ve never admitted in company,” Luna says, same even tone, as if she’s asking him to pass the salt.

It slips out so easily Draco almost doesn’t hear himself. “I haven’t touched anyone since the curse began.”

The room stops. The instrument hums on, unembarrassed.

Ron says, softly and with no performance, “Mate,” and it is, horribly, the first time Draco has ever heard pity from him that wasn’t dipped in history.

Draco hates it. “Don’t.”

Ron shuts it down at once. Good. One competent Weasley, then.

Theo clears his throat like he’s rescuing a drowning cat. “Explains the chronic disposition.”

“I was born with the disposition,” Draco says. “I merely honed it.”

“Against your will,” Theo adds, which is unfair and true.

“Note patterns,” Luna says, and they all look where she points: three jagged maps describing a life you wouldn’t wish on an enemy. “Falsehood attempts trigger trauma. Regrets trigger pain. Desire destabilises. He displays markers of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress. Distinct variable: curse obstructs coping. No repression, no denial, no self-deception. He inhabits permanent hyper-reality.” A beat. “Survivable, not sustainable.”

Hermione doesn’t write that line down. She just absorbs it and looks at Draco, and there’s no pity in it, no heat either, only the kind of attention that takes things apart and, if you’re lucky, puts them back together again.

Harry finally speaks, voice roughened at the edges. “Three years of this.”

“Yes,” the curse says through Draco’s mouth.

Ginny, who has reappeared with three mugs and the expression of someone pretending not to hover, sets one in front of Luna, one in front of Hermione, and, after the smallest hesitation, one in front of Draco. “Tea,” she says. “Don’t spill it.”

“It’s a bit late,” Draco tells the mug.

Theo leans over the charts, tongue caught in his cheek the way it does when he’s bored of being ornamental. He taps a particular kink in the magic-line, then another, then the small flatline where Draco tried, once, to tell himself he’d be fine.

“Look,” Theo says, suddenly serious. “It’s not just punishing lies. It’s preventing belief. He can’t even convince himself. Any attempt to internalise a comforting fiction, I’m all right, it will pass, I can manage, gets treated as a falsehood and knifes him.”

Bill nods, slow. “Which is why the damage compounds. No rest, even in your own head.”

Luna adds, “No placebo. No place to put pain that isn’t truth. It accumulates.”

Draco can feel every set of eyes on him, which is rich, given how invisible he’s been all day.

“Thrilling,” he says. “I’m a museum exhibit. Please refrain from tapping the glass.”

No one laughs. Good. He wasn’t joking.

Hermione finally sets her quill down. The absence of scratching is loud. She studies him in a way that is somehow worse than hostility and kinder than mercy.

And he realizes, with a clarity that tastes like iron, that she’s caught as badly as he is. Not by the same claws, but by an adjacent set. The curse has its teeth in him. Her mind has its teeth in the curse. Neither of them is letting go. It is latched to his mouth; she is latched to its mechanism. They are both being eaten alive by different hungers that rhyme.

Perfect, he thinks. Even my damnation comes with a study partner.

The Burrow breathes around them: stairs creak, a clock hand shivers from mischief managed to mostly safe, someone in the sitting room laughs in a sleep-thick voice. Life carries on, indecent and loud.

“Right,” Harry says at last, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Tomorrow we do this again. Fewer duels. More answers.”

“Disagree,” Charlie says cheerfully, wringing water out of his hair. “Same number of duels. Also answers.”

“Bring a towel,” Hermione says without looking at him.

“Bring better aim,” he fires back.

She doesn’t smile. Not really. But something in her mouth loosens, like a knot deciding it might one day be a thread again.

As they stand, Bill slips a thin, soot-smudged scrap onto the table, something he must’ve palmed out of Grimmauld before they abandoned it. Charcoal lines. A partial sigil. The ghost of a hinge-mark.

Hermione’s hand is on it before she remembers to ask permission. Luna leans in. Theo tilts his head. Bill says, “Found that under a floorboard last week. Didn’t make sense then.”

Now Hermione breathes out through her nose, that soft sound she makes when a problem stops being a wall and starts being a door. “It’s not a ward,” she says, voice gone quiet and very dangerous. “It’s a latch. Bellatrix didn’t just design a cage. She designed an open-and-shut. Which means it was built to open.”

Draco feels it like weather breaking over bone.

For the first time in a long time, the word that comes isn’t impossible. It’s worse and better.

Maybe.

He hates it. He clings to it anyway.

Chapter Text

He tells himself this while buttoning a crisp white shirt that sits exactly right across his shoulders (not an accident), while knotting a charcoal tie he won’t keep on (habit), while shrugging into a jacket that says I’m in control even when he isn’t. The mirror gives him back someone lean, composed, annoyingly handsome for a man en route to be dissected. Good. If they’re turning him into a case study, they can at least have decent scenery.

Wand: holstered at his wrist, charm-muted, within reach. They’ve agreed he can carry it. Truce, not trust. Considering the headcount in that house on any given afternoon: Potter, Weasley, Weasley, Weasley, Granger, Lovegood, possibly another Weasley, trying anything would be comedic. He pictures the duel: seven to one, with commentary. He’d lose stylishly, which is something, but still lose.

He tells himself all the way down the lane that he’ll turn on the spot and leave, Apparate to somewhere with fewer Weasleys per square metre, go home and drink his good whisky and speak to no one until the world gives up demanding things.

Then he walks into the Burrow because apparently that’s his brand now: attendance with attitude.

The house is already mid-chaos. A pan shouts; a ghoul sulks overhead; a clock hand labelled Faffing About judders toward Get On With It. Neutral ground, they call it, because Grimmauld’s residual spite is unhelpful for delicate runic replication. Calling the Burrow “neutral” is like calling a dragon “warm-blooded” and pretending that makes it a cat.

Weasley-Potter meets him at the kitchen threshold, sleeves rolled, hair pinned up like practicality won a duel with glamour. Quick top-to-toe that clocks the tailoring and refuses to be impressed.

“You’re on time,” Ginny says. “I’ll alert the Prophet.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t,” Draco says. “But thank you for the vote of confidence.”

“Tea’s on. Don’t bleed on anything sentimental.”

“I’ll limit any hemorrhaging to objets d’art.”

Ron appears from the back door with a handful of apples and the air of a man who can’t decide whether to offer a handshake or a warning. He settles for both.

“Malfoy.”

“Weasley.”

Ron shoves an apple at him like a truce he’ll snatch back if misused. “Eat. Luna doesn’t like people passing out on her instruments.”

“I’ll do my best not to faint on your furniture.”

“Brilliant,” Ron says. “We only just mended the table.”

Potter is already in the kitchen, leaning against the counter in a posture that pretends at rest and achieves surveillance. He looks like someone who learned to scan doorways before long division. His gaze lands on Draco and stays there a measured beat, not hostile, not friendly, policy.

“Don’t bolt,” Harry says, voice sanded down. “It’s annoying.”

“Cursed, not feral,” Draco replies. “Though the distinction blurs after tea.”

“Prove it,” Potter says, and somehow it isn’t a jibe. It’s a standard operating procedure.

Bill Weasley drifts in from a side door, all easy strength and quiet scars, the sort of presence that makes a room feel safer by breathing. “Ward sweep’s clean,” he says. “Grimmauld’s temper isn’t bleeding through.”

“Good,” Hermione says, appearing with a stack of parchment that looks like a legal case and a vendetta had a child. She doesn’t greet Draco; she places the papers with exacting care, ink to her left, quill between fingers as if it were a surgical instrument. Her mouth is set to inefficient world.

Lovegood follows, robes immaculate, hair tamed into healer-sensible, the humming disc poised in her hands like a subdued planet. She gives Draco the same serene, unblinking look she gives everyone—as if she has already read the inside of your pulse and judged it adequate.

“Hello, Draco,” Luna says, and means it. “Chair there. Feet flat. Hands relaxed. Try not to be brave.”

“I outsourced bravery to Potter circa 97’,” Draco says, because if he doesn’t say something he’ll start thinking. “He’s still paying off the owls.”

Harry’s mouth almost twitches. Almost.

Draco takes the chair she indicates, notes his own wand’s weight under his cuff: permitted, yes, but it might as well be a theatre prop in here. He can feel the room counting it anyway. Fair. He’s counting theirs.

“Back door,” a voice says, mild and amused. “Before she draws blood with the quill.”

Charlie Weasley has the kind of smile that looks like trouble and the kind of shoulders that look like they carry it for sport. He jerks his chin at the garden. Draco doesn’t follow so much as he chooses air over steam and ends up outside.

The orchard hums. An evening that belongs to someone else unrolls itself over the hedges. Charlie doesn’t light a cigarette (Potter’s vice, apparently), but he leans on the fence like a man who knows how to look at distance.

“You’ve stumbled into a machine,” Charlie says conversationally. “Thought you might like the manual.”

“Oh good,” Draco says. “Instructions on how to be tolerated.”

“Not tolerated,” Charlie corrects. “Managed.” He counts off on blunt fingers. “Them—” he jerks his chin toward the kitchen, “—they’re a closed circuit. The Trio. They fight, they decide, they don’t break. Everyone else orbits and pretends we’re not gravitationally bound. Weasley clan: suffocatingly loyal. Annoying. Useful. Hermione—”

“Is a zealot,” Draco says, before he can stop himself.

“Is a purpose,” Charlie says. “She’ll eat glass if it gets the job done. Someone has to tell her when to spit.”

“Is that you?”

“It was,” he says. “When she visited Romania. Dragons suit her, don’t let her hear me say that. So does danger. She doesn’t like that truth much.”

Soulmates? Draco thinks, and immediately hates himself for the term.

Charlie glances sideways, Legilimens casual as breathing, of course, and shakes his head. “Twin flames that never got to blaze. Wrong century, wrong war, wrong world. She’s not interested in a Weasley. I’m not interested in anyone.”

“You look interested in being contrary,” Draco says.

“I look interested in dragons,” Charlie corrects. “Bill pulled rank. Said I was to keep the ceiling from catching fire. He’s a father now—” a ghost of a grin, “—so he enjoys giving orders.”

Draco tries not to think, Are you and Granger… and hates that the thought arrives like a drunk at closing time.

“No,” Charlie says aloud, patient as a scolded dog. “And no, you’re not attracted to me either. People just think that after I tell them I don’t like people.”

Draco’s ears go warm in a way he refuses to name. “Perhaps I’d enjoy a person with employment.”

Charlie laughs, delighted. “Ask them about their jobs,” he says. “See how that goes.”

They go back in; the kitchen smells of onions and paper and impending indignation. Hermione has built a fortress of notes around the humming disc. Bill’s fingers ghost over a warded edge with the respect of a craftsman and the insolence of an older brother. Ron occupies the doorway like a habit. Ginny stirs something that might be soup and might be a potion to keep people civil. Harry does the same old lean, the one that says I don’t want to be here and I’d kill for these people in the same breath.

“Don’t you lot have jobs?” Draco asks, because he’s too tired not to be rude.

“Day job,” Harry says without changing posture. “Head Auror.” A beat. “Two kids. That’s the job.”

“Curse-work,” Hermione says, not looking up. “Independent.”

“Wards, contracts, cleanups,” Bill adds. “Goblins still call when something bangs instead of hums.”

“DMLE projects,” Ron says. “The interesting ones.”

“Retired Quidditch,” Ginny says, amused. “Occasional Prophet work. Managing chaos in my spare time.”

“So while I allegedly sulk in my Manor—”

“Most often than not,” Theo says, materializing at Draco’s elbow with the timing of a conjurer. “He sulks in mine.”

“Do shut the fuck up, Theo,” Draco says, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Theo smiles like a saint painted by someone with a grudge. “See? My Manor gets results.”

Then Theo leans back to take the room in, eyes flicking from Hermione to Charlie and back again. “Honestly, I don’t know who’s more attractive, Granger or Charlie.”

Draco thanks every god worth ignoring that it isn’t phrased as a question, because he isn’t sure either and the curse would make that humiliating.

“Right,” Luna says, clinical as frost. “The instrument is ready.”

The humming disc sits on the table like a tamed storm. Three quills hover over warded parchment: Pulse, Respiration, Magical Resonance. Draco takes the chair across from it, aware of his wand under his cuff and the six other wands in the room not under cuffs. Truce, not trust. If he twitched wrong he’d be pinned to a wall by kindness and hexes.

“Ground rules,” Hermione says without looking at him. “You don’t touch anything without permission. You don’t offer commentary unless asked. If you feel faint, say so before you fall. If you vomit, do it away from the notes.”

“Kind of you to assume I’m interesting enough to vomit,” Draco says.

“Shut it,” she says, and makes the word a blade.

“Segment one,” Luna says, tone steady. “Baseline conversation. Forty seconds. Ginny.”

Ginny doesn’t miss a stir. “Draco, be useful and open that window before we suffocate.”

He rises, slides the latch, lifts the sash with one clean push. The quills note a trivial elevation: exertion, annoyance, aesthetic offence at a window that resists.

“Baseline stable,” Luna says. “Cognitive load without moral weight. Ron.”

Ron looks pained, then relieved. “Quidditch scores,” he decides, and rattles off a Cannons season so tragic even the quills look sorry.

“You misremembered Ballycastle,” Draco says, because he can’t help being himself. “One-ten to one-eighty. Their Seeker ate turf.”

Ron squints. “Look at him with a hobby.”

“An old vice,” Draco says. The resonance line does a small satisfied twitch: competence without cost.

“Identity prompt,” Luna says. “Hermione.”

Hermione’s eyes never leave the instrument. “Name.”

“Draco Malfoy.”

“Condition.”

“Compulsory honesty anchored to a Gringotts artefact,” he says, his voice tasting like paperwork.

“Purpose,” she says.

“To break it,” he says. “Preferably before I die of overexposure to Weasleys.”

Ron snorts; Ginny doesn’t bother hiding a grin. Hermione’s quill writes purpose credible; tone regrettable.

“Moral provocation: mild,” Luna says. “Harry.”

Harry doesn’t move from the counter. “Would you have joined him if he’d won?”

The curse stretches in Draco like an old injury. He hates the question and the honesty of hating it. “I didn’t plan to survive,” he says, too fast to decorate. “In the unlikely event I’d had to choose… I don’t know. Cowardice would have been easy. I was practiced.”

The resonance line sketches something jagged and familiar. Bill’s jaw flexes once; Ron’s eyes go somewhere nearer than distance. Hermione’s quill doesn’t pause.

“Memory recall,” Luna says. “Describe the first time you realized this wasn’t hangover guilt.”

“Day two,” Draco says. “I tried to tell my mother I’d been productive. I said, ‘I accomplished nothing and drank at lunch.’ She said, ‘At last,’ and poured me more.” His mouth twists. “Later I tried to reassure myself: you’re fine. I said, in an empty room, ‘I am not fine.’ It hurt.”

“Where?” Luna asks.

“Throat. Chest. Behind the eyes. Everywhere pretense lives.”

Hermione writes pain locus: speech + breath + cognition in ruthless script.

“Attempt internal placebo,” Luna says. “Think a comforting fiction. Say nothing.”

He thinks you’re all right like a rug he can tuck over his knees. The curse sets a match to it. He swallows a betraying sound. The quills jump: micro-spike, silent.

“Noted,” Luna says. “He can’t even internalize a placebo.”

Hermione underlines no internal analgesia like she’s swearing at the concept.

“Social friction without moral content,” Luna continues. “Ginny: mild insult. Ron: light support. Harry: neutral.”

Ginny glances up, eyes bright. “Your hair is too perfect. It’s suspicious.”

“It just grows like this,” Draco says. “Envy is unbecoming.”

“Support,” Luna reminds.

Ron sighs dutifully. “He can’t help it. It’s genetic smug.”

Harry remains a piece of furniture with opinions. The quills are bored. Excellent.

“Grievance,” Luna says. “Hermione, ask the question you’d ask if he weren’t here.”

“Why should we risk anything for you?” Hermione says. No decoration. Just blade.

“Because you can,” Draco says, and despises how small it sounds.

The charts love the simplicity; Hermione’s quill hesitates a heartbeat, then writes utility minimal; honesty maximal and underlines both as if the page has committed a personal offence.

“Truth prompts,” Luna says. “You can refuse. The refusal is data.”

“Joy,” Draco says. “A quiz.”

“Truth one: smallest lie you miss most.”

“Saying I’m fine as social lubricant instead of self-harm,” Draco says.

Ron’s mouth flattens, something like sympathy that will die rather than be named. Harry watches the line on the parchment instead of Draco’s face. Hermione underlines lubricant, twice.

“Truth two: what you believe about yourself and wish you didn’t.”

“That I corrupt things I touch.”

Silence lands with its boots on. The resonance chart scrawls a cliff and keeps falling.

“Truth three: what you didn’t admit because you liked the you that didn’t admit it more.”

“That I enjoy being cruel,” Draco says, and the curse digs claws in his lungs for leaving out the tense. He coughs, corrects: “Enjoyed. When it made me feel powerful. I don’t, now. Mostly because it’s boring.”

The exhale that travels the room is a weather system. Bill looks at his hands. Ginny wipes a nonexistent spill. Ron’s jaw tightens; sixteen-year-old Ron would have swung. Harry doesn’t blink. Hermione writes past tense noted like she’s pinning a specimen.

“Stop,” Luna says, turning the dial down. “We stop before we tip him. Five minutes. Hydrate. Stretch. No baiting unless medically advisable.”

Draco stays seated because standing means choosing a direction and he isn’t ready to pick one in front of six witnesses. Ginny deposits a glass by his hand without comment. He drinks because being stupid is expensive and he’s already paid enough.

Hermione rearranges her papers like a librarian with a grudge. Bill leans in, murmuring about a resonance kink on minute seven. Luna hums to the disc like it’s a feral thing she tamed. Harry scrubs a hand over his face; the tired king hates the crown. Ron eats an apple like it owes him rent and watches the door out of principle.

Theo taps the Magical Resonance chart with a thoughtful finger, tilting his head at Draco. “He holds,” he tells nobody in particular. “Looks like he’ll break. Doesn’t. Annoying.”

“Practice,” Draco says.

“Vanity,” Theo replies.

“Back door,” Charlie murmurs from the threshold. He isn’t grinning now. “Two minutes.”

Hermione doesn’t look up. “I have one.”

“Then spend it outside,” Charlie says, and it’s not an order; it’s an extraction.

She sets her quill down, breathes like she might forget and write with her fingernail, and follows him into the night. Draco pretends not to watch them leave. He is very bad at pretending.

In the garden, Charlie pitches his voice low, meant for her. Draco shouldn’t hear. The house carries noise like gossip.

“You’re in too deep,” Charlie says.

“I’m in exactly as deep as this requires,” Hermione answers.

“If they clock it, they’ll yank you.”

“They can try.”

“They’ll succeed,” he says, and keeps it gentle. “And they’d be right.”

“I won’t let Bellatrix keep her hands on our lives,” Hermione says. “Even if it’s that prat who’s cursed. Voldemort lost ten years ago. He doesn’t get to win now because we got tired.”

“When you start preaching to yourself, it’s a prayer,” Charlie says.

“I don’t pray,” Hermione replies. “I work.”

“Take a night off.”

“I’ll take two when it’s done.”

They come back in as if nothing has happened. Hermione picks up the quill like a weapon she trusts. Charlie leans on the doorframe like a man who will move when the ceiling starts to drop.

Luna claps her hands once, soft. “Segment two in five,” she says. “Hearts calm. Heads clear.”

Draco stares at the humming disc, at the cruel neatness of their charts, at the improbable domesticity of all this violence in tidy lines. He feels outrage and relief gnawing the same bone. He is outnumbered and armed. Truce, not trust. He’s exactly where he doesn’t want to be and exactly where he has to stand.

“Don’t forget,” Theo murmurs at his shoulder, wicked and fond, “if they ask which of them you find more attractive, say Theo.”

“Bless you,” Draco says dryly. “For nothing.”

The house breathes. The instrument hums. Hermione lifts her head, eyes bright and terrible.

“Ready,” she says.

He isn’t.

He nods anyway.

They take it outside. Of course they do. The Weasleys have a ritual for everything, and this one wears lantern light and grass stains. Apple trees lean over a scuffed chalk line cut into the lawn; the night hums with late summer and nerves. Potter stands at the edge with a cigarette between his fingers, smoking like a man who has earned at least one bad habit and intends to keep it.

Weasley explains it to him like house rules. “Started the first summer after,” Ron says, easy as breathing. “We were twitchy. Figured if we were going to hex each other in our sleep, might as well do it awake. Healthy competition.”

Bill adds, dry, “Also stopped Hermione killing us with revision.”

Granger folds her arms. “You’re not dead, are you?”

Theo whistles. “Not yet.”

Ginny produces a parchment roll from her back pocket and unfurls it with ceremony across a garden bench. Draco peers despite himself. It’s a rota: three feet of names, dates, wins, losses, and marginalia. There are doodles (a stick Harry clutching his backside; a dragon that is either Charlie or a slur), and commentary:

Potter: lodged formal complaint re: indecency, July ’07.

Bill banned from wand-twirl after ‘Narcissus Incident’ (ask Mum).

Ron claims victory; Hermione refuses to recognise technicalities as real.

“You keep minutes of your recreational violence,” Draco says, tone flat. “Adorable.”

“Accountability,” Ginny says, tapping the quill against the margin. “And blackmail.”

Potter drops his cigarette, grinds it under his heel, and lifts his voice. “Right. Disarm only, no lasting damage. If anyone faints, Ron’s on recovery.”

“Why me?” Ron asks, but without heat.

“You’re least likely to panic,” Potter says.

Theo, helpful as ever: “Or notice.”

“Shut it,” Ron tells him fondly.

Potter tilts his head toward the line. “First match. Hermione versus me.”

They bow with the politeness of people who don’t need it and go straight to knives. Granger opens like a thesis with teeth. Potter’s response is infuriatingly competent, shields clean, counters economical, footwork neat. Draco hates admiring it and does anyway.

Granger’s wand cuts a quick V; a pale jet skims Potter’s sleeve. “Better,” she calls, unforgiving.

“Working on it,” he says, and the faintest edge of a grin ghosts his mouth.

For all his perpetual exhaustion, Potter moves like someone who refuses to fall over out of principle. It keeps him upright through three more exchanges. On the fourth, Granger snaps a small, elegant flick and a blue thread hisses across the space. Potter recoils, yelps, and starts clawing at his robes like a man auditioning for public indecency.

“Foul!” He’s laughing despite himself, twisting. “That’s not disarming; that’s a crime!”

“Efficiency,” Granger says, lowering her wand with brutal primness.

She marches to the rota and writes, in viciously tidy hand: Potter: surrendered to itch hex; see 2007 precedent. (No “again,” Draco notes. Good.)

Potter bows, still trying not to scratch. “Your win. I’ll lodge another complaint.”

“Denied in advance,” she says sweetly.

Ron cups his hands around his mouth. “You absolute muppet!”

Potter tips him two fingers without looking.

Bill ties his hair back with the solemnity of a man about to commit to theatre. Ron rolls his shoulders. They stand opposite like two versions of the same story: one burnished by age and scars, one grown into his strength under bad weather.

They start cautious, then abandon it. Shields crackle. Stings pop. Bill’s work is architectural, load-bearing wards, tidy binders. Ron’s is opportunistic and appropriately mean. Draco, educated by maniacs and expectation, recognizes quality even when it wears a Weasley jumper.

Ron lands a neat hit to Bill’s ribs; Bill answers with a charm that detonates Ron’s hair into canary yellow. Ron retaliates with a stripe-hex that massacres Bill’s tunic. They both grin like idiots through the pain.

“Draw?” Bill offers.

“Draw,” Ron agrees, clasping forearms.

Ginny scribbles: Weasley vs Weasley (curse-breaker/DMLE): fashion casualties; Mum complained. Outcome: draw; ego casualties pending.

“Gryffindors can’t finish a duel without hugging,” Draco says, because someone has to.

Charlie laughs first, sharp, genuine. “Careful, Malfoy. Sarcasm’s a muscle. Warm up.”

“Occupational hazard,” Draco returns. Charlie’s grin widens, obscene in its sincerity.

“You,” Ginny says, pointing straight at Charlie.

Charlie sighs like a man signing a waiver. “Dirty tricks, then.”

“Obviously.”

She pelts him with low, cruel jinxes, knee, ankle, shin, plus a Beater’s feint Wood would have killed for. Charlie evades with dragon-tamer economy, parrying just enough, stepping just so, maddeningly calm.

“Thinking left-feint, undercut,” he calls, plucking the pattern from her head.

“Try keeping up,” she says, thinks left and hits right. He takes it to the shoulder with a grunt and a delighted, “Rude.”

He tries to distract her again, not with Legilimency this time, but with sheer gall. “How’s the ankle after last time?” he asks, mouth twitching.

“Fine,” she says, and hammers him with a trip-jinx for the insinuation. He stumbles and recovers like momentum is a toy.

They end wands up, neither conceding, both laughing. Ginny writes: Weasley (Quidditch super star) vs Weasley (dragons): younger victorious; elder contests; contested struck through for cheek. Charlie leans over and adds in tiny script, Still contesting. Ginny draws a skull through it.

Draco allows himself the most microscopic smirk. It’s practically invisible. He still feels exposed.

The back door bangs, and George wanders onto the lawn like he’s part of the ritual. “I half heard a rumour, pun intended, that there’s a dummy-sized Malfoy out here for testing.”

“Go away,” Bill says, affection like gravel.

George flicks his wand; Bill’s shoelaces knot themselves, and Bill pitches forward before Ron hauls him upright with a curse. George beams, years of mischief honed sharper than curse-breaking.

He peers over Luna’s stowed instrument, eyes unexpectedly keen. “Bellatrix’s curse? Nasty puzzle. One of those jigsaws you’re not meant to finish. Turn it over. Start from the back, reverse engineer. Break the picture first. People get precious about edges.”

Luna considers, clinical. “That’s very good.”

George bows. “Do write that down. Mum never believes me when I say I help.”

Draco thinks, with feeling, that he doesn’t want his reverse involved. Charlie barks a laugh before the thought finishes forming.

Draco glares. Charlie shrugs. “New minds are loud. You’ll quieten.”

Draco gestures at Theo. “He’s new.”

“For the public good,” Charlie says solemnly, “I’ve blocked him out.”

Theo beams. “I feel so seen.”

“Tragically,” Draco adds.

“You then,” Ginny says, pointing at George. “Since you’ve deigned to join us.”

“Define ‘join’,” George says, setting himself with a flourish. “Is the winning sibling allowed celebratory fireworks?”

“No,” says everyone.

They go at it like a pantomime performed by assassins. George conjures treacle-smelling smoke (illegal per rota note, 2002); Ginny dispels it with a sleek, surgical banishment. He animates a rubber chicken (banned in three counties); she hexes it mid-air, uses the rebound to sting his wrist, and disarms him with something so elegant that even Granger’s mouth does a guilty twitch.

George sprawls in the grass, delighted. “Raised by wolves,” he declares.

Ginny updates the rota: Weasley (double champion) vs Weasley (joker): elder flamboyant; younger efficient; younger victorious; commentary limited for mercy.

“Who wants Malfoy?” Theo says to the crowd, too bright, too helpful.

“You are a fucking traitor,” Draco tells him, flat.

“They won’t kill you,” Theo shrugs. “They need you alive for now.”

No one volunteers. Which is worse than everyone volunteering. Pity? Caution? The simple desire not to be the one who knocks the cursed man over?

“Luna’s already dismantling him,” Ginny says. “Feels like bullying.”

Granger’s eyes go fox-sharp. “I’ll take the both of them, why not?” 

Theo groans. “Why Nott, indeed.”

They step over the line, and Draco promises himself he won’t humiliate himself.

He does, of course. Not for lack of effort. He and Theo try a pincer; she breaks it without looking. Theo tries flamboyance (never a good idea against Granger); she dismantles him like cheap furniture. Draco’s best shield fractures under a precise, ugly little hex he knows he should have seen coming. Theo’s wand spins and lodges in an apple bough. Both of them end on the grass, coughing in embarrassment.

“Utterly predictable,” Granger says, lowering her wand with clinical serenity.

“Efficient,” Theo mutters, brushing ash from his sleeve with wounded dignity.

Flat on his back, Draco stares at the lanterns and says to the sky, “Please note my grievance.”

Ron leans over, grinning. “We’ll order parchment by the yard.”

Charlie laughs first, loud, unbothered, and the sound spreads until even Draco’s mouth betrays him with a fractional curve. He hates it. He doesn’t stop it.

“Your turn,” Charlie calls Granger and lobs her an apple. She Vanishes it mid-arc and substitutes a tidy sting to his shoulder. He whoops, delighted.

“I’m going to feed you to the dragons next time you’re in Romania!” he shouts across the lawn.

“Krum can lick your wounds,” he adds, too loud, the menace, when she corners him with ruthless efficiency. She ties his laces (George applauds on principle). He foregoes magic entirely, lunges, and wraps her in a bear hug. She laughs, furious.

“Let go before we get a re-do of 2003,” she says, voice low enough for him and unfortunately audible to everyone else.

“What happened in 2003?” Ginny demands, immediate.

“Nothing,” they mumble, synchronized and unconvincing. Granger jabs him with a petty little jinx for cheek. He grins wider. Apparently their private dialect is mutual assault with affection.

Ginny, very small script on the rota: Ask about 2003 when Mum’s not here.

This, this ridiculous ritual in bad lantern light, is not a joke. It’s a system for surviving themselves without breaking again. A way to translate war back into muscle memory that bends. They trained this. They trained each other. While Draco trained isolation and silence, they trained the practice of not dying and then laughing at it.

The old ache rises, pure and familiar as his own name: outside. He recognizes it, lets it sit beside him. Then tiny, impolite gestures knock it off-balance. George sprawls across his boots without apology. Ron tosses him a bottle without looking. Ginny asks for a quill and takes his without thanks. Bill claps his shoulder once, brief and steady. Potter flicks his cigarette into the damp and doesn’t tell Draco to leave.

Not welcome, no. Not unwelcome, either. A narrow ledge. He has stood on thinner.

Luna chooses then to set her bronze disc on a stool and clear her throat with clinic-room softness. “One more observation,” she says. “When we pressed the curse, prodded, provoked, it resisted. But there was a consistent recoil. Something pushed back. Not him,” her calm glance touches Draco, “and not us. A third force.”

Granger is already writing. “Meaning an anchor. Or a counterweight.”

“Anchors can be lifted,” Luna says. “The compression spikes, then falls off faster than the input pressure predicts. In plain speech: there’s a buffer. Not relief, exactly. More like a shock-absorption layer that prevents full system collapse when the compulsion is stressed.”

Bill leans in, interest sharpening. “Anchored to what?”

“We don’t know.” Luna’s tone stays maddeningly gentle. “But it’s not infinite. It frays under pressure. Slightly. Repeatable.”

Ginny eyes the chart Luna produces from her satchel, curves, ticks, the flat honesty of ink. “So he’s… not dying?”

“Not from this,” Luna says. “Not yet. And I don’t believe it’s permanent.”

Granger underlines something three times. Draco’s chest tightens and loosens in the same beat, like a man who remembers air. He dislikes it. He wants more.

Potter studies him across the garden, smoke gone, tired still. He speaks quietly, like a truth that doesn’t want to be performed.

“Your aunt,” he says, “may she rot in hell, was evil itself.”

Draco huffs, weary. “And don’t I know it, Potter.”

The lanterns sway. The rota flaps in a small wind. Someone’s laughter runs out of breath. For once, truth isn’t a noose. It’s oxygen you’ve got to earn and keep earning.

Granger, because she cannot leave a thing unpushed, flicks a petty stinger at Charlie from ten paces. It lands; he yelps. “I’m feeding you to the dragons,” he calls back, cheerful as sin.

“I’d be exquisite,” she says, already writing.

Draco watches them bicker, watches the ink dry on anchors can be lifted, and, for the first time in a long time, lets himself believe the word tomorrow might not be a threat. 

Chapter Text

A month passes.

Thirty days of indignity, thinly disguised as research.

Every evening at the Burrow Draco is dragged through Luna’s clinical diagnostics: pulse, breath, magic, all charted with precision that would impress St. Mungo’s. Granger scribbles every detail, muttering arithmancy under her breath. Weasley fetches tea, biscuits, and insults in equal measure. Potter smokes by the back door, contributing nothing except second-hand smoke and the occasional cutting remark. Theo loiters with the air of a man enjoying someone else’s misery.

And then there is the rota.

Pinned between Molly’s shopping lists and a child’s crayon sketch of a dragon, it records Draco’s humiliation with merciless commentary:

Day 4: Malfoy arrived early. Probably lost track of time sulking.

 Day 11: Malfoy tried sarcasm. Groundbreaking.

Day 18: Malfoy attempted charm. Nobody noticed.

 Day 25: Malfoy almost smiled. Someone check him for curses.

Written in Ginny’s sharp hand or George’s looping scrawl, the jabs sting. And yet — if he tilts his head just so, if he squints — they almost read like affection. He tells himself he doesn’t squint.

Not everyone comes every night. Even Granger misses two evenings: once for a Ministry hearing, once without explanation. Weasley keeps the notes in her absence, and to Draco’s dismay, he is irritatingly competent.

“Wasn’t like this back at school,” Ron shrugs when Hermione skims the pages and raises her brows. “But in Auror training, I couldn’t trust Harry to write anything down. Had to keep my own records. Turns out I don’t gallop through life without a plan and a bad haircut.”

“Oi!” Harry barks from the back step, cigarette glowing faintly.

“You gallop,” Ron presses, grinning.

Harry mutters, “I do not gallop.”

On the twenty-eighth day, the experiment goes wrong.

Luna’s instruments spike in color and sound, the wards shiver, and the house itself groans. A vase in the sitting room explodes. Upstairs, a child screams.

Molly Weasley arrives like a thunderclap, wand drawn, apron askew.

“That’s enough,” she says, voice like steel. “This house has seen enough Dark magic. Not again. Not with children under this roof.”

No one argues.

The Burrow has survived two wars. It will not survive becoming a laboratory.

The research stops.

Back at the Manor, Draco sulks. Not sulks, precisely. Just sits in the dark with whisky, glaring at portraits until they look away. Which is sulking by any other name.

Without Luna’s charts, without Granger’s muttering, without Potter’s smoke curling in the air, the days stretch blank and heavy.

He catches himself missing it. Missing the bloody humiliation. Missing, damningly, having a purpose.

It is intolerable.

Three days later, the owl comes.

It lands on the sill with the disdain only owls can muster, glaring as though Draco has personally wasted its time by being alive.

The note is short, penned in Granger’s maddeningly neat hand:

Malfoy,

We meet at mine. Today, six sharp. New findings. Bring a will to remain alive.

— H. Granger

He reads it twice. He mislaid his will to remain alive somewhere in 1997, but fine. He can improvise.

Muggle London is worse than he remembers.

Theo makes appreciative noises since they Apparated into an alley off Charing Cross Road, the note folded in Draco’s pocket.

“Look at this,” Theo says as a red bus trundles past. “Double-decker. Efficient.”

“It’s a bus, Theo,” Draco mutters. “They’ve had them since Merlin knows when.”

“Still. Elegant in its way.”

“Do shut up.”

They turn a corner. Draco hates the noise, the indifference, the sheer anonymity of it all. Wizards build places that look like family trees turned to stone. Muggles build… this.

Theo points at a doorway with bright curtains. “Flat sixteen. That’s her.”

Bright. Of course it is bright.

The flat is nothing like he expects.

Not a chaos of parchment and ink, not the smell of cat hair. Instead: wide windows, clean lines, polished wood, Muggle furniture that looks deliberate rather than cheap. Shelves of books in sharp order. Photographs on the wall: her parents, smiling; a young Hermione at some kind of graduation.

It isn’t grand. It isn’t aristocratic. But it is hers. And that makes Draco feel like an intruder.

George is already there, sprawled on her sofa, flicking sparks from his wand into shapes across the ceiling.

“Don’t burn holes in my flat,” Hermione says without looking up, arms full of parchment.

George grins. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Well. Not again.”

Draco scowls. Once, he would have assumed she was collecting Weasleys like trophies. Now he understands: they come because they want to. Somehow that is worse.

“This is driving me insane,” Harry sighs, leaning against the window, cigarette glowing faintly.

“Driving?” Ron perks up. “When have you ever been able to drive? Remember when he tried to learn, Hermione?”

Hermione doesn’t look up. “He changed the gears like a troll. My poor car still makes noises.”

Harry groans.

“You destroyed the clutch in ten minutes,” Ron adds.

“Eleven,” Hermione corrects, quill scratching.

Harry raises the hand not holding his cigarette and gives them both the middle finger with the weary dignity of a man who has no better defense.

Ron barks a laugh. Hermione smirks.

Theo leans toward Draco. “Do they do this every night?”

“Yes,” Draco mutters. “It’s revolting.”

Harry exhales smoke. “We can hear you, Malfoy.”

“Good,” Draco says flatly. “I’d hate for my suffering to go unremarked.”

Hermione stacks her notes with precision, eyes sharp.

“It isn’t random,” she says. “The spikes Luna measured, they match a sequence. Bellatrix didn’t leave chaos. She left a pattern.”

Theo leans back, unimpressed. “You sound cursed yourself.”

Hermione’s glare could flay skin.

And Draco’s curse yanks the words free. “She is cursed. Just not by Bellatrix.”

The air goes taut. Hermione’s eyes cut to him, sharp as steel. For a heartbeat, he thinks she will hex him. Instead, she turns back to her notes, jaw tight.

Draco looks away. He hates her. Obviously.

But as he sits in her flat, surrounded by her books and her order, her people filling the room with noise and history, an unwelcome thought presses in: perhaps Hermione Granger is more dangerous , and more necessary, than anyone here dares admit.

He buries it.

Draco Malfoy hates Hermione Granger. That is safe. That is true.

Isn’t it?

Hermione’s flat is too bright for this sort of meeting. Truth is better handled under poor lighting, preferably in a dungeon with a damp smell and a chair you can resent. Here there are wide windows, dry air, and a table that looks like it came flat-packed with optimism. Draco stands because no one offers him a chair. Of course they don’t. He is the experiment, not a guest.

Parchment blooms across the table like battle plans. Hermione sorts it with that clipped competence that makes him itch: columns, arrows, a diagram of looping runes that look unsettlingly familiar. Ron leans a hip on the counter, already into a biscuit, crumbs everywhere. Harry props himself at the open window, smoke curling and dissipating on a very untragic breeze. Theo occupies the arm of the sofa with an ornamental air, ankles crossed, a small glass balanced in his long fingers. George has annexed the other end, lazy sparks drift from his wand and sketch shapes on the ceiling until Hermione glares them out of existence.

She taps a quill against one of the diagrams. “Luna’s instruments spike at intervals, not randomly,” she says, eyes on the paper, mind three steps ahead. “Three peaks in one session, four in another. Not chaos. I cross-check the timing against the marginalia in Bellatrix’s notebook and the same rhythm emerges in her rune sequence. It’s not messy, it’s engineered.”

Ron stops mid-bite. “Meaning?”

Hermione doesn’t blink. “Meaning resisting it powers it. Every time he”—a sharp chin-flick at Draco—“pushes back, the structure tightens. Think tether: you pull, it pulls harder. You pull harder again, it ‘learns’ the force required to hold.”

Draco exhales through his nose. “Punished for having a spine. Family tradition.”

“Spare us the martyrdom,” she says, without heat. “It’s not a moral judgement, it’s mechanics.”

Theo tilts his head. “Like an abusive marriage,” he says, velvet-voiced and monstrous for putting it so neatly.

“Not inaccurate,” Draco mutters, and hates that the room hears him.

George leans forward, elbows on his knees. “So it’s less ‘curse’ and more ‘prank you can’t solve’. Busywork in fancy robes. Keep the mark dizzy running in circles until they decide despair is a hobby.” He half-grins, then sobers because Hermione is looking at him like she will staple his mouth shut. “Reverse it. Start where the thing wants to end and tug backwards through the joins. If it’s designed to feed on resistance, feed it decoys. Starve the real mechanism.”

Hermione opens her mouth to tell him all the reasons that’s imprecise and unsafe. She closes it again and writes three lines at speed, ink tight and small. Draco watches the quill scratch. He can almost hear the old school bell in his head. She learned everything under a clock.

Theo murmurs, “Granger takes notes on Weasley’s jokes. Academia has fallen.”

“Shove off,” George says, amiably.

Ron eyes the teetering piles Hermione’s making. “And there she goes. Up all night, again.”

“You don’t have to play nurse,” Hermione says without looking up. “I can manage tea.”

“You forget to drink,” Ron says, without accusation. “You forget to eat. I’ll bring tea.”

Harry blows smoke sideways and squints. “You two sound like grandparents.”

“Better than being married to each other,” Ron returns, promptly.

Theo’s eyebrows lift. “Said like a man with research.”

Ron snorts. “We tried. Decided we like not killing each other.”

Hermione’s mouth does that unwilling twitch that isn’t a smile because she doesn’t have time for smiles; then she turns another page and mutters, almost to herself, “The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself.”

Draco cocks his head. “Insulting and insightful. Well done.”

“Wasn’t mine,” she says, still reading.

“Waterloo!” Ron crows, showering crumbs.

Harry groans around the cigarette. “Every bloody time.”

“What the fuck is a Waterloo?” Draco asks, pure bafflement.

Three faces pivot toward him with practiced pity.

“A song,” Hermione says, as if that settles anything.

“A Muggle song,” Ron adds, too pleased.

Theo smirks. “You’ve missed entire wars, Draco.”

“Waterloo was a war,” Draco says, stung. “I did read a book once.”

Hermione looks up at him properly then, eyes bright with a dry amusement that should be illegal. “Then consider it history repeating.”

The moment tilts. The room is laughing: the soft, resigned kind of laugh you hear in kitchens at midnight when everyone’s too tired to pretend. Draco feels it like a draft under the door. He is in the room and not of it.

The curse chooses then, when his guard dips by a hair. Of course it does.

“You’re fixated,” he says, voice too clear, the words ripping past his teeth like something winged and sharp.

Her head snaps up, glass-hard. “Come again?”

“You heard me,” he says, because the only thing worse than truth is repeating it. “You’re obsessed. The curse holds me the way you hold the curse: relentless, joyless, relentless again. It doesn’t let go. Neither do you.”

Ron’s biscuit hovers midair, a small planet awaiting gravity. Harry takes a drag, exhales, and considers intervening, then decides he enjoys living. George’s eyes flick, measuring for blast radius. Theo looks delighted. Treacherous man.

Hermione’s jaw works once, like she’s biting a word into smaller parts. The quill hovers above the margin. She does not write he is right, but Draco feels the omission.

She turns a page instead, forces her voice even. “If we map the spikes across sessions, we get a repeating lattice. The intervals compress when he lies by omission—” a flick of her gaze at him, efficient as a scalpel— “and expand when he speaks bluntly. That’s the only relief pattern we’ve seen. Tell the whole truth, the lattice slackens for seconds.”

“How cheery,” Draco says. “A diet of confession.”

“Better than starving,” Theo says, easy. “You starve long enough, even a bad diet looks like a feast.”

George taps his wand against his knee, thinking. “If the only relief is brute honesty, build structured vents. Script the truths. Push them down safe channels so the rest of you can breathe.”

Ron blinks. “You’re… good at this.”

George shrugs, eyes old for a heartbeat. “I’ve taken things apart that were meant to make people laugh and found pieces that didn’t care what they did. You learn to tell the difference.”

Hermione’s quill skates. “Structured venting. Decoy resistance. Lattice inversion when—” She stops, glances at Draco like she’s checking a gauge. “Are you following?”

“I am cursed, not stupid,” Draco says. It comes out sharper than intended. The curse thrives on edges.

A small huff leaves her, not quite a laugh. “Noted.”

Draco wishes the floor would open and deliver him to a quiet grave. The windows are too wide for self-respect. He shifts his weight. Standing looks like impatience. Sitting would look like surrender. He settles for insolence: an aristocrat leaning against a bookcase he has not paid for.

Hermione circles a sequence and doesn’t notice that the motion is a little too fast to be calm. She flicks her gaze over them, inventory more than care, but it turns care by habit. “Ron, eat something that isn’t a biscuit. Harry, you’re ashing on my plant. George, stop making lightning at the ceiling. Nott—just… behave. Malfoy—”

She stalls, the barest hitch, as if she’s about to say sit down or stop breathing and thinks better of it. What comes out is automatic and clumsy: “You’ll be fine.”

Draco lifts an eyebrow in lazy murder. “Will I?”

She hears herself then; the armor slips a fraction; the truth spills in a tangle. “I can’t let you die, I need to solve this first. You can die after that.”

The room chokes on a laugh nobody trusts. Ron covers his face with his hand. George wheezes. Harry mutters “sound bedside manner” into his cigarette. Theo actually claps once, silently and appallingly pleased.

But Draco doesn’t laugh. He can’t. He has spent three years being compelled to the bone. He knows the difference between a clever line and an involuntary leak. Hermione Granger is not careless with words. If one gets past her guard, it is because it outruns her.

He files it where the curse lives: under truths he didn’t ask for and can’t return.

She recovers with a snap, stacks her parchment as if she can compress the moment with it. “This flat won’t hold much more of this. The resonance is already stronger than the wards like. We’re not doing a repeat of the Burrow here.” A flash of something: fear, anger, duty, cuts across her face and goes. “We need older material. The sequences reference Black family methods. We have to go back to Grimmauld Place.”

Harry’s cigarette stills. The ash grows a spine and drops. “That house again,” he says, not dramatic—only tired in a way that has a border. Draco sees it: rooms that never warmed properly, a hallway that smelled of damp and history, a mad portrait that required silencing like a difficult conscience. He understands why Potter never lived there. He also understands that some houses refuse to let you stop paying rent.

Ron glances at the window as if the street beyond might volunteer to be a different life. “We can do it. We’ve done worse.”

“That’s what worries me,” Hermione says, dry.

Theo rolls the glass between his fingers. “Pros: original context, original materials, original ward signatures. Cons: the memory of an entire war with nicer curtains.”

George scratches his jaw. “I’ll bring toys.” He catches Hermione’s look. “Not exploding ones. Distracting. Give the house something shiny so it stops chewing the furniture.”

“You are not giving Number 12 a chew toy,” Hermione says, but she writes decoy ward stressors in the margin anyway because she’s constitutionally incapable of ignoring a potentially useful terrible idea.

Harry crushes the cigarette out on the sill and flicks the butt into a jam jar where three others already drown. “We set conditions. Pairs. No one alone with the house or the past.” He doesn’t look at Draco when he says or the past, which is almost polite.

Ron nods. “And daylight only. No night-time heroics.”

“Agreed,” Hermione says, which is rich coming from her.

“Who watches Malfoy?” George asks, faux-innocent.

“Everyone,” Hermione says. Then, not meeting Draco’s eye: “Especially me.”

The curse noses at that like a hound, wanting to drag it fully into the open. Draco clamps his jaw. He has learned that some truths cost more than the relief they buy.

The room exhales like a tide changing. For once, there is no immediate sprint, no frantic packing of bags or seven contradictory plans shouted at once. They are adults with rotas and backs that ache. They can afford to wait till morning.

Harry pushes away from the window. “Right. Enough for tonight.”

“Seconded,” Ron says around the last bite of biscuit. “If we go over much more, Hermione will start making us translation glossaries for Bellatrix and George’s nonsense.”

Hermione makes a note that says exactly glossary and Ron groans like a man who has seen God and regretted it.

Theo slides off the sofa arm and straightens his cuffs. “I am available to consult for a scandalous fee.”

“I’m not paying you,” Draco says, the truth scratching his throat into politeness.

“You never do,” Theo replies, affectionate and cruel in the way only oldest friends can be.

George stretches, bones popping, older than his grin lets on. “I’ll send over a list of harmless mischief that reads like a threat.” He taps the diagram with the back of his wand. “And Granger? Make a copy of that for me. I want to see how a madwoman thought about corners.”

Hermione’s pen pauses. “Which madwoman?”

George meets her eyes, the weight of two names tucked into the set of his mouth. “Either.”

Silence threads thin through the room. Draco thinks of Bellatrix and the particular flavor of dread that word still carries. He thinks of Hermione, eyes hollowed out by sleeplessness, scribbling under a lamp at two in the morning, the quill wearing grooves in paper and perhaps in her. He says nothing, because if he says anything, the curse will insist he say too much.

They drift without ceremony. Ron clears mugs into the sink. Harry opens the window further and fans the smoke like he can waft war out into the London night. Theo pockets his glass because he’s a heathen. George pockets a biscuit because he’s a Weasley.

Draco remains where he is. Hermione is left with the papers and the quiet. She aligns a stack that does not need aligning. He recognizes the trick. Sometimes order is the only spell that works.

She looks up, as if she’d forgotten he was part of the furniture and is mildly surprised to find he hasn’t folded himself and slid under it. Her voice comes out brisk but less sharp. “You can go.”

“I wasn’t asking permission,” he says, because he has to say something and that is least revealing.

She nods like the conversation has occurred to her in a language she’s still learning. “We leave at ten. Daylight,” she adds for Harry’s benefit, though he’s already gone.

Draco’s mouth moves before he can find the safer version of the sentence. “Try to sleep.”

Her eyebrows lift. “Do I look like I need the reminder?”

“Yes,” the curse says through him, hard and stupid. “Constantly.”

Something like a smile ghosts her face; thin, accidental, traitorous to her intentions. “Then take your own advice. You look like you haven’t done it in a decade.”

“Three years,” he says, too honest. He swallows the rest. He doesn’t owe her the arithmetic of his nights.

She gathers a few sheets and opens a drawer, slips them in as if she’s posting letters to the future. “You’ll be fine,” she says again, and this time she hears herself and amends nothing.

He nods as if he believes it, because he can lie with silence if not with words. He moves to the door. Theo ghosts at his shoulder like the bad idea he lives for.

In the hallway, Theo exhales a sound that might be laughter. “Well. We’re all going to die artistically.”

“Shut up,” Draco says, without heat.

On the threshold, he looks back once, an old habit, like counting hex-marks on a door you hate. Hermione is already bending over the diagram again, pencil between fingers now instead of quill, faster, rougher, more human. She touches the sequence like she’s learning a melody she intends to break and rearrange until it plays in a different key.

The truth prods him once more, an unkind friend: she is fixed on the curse the way the curse is fixed on him. It is consuming her. It has consumed him. Between those hungers, there might be a seam to pry open.

He closes the door on the thought before it has the chance to become hope.

Down on the pavement, London does that indifferent roar that tries to convince you you’re small and therefore safe. It lies, badly. Theo says something about buses. Draco pretends he doesn’t hear him. They walk.

At the kerb, a cab rattles past, radio tinny through the glass, a voice pitching toward the chorus. Draco catches a fragment, kings and defeats and something about destinies, and decides Muggle culture is just wizard nonsense with better hooks.

“Tomorrow,” Theo says, hands in pockets.

“Tomorrow,” Draco agrees, and hears the curse hum in the word like a string pulled too tight.

They Disapparate from the alley with a crack the city promptly swallows, and Hermione’s bright flat exhales once into the quiet. On the table, the diagram waits. In the jar on the sill, three cigarette ends lean together like battered soldiers. On the shelf, a photo of two Muggles smiles without knowing anything about wars their daughter keeps winning long after they end.

And in Draco’s chest, something small, stubborn, stupid, turns over and refuses to die, no matter how many clever ways he’s invented to bury it.

He tells himself it’s indigestion.

It isn’t.

Chapter Text

Three years ago

Theo had chosen one of the quieter sitting rooms at Nott Manor, the one that smelt faintly of leather and old ink instead of cigars and bad decisions. The lamps were low the way he liked them, whisky already breathing in the cut crystal, and the curtains drawn enough to pretend the rest of wizarding Britain didn’t exist.

“Right,” Theo said, settling on the arm of a chair like furniture had been designed as a provocation. “Before we discover you’ve been cursed by a bored god, tell me what the hell happened with Astoria.”

Draco had intended to lie. He always intended to lie lately; it never worked. “I told her,” he heard himself say, flat as a ledger, “that I’d rather jump off a tower than marry her.”

Theo blinked once. “Direct.”

“I also said,” Draco went on, because apparently his mouth had unionized, “that I didn’t think I could make another person happy while I was… like this.” He gestured vaguely at himself, as if that narrowed it down. “And that, selfishly, I wanted out.”

Theo’s mouth twitched. Concern wore his friend’s face like a well-tailored coat; he tried to hide it under humor and failed, which for Theo counted as sentiment. “And she…?”

“She was relieved,” Draco said, and the truth of it surprised him afresh, as if he’d only now allowed himself to look at that memory without dressing it. “More relieved than offended. We’re not enemies. We were never much of anything.”

“And Narcissa?”

He didn’t sigh, exactly; Malfoys weren’t supposed to deflate in public. “She sent me a three-foot letter whose thesis was ‘what the hell is wrong with you’ with footnotes in French.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “She had a plan. I ruined the plan. She doesn’t like improvisation unless she’s the one improvising.”

Theo poured. “Motherhood’s favorite hobby: editing a son’s life.”

“Mm.” Draco took the glass because doing something with his hands made it less likely he would throw them in the air. “She said I’d embarrassed the family. I said the family was already an embarrassment. She said I was being dramatic. I said I was being honest.”

“And you think that’s the problem,” Theo guessed, not unkindly.

“I think I can’t stop,” Draco said, and hated the smallness of it. “I think I can’t say the wrong thing, which would be… helpful in any other life.”

Theo perched properly, hands steepled in a way that would have looked ridiculous on anyone else. “Let’s establish facts. You first noticed it when?”

“After Gringotts,” Draco said before he could choose a clever evasion. “The vault. A week later? Ten days? I don’t know. I woke up and everything had become… absolute.”

“You tried to lie and it…?”

“Came out the opposite,” Draco said. “Or came out the truth. Or came out more truth than I’d meant. It’s like—” He stopped, irritated at the poetry of it. “It’s like the words jump the queue. I open my mouth to say the polite thing, and the accurate one elbows past.”

Theo’s eyes warmed with that particular brand of sympathy he never weaponized. “So let’s test. Baseline. Say something harmless. ‘I like wine.’”

“I like wine,” Draco said. It slid out easily; his throat didn’t burn; no headache pressed at his temples. He felt, absurdly, grateful for the simplicity of a sentence.

“Good,” Theo said. “Now something we both know is false, but harmless. ‘I enjoyed school.’”

“I hated school,” Draco said promptly, and then, uninvited, “except Quidditch.” He scowled. “That wasn’t part of the exercise.”

“The curse likes to annotate,” Theo said lightly. “All right. Stronger lie. Say you adore your father and always have.”

Draco set his glass down very carefully, because dropping it would be theatre and he was not doing theatre today. “I—” The shape of adore dried out his mouth. He pushed at the word the way you push at a stuck door. Pain blossomed at the hinge of his jaw, a pressure behind his eyes. “I…” The door refused. The truth kicked it open. “I feared him,” he said. “I resented him. I wanted him to be someone else and he never was.”

Theo didn’t flinch. He only adjusted the target. “Tell me something you can comfortably lie about. Something neutral. Weather.”

“It’s a lovely day,” Draco said, and the curse turned the screw, obliging, cruel. “It’s bloody grey,” he corrected, breath leaving him as if the air had cost him.

Theo’s smirk softened into thought. “So: any attempt at a falsehood triggers correction. Side effects?”

“Headache, throat tightens,” Draco said. “A sort of… pressure until I give in.”

“Punishes resistance,” Theo murmured. “Rewards compliance with relief.”

“Like training a dog,” Draco said, sarcastic to cover how that landed. “Heel, speak, roll over.”

Theo inclined his head. “Not inaccurate. Next: omission. Tell me about breakfast.”

Draco reached for safe ground. “Toast.”

Theo waited.

“Tea,” Draco added, feeling faintly foolish.

Theo kept waiting.

“And… whisky,” Draco said, and the pressure eased. “It was a bad morning.”

“We’re establishing that if you omit relevant detail, the curse prompts more, yes?” Theo’s tone stayed clinical, but his eyes kept skimming Draco’s face like he was checking for little cracks.

“Yes,” Draco said. “It is a very nosy parasite.”

“Try refusal,” Theo said gently. “Say nothing. Choose not to answer.”

Draco closed his mouth and looked at the wallpaper. The wallpaper had always offended him; today it became a focus. He fixed his gaze on a pattern of interlocking leaves and decided he was not answering. The pain was slower this time, like a hand tightening. He lasted longer than he had with lies. Then breath hitched and words pushed. “I can’t,” he said hoarsely. “It won’t let me have nothing.”

Theo exhaled. He had the grace not to write anything down. “So the options are: tell the truth, tell more truth than intended, or suffer until you tell the truth.”

“You forgot ‘decorate the truth’, which it also enjoys,” Draco said. “We learnt about toast.”

“Better toast than trauma,” Theo said lightly, then sobered. “Look at me. Do you feel… watched?”

Draco raised an eyebrow. “By you? Constantly.”

“By the magic,” Theo corrected. “Is there a sense of… listener? Caster? Anchor?”

Draco considered. He didn’t want to. Consideration meant looking directly at what he’d been skirt­ing. “No,” he said finally. “Not like a person at the other end of a string. It feels… self-contained. Like an instruction repeating itself because that’s what it does.”

“A loop,” Theo said. “An engine.”

“Spare me your metaphors,” Draco said, except he wanted them because understanding meant control, and control had been in short supply since he was eleven.

Theo studied him for another long moment. Then he sat back and attempted a smirk. “The good news is you’re very honest. The bad news is you’re very honest.”

Draco made a face. “I am leaving your house.”

“You live in my house half the time,” Theo said. “It would be symbolic at best.” He lifted his glass again, and when he spoke next, the levity was thinner. “This isn’t… small. You know that. It isn’t a jinx you picked up at a pub. It’s structured. The corrections are consistent. The punishments are proportional. It’s… designed.”

“To what.” Draco didn’t ask. The question asked itself.

Theo’s smile went sideways. “To make you an excellent dinner guest.”

Draco glared.

Theo let it drop. “We’ll catalogue symptoms first. Then sources. Backwards from the last week to Gringotts. Who did you see. What did you touch. What did you say.”

“You’re enjoying this,” Draco accused, because snapping was easier than saying thank you for helping me not fall apart.

“I enjoy being right,” Theo said. “I don’t enjoy this.” He gestured at Draco and meant everything. “And I don’t enjoy the idea that someone designed something that lives in your mouth.”

Draco stared into his whisky. “I am going to die of mortification before the curse finds a way to finish me,” he said. “That’s how it ends. Tell my mother I expired from honesty.”

“She’d never recover,” Theo said, perfectly solemn. “Also she’d find a way to make it your fault.”

Draco’s mouth twitched, traitorous. “She’s very talented.”

“Hmm,” Theo said. “Tell me something true you wish you could lie about.”

Draco didn’t even try to choose a gentle one. “I don’t know that I’m capable of happiness,” he said, and his own voice annoyed him. “There. Put it on a cushion.”

Theo winced like he’d walked into furniture. “Try again. Smaller.”

“I miss my mother,” Draco said, and then, as the compulsion tipped him forward: “I miss the version of her I had before she decided I was a legacy to be managed.”

Theo didn’t speak. He got up and came back with the decanter and topped Draco’s glass as if topping it would anchor the man holding it. “All right,” he said after a beat. “That’s enough for today.”

“We’ve established very little,” Draco said.

“We’ve established plenty,” Theo said. He ticked points off on elegant fingers. “You can’t lie. You can’t omit without pressure. You can’t keep silent for long. The correction is immediate, worse with bigger falsehoods. It’s not tethered to a caster you can sense. It behaves like an instruction set—self-enforcing, iterative, punishing resistance. We will find the design. Then we will find the designer.”

“Assuming they’re not dead,” Draco said drily.

Theo’s eyes flicked up, briefly sharp. “Dead people leave notes.”

“So do mad people,” Draco said.

“My point stands,” Theo said. He drained his own glass, set it down, and went for jest like a man reaching for a familiar coat. “In the meantime, you have me. I’ll ask gentle questions and you’ll blurt appalling truths. We’ll call it therapy.”

“I will not be paying you,” Draco said.

“You never do,” Theo said, with real fondness under the tiredness. “Sleep here tonight. You look like you’ll pick a fight with your staircase.”

Draco considered. He didn’t want to impose. He also didn’t want to hear his own footsteps echo through rooms that had far too much of his father’s voice baked into the walls. “Fine,” he said. “But I’m taking the bed.”

“You’re taking the sofa,” Theo said, both of them knowing there were far too many empty bedrooms with spare beds in that Manor.

Draco opened his mouth to lie about that. The headache began at once. He shut it again, scowled, and conceded defeat. “Your house,” he said. “Your furniture.”

Theo grinned and, briefly, looked as young as they both still were. “Exactly.”

They sat back into the quiet with the lamp glow soft against the spines of books. Draco let himself look at his friend in the light and admit the thing the curse would pry out anyway: he was grateful, and he was frightened, and he had no intention of saying either aloud if he could help it.

“Tomorrow,” Theo said into the peace, “we start writing a list.”

“Of what.”

“Suspects,” Theo said. “Artefacts. Incidents. Anything with teeth. We’ll work backwards till something bites our hand.”

“Excellent,” Draco said. “You’re very reassuring.”

“I know,” Theo said, and let his head tip back against the chair with a weary grace. “It’s my worst trait.”

Draco closed his eyes and tried not to think of towers or vows or girls with tremoring hands being told the truth like a slap. He tried not to think of his mother’s elegant fury, of letters with sharp edges, of being twenty-four and already exhausted by his own voice.

The whisky warmed a path down his center. The lamps hummed. The room held. And for an evening, at least, he could pretend they had more time than they did.

They began the next day with lists and ended it with a headache. The lists didn’t mind; they multiplied under Theo’s neat hand, arranging themselves into families: curses with compulsion elements, artefacts designed for interrogation, old Black magic that sounded like instruction, goblin work with hinges (why hinges? Theo had reasons for everything). Draco found himself pulled along by the momentum, saying things he hadn’t meant to say and watching Theo build a scaffolding out of them. It should have been humiliating. It was, a little. It was also the first week he’d felt like something other than a man strapped to his own mouth.

On the third evening, Theo said, “Try this for me. Say you’re well.”

Draco said, “I am not well,” and the curse let him have the mercy of it.

“Good,” Theo said, then grimaced at his own word choice. “Not good. Useful.”

“Hmm,” Draco said. “Say something untrue,” Theo prompted, and Draco, very tired, tried, “I don’t miss her.” The curse corrected: “I miss her,” and after a beat, to complete the ritual it seemed to prefer, “but I wouldn’t make her happy, and she wouldn’t make me, and pretending otherwise would be a cruelty.”

“The curse doesn’t force eloquence,” Theo said dryly. “That was all you.”

“Kill me,” Draco said into his glass.

“Later,” Theo said. “After we have a method.”

They discovered, across that first fortnight, that silence hurt more in the morning and less at night, that lies about the past drew blood and lies about the weather only tugged, that omitting names cut like a paper slice on soft skin. They discovered that Draco could not say no to the act of speaking, but could say no to invitations, which was petty and pleased him in a childish way. He said no to Theo three times just to prove he could. Theo took the abuse with good humor and reached for another sheet.

On the seventh day, Draco found himself staring at a sentence in Theo’s careful script: Self-enforcing instruction. Punishes resistance. Rewards compliance. Goal unknown.

He put his finger on unknown and said, very quietly, “It wants obedience.”

Theo lifted his head. “Say again.”

“It wants obedience,” Draco repeated, and the curse didn’t bite; it sighed in relief as if it had been waiting for him to name the obvious. He laughed without any humor in it. “Of course it does. It wants me trained.”

Theo’s smirk didn’t survive that. “All right,” he said. “Then we find the trainer.”

Draco nodded. He swallowed the dread that came with the obvious next step: if you wanted widespread obedience, you didn’t waste your best trick on one ex–Death Eater out of pity. You prototyped on him, perhaps. You did not stop there.

He didn’t say it. He didn’t need to. Theo wrote anyway, hand steady. If this scales, it builds a system.

“Tea?” Theo said too brightly.

“Whisky,” Draco said, and let himself be human enough to take it.

Present bloody day

Daylight slants across Hermione’s flat, bright and sharp, the kind of light that ought to belong to rest days. It’s a weekend, which means the others are scattered to families and obligations. Only three of them can make it: Granger, Lovegood, and Draco.

Luna looks tired , more than tired, really. Her healer’s robes are pressed but her eyes are smudged, her hair escaping in wisps. Draco knows, against his will, through the endless osmosis of other people’s chatter, that she’s a mother of twins, a full-time healer, and still makes time to help them catalogue his misery. He resents knowing these things about her life, as if someone had scribbled notes in the margins of his book.

It makes Granger’s brisk efficiency seem almost merciful by comparison. She’s half-hidden behind her quill, her notes neat enough to be weaponized. The three of them are gathered because no one else could rearrange schedules, and Draco thinks there’s something absurd about being dissected on a Saturday afternoon.

“Say something untrue,” Luna says evenly. Her voice has none of the dreamy lilt of old; it’s clinical, the same tone she’d probably use on a coughing patient.

Draco smirks. Fine. Easy enough. He thinks, Granger’s flat is hideous.

But what comes out is: “I like Granger’s taste. The flat is tolerable. Even stylish.”

Hermione’s quill halts. Her mouth tightens.

Draco groans. “Bloody hell. Didn’t even let me attempt it. Rewrote me before the words were out.”

Luna flicks her wand, charting the spell’s signature in the air like a doctor tracing veins. “Attempted falsehood blocked. Compelled truth overrides intent.”

He tips his head back. “Excellent. Not only can’t I lie, I don’t even get the courtesy of trying. I’m a marionette.”

It hits like déjà vu. Theo, years earlier, perched on a desk with Firewhisky in hand: ‘Try again. Tell me the moon’s made of cheese.’

Draco had tried. Instead, he’d spat, ‘The moon is a dead rock and I hate it.’

Theo had laughed until he cried, then sobered. ‘It’s not about truth, mate. It’s about control.’

The memory settles over him like dust.

“Again,” Hermione says now, sharp. “Say nothing.”

Draco clenches his jaw. He forces silence. It slips anyway: “I am tired. I am bloody tired.”

The curse drags him like a hook through the ribs. He wants to spit at the floor, but the words keep spilling.

“I have become a cautionary tale in political engineering. How very dull.”

The room stiffens. Hermione’s quill hovers, useless.

"Not yet", Granger utters, then she breathes, almost to herself: “With a little help from my friends.”

Draco lifts an eyebrow. Friends? What the hell do her friends have to do with him being a lesson?

Luna looks up, offering the faintest sad smile. “Oh, I know that one.” Her voice softens, and this time it carries that old faraway quality, as though she’s speaking across a great distance. “Do you need anybody?”

Hermione exhales, a humorless laugh. “I just want someone to love.”

Draco blurts, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The Beatles,” Hermione says, half-smiling despite herself. The expression flickers, fragile, and her ears pink. She steps away from the table as if she’s caught herself out.

Luna tilts her head. “That was one of Fred’s favorite songs. It fits, don’t you think? He always went by with a little help from his friends.”

Hermione returns after a beat, sitting straighter. She doesn’t resume her notes. She just watches Draco as if he might sprout another confession.

For the smallest, most treacherous second, Draco notices how the light catches the strands of hair slipping from her braid, how stubborn she looks even when she’s shaken. The thought sparks uninvited and he stamps it out as quickly as it arrives. No. Not that. Never that.

Luna closes her parchment with finality. “It isn’t about truth. It’s about obedience. Oppression.”

Hermione’s voice is raw now. “If this curse had spread, if it had scaled—no lies, no secrets, no resistance. Only his reality. His world.”

Draco feels the words carve through the air.

Theo’s old voice echoes in his skull: Not truth. Control.

Voldemort hadn’t needed victory in battle. He’d been planning victory in silence. Domination at the root.

And this was only the blueprint.

Chapter Text

Saturday daylight turns Hermione Granger’s flat into an operating theatre. Bright windows, bright plants, bright order. It ought to be restful; it isn’t. The room hums with the ache of unfinished problems.

It’s a reduced cast today: Potter, Weasley, Granger, Nott, Charlie, and Draco. Ginny is at the Burrow with the kids; Potter says it like a weather report. Weasley adds that Bill is with his lot, too: same tone, different weather. Family day across the Weasleys. The air shifts for a second around the mention of children. Draco ignores the tug in his gut. He has practice.

Granger doesn’t do preamble. “We can’t keep testing here,” she says, a pencil behind her ear, quill poised like a scalpel. “Too much magic in Muggle London is reckless. My wards weren’t designed for… this.”

“Translation,” Nott murmurs, lounging on the arm of a chair, “she doesn’t want us blowing up her nice flat.”

Granger ignores him. Potter nods once, decision taken, and the room reorganizes itself as if willed. Cloaks are lifted, notes stacked, wands checked. No one asks Draco if he’s ready; the assumption is built into the way they move. He follows because there’s nothing else to do.

They Apparate to the street off Grimmauld Place. The number is blank, a gap where a house pretends it doesn’t exist. They climb the familiar step and then, nothing. No sly unfurling of brick. No conspiratorial shiver. Just a group of wizards standing on a London pavement like tourists at the wrong museum.

Potter frowns at the empty doorframe. Tries a counter-ward. The air tickles and does nothing. Charlie sets a steadying palm to the lintel and shuts his eyes, listening the way only dragon men and war people listen. Weasley swears under his breath.

They stand there long enough for Draco to get bored of their faces.

“Maybe the house is a vampire,” he says, dry as dust. “Wants blood.”

No one tells him not to be ridiculous, which is how you know it isn’t. He draws his wand across his palm without drama and presses the smear to the stone. Blood darkens, magic takes it like a dog takes a treat, and the world flinches. Number 12 elbows itself back into being with a sullen groan.

“This house is going to bleed me dry by the end of the month,” he mutters, flexing his hand.

“At least it’s the first time something actually wants you, Draco,” Nott says, not looking up as he pockets a handkerchief he’s just charmed into bandage duty. He hands it over anyway. “Present for the donor.”

Draco wraps his palm. The door yawns. They step into the narrow hall, and the house breathes out a draft like an insult.

It’s wrong today. Not merely dusty, or old, or full of history that can’t keep its hands to itself. Wrong in the actively resentful way a place gets when it’s been used and emptied and then summoned again by people who weren’t invited. The wooden runner creaks with opinion. The balustrade rattles. Something invisible knocks a chair six inches sideways and drops it again, petulant as a child who’s learned the word “mine”.

Charlie works a quick, neat triage on the nearest ward-lines. “Not safe,” he says, voice low. “This place wants blood, and it’s starving for it.”

“Excellent,” Draco says. “I’m the family tap. Try not to use me up all at once.”

No one laughs, but something loosens; gallows humor always gets a seat at this table.

Granger is already halfway down the hall, checking the ward signatures Potter and Bill layered weeks ago. Potter takes the opposite wall without needing to be told. Weasley plants himself near the door, a habit as old as survival, covering the exit with the casual competence of someone who’s stood in too many thresholds.

They spread like they’ve done this for years, and they have, in different houses with different ghosts. Granger calls for a reading; Potter answers with numbers; Charlie translates the house’s sulks into cursebreaker problems. Draco can make out three layers of ward-magic in the air, vibrating like strings in different tempers: the old Black bones, the Weasley-patched tendons, and something newer that keeps trying to bite.

“What did you do to aggravate it?” Nott asks, mostly to amuse himself.

“Showed up,” Draco says.

Weasley snorts. “That’ll do it.”

They take the entrance first. If the house can be bullied into a truce, it must start at the door. Potter anchors a simple column against backlash. Weasley braces the frame with a stubborn bit of Auror engineering that looks like nothing and holds like a friend. Granger maps the threshold with her wand-tip, lips moving as she translates. Charlie murmurs counter-harmonics down the stairs until the banister stops twitching like it’s thinking about strangling someone.

Draco stands exactly where Granger told him, which is to say: barely inside, hands visible, calm. It irks him that he takes orders well. It irks him more that it works.

The first wave is hissy: a teeth-on-glass rasp that pricks the skin, sets the hair on his arms to attention, and tries to shove him back onto the step. The second is heavier, a dull-bodied punch that hits the ribs and rumbles the floorboards. The third goes for his throat—the sort of magic that wants names and gets them. He feels the curse under his tongue twitch, eager to oblige.

“Don’t,” Granger says without looking up.

He doesn’t, and the word lands with more relief than he’d like to admit. Weasley’s bracing charm catches the worst of the shove; Potter’s column hums; Charlie’s counterpoint undercuts the house’s temper with a deeper, steadier rhythm. The hall eases. Not friendly, never that, but marginally less likely to throw a lamp.

“Entry stabilized,” Granger says. “For now.”

“For now,” Potter echoes, tone unamused.

The next room is the drawing room, the one with the curtains that should be classified as a weapon. Someone muted Walburga ages ago and stapled her behind spellwork, but the portrait still glares like a curse with a face. Draco experiences a petty, private joy at walking past her with his wand out and not being immediately hexed into next week.

They set temporary anchors in the four corners and triangulate the worst of the house’s sulking. Charlie draws a chalk circle on the floor. “Short read,” he says. “In and out. If the bone wards spike, we stop.”

“No longer than three minutes,” Granger adds. Potter nods. Weasley folds his arms and makes the face of a man impartially opposed to stupid ideas.

“Who’s in the circle?” Draco asks, though he’s already stepping into it.

Nott raises a hand. “I’ll stand at the line. If you start doing your greatest-hits confessional, I’ll cut it. Promise.”

“You’re terrible at promises,” Draco says.

“I’m excellent at cutting things,” Nott replies. “Different discipline.”

Charlie looks between them, then at Granger. “On your mark.”

Granger glances at Potter, and something passes between them that’s older than any of this: the look people wear when the only way out has always been through. Potter gives one short nod. Weasley exhales, shifts his weight, ready to move.

“Now,” Granger says.

The circle kisses Draco’s ankles (cold first, then hot) and the curse wakes like a dog hearing a gate. He keeps his mouth shut to be clever; it isn’t. Pressure builds behind his teeth like water behind a bad dam.

“I—” It rips out. “I thought I’d be dead by twenty. Everything after that feels like a scheduling error.”

His chest tightens. He tries to drag the words back. The curse takes offence and shoves.

“I wanted the Dark Lord dead long before he was.”

The air in the circle sours. Nott’s hand twitches toward the line; Granger’s wand tilts. Draco’s throat burns.

“I dream about putting my wand in my own mouth.”

“Stop,” Granger says, voice like a clean cut.

Nott slices the circle with a simple, brutal counter. The line hisses, breaks; magic snaps back into the floor with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Draco staggers, catches himself on the table, and swallows until his stomach believes it won’t be sick.

Nott crouches in front of him and goes for levity that fools no one. “Well. That went worse than expected. Which, considering my expectations, is saying something.”

“Your methodology is flawed,” Draco manages. He hears himself and hates the prissy edge enough to love it a little.

“So is your personality,” Nott says, gentler. Worry sits neat and unapologetic in his eyes.

Potter doesn’t offer comfort, which is a comfort in itself. “We learned something,” he says instead. “The circle amplifies the compulsion. It also gives us a clean way to cut it.”

Granger is already writing, lips moving. “Environmental triggers matter. Anything that mimics confinement increases pressure to disclose.” She looks up at Draco. “Did you feel a change when you tried to stay silent, before you spoke?”

“I feel a change whenever I try to stay silent,” he says, and nearly laughs because the line is almost funny. “It’s a tug first. Then a shove. Then, pain, if I’m stubborn past the curse’s patience.”

She writes that down, not in triumph but in something like anger on his behalf. It’s not for him, of course. It’s for the problem. He still takes the shape of it, and the shape sits somewhere unfortunately near gratitude.

The house throws a small tantrum to remind them it exists: a puff of dust from the crown molding, a clatter from the fireplace as if a grate decided it didn’t want to be in this marriage any longer. Charlie hums at it and it sulks quieter. Draco files away, for future fascination, that this is what competence looks like in men who have chosen dragons over people.

“Entrance, drawing room, and the corridor to the study,” Granger says, ticking boxes in her neat little war inside a notebook. “We won’t re-layer anything permanent with Bill gone, but at least the house won’t try to swallow us whole every time we open a book.”

Weasley glances at her ink-smeared fingers. “You know this counts as a day off for you, right?”

“I don’t know what those are,” she says, deadpan.

“Exactly my point.”

Potter checks the bracing column at the door again. It hums obediently; even the house has limits. He looks tired in the way new parents look tired, married to it, resigned, but steady in the way survivors do. The scar on his forehead is a pale, uninterested line today, more old punctuation than threat.

They pause, the lot of them, in that narrow way people do after a room stops trying to murder them. Draco watches the trio without meaning to. It’s not banter now. No jokes, no quick words. Just the old, quiet choreography of three people who learned to stand upright by leaning. Potter rubs his thumb over the corner of a table and stares at nothing for exactly one breath too long; Weasley steps to him without looking, a shoulder half-press in passing; Granger’s hand skims the back of Weasley’s arm as she passes to Potter, and then she is in front of them both, eyes on the numbers, voice low, and they are, unshowily, together. Charlie sees it too, of course he does, and obligingly looks away. Draco catalogues the feeling that slides through him and calls it contempt because the alternative is something with teeth.

“Right,” Granger says at last, brisk again. “Before we break anything else, can we summarize what we do and don’t know?”

“We know the house hates us,” Weasley offers.

“We knew that,” Potter says.

“We know it hates Malfoy less,” Weasley adds, and if it’s a joke it’s the kind that owns its edge.

“I’m irresistible,” Draco says.

“Only to buildings,” Nott says. “And bad ideas.”

Granger waits them out. They go quiet in the manner of people who have been trained, by the same woman, to do as they’re told. She taps the quill against the page, tongue behind her teeth, thinking.

“The compulsion escalates under constraints,” she says. “Circles, thresholds, formal bindings. Silence is punished. Attempted falsehood is intercepted, rewritten before speech.”

“Possession by bureaucrat,” Draco says.

“Poetry,” Nott murmurs. “You’ve grown.”

Charlie leans a hip on the mantel as if he trusts nothing else to hold weight. “The bone wards are reactive, not purely passive. The house is setting its own conditions. It took Black blood to open the door; it’ll keep demanding it until we rework the base layer.”

“Bill,” Weasley says, already resigned to sibling logistics.

“When he isn’t a father first, yes,” Charlie says, with the mild gravity only brothers can get away with. “Until then, I can keep it from biting.”

“Noted,” Granger says. She turns the page. “Malfoy, what else have you tried that we haven’t catalogued?”

There are several answers he could give, none flattering. He thinks about offering one of the ones that make him look like a man of extraordinary persistence rather than a man who has run out of surfaces to bounce off.

Nott saves him from the performance. “He’s been sneaking off to Hogwarts for about a year.”

Every head turns. Nott smiles as if he’s helped.

“I ran out of places to consult,” Draco says, flat. “Begged McGonagall to let me pester the dead. They’re unspeakably dull, and I say that as someone who once had a two-hour conversation with a tax ledger.”

Potter’s mouth doesn’t smile, but something eases in his eyes. Recognition, perhaps, of the way desperation looks dressed up as research. “Hogwarts would be the right place to study this.”

Weasley throws up a hand. “Sure. Shall we all commute to Scotland every day? Because my knees won’t stand for it. And Mum will ask questions if I keep nicking leftovers to feed a castle.”

“Mum asks questions when you breathe,” Charlie says, amused.

“Exactly,” Weasley says, with the satisfaction of a man who has made and won an argument with a family member inside his own head.

Granger is still looking at Draco. He pretends not to notice. He is very out of practice at being looked at without contempt, and whatever this is, analysis, fury, inconvenient empathy, feels dangerous.

The house groans, a long, unhappy vertebrae-pop of a sound, and drops a handful of stale soot into the fireplace like punctuation. Charlie flicks it aside without breaking his line of thought. “We should keep today to stabilization,” he says. “No clever experiments without Bill or Luna.”

“Merlin save me from clever experiments,” Draco mutters.

“You love clever,” Nott says. “It keeps you from feeling anything else.”

Draco opens his mouth to reply and the curse, delighted to be of service, shoves three honest retorts to the front of his teeth at once. He shuts his mouth again. One day he will bite his own tongue off and be free.

“Fine,” Granger says. “Stabilize entry rooms. Confirm we can occupy the study without getting killed by the bookcases. Brief testing only if we can control it.”

“Define control,” Nott says, because he is constitutionally incapable of not.

“Me,” Granger says.

Nott grins, as if she’s told a joke. She hasn’t.

They move again. The study smells like old ink and older men. The house tries to bluff with a petty shove; Weasley’s charm blocks it with the weary tolerance of a man refusing to be bullied by a room. Potter holds his column steady. Charlie lays a gentler hum under everything and the shelves decide, temporarily, not to throw themselves.

Draco’s headache arrives on schedule. He leans a hip against the table and closes his eyes. He stays there long enough that someone might call it resting and short enough to pretend it was nothing. When he opens his eyes, Granger is watching him with a clinical interest that has nothing to do with pity. He scowls to cover the small relief of it.

“Short test,” she says, as if the earlier disaster didn’t happen. “No binding. No circle. Environmental pressure only. I’ll ask, you don’t resist.”

“The dream,” Nott says, too quickly, trying to make a joke of the worst thing in the room. “Live the dream.”

Draco gives him a look that would have got them both detentions in school. “I’ll try not to ruin your afternoon by dying on the carpet.”

“Please don’t,” Weasley says. “I hate bloodstains on rugs.”

“Fine,” Draco says to Granger. “One question.”

She nods, sober. “What would you do if this were over?”

He aims for a deflection. The curse kicks his knees out.

“Leave,” he says. “Vanish. Find somewhere that doesn’t know my face and be no one in particular.” The truth lands in his mouth like a bruise.

Granger’s pen doesn’t move. She just looks at him for a heartbeat longer than is legal.

“Next question,” Potter says, clean, to save them both. It’s almost kind.

“No,” Granger says, and the word isn’t sharp; it’s careful. “That’s enough.”

The house, apparently sensing a lull, throws one last trick at them: a gust of old cold up from the cellar that smells like dead birthdays. Charlie swears in Romanian without thinking. Weasley rubs his hands together and announces that the kettle at the Burrow always knew when someone needed tea. Potter, criminally, almost smiles. Nott declares they should all go home and order something greasy as preventative medicine.

“Preventative medicine,” Draco repeats, and it tastes, absurdly, like an old joke in a friend’s library and the long road that led him here.

They don’t leave. They never do when leaving would be sensible. They stand in the awful, ordinary light of an old house that resents them, and they fix what they can.

It takes an hour to set the temporary anchors well enough that Grimmauld stops sulking on every breath. During it, Draco watches the trio rediscover the shape of themselves without showing anyone how they do it. At one point, Potter’s hand shakes once and then doesn’t; Weasley notices and bumps his shoulder again; Granger doesn’t speak until they’re ready to listen. Charlie sees it, steps back, and lets the moment belong to the three of them. Nott, miracle of miracles, says nothing.

By the time they call it, the entrance holds, the drawing room tolerates them, and the study has agreed not to fling a shelf at anyone in the next hour. It’s not victory, but the room is inhabitable, and after the last few years, that sometimes feels like more than enough.

“Right,” Weasley says, rolling his shoulders. “We going to pretend this is a plan?”

“It is a plan,” Granger says.

“It is a plan,” Potter confirms, as if he can will the house to agree by using his reasonable-voice on it.

Nott claps his hands, lazy. “Look at us. Not dead. Hardly screamed. I’d call that growth.”

Draco considers disagreeing out of principle and decides he’s too tired. He flexes his bandaged hand instead. “I’ll invoice the house,” he says. “For materials and labor.”

“Good,” Weasley says. “Send it to Walburga.”

The portrait glares from behind her mute spells as if she’s heard her name and loathes the sound. Draco bares his teeth at her without meaning to, and the satisfaction is so juvenile he almost enjoys it.

Granger closes her notebook with a snap. “We’ll take a break,” she says, like someone who has finally remembered the concept. “We reconvene in an hour. No one touches anything that looks pleased with itself.”

“That’ll eliminate you and Malfoy,” Nott says.

“Go away,” Draco tells him.

“Never,” Nott says, amiably, and drifts toward the corridor with the grace of a man committed to being exactly where he is not supposed to be.

They scatter, a little. Potter checks the bracing column again; Weasley tests the doorknob like it might have learned new tricks; Charlie leans against the window and watches the street as if dragons might stroll by in Islington. Granger lingers at the table, fingertips tapping once on the notebook.

For a moment, it’s almost quiet.

Draco breathes, and the house does not bite.

He finds them later in the hall, close together and saying nothing, which is when the trio are at their most articulate. He stops before they can see him and watches them for the length of a sip of water, which is to say: too long, but not long enough to be arrested for it. Potter’s head is down, chin to chest, breath counting. Weasley leans shoulder to shoulder, not to crowd, just to anchor. Granger stands between them, not leading, not following, but holding the line.

Charlie passes Draco in the corridor, catches his glance, gives a single nod like a man acknowledging weather. It says: leave them a second. It says: you’re not wrong to look. It says: this is how they breathe.

Draco doesn’t move. He catalogues the ordinary holiness of it and files it under things he will not say out loud.

Nott, behind him, whispers, “If you stare any harder you’ll set them on fire.”

“Please,” Draco says. “I’d never waste good arson.”

They go back to work because that is what these people do when the world refuses to stop.

“Quick debrief,” Granger says a little later, crisp again. “Entrance holds. Drawing room holds. Study holds, provided Malfoy doesn’t stand directly under that appalling chandelier.”

“Glad to be the variable,” Draco says.

“You are,” she says, and for once it isn’t an indictment; it’s logistics. “We’ll need Bill to rebuild the base layer. Until then, we avoid anything that smacks of confinement.”

“Circles,” Nott says, guilty and unrepentant.

“Circles,” she agrees.

Potter checks his watch like a man dividing days into pieces he owes to people who are small and wonderful. “We’ve got an hour before I need to head out.”

“Right,” Weasley says. “Someone tell Mum we can’t stay for dinner and then tell her we’re fine and then tell her we’re eating vegetables.”

“I’ll draft a statement,” Potter says, deadpan.

It takes them another ten minutes to stop behaving like they’re about to keep working. Eventually even Granger concedes that breaks are not a symptom of moral failure. They disperse again, and Draco sits in the study and stares at the ledger that ate an evening a few weeks back and decides not to touch it, because sometimes even he learns.

Nott slouches into the opposite chair and smiles his unhelpful smile. “Better,” he says.

“What is?”

“You,” Nott says, as if it’s obvious. “Still awful. Slightly less drowning.”

Draco considers telling him to sod off. The curse hums, ready to enforce sincerity. He settles for a shrug that means, you might be right and I hate it.

“By the way,” Nott adds, because he cannot bear to leave well enough alone, “when you made the vampire joke? That was almost charming.”

“I am never charming,” Draco says, relieved to be able to say it.

“True,” Nott says, and grins.

From the hall: Granger’s voice, giving orders to no one in particular, Potter’s never-again patient assent, Weasley’s sigh that could be a laugh if the world were kinder. Charlie’s low reply, weathering the house by existing where he is. The old place rattles once and then thinks better of it.

For a long minute, nothing happens.

It feels like the first sensible magic Draco has been allowed in years.

They don’t leave for the day; they only scatter. Potter and Weasley slip down the corridor for air and a quick mutter about schedules and children; Nott vanishes kitchen-ward, bragging about “forensic snacking”; Charlie lingers in the hall, listening to the house breathe like he’s coaxing a nervous dragon out of its crate.

And then the study goes quiet, and it’s just Draco and Granger.

The quiet isn’t friendly. It’s static-charged, that waiting-before-a-storm hush. Granger bends over her notebook, quill moving with a speed that looks like discipline and smells like compulsion. Draco slouches opposite, tapping his bandaged hand on the table because giving himself a headache feels easier than giving her the last word.

“You’re glaring,” she says, not looking up.

“You’re existing,” Draco replies, dry as chalk.

Her quill stops. She lifts her head slowly, eyes sharp, no humor. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Because of course she hears the old slur under the dust of it, the word he never says anymore and the world said to her too often. The curse pushes against his teeth, demanding clarity. He lets it.

“You’ve made a career out of it,” he says, waving his good hand vaguely at the ledger, the wards, the mess. “Existing. Knowing. Fixing. Always fixing. Do you ever tire of playing saviour?”

Her jaw locks. “Better than playing the victim, which you always have.”

The words slap harder than a hex. Draco’s breath hitches. The curse jerks honesty free like a hooked tooth.

“I didn’t choose victimhood, Granger. I chose survival.”

“You call this survival?” She stands so abruptly the chair snarls on the floorboards. “Bound to a curse that forces you to spit truth until your tongue bleeds? That isn’t survival, Malfoy, that’s punishment. That’s the whole point. That’s why we are here.”

He’s on his feet before he means to be, glare meeting glare. “Punishment, then. Is that what you want to hear? That Bellatrix got her way, even from the grave?” He laughs, ugly, hollow. “Fine. Consider me punished.”

Her fingers tighten on her wand. She doesn’t raise it. She doesn’t have to. They both know she doesn’t need it to do damage. Her voice cuts clean: “Don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself and put this on anyone other than yourself. Don’t you dare make me pity you.”

Something cracks. “I don’t need your fucking pity, Granger!” His voice ricochets off the shelves. “I need this curse gone, that’s it, that’s all. And yes, I hate you too, just out of sheer habit. Happy? Do you think I’m fucking happy?”

She’s shaking, rage or something meaner living under it. Freckles sharp on pale skin; breath too fast. “I know you’re not fucking happy. But guess what? You are everything I fought against just to stay alive since I was eleven.” She jabs two fingers into her own forearm. “Every sneer, every slur, every hex that nearly took me down, I have a fucking scar on my arm. You are the face of all of it. You’re the reason I can’t walk into a room without expecting a fight for my life. And now you want me to believe you’re different?”

He laughs again and hates the sound of it. “Different? I’m not different. I’m just here. And believe me, Granger, that was never the plan.”

Her nostrils flare. She steps closer. “Then why are you here?”

He stops. The truth waits, brutal and small. “Because—” He swallows. “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

It lands between them, hot and jagged. Neither of them wanted it. Both of them recognize it.

They are too close now. Close enough that Draco has to look down; she isn’t small, but he’s taller, and the angle forces him into her orbit. There’s the flare of her nostrils, the scatter of freckles across her cheekbones, the absurd detail of light catching on lashes. He can feel her breath; hers probably feels his.

It would be too easy to tilt forward that fraction and erase the air.

He leans, exactly that fraction, hears his own voice, low, wrecked: “It would be too fucking easy.”

He pulls back at once, as if the air burns. In his head: not all tension is sexual. The thought is brittle, defensive, almost convincing.

Granger blinks, a snap of dark eyes, then turns to the table like she’s been interrupted by something ordinary, quill resuming its furious, careful march. “We regroup,” she says, voice clipped. “Five minutes.”

“Grand,” Draco says, and his hands are shaking where she can’t see them.

A scuff of boot in the corridor. Charlie’s outline ghosts past the study door; he glances in, just once. Surprise flickers, quick, clean, then smooths. He nods as if to himself and keeps walking. He will not say a word. He will absolutely remember.

Potter and Weasley come back first, their faces set to the work-mask people put on when feelings would be untidy. Nott appears with the spoils of his forensics (a tin of something he insists is edible), then plants himself where the room will have to look at his grin and choose to ignore it. Charlie returns last, expression all practical patience, as if no study door ever hid weather.

They sit. It is almost a council, if you squint. Granger stands with the ledger open and her notes bristling like a hedgehog, and she does the thing she does: she orders chaos into sentences.

“We’ve mapped triggers and responses,” she says, steady now. “Confinement increases compulsion. Attempted silence is penalised. Falsehood is intercepted and replaced at the mouth with the nearest true utterance. It’s not just a curse acting on a person.” She taps the ledger. “It’s a system acting on a population.”

Potter’s eyes sharpen, tired and dangerous. Weasley goes very still. Nott stops looking amused. Charlie folds his arms and watches Granger, not the book.

“It’s not just to make you talk,” Granger continues, and Draco is not sure whether she means him or the general you. “It’s to make everyone talk. To erase the space where refusal lives. It punishes the pause. If you can’t pause, you can’t think before you speak; if you can’t think, you can’t resist. The truth becomes an instrument of control.”

“Infrastructure,” Draco says, because the word fits like a lock. “Not a hex.”

Granger nods once. “Precisely. It scales. It attaches to places and procedures as much as people. Courtrooms. Interrogations. Hospitals. Schools. Family homes. Anywhere speech matters.” Her mouth tightens. “Anywhere silence matters more.”

Weasley’s voice is quiet, the kind of quiet that makes rooms listen. “They’d have used it on us all. On Mum. On Ginny. On… everyone.”

“And no Veritaserum needed,” Potter says, flat. “No oaths to break. No legal remedy to argue. Just—”

“Compliance,” Granger finishes, and the word sounds obscene. She looks at Draco then, not unkindly, not kindly either, simply fully. “He wasn’t planning victory in battle,” she says, each syllable placed like a brick. “He was planning domination.”

The room swallows the sentence. Even the house seems to hold its breath.

Nott is the one who moves first; he exhales like he’s been punched and leans back in his chair as if laughter might be a future option. Weasley rubs a hand over his face and finds nowhere to put it. Potter’s gaze goes to the doorway and stays there, counting ghosts. Charlie’s jaw works; he nods, small, grim seen, understood.

Draco sits very still and listens to the thing under his skin hum in recognition. It is a horrible comfort to have a name for the cage. It is worse to understand the cage was meant to be the world.

No one speaks for a long half-minute. Then practical life reasserts itself the way it does when you’ve been trained to live anyway.

“Right,” Potter says, voice even again, as if steadiness could be conjured and handed round. “Then we break it.”

“Then we break it,” Granger echoes, and for the first time all day her hands are not shaking.

Chapter Text

Grimmauld Place is already sulking when Draco arrives.

The street is grey with the kind of light that makes even London look embarrassed, and the house waits like a predator that hasn’t eaten in years. Theo drifts up beside him, unhurried, immaculate, the kind of man who looks like he belongs on a chaise longue even when he’s standing on cracked pavement.

“You’ve got that look again,” Theo says.

Draco doesn’t glance at him. “Which one?”

“The one that says: I despise everything around me and wish it would combust, but until then I’ll sneer at it.”

Draco exhales through his nose. “Accurate.”

Theo tips his head, studying him with the infuriating patience only he can manage. “I keep showing up, don’t I?”

“You’ve got nothing better to do.”

Theo smirks, but his voice softens. “Or maybe I just don’t like you being here alone.”

Draco doesn’t answer, because if he does the curse will make him admit he doesn’t hate the company.

They don’t wait long. Apparitions crack like a string of firecrackers: Granger first, curls damp with sweat, her hands dusted with fine grey powder that speaks of curses dismantled by force. Her trainers look like she’s walked them through three ruins and a ditch. There’s a faint scorch across the edge of her jumper that she hasn’t even noticed yet. She looks, Draco thinks sourly, like she’s been arm-wrestling hexes all day and winning.

Weasley follows, shoulders rolling like he hasn’t stopped since morning. Potter appears last, sleeves rolled, ink smudged at his wrist. Bill brings parchments. And Charlie, Charlie leans against the railing, relaxed, unfairly broad, and annoyingly present.

Draco thinks sourly: who’s taking care of the dragons?

Charlie’s eyes flick to him, sharp. His voice is faint, almost conversational:

“If you think dragons need to be taken care of, then why are you named as one?”

Theo barks a laugh, quick and sharp. “Brilliant. I like him.”

“Traitor,” Draco mutters.

Inside, the wards snarl. Bill swears in Gobbledegook, flaring his wand against stone. The house doesn’t like them. Or maybe it doesn’t like Draco.

Before anyone can react, a panel slides sideways with a crack and swallows him whole.

Except not just him.

Granger is shoved in too, her shoulder slamming his chest as the stone seals. The alcove is narrow, dark, airless. Their bodies pressed close, pressed too close.

Her elbow digs into his ribs as she straightens. She shifts, trapped against him, and a small involuntary sound escapes her throat , strained, caught between annoyance and discomfort, pitched in a way that doesn’t belong in company.

Interesting, Draco thinks clinically, like he’s classifying specimens. Granger, under pressure, produces sounds unsuitable for polite society.

He extends his hand without thinking. She takes it, grip firm, and pulls herself upright. And just like that, they’re closer. Too close. Shoulder pressed to chest, hip brushing thigh, breath mingling.

It’s unbearable. Like a band stretched to snapping.

She hisses, low, her voice hot against his collar. “Stop moving your bloody hips when you pivot. It’s distracting.”

“Oh, Granger,” he deadpans, leaning a fraction closer, “you’d love for me to distract you.”

The curse lets it stand. Unsettling. He hasn’t been that sort of distraction in too fucking long. Too fucking long. He wonders, when was the last time Granger let herself be distracted? And by whom?

Her jaw locks. “You think you’re irresistible.”

“No,” he says flatly. “I think you’re not easily distracted.” A tilt of his head. “And yet here we are.”

Her elbow digs again. He doesn’t move. The alcove shrinks further, every breath measured, every inch too aware. He catalogues her face as though he’s building evidence: freckles sharp, lashes catching the thin light, nostrils flaring with fury. If he leant forward a fraction, they’d—

“Are you two alright in there?” Bill’s voice calls from outside, muffled but amused.

“Just peachy!” Granger snaps.

Draco huffs a laugh, low and humorless, before the panel groans open.

They step out together, shoulders brushing, faces carefully composed.

Theo’s waiting, smug as ever. “Well, that was intimate.”

“Shut it,” Draco mutters, brushing stone dust from his sleeve.

But the stretched band hasn’t snapped. It’s still humming between them, sharp and unbearable.

Bill doesn’t bother with reassurance; he drops to one knee by the skirting and starts mapping wardlines with his wand-tip, mouth moving in Gobbledegook like he’s scolding an ill-bred hex. The house hums back, sulky, petulant, and everyone falls into the shapes they always do. Potter paces, counting threats only he can see. Weasley posts up where he can cover three exits at once with the casual economy of someone who’s done too many late-night raids. Charlie prowls the perimeter, all rangy ease until something moves; then he’s iron. Theo commandeers a chair and radiates useless beauty like a heat source. And Granger slides in beside Bill, already reading what isn’t written, hair frizzing with static, quill scratching a furious shorthand.

Draco takes the opposite edge of the table because pretending not to hover is less pathetic than hovering. He can still feel the memory of the alcove against his ribcage. The band hasn’t relaxed. It hums under the skin. Every time Granger shifts, his body notices first.

Bill’s wand catches on a seam. The panel there is different, older magic layered under newer, like patched stone. “Hold,” Bill says, and charmed chalk crawls across the wood in a quiet whirlwind, outlining a rectangle he didn’t draw.

“What is it?” Potter asks, already bracing.

“Something that wants to be a cupboard and isn’t,” Bill mutters. He touches three points in a triangle; the chalk blazes; the rectangle breathes.

The recess opens with a sour exhale and reveals a small black box, obsidian-dark and quietly smug. It hums the way good curses hum-like a tuning fork inside a throat.

Granger’s voice comes low, sharp. “Don’t touch—”

Potter’s hand isn’t on it; it’s near it. Near is enough. The box flexes. A lid he couldn’t see snaps, and the edge kisses his palm. There’s a wet sound. Red shines.

Everything freezes.

Draco’s stomach drops, useless and immediate. Potter goes white in a way that isn’t dramatic; it’s the color of ghosts. For a stupid, spinning second he looks seventeen again, bracing for a man who won’t stay dead. The room tilts toward a past everyone has been avoiding by sheer force of will.

“Fuck,” Weasley says, soft and furious, already there, already catching Potter’s wrist like it’s standard protocol. He peels the hand over his own, sees the line of blood, meets Potter’s eyes. And then, steady as a metronome: “Remember that old toad Umbridge? Well, now you must tell a lie.”

It lands like a rope in a storm.

Potter’s mouth goes hard. He inhales, shakes once, and threads the lie through his teeth like he’s swallowing glass. “Dolores Umbridge,” he says, every syllable a dare, “was the most inspiring professor I ever had.”

The room holds its breath with him.

Nothing happens.

No lash of compulsion, no hot bite dragging truth up by the roots. Just a ridiculous sentence hanging in the air and the soft thud of everyone exhaling at once.

Granger’s hand has flown to her brow, one finger pressing between her eyes like she’s holding back a headache. “Prototype,” she breathes. “Trigger’s there, blood opens the mouth, but the binding matrix isn’t finished. It’s a test. Bellatrix was iterating.”

Bill’s already fishing for a clean strip of cloth. “Hold,” he tells Potter, binding the hand with the no-nonsense tenderness of an eldest brother. Charlie’s already there too, not hovering exactly, but ready to break the box in half with his bare hands if it so much as inhales again.

Potter flexes his fingers once the bandage is tied, jaw unclenching by degrees. The colour comes back in cautious shades. “Felt like it knew me,” he says, too level. “Like the house does.”

“It knows blood,” Bill says. “Black blood. And what’s been in its walls. We’re what’s new.”

Charlie taps the recess with his wand-tip, not touching the box. “And hungry things snap at anything that twitches.” He glances at Bill, something like a warning hidden under the tease. Bill answers with a flat look that says: not funny, and Charlie’s mouth curves, wry and apologetic, an older-brother truce that doesn’t need words.

Theo, from his chair: “Well. That was hideous. Shall we never do it again?”

“No one touches the artefact,” Granger says, too sharp, which is how you sound when you nearly watched the worst thing repeat itself. She looks at Potter like she’s counting breaths with him, then looks away before it looks like pity. “We need to read before this house eats one of us.”

Draco pretends to study the recess, but he’s watching the way Potter stands very still to make the world stop moving, the way Weasley keeps a hand casually braced on his shoulder like he isn’t holding him up. Like it’s a habit. The stupid band under Draco’s skin thrums again. He is not part of that habit.

Bill lays vellum across the table. Not maps, cuts. Runes disassembled and sketched like bones. Granger drops into the chair beside them, so close her sleeve nearly brushes Draco’s wrist. He doesn’t move. Neither does she. The not-touching becomes a touch all its own.

She murmurs as she reads, not the frantic mumble of panic but the low, surgical commentary of someone who can see under the skin of things. “Blood to prime. Mouth to open. We’re missing the hinge-work that forces compliance. Here, see how she anchors the series with Thurisaz, but the loop doesn’t close? She’s testing output without binding. This would never hold a living subject. Not yet.”

“You should keep your brilliant comments to yourself,” Draco says, dry as the parchment, “or share them with the class. Mumbling is annoying.”

It earns him her eyes, sharp, irritated, and lit with the wrong kind of spark. “It’s called thinking.”

“It’s called broadcasting,” he returns. “You’re unbearable when you’re interesting.”

Theo fans himself with an old ledger. “He means that as a compliment. I hate this phase of his development.”

Granger looks away first. “We need to model the missing thread. The full thing wouldn’t just drag truth out, it would make thinking around it difficult. Like… like a net you can’t swim through.” Her hand moves, drawing three tight spirals, then bridging them. “Obedience isn’t the side effect; it’s the point.”

Weasley scrubs a hand over his jaw. “Right. So you don’t just tell the truth. You get shaped into it.”

“And if you try to cheat it,” Bill says, tapping the diagram, “the structure catches you. Think of it as—”

“A corridor,” Charlie says, catching the thought. “Looks like a room. Walk it long enough and you forget to turn.”

Potter’s hand is still on the table, bandage neat, knuckles pale. He stares at the box as if it might develop a face. “He didn’t need to kill us,” he says, too calm. “He could have made us live like that.”

No one argues. The house groans, plumbing or malice, impossible to tell.

They work. It becomes a thing with breath, Granger reading runes as if they’re gossip, Bill mapping the wardlines against the old Black signatures, Charlie pointing out structural weaknesses the way you talk about fence posts, Weasley translating their brilliance into plain sense so the room doesn’t float, Theo making the occasional savage quip to slice tension before it hardens. Potter keeps the perimeter like a man who keeps promises; he does not touch the box again.

The band between Draco and Granger stretches tighter because it has nowhere else to go. Every time she leans, the edge of her forearm warms his. Every time he shifts to see what she sees, their shoulders align like it was planned. He pretends it’s nothing; the curse says nothing about pretending.

She is trying not to look. He is trying not to be obvious. Neither of them is succeeding.

Hours fold. The table turns into a battlefield, runic corpses and tactical arrows everywhere. When Bill finally leans back, he looks older by a decade and satisfied by an inch. “Alright,” he says, voice gone rough. “If I were a madwoman building infrastructure for a tyrant, I’d do it like this.” He indicates Granger’s three spirals, then the bridge she’s drawn. “Blood primes. Mouth opens. Binding closes the loop. The loop doesn’t stop you speaking, it stops you not speaking. You can’t hedge, you can’t stall, you can’t swallow. The structure forces everything through the narrowest point until only one thing comes out.”

“Truth,” Weasley says, like the word tastes wrong.

“Obedience,” Granger corrects, too tired to soften it. “Truth is the mechanism. Obedience is the goal.”

Potter’s eyes cut to Draco then, brief, unreadable. Draco wants to look at anything else, the cracked plaster, the curtained portrait, the pattern on the table where someone once put down a cup and never wiped the ring away. He holds the gaze anyway. What’s the worst that happens, he tells the truth?

He doesn’t say it aloud, but it’s there in the back of his teeth, bitter as penny-ink: I’ve been living in the victory Bellatrix built.

Granger must see some shard of it, because her mouth flattens and she looks back at the page, like mercy is a thing she can refuse to consider if she reads fast enough.

Theo claps his hands once, politely. “Case conference: the artefact is a draft, the design is monstrous, and we haven’t all dropped dead. Tea?”

“After I reset this corner,” Bill says, already on his feet. He nods at Charlie. “Watch the perimeter while I stitch. If the house tries to spit, you shove it back.”

“Like old times,” Charlie says, and there’s that brother-triangle again, Bill’s flat look, Charlie’s lopsided grin, something almost like relief passing between them that doesn’t need translating. Draco files it away like evidence. Family is an unkillable curse too, apparently.

Weasley pushes off the wall and rolls his shoulders; the sound is bones and responsibility. “Right. Everyone who bleeds Black, stay behind Bill. Everyone who doesn’t, try not to nick yourself on any Victorian death-traps.”

“That’s me,” Theo says brightly. “Fragile constitution. Paper cuts end me.”

No one asks Draco to stay back. They don’t need to. The house has its own opinions about him; it will open or it won’t.

Granger rubs the heel of her hand into her brow and then, without looking up, says, “Either contribute or keep still, Malfoy. I don’t have time to narrate.”

The corner of his mouth twitches before he kills it. “You’re unbearable when you’re interesting,” he answers, and the curse lets him because there isn’t a lie in it.

She risks a glance up. The look they trade isn’t soft, isn’t kind, isn’t anything anyone should write poetry about. It’s a line thrown across a gap: I see you, and I still don’t like it, and I might not stop looking.

Bill starts to stitch. The wardline flares like a nerve. The house shudders. For a second the old place bares its teeth and remembers every secret it ever held, every scream it absorbed, every Black who ever bled on its stones. Then Bill’s magic catches, the glow steadies, and the snarl quiets to a sullen hum.

“Good,” Bill says, exhausted and decisive. “We’ve got it tamped. We can work in here without it biting, so long as no one waves their hands over any mysterious boxes like an idiot.”

Potter raises his bandaged hand in a small salute. “Learned.”

“Learning,” Weasley corrects, affection buried under the gruff.

Charlie stretches, spine cracking in a way that sounds like relief. “If this thing starts snarling again, I’m torching the curtains as a treat.”

“Don’t,” Potter and Bill say together, without looking at him. It’s a sibling joke, except none of them are siblings, except they are.

Granger draws a clean sheet toward her, quill poised. Her voice drops. “If we’re right, and we are, then this wasn’t a weapon in a vault. It was a blueprint. Put one of these in every Ministry office, every courtroom, every classroom—”

“—and you never need to win a war,” Potter finishes, quiet as a grave. “You just tune the world until it stops arguing.”

Weasley’s mouth thins. He looks at the box like he’d like to kick it straight through time. “And if people try to fight it?”

Granger’s quill doesn’t move. “They can’t. That’s the point.”

Silence comes down like dust. The house seems to listen. Draco has the sudden, unpleasant sensation that the walls approve of this plan.

He stares at the box until it blurs. He doesn’t speak. If he does, the curse will drag the worst of it out the way it always does, and he doesn’t fancy bleeding in front of this many witnesses. The thought still lands, sharp and undeniable: I’ve been living in the victory Bellatrix built. The worst part is how obvious it is once said. The second worst part is that he didn’t say it aloud.

Granger’s hand hovers, then presses the nib to paper and writes the sentence they’ve all been circling: OBEDIENCE IS THE ENGINE. TRUTH IS THE FUEL. Her handwriting is as neat as her mind. She underlines it once, hard enough to tear the page.

Theo blows out a breath like he’s been holding it. “Horrid. I vote we make tea anyway.”

Bill sags onto a chair. “In a minute.”

Charlie claps a warm palm to Bill’s shoulder, squeeze and release; old code for still here. Bill answers with a tired, sideways smile that says I know. The domesticity of it is obscene in a room with a box like that, and somehow necessary.

Weasley rubs at the back of his neck. “We need to tell the others,” he says. “George will want to see it. He’ll have ideas for… I don’t know. Un-building it. He’s good at making dangerous things into daft ones.”

Potter nods once. “Tomorrow.”

Granger caps her ink. The lines of her face are pulled tight with fatigue and fury, but she looks at the mess like it’s a fight she can win if she stays angry enough. “We document tonight,” she says. “We make sure no one ever finishes this properly. We break it in theory before anyone tries it in practice.”

“And we don’t touch the bloody thing again,” Bill adds.

Potter’s mouth flickers, almost a smile, almost. “I can learn.”

“Learning,” Weasley repeats, gentler this time.

Draco stands because sitting feels like surrender. He tells himself he’s moving because the light is better at the far end of the table, not because if he stays where he is he’ll keep cataloguing the curve of Granger’s wrist and the smudge of soot at her jaw. The band under his skin hums. It doesn’t snap. It just tightens to a pitch he didn’t know he could hear.

The house settles, insulted but resigned. The box sits, patient and obscene. The people with lives gather their coats and their jokes and their tired, battered routines.

No one thanks him for bleeding on the doorstep earlier. He wouldn’t have liked it if they had.

On the way out, Potter pauses by the recess, looking at the closed mouth of the box with a gaze Draco recognizes: the look of a man measuring what almost happened and deciding not to flinch. “He didn’t need to kill us,” Potter says again, to no one and everyone. “He just had to make us live like this.”

Granger doesn’t touch him. She doesn’t need to. “Not on my watch,” she says, soft and savage, the promise of a woman who once rewired time to save a stranger.

Draco doesn’t look back at them. He doesn’t need to. He knows the shape of them even when he’s turned away. It irritates him enough to feel like oxygen.

He thinks, because he can’t stop himself: We are going to break this. He doesn’t say it aloud. He doesn’t have to, not tonight. The house isn’t the only thing listening anymore.

And somewhere under all the dust and malice, Grimmauld Place seems to shift, like an old animal turning in its sleep, acknowledging that the predators inside it might be worse than the ghosts that built it, and deciding to watch.

Draco leans back, swallowing bitterness like ash. He doesn’t say it, but the thought claws at him anyway: I’ve been living in the victory Bellatrix built.

Chapter Text

The pub is dim, smoke curling in lazy arabesques from the lamps, and Draco wonders, not for the first time, why he agreed to follow Theo out in the first place.

It isn’t that he dislikes pubs. It’s that pubs are full of people, and Draco has made a career out of avoiding those. But Theo had leaned against the Manor hearth earlier that evening, all grin and easy cruelty, and said, “If we stay here any longer, you’ll start haunting the place, and I’ve already got enough ghosts.”

So now Draco is sitting at a sticky oak table in a tucked-away pub off Knockturn Alley, a place Theo swears is “respectable enough for my delicate sensibilities.” He stares at the rings on the wood where pints have sweated themselves into permanence, and counts the number of exits. It is not the worst place he’s been dragged to.

Theo, of course, thrives anywhere. He’s talking to the barmaid, a witch with bright green hair and brighter teeth, spinning some ridiculous tale about the time they were “nearly eaten alive by a Hungarian Horntail” during a school trip. Draco raises an eyebrow at the embellishment. They had been, in fact, chased for half a field-length by a charmed school banner. Close enough.

When Theo comes back, carrying two drinks, he drops into the chair opposite Draco with the smug glow of someone who believes charm is its own currency.

“Drink,” he says, pushing a glass toward Draco.

Draco eyes it with suspicion. “What is it?”

“Liquid courage,” Theo says. “Or in your case, liquid misery. It’s gin. Don’t pout.”

“I don’t pout.” Draco lifts the glass anyway, sips, and winces. It is, indeed, misery in liquid form.

Theo grins, sprawling like a cat in the chair. “You’re sulking.”

“I am not sulking.”

“You’re always sulking. It’s practically a lifestyle choice.” Theo tilts his head, studying him with mock seriousness. “If you’re going to sulk, at least sulk with style. You’ve got the jawline for it.”

Draco sets the glass down, flat as stone. “Lovely. I’ll put that on my epitaph.”

Theo toasts him with his own drink. “Here lies Draco Malfoy, professional sulker, survived the war only to die of ennui. Tragic.”

Before Draco can retort, a flutter of wings cuts through the low murmur of the pub. A sleek Malfoy owl swoops in, scattering a few mutters and curses from the other patrons. It lands on the table between them with a haughty shake of its feathers and thrusts out one leg.

Draco unties the parchment. The hand is neat, sharp, and infuriatingly precise.

Malfoy. Hogwarts library. Tomorrow at dawn.

Don’t be late. —H. Granger

Theo leans over his shoulder and nearly spits his drink laughing. “At dawn? Gods, she really does hate you.”

Draco folds the note, carefully, too carefully. “She’s pathologically punctual. It’s not personal.”

“Everything with Granger is personal. That’s what makes her terrifying.” Theo sits back, smug, eyes glinting. “And what makes you show up.”

Draco doesn’t answer. He stares into his glass instead, watching the light fracture in the gin. Tomorrow. Hogwarts. With Hermione bloody Granger. He’s half tempted to ignore it. But the curse won’t let him, not really. Truth always drags him by the collar.

The castle looks the same and utterly different. Draco hasn’t been here often, just enough times to consult the dead, as if the library itself can be bullied into obedience, but every return feels like tearing open an old scar.

Theo had peeled away at the gates, muttering something about not being “built for early mornings,” leaving Draco to walk the rest of the way up alone. Predictable coward.

Granger is waiting in the courtyard in Muggle trousers and a rolled jumper, hair pinned and already escaping, hands dusted faintly with the glitter of curse-breaking residue. She looks maddeningly competent. Draco resents it.

“You’re late,” she says.

“It’s dawn,” he replies. “That’s an indecent hour for research and most funerals.”

She doesn’t bother answering, just turns on her heel. He follows, because apparently he’s become the sort of man who follows Gryffindors into buildings that used to try to eat him alive.

The Restricted Section opens for her as if it has been waiting. Chains whisper, wards sigh. She moves like she belongs; he moves like he dares the shelves to argue.

“This way,” she says. “Truth-compulsion families. Anything on obedience curses. Anything that binds cognition.”

“The happy shelves,” Draco mutters.

She starts pulling tomes in a rhythm he remembers too well, spine, weight, decision, hair frizzing with static. For all her curse-breaking credentials, the library is still her first natural environment. It suits her bones, and he hates noticing.

He doesn’t say it aloud. He isn’t suicidal.

They fall into a rhythm. She names catalogue numbers; he fetches. He mutters runic families; she produces supplements without looking. They burn through codices and monographs, strip propaganda for footnotes, discard everything useless.

“Nothing on obedience without potions,” she mutters, flicking pages. “Bellatrix didn’t want potions. Too traceable.”

“Goblins call it rivet-counting,” Draco says, tapping a margin. “This isn’t that. No bargain, no contract. Just a mouth.”

Her head lifts. “A mouth?”

“To feed truths through. If you can’t stop, you’re not choosing.”

She studies him, sharp and interested, like he’s a book she didn’t expect to enjoy. “Keep thinking like that.”

“Bossy,” he says.

“Efficient,” she corrects. “Try the Grimshaw collection. Top left.”

Their sleeves brush when he reaches above her. Nothing combusts. The world is stranger for letting him survive it.

An hour passes. Nothing conclusive. Proof by absence is still proof, but it’s not enough.

“We’re wasting time,” she says, closing a volume with care that looks like fury. “McGonagall’s private shelves. Come on.”

McGonagall’s office is warmer than it used to be. Same stern lines, same view of mountains, but softened with tea and tartan. Portraits line the walls, some feigning sleep, some craning to listen.

The Headmistress looks up, spectacles low. “Miss Granger. Mr. Malfoy. If Mr. Potter materializes behind you, please warn me, so I may fortify the tea.”

“Not today,” Hermione says. “We couldn’t find anything. May we consult your private shelves?”

McGonagall’s gaze flicks from her to Draco, noting the exhaustion in both. She has been reading students for fifty years; she sees what isn’t said.

“You may,” she says. “But leave my labels as they are. The last time someone alphabetized my grimoires, I nearly resigned.”

Hermione almost smiles. “We’ll be careful.”

McGonagall stands, tartan robes sweeping. “Far case, top rows. If a book bites you, replace it. They sulk less.”

“Sound policy,” Draco mutters.

“Mr. Malfoy,” she nods, formal. He mirrors it, surprised the word Professor doesn’t stick in his throat.

He greets a few portraits, Phineas Nigellus pretending not to nap, Dilys Derwent already angling for scandal, then sees him. Black robes, hooked nose, eyes sharp as ever: Severus Snape.

“Severus,” McGonagall warns. “Minimum commentary.”

Snape opens his eyes, smirk curdled. “Headmistress. Granger. Malfoy. The insufferable know-it-all and the failure. A full set.”

Hermione is across the room before Draco can blink. Her voice is low and vicious. “You are not a tragic hero. You bullied children. You humiliated Harry for having her eyes. You lived a petty life and were lucky enough to die in the right moment so people could pretend it redeemed you.”

Well, that one was twenty years in the making.

Portraits stir. Even oil and canvas shift when fury’s that sharp.

Snape sneers. “And you remain sanctimonious. Does Potter’s shadow keep you warm?”

“Don’t you dare,” she spits. “Don’t you dare. If love meant anything to you, if Lily meant anything, you wouldn’t have used her son as a target.”

“Love meant everything,” Snape snaps. “I risked my life, my name, in service—”

“Of your guilt,” she cuts in. “Not of us. You were cruel because it pleased you. Convenient martyrdom doesn’t erase that.”

Snape’s eyes dart to Draco, seeking an ally. Draco keeps his face blank as marble. He thinks of Harry turning white when the prototype cut him. Of Ron’s steady hand. Of Granger writing OBEDIENCE IS THE ENGINE.

He says nothing.

Snape turns back, voice like silk over glass. “Severity is not sadism. I sharpened the Chosen One because the world would not blunt itself.”

“You enjoyed it,” Hermione says, no room for argument. “You hid in your dungeon and called it martyrdom.”

The portrait’s face flickers, ugly, resentful. “Careful, girl. Your righteousness is showing.”

“My memory is.” Her voice is steel. “Your ledger doesn’t erase what you did. To him. To us.”

“And yet you’re here,” Snape hisses. “In my old room. Asking my help.”

“Not yours.” She tips her head at McGonagall. “Hers. And the shelves. The shelves never lied to me.”

“That will do,” McGonagall cuts in, iron and gentle.

Snape retreats, sneer brittle. To Draco: “How does it feel to learn from those you once called beneath you?”

“Quieter,” Draco answers before he can stop himself. “Less echo in the head.”

For a moment, Snape looks… curious. He shutters it quickly. “Do your reading.”

The office exhales. Hermione stands taut, like fury sheathed. McGonagall pours tea, sets cups down, and points them to the tall case.

“Top shelves. Dark frameworks. Don’t set them on fire.”

“Of course not,” Hermione says, too quick.

“Thirteen,” McGonagall corrects briskly, without looking up.

Hermione’s mouth twitches despite herself. She moves to the shelves. Draco follows, because it’s easier than standing still with Snape’s eyes still lingering in oil and canvas.

They don’t find answers yet. Just sharper questions. Hermione reads like a storm system. Draco reads like a man measuring exits. Between them, the shelves yield a fraction at a time.

And the castle waits.

They read until the light changes on the mountains and the steam from McGonagall’s teapot starts smelling faintly of peat. The private shelves are a well-behaved jungle: grimoires with spines like knuckles; treatises that have bullied generations into clarity. Granger hunts among them like she remembers every argument they ever made. Draco tracks the edges—the bibliography trails, the half-forgotten symposiums where Dark frameworks were discussed sideways under softer names.

“Here,” Granger says, not quite triumphant, she saves that for battles won, not battles mapped. She lays a vellum folio flat, and it crackles with age and poor decisions. Frameworks of Cognitive Constraint. Anonymous, naturally. The table of contents looks like someone tried to register for morality and was turned away at the door.

He reads over her shoulder, because pretending not to is stupid. “Anchoring a subject’s decision tree to external runic triggers,” he translates, dry. “How to harvest compliance without reagent.”

“Nothing about forcing truth specifically,” she says, flipping to a section marked Mouths & Gates. “But look, these are gates. Bellatrix built mouths. She wanted intake, not threshold.”

“She wasn’t patient,” Draco says. “Mouths eat. Gates wait.”

She glances up, quick, as if surprised he’s useful. The look is gone before it can be anything.

“Professor,” Granger says without looking back, voice steady in that Gryffindor way that fools you into thinking nothing’s shaking. “May we consult the portraits?”

McGonagall considers her teacup as if it has opinions. “You may consult anyone who consents to be consulted,” she says at last, tartan rustling like a warning to the frames. “And you’ll both eat a scone. I refuse to have you faint on my carpet.”

She leaves them the tray and the office, and the portraits, who are now wide awake and pretending they aren’t.

Dumbledore clears his throat, the gentlest intrusion in history. “Miss Granger. Mr. Malfoy. A pleasure.”

Granger turns slowly. The air tightens. Draco watches the room reconfigure around an old gravity, one that once held, then dropped her. He half expects her to smile just to prove she can. She doesn’t. Here we go again. Draco is far too sleep deprived for this. 

“You left us alone,” she says, not loud, not accusing in pitch, accusation is in the structure of the sentence. “You knew he had to die and you let a seventeen-year-old walk toward it with a wand and a rucksack.”

Dumbledore’s eyes do the sympathetic twinkle, only now it feels like weather reflected off ice. “You were never alone,” he answers, soft as dust. “But I accept that my choices made it feel as though you were.”

“You made it true,” she says. “Not just felt. True.”

He doesn’t debate the semantics. Sensible of him. “I believed,” he says, “that knowledge placed precisely can save lives.”

“It can also crush them,” she replies. “We’re here because somebody weaponized knowledge. Again.”

Dumbledore inclines his head towards Draco, a gesture halfway between apology and appraisal. “And yet, Mr. Malfoy, here you stand. Not many break orbit the way you have.”

“I didn’t break anything,” Draco says. “I started telling the truth and discovered I had an audience.” He hears how brittle it sounds and doesn’t correct it.

“Truth is not kindness,” Dumbledore says. “But it can be mercy when wielded with care.”

“Bellatrix wielded it like a cudgel,” Granger snaps. “Where did she learn it?”

Dumbledore’s expression goes grave in that particular headmasterly way that means terrible idea incoming. “There were families,” he says, “for whom compulsion was an art long before Voldemort made it a factory. The Blacks collected frameworks as other people collect ancestors. Bellatrix did not need to innovate; she needed only to refine.”

“So it’s all here,” Draco says, hating how obvious it is: the walls of this castle, the walls of Grimmauld, the walls of his skull. “And we keep finding footnotes.”

“Then follow them,” Dumbledore says gently. “Footnotes are doors for people with patience.”

Granger doesn’t thank him. She turns back to the table and starts to deconstruct Mouths & Gates with a pencil that soon looks like an exhausted wand.

Draco pours tea because he’s not an animal. He sets a cup near her elbow. She doesn’t look up, only reaches for it without checking the colour, drinks, and winces.

“What did you do to it?” she demands.

“Nothing. It’s tea.”

“It’s regret in a cup.”

“You asked for scones with your pen,” he says. “Perhaps the tea took offence.”

“Stop helping,” she mutters, and keeps annotating.

He doesn’t stop. He sorts the pile into three stacks: probable, possible, and the ones with tone issues. He reads silently while she reads aloud to herself in a low surgical murmur. The room steadies in the rhythm of two people working the same wound from different angles.

Snape’s portrait cannot help himself. “Granger,” he says, oily with habit, “you always did prefer the sound of your own analysis.”

She doesn’t turn. “I prefer results.”

“Is that what you call antagonizing your betters?” Snape drawls.

“Only if they’re better,” she says, finally flicking him half a glance. “You were cruel for sport. Sit in your frame and be quiet.”

Snape’s mouth compresses into a hyphen. He looks at Draco like control your…whatever this is. Draco applauds silently with his eyebrows.

McGonagall returns, clears her throat like a gavel. “I will not have a row in my office,” she says, and somehow it lands on everyone. She sets down a fresh pot with the finality of a ceasefire. “Progress?”

Granger taps the folio. “We can prove Bellatrix used mouth-forms. We can’t yet prove the bridge to cognition-binding.”

“Prove it by absence for now,” McGonagall says. “Then go and look where she would be proud to have hidden it.”

“Grimmauld,” Draco says.

“The tapestry room,” McGonagall agrees. “If she wrote anything she was proud of, she’d want the ancestors to watch.”

Granger closes the folio carefully. The set of her jaw is that particular mix of horrified and energized she gets when the worst thing also happens to be solvable. She thanks McGonagall with a nod, thanks Dumbledore with a silence, and refuses to waste another syllable on Snape.

They leave with a stack of citations, ink on their fingers, and the kind of tired that feels like a plan.

In the corridor, the castle breathes them in and lets them go. Students in uniforms, different colours, same noise, surf the staircase tides. One or two stare at Draco because people always do; one whispers, “Is that—?” and another answers, “No, he’s taller,” which, frankly, is a relief.

At the landing Granger stops abruptly and puts a hand to the stone, a gesture so old it must be instinct. For a heartbeat the staircases groan and slot the way she wants. Of course they do.

“You and this place,” Draco says. “First language.”

“Second,” she says automatically. “Books were first.”

He knows. He shouldn’t know, but he does.

They descend without speaking. The silence says enough: we’re going back into the house that hates us, because that is where the last piece is.

The day has the indecency to be beautiful. They ignore it like professionals.

They should leave. They don’t. The corridor outside the office is empty for once: no portraits faking naps, no first-years trying to look lost in case pity counts for points. A strip of afternoon sun lies across the flagstones like a line they could step over and be ordinary people on the other side. They both stand looking at it like a joke whose punchline hasn’t landed yet.

Granger breaks first, because of course she does. “Thank you,” she says, like the words taste strange. “For… not taking his side.”

“Snape?” Draco says. “He never wanted me. He wanted a tool with better cheekbones.”

“You obliged,” she says, not quite cruel.

“For a while,” he admits. “I wasn’t unique in that.”

Her mouth flattens. “No.”

He should leave it. He doesn’t. “Your fight with him—”

“Don’t,” she warns, soft.

“I won’t compliment it,” he says. “That would be obscene. But I understood it.”

She huffs something like a laugh and leans her shoulder against the wall, just far enough away that he can’t accuse either of them of seeking proximity. “He made me feel small because I was the thing he hated most: a Muggle-born who could beat him at his own subject.”

“That,” Draco says, “and you were alive.”

Her head turns at that, not all the way. “You do realize that’s grotesquely bleak.”

“It’s also true,” he says. The curse hums, satisfied. “I recognize resentments. Family speciality.”

They stand in the thin sun like people queuing for absolution and pretending it’s just the light. From the stairs comes a sudden shatter of laughter, someone’s charmed quills exploding into glitter. The noise hits them both like a time dilation.

“You came back after the war,” she says, a statement she wants to make a question.

“Sometimes,” he says. “To consult experts with appalling bedside manner.”

“Snape?” Dry as chalk.

“And the other one,” he says, tilting his head at the office door. “The one with the better PR.”

She snorts despite herself. It leaves awkwardness for a moment and is almost worse.

“Why do you keep doing it?” he asks, before he can dress the question up. “This. Fixing things you didn’t break.”

Her breath flares. He expects a speech. Gets something smaller, more dangerous. “Because I can’t bear the idea that someone like Bellatrix thought she could write the rules forever.” A beat. “Because I survived when other people didn’t, and I feel sick if I waste that. Because if I can’t break it, what was any of it for?”

He recognizes that answer; it’s ugly and it fits. He nods once, because saying same would be self-pity in a nicer coat.

They don’t move. The light crawls a fraction along the stone.

He says the smaller truth, because the big ones have been shouted enough. “You’re very good at this.”

She looks at him as if she’s never heard the sentence before without a but attached. “Yes,” she says after a second, defiant. “I am.”

“Annoying, too,” he adds, because equilibrium is a compulsion with him.

“There it is,” she says, and almost smiles.

They step off the strip of sun at the same time and don’t comment on how their strides sync. The castle leads them down the last staircase as if it approves, which is unnerving.

At the door to the courtyard, McGonagall materializes with that Scottish knack for appearing precisely when you’re about to misbehave. “Miss Granger,” she says, eyes softening at the edges despite herself. “Do try not to set anyone on fire today.”

“One time,” Granger mutters, mortally offended on principle.

“Three,” McGonagall says without breaking eye contact, and sweeps past.

“Terrifying woman,” Draco says.

“National treasure,” Granger counters. Then, with a look at the sky: “We should send word. Grimmauld, tonight. Tapestry room.”

“Lovely,” he says. “Back to the house that wants me as a garnish.”

“Try not to bleed on anything we can’t wash,” she says, already walking.

He follows, because apparently this is his life now: cursed, catalogued, and consenting to be dragged toward the worst places by the only person who insists the worst can be dismantled.

They part at the gates. Neither says see you later. It’s baked into the plan.

On the path down to the apparition point, he catches his reflection in a window, tired aristocrat, still annoyingly fit, haunted just enough to be a public service announcement. What a relief that the glass can’t force him to say anything.

The owl finds him halfway to the boundary. Tonight, 7. —H.G. No please, obviously. He tucks it away like a summons and tells himself the flutter low in his ribs is dread, because that’s the most respectable option on offer.

He turns on the spot. The world cracks. The castle slides away like a memory he refuses to tidy.

Back at the Manor, the portraits mutter. He ignores them. He stands at a window and watches his reflection not blink. He doesn’t say the thing that wants to be said: You did fine. The curse has no opinion on kindness withheld from oneself. Small mercies.

At 6:59 he’ll be on the step at Grimmauld again, palms already itching, blood at the ready because the house is a snob with a taste for Black ironies. But for a handful of hours he has quiet, and in that quiet the day rearranges itself into a single, unacceptable fact:

He and Granger worked. Not well, not kindly, not comfortably. But they worked.

It shouldn’t matter. It does.

He refuses to name the feeling. The curse is merciful enough, for once, not to insist.

Chapter Text

Grimmauld Place breathes the way old houses do, slow, labored, resentful, as though every creak is a sigh of disappointment. Draco hates it.

He hates it almost as much as he hates the fact that he’s here again, arriving before the rest, obeying Granger’s summons as if she were the Minister herself. He’s early. He never means to be early. It feels like surrender, and Malfoys do not surrender. Not to dusty wallpaper. Not to Gryffindors. And certainly not to moth-eaten furniture.

The tapestry room waits in its dim, threadbare grandeur. Gold and silver embroidery coils across the far wall, a sprawling family tree in arrogant stitches. Names gleam where the thread hasn’t dulled, others blasted into ash, scars stitched over scars. The whole thing hums faintly with enchantments so old they feel bone-deep, like the house itself is still muttering about its tragic lot.

She’s already there, of course.

Hermione Granger stands before the wall with notebook open, quill at the ready, hair pinned and already half escaping. There’s dust on her hands, ink across her wrist. She turns when she hears him, eyebrows rising.

“You’re early.”

It throws him off more than it should. He’s braced for You’re late, the usual sermon. Not this. Not you’re early.

He recovers fast, dry as parchment. “Woman, you’re impossible to please.”

She scoffs, color rushing faintly into her cheeks. “No, I’m not.”

He should leave it there. Truly. He even tries to. But the curse drags honesty like a hook, and his voice comes out quieter than intended. “Thank you.”

Her head tilts. “For what?”

“For all of this.” He gestures at the notes, the parchment, the tapestry itself, as though it’s self-evident. “You didn’t have to. It isn’t your curse. It isn’t your burden. And yet you’re the one keeping this alive, making it possible. Not Potter. Not Weasley. You. Always you.”

Hermione blinks, lips parting. She looks caught, like she hadn’t expected gratitude, like the idea itself is suspicious. “Is the curse making you say that?”

“No.” The word slips out sharp and certain, surprising even him. He almost wants to demand a recount.

Her eyes search his face for a long moment. She doesn’t glare, doesn’t argue. Just looks. Then she breathes out, softer than he’s ever heard her, and lets the smallest nod slip free. “You’re welcome.”

It feels raw. She’s not used to thanks, only expectation. The acceptance costs her something. And he knows, with a jolt, that he isn’t used to being grateful either. Stupid symmetry.

The silence is brittle, alive. He turns back to the tapestry because staring at Granger when she’s vulnerable feels illegal.

The door opens.

Harry and Ron arrive together, as they always do, their footsteps unconsciously matched. Harry scans corners like the room owes him a duel, shoulders set with the vigilance of someone who has never been safe. Ron is steadier, grounding him, one hand brushing his wand holster out of habit. They lean into each other like planets caught in the same orbit, tired but familiar. Draco pretends not to notice.

Bill comes next, tall and taut, all curse-breaker precision. Charlie follows, looser but no less tense, jaw tight, shoulders set. Something passes between the brothers in a look, worry unspoken, carried like blood.

And then Theo, of course Theo, who wasn’t invited but arrives anyway, sweeping in with a grin that dares anyone to say otherwise.

“Hermione,” Charlie greets, warm but distracted.

“Harry. Ron.” Bill nods, clipped.

Theo flourishes a bow at no one in particular. “My presence improves the room.”

Hermione smiles at them all in turn, voice softening for each name. They greet her back. And then, to Draco’s faint surprise, they greet him too. Not warmly, not like family, but with recognition. Ron’s grunt. Harry’s nod. Bill’s “Malfoy.” Even Charlie throws him a brief, acknowledging look.

It’s small. It’s enormous. Four months ago, they’d have sooner hexed him. Progress is strange, uncomfortable, and vaguely insulting.

Hermione clears her throat, pulling them back to purpose. “We’re here to look for traces of Bellatrix in the family’s own record. This tapestry spans centuries. If she left anything behind, patterns, symbols, lineage curses, it will be here.”

“And Ginny?” Ron asks.

Hermione shakes her head. “With the children tonight. She’s tired.”

Ron nods. Harry leans a little closer without thinking. The habit is almost sweet. Almost.

The group scatters instinctively. Bill examines ward-lines stitched into the fabric, muttering like he’s telling off an errant curse. Charlie prowls the perimeter, wand loose, shoulders sharp when the threads twitch. Harry and Ron take opposite sides, covering exits like old soldiers. Theo drapes himself into a chair like a decorative nuisance.

Draco steps closer to the tapestry. Names sprawl, overlapping, looping back. Cousins marrying cousins. Aunts and uncles tangled where they shouldn’t be. He laughs, sharp and bitter, because the alternative is weeping.

“Nothing says legacy like marrying your cousin twice removed.”

Hermione bites her lip, fighting it. But then, against her will, a laugh escapes. Quick, startled, honest. She shakes her head. “That’s… quite fucking funny, actually.”

Draco glances at her, smug despite himself. If he can still make her laugh in a mausoleum like this, perhaps he’s not entirely beyond salvage.

They move along the tapestry, eyes drawn inexorably to the end of a scorched branch. Two names remain: Sirius Black and Regulus Black.

Draco’s voice is quieter than he expects. “What do you know about Regulus?”

Hermione studies the stitched letters, voice gentling. “He was the youngest Death Eater of his time. But he died a brave man, with the hope that someone braver than him could defeat the Dark Lord.”

The curse claws at Draco, forces the thought free. “He was brave. Bravery was diluted somewhere in the line. It didn’t get to me.”

Hermione turns, sharp-eyed. “You wouldn’t be here if you were a coward. You could have run.”

The words sting. Not pity. Not absolution. Something harder, truer. Recognition.

He looks back at Regulus’ name. The youngest Death Eater. Loyal until he wasn’t. Brave too late. Draco sees himself there, a reflection warped but familiar.

Hermione’s gaze drifts to the other name. “What do you know about Sirius?”

“Nothing.” Honesty tastes like rust.

So she tells him.

About the boy who broke tradition and chose Gryffindor. About James Potter’s best friend, reckless and brilliant and loyal to a fault. About the man who lost everything to Azkaban and still fought when freedom came. About the godfather who died with a smile, fighting for what he believed.

Draco listens, the curse binding him to silence. He sees the shape of it, the contrast between brothers. Regulus, swallowed by obedience, trying too late to break free. Sirius, defiant from the start, consumed anyway.

Two sides of the same thread. Both doomed.

And Draco thinks, with the bleak dramatics of someone who has had far too much practice: Maybe I was meant to burn too.

Hermione looks at him then, really looks, and something passes between them. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But connection. Something hot and unresolved, humming under the skin.

The room hums too, Bill’s mutterings, Ron and Harry leaning against each other, Charlie’s steady prowling, Theo’s amused quiet, but Draco and Hermione stand before the tapestry as though it’s only the two of them.

Neither speaks. Neither moves.

The tapestry waits, silent witness to another generation trying to survive its curse.

The tapestry stretches like a map of mistakes, inked in blood and fire. Draco stands in front of it long after Hermione has crossed the room at Harry’s call. His eyes trace the stitched branches that coil and tangle, cousins marrying cousins, names scorched black like rot spreading through a tree.

He laughs under his breath. Of course they’d embroidered it. Make the inbreeding decorative, immortalized in gilt thread, like something to be proud of. He almost expects to find a note beneath one of the unions: Best kept in the family.

Hermione had laughed earlier too. She tried to bite it back, but it slipped. He caught it. He catalogues these slips now, as if each one were a rare mineral he might polish later.

His eyes drag to the edge, to the last two names still visible, not yet obliterated by fire: Sirius Orion Black and Regulus Arcturus Black. Two brothers staring at each other across the cloth like they’d been preserved for his scrutiny.

Regulus. The family whispered his name with reluctant respect , the youngest Death Eater, the clever boy, dead too young. They never knew he’d turned traitor until Kreacher told Harry bloody Potter of all people. Draco feels the irony coil in his chest like smoke. Regulus had gambled bravery where it counted. Draco had only survived.

And Sirius. He doesn’t know enough yet. Only that his portrait has been scrubbed from Grimmauld walls with the same ferocity they once used to curse his name.

He’s still staring when voices drift across the room.

“…Ginny’s pregnant,” Potter says. His tone is soft, almost sheepish, as if happiness itself is a fragile secret.

For a heartbeat, silence. Then Weasley’s bark of laughter, loud enough to echo. “Merlin, Harry, you’ve got terrible timing for this sort of news.”

Terrible timing.

Draco scoffs aloud before he can stop himself. A sharp, private noise. Tell me about it. He was born with bad timing, had announced as much in this very house, weeks ago, when the world felt like it had teeth. Apparently the condition was contagious.

What surprises him most is the absence of that sharp twist in his gut. Once, news like that, Potter’s domestic bliss multiplying like rabbits, would have hollowed him. But there’s nothing. No pang, no envy. Just a flicker of surprise, and then the faintest warmth at the thought that Potter looks lighter than he has in years.

He closes his eyes briefly. The Black brothers stare at him still, stitched and silent. He wonders which of them he’s meant to measure himself against.

Hermione returns. Her face is flushed, not from anger for once, but from the news still buzzing across the room. She joins him at the tapestry without a word.

“Sirius,” Draco says, nodding at the name. “What do you know?”

Her gaze softens in a way that makes him uneasy. “He was brilliant. Reckless. Infuriating. He could light up a room and scorch it in the same breath. He was James Potter’s best friend, and he lived as if rules were made to be mocked.”

Draco arches a brow. “A Gryffindor, then.”

“The first Black to wear scarlet and gold,” she confirms. “Your family never forgave him. He was everything they despised and everything they feared they could never smother.”

She steps closer to the woven name, voice low. “He was terrible sometimes. Cruel when he was young. He almost got Severus killed once. But he chose. He chose to fight. He chose to stand with Harry, even when it cost him everything.”

Her hand drifts up, almost touching the fabric, then falling back. “And he died with a smile on his face. Fighting for what he believed.”

The air between them changes. Thicker. Charged. Draco’s shoulder brushes hers as he leans to study Sirius’s stitched name, and she doesn’t move away. He notices the faint smell of parchment and dust clinging to her jumper, the warmth radiating off her arm. Their bodies align without meaning to, the kind of nearness that sets every nerve awake.

She clears her throat, deliberately steady. “Do you know about the Marauder’s Map?”

He frowns. “What map?”

Her mouth curves, not quite a smile. “The Marauders: James, Sirius, Remus, Peter, they made a map of Hogwarts. Every passageway, every secret door. Even every person walking the halls, in real time.”

Draco blinks. “Potter had a map of Hogwarts?” Disbelief coils sharp in his voice. “Of course he did. That’s how you got away with all your mischief.”

At the word mischief, she laughs. A real laugh, bubbling out before she can stop it, startled by the echo.

“One day,” she says, catching her breath, “maybe we’ll show you.”

The promise hangs between them, dangerous and shimmering. He turns his head, and for one long moment their faces are too close. He can see the faint freckle near her jaw, the way her lashes catch the low light. The band under his skin thrums, and every part of him knows how easy it would be to tilt forward, close the space.

He doesn’t. Neither does she. But neither of them steps back, either.

The tension hums like a held breath.

The others are clustered across the room now, orbiting Harry’s news. Bill and Charlie exchange glances, older-brother worry etched in the lines of their mouths. Bill, always assessing risk. Charlie, restless even in celebration, as if measuring how to guard joy against the world’s teeth.

Harry and Ron lean into each other the way only war-forged brothers can, tired but standing, laughter softening their exhaustion. The kind of bond that needs no translation. Draco turns away, because watching it feels like trespassing.

Hermione lingers by the tapestry a little longer, but her shoulders slope, heavy. Charlie notices. He crosses the space and stops beside her, saying nothing at first. Then, simply, “You’re in too deep.”

She exhales, but he continues before she can protest. “I know you’re worried. I know you’re tired. And I know you won’t say it, so I will.”

Her lips part. He cuts her off again, gentle but firm. “You think you’ve got to carry this alone. But you don’t. Not this time.”

Hermione doesn’t argue. She just lets him say it, lets the words wash over her like something she can’t block. Their understanding is easy, old, carved in battles that didn’t leave scars on skin but on marrow.

Draco watches. And for the first time, there’s no jealousy burning in his gut. He understands now. They’re twin flames that never blazed together, but burned in the same direction. Not lovers. Something older, stranger, maybe stronger.

Hermione lifts her gaze finally, meeting Charlie’s eyes. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t need to.

Draco looks away. His own reflection stares back from the tapestry’s woven surface, pale and blurred. Two brothers, two ends of a thread, stitched in defiance or silence.

Then something catches his eye.

A seam, faint but wrong. A stitch that doesn’t match the others. At the edge of Sirius’s branch, almost hidden in the dark threads, the embroidery ripples like a secret waiting to be pulled. 

His breath hitches. “Granger,” he says, voice low.

She turns back, following his gaze. Her eyes widen.

The tapestry moves.

Chapter Text

The tapestry behaves like it has lungs.

One moment it’s thread and dust; the next it’s breathing, just a little, which is a hateful party trick for fabric. A single line of silver wakes inside the Black family tree, humming under candlelight as if someone strung a nerve through it and dared you to press.

“Bellatrix,” Granger says, quiet and flint-hard. She doesn’t touch. Of course she doesn’t. Her hand hovers, measuring. “She stitched concealment wards into the weft. A key, not just a record.”

“Of course she did,” Draco says, because if he stops narrating he might start feeling. “Why keep your depravity in a diary when you can embroider it onto the wall?”

Theo, folded into a chair like lounging is a vocation, smiles at the glowing vein. “It’s chic. Horrifying, but chic.”

Bill is already moving, curse-breaker crouch, wand up, eyes narrowed as if the wardline is a sudoku he’s decided to fight. He brushes the glow with a whisper of magic and the whole thing thrums under the house’s ribs. The house theatrically sighs when anyone touches near the tapestry. 

“Anchored,” Bill murmurs. “This thread is feeding something. Down.”

Potter takes one step toward the door like he’s heard an alarm in his bones. Weasley shadows him without looking, the way people do when they’ve grown up inside each other’s blind spots. Charlie ghosts in a half circle, reading the room like it’s about to lunge. Granger doesn’t blink, and Draco decides that if he ever dies of admiration it will be today and entirely her fault.

He also decides not to tell her that; he isn’t suicidal.

The wall stirs. A seam appears where there wasn’t one, clever as guilt. Somewhere below, something unlocked a throat.

“Brilliant,” Draco says. “Our ghastly family tree is a lift.”

“Vault,” Bill corrects, already shouldering through the gap. “Bellatrix didn’t build lifts.”

“No,” Draco agrees, dry as chalk. “She built problems.”

They go down.

Grimmauld Place has as many basements as it has regrets. The stair spirals, stone sweating, the air cooling to that particular cellar-cold that remembers bodies. The Black ancestors did nothing by halves; they would have lined the steps with bones if decorating with spines had become fashionable long enough to be tasteful.

“Cheerful,” Theo says, voice bouncing off the walls. “I feel so welcome.”

“You are not,” Draco says, and the remark warms him out of proportion because petty is free.

At the bottom: a door that looks like it belongs in a cautionary tale. Iron-banded, wardlines pressed into the metal like veins. The magic that leaks from it is sour and old and hungry.

“Don’t love that,” Charlie says, which from Charlie covers an ocean of loathing.

Bill kneels. Granger is beside him before Draco can decide he should be irritated by how easily her body knows where to land. The two of them begin that wordless, ruthless duet curse-breakers do: the short, half-spoken phrases, the angled wrists, the way good partners move around one another like knives doing a dance.

Draco tries not to stare. Fails. Resentment and respect braid themselves into something with teeth.

“Don’t hover,” Theo whispers near his shoulder, which means Draco is hovering. “You’re being furniture,” Theo says sweetly. “Your best role.”

A ward screams as Bill snaps it; sparks spit and pebble-bounce into Draco’s robe. Granger steadies Bill’s elbow without looking and layers a chant that cuts the scream into a sullen hiss. Another line falls. Another. It goes on. Curse-breaking has none of duelling’s drama; it’s more like surgery done on a patient who bites.

“Hungry, this one,” Bill mutters.

“All of this house is hungry,” Draco answers before he can help himself, because apparently he narrates now. “It hasn’t had Black heir blood in years. Then I showed up like a delivery.”

Granger flicks him a look that says: I heard that. He looks away like he didn’t mean to be honest out loud.

The door gives with a sound like an old argument finally deciding to end and swings inward on hinges that shouldn’t work. The vault is small and wet-stoned and disappointed in them. In the center: a low pedestal bearing a black box the size of an invitation to disaster. Obsidian-dark, edges clean enough to cut a thought, humming at a frequency that makes the hairs on Draco’s arms want to resign.

“No one touch it,” Granger says, too calm. “I mean you, Potter.”

“I’m not touching it,” Potter says, insulted in the way only people who are always assumed to be touching things can be.

“Yet,” Weasley offers, helpful and unhelpful in equal measure.

Bill circles the pedestal, wand held out at the exact angle of a man negotiating with a hydra. “It’s active. Compulsion signature. We’ll probe at a distance.”

“Excellent,” Theo says brightly. “I’ll probe from the other room.”

Charlie’s wand is in his hand in that lazy way that fools almost everyone. “If it so much as twitches, I’m smashing it.”

“Don’t,” Bill and Granger say together, because apparently the Weasleys’ answer to fine art is a hammer.

Draco steps closer without deciding to, because this house likes him in the same way a parasite likes a host. The box hums, pleased, as if tasting Potter’s blood. Draco resists the impulse to bare his teeth at it like a dog.

“Do you feel that?” Granger asks, and of course she has noticed the way he tenses, the way his breath wants to shorten. Of course she has.

“It’s flirting,” Draco says. “I’m not flattered.”

“Shut up,” she says, not unkindly.

Bill makes a last, precise arc with his wand over the lid. “There. That should keep—”

The box opens itself.

No showy click. No dramatic flare. Just the simple, arrogant confidence of a thing that does not believe in permission. A seam appears where none existed; the lid tips a fraction. The air in the vault moves like a long, slow blink.

It hits Draco first, (of course it does) like static laid between skin and breath. His own curse perks, as though someone whispered its name in a crowded street. The atmosphere tastes of iron and old pennies, of words stripped to the wire.

“Don’t speak,” Granger starts.

Too late.

“I’m terrified,” Potter says, and his voice is steady for exactly half a word, then trips into the truth like it’s been shoved. “Of being a father again. I—bloody hell, it’s probably a girl. What if I fail her?”

He does not look at anyone. He looks at the box like it’s a mirror he’s tempted to break.

The room does the thing rooms do when no one knows where to put their eyes.

“Harry,” Weasley says, gentle the way he is when he forgets to be sarcastic.  He steadies Potter, and a faint silver shimmer runs across Weasley’s wrist, gone in a blink. Draco’s curse prickles, like it wants more voices in the room.

Potter swallows, jaw working. “That wasn’t— I didn’t plan to—” He stops trying to tidy it up. “Right. So that’s that.” Granger’s fingers brush the back of Potter’s hand to calm him; the lamps flare slightly, the house creaks sounding pleased. 

Bill’s face tightens in a way Draco has only ever seen around cursed objects and his youngest siblings. “Compulsion field, non-contact. She built honesty into the air.”

“Rude,” Theo says, and then the box chooses him. “Fine,” he continues in the exact same tone, because Theo Nott being hijacked produces only better diction. “I am, in fact, devastatingly good-looking, and yes, I know that isn’t helpful.”

Silence does a strange little hiccup.

Charlie’s mouth jerks like a man trying not to grin. “Is that your great truth, Nott?”

“No,” Theo says, affronted. “My great truth is that I am terrified of irrelevance. The prettiness is merely a consolation prize.”

“Merlin’s bollocks,” Weasley mutters, which in Ron-speak is surprisingly compassionate.

Bill’s knuckles whiten on his wand. “Everyone keep your distance. It may escalate.”

“Define escalate,” Draco says, because if he must be dragged through this with them, he gets to keep his narration.

“Do this,” Bill says, and his voice has that elder-brother side to it that means panic in disguise. “Do not say anything you would mind hearing out loud for the rest of your natural lives.”

“Grand,” Draco deadpans. “A room that works like my head.”

The box ignores the advice.

Ron’s truth arrives like a hiccup and a punch. “I hate being the sidekick,” he blurts, color rising like a curse. “Hate that people still look at me and see… him.” He gestures at Harry without looking. “Thought I’d be past it by now.”

He is immediately mortified. It’s spectacular. He looks at the floor like it has betrayed him.

Potter doesn’t say I know, because that’s not how this trio works. He shifts half a step so he is shoulder-to-shoulder, which is better. “You’re not my sidekick,” he says, too soft to be for the room. “You’re my—”

“Don’t,” Ron says, because if Potter says it out loud, the box will make a feast of it.

Granger is pale; not the dramatic kind, the kind where all the blood has evacuated in protest. She’s breathing through her nose like a woman taming a stampede. Draco, who has carried truths that kicked the door off its hinges, recognizes the minute before a mouth betrays its owner.

“Granger,” he says, because saying her name helps nothing and he does it anyway.

She glares at the box and then at him and then at nothing, and the truth elbows its way out regardless. “You’re all—” She bites it back. Her eyes spark like flint. She loses. “You’re all bloody fit, and I’m in desperate need of a shag.”

It lands like a dropped chandelier.

For a second no one breathes. Then Theo, a saintly idiot, puts a hand to his heart. “I feel so seen.”

Bill makes a sound like he’s inhaled a lemon. Charlie blinks, slow, as if delaying reaction can retroactively prevent it. Potter turns pink to the tips of his ears and examines a wall as if it contains prophecy. Weasley looks like he’s rethinking every life choice that put him in this vault today.

Granger’s face flames: cheeks, ears, down to the line where her collarbone vanishes into her jumper. “I didn’t— That wasn’t— Forget I—”

“You can’t,” Draco hears himself say, before he can stop the conversational suicide, “unsay honesty.”

Her eyes go nuclear. “Shut up.”

“Yes,” he agrees pleasantly. His heart is a ridiculous animal. He can feel it galloping in its cage, all because the sentence you’re all bloody fit logically includes him and the curse sits there, smug and silent, and does not object.

This is what hope feels like, he thinks, and wants to punch it in the throat.

Theo, redeemed only by consistency, bows at the waist. “For the minutes and seconds, Miss Granger: should you wish to convert researchers into relief, I am, alas, distractingly qualified.”

“I’m not! Not even at wandpoint,” Charlie says, and it isn’t cruel; it’s something else, older and softer and closer to sibling. The twin-flame tenderness he reserves for her when she’s vibrating at murderous frequencies. “Stand down, Notty.”

Granger drags both hands through her hair, destroying half her pins and all of Draco’s equilibrium. “I hate this house.”

“You love this work,” Draco says, because if he’s going to be used as a conduit, he might as well be useful. “You hate the way it strips you to the truth.”

Something vicious and complicated crosses her face. “Don’t analyze me.”

“Can’t help it,” he says. “Occupational hazard.”

“Your occupation is being cursed,” she snaps.

“And supervising,” Theo adds helpfully. “He supervises at a very high level.”

The vault hums, contented, like a cat curled around a secret. Bill flares magic in a contained pulse that makes the hair rise on Draco’s arms. “It’s general compulsion,” Bill says, grim. “Not fine-tuned. It pulls whatever’s nearest to the surface.”

“Right,” Weasley says flatly. “Which, for some of us, is apparently sex and identity crises.”

Potter scrubs at his jaw with the heel of his bandaged hand. “Better out than festering,” he says, and then gives the box a look that could have felled Basilisks. “I take that back.”

“Let’s just… not talk,” Granger says, tight as wire. “For a minute.”

Theo leans toward Draco, voice a theatre whisper. “You are vibrating.”

“I am not.”

“You are vibrating like a tuning fork.”

“Shut up, Theo.”

The box is open. The air is a net. Draco’s own curse sits very still and watches its cousin work; a snake contemplating another snake.

“Does it want blood to close?” Potter asks, not approaching, not that drunk anymore.

“Everything in this place wants blood,” Draco says, and the line is so true the curse nudges it like an elbow from inside.

Bill steps close to the pedestal, shadowing the box without crossing the line he drew with his wand. “It’s keyed to the room, not the object. We can work beside it if we’re careful.”

“Define careful,” Ron repeats, because repetition is the only sane response to a world like this.

“Pretend you’re in a courtroom,” Bill says. “And Um— the Toad is waiting to pounce.”

“Ah,” Weasley says, grim humor slotting into place like armor. “So: lie low, speak slow, never stop moving.”

“Not the worst protocol,” Charlie offers.

Granger uses the back of her sleeve to press color out of her face and conquers the work like a battle she’d planned to fight since birth. “Right. We document before we dismantle. Draco, take dictation. No commentary.”

“Bossy,” he says, taking parchment anyway. “You’re unbearable when you’re interesting.”

She flicks him a look that would have incinerated him in third year and only warms him now. “And you’re verbose when you’re anxious. Quill.”

He writes.

Bill maps sigils in chalk on the stone at their feet—three linked spirals, a shallow bridge, little skins of runic shorthand that, to Draco’s eye, look like the bones of an insect. Granger names the families, cross-references the ones they’ve seen in wallpaper and wardstone and the hinge-scratch Theo slowed in that tatty memory loop. Charlie watches the lines with the lazy attention of a man counting fence posts and planning where the wolves will get in.

Potter keeps the perimeter with the particular stillness of someone who has learned not to startle the worst things. Weasley leans a shoulder into his, not protective, not quite. Something steadier, old as the tent they didn’t leave each other in the middle of winter.

Theo provides commentary because he is physically incapable of not. “So the mechanism is not truth for truth’s sake,” he muses, eyes on the spiral. “It’s truth as force. You don’t just tell what’s true; you can’t not. You’re pushed through your own mouth.”

“Yes,” Granger says, quick and grateful for once. “Exactly. Truth is the fuel. Obedience is the engine.”

It is grisly, how right that sounds.

Draco’s hand moves across the page. His handwriting, he notices distantly, has settled into something legible since this began. Perhaps telling the truth improves penmanship. He does not intend to test that.

They work in a rhythm that tastes unfamiliar and necessary: the curse-breakers building a skeleton; the Gryffindors holding the room on habit and stubbornness; Theo making jokes that drive tension off before it sticks; Draco, of all people, taking notes like a good prefect. If his House had seen him now, they’d have died of irony.

The air pulls at them, occasionally tugging sentences out of their throats like weeds.

“I’m tired,” Potter says at one point, apologizing to no one. “Of being turned into the story other people need.”

Ron answers by not answering and standing a fraction closer. It’s obscene and private and Draco pretends to be absorbed by chalk.

Bill says “I miss Egypt,” and then, startled by his own honesty, coughs into his sleeve, eyes going sideways to Charlie. The big brother returns a small, wry tilt of his mouth: me too.

Charlie breathes, “I am happiest around things that could eat me,” and the room decides to permit that.

Theo announces, “I crave an audience,” and when no one obliges, adds, “I’m not ashamed.”

Granger doesn’t speak again. She wrestles the language into lines and lets the work be her confession. Draco thinks she might be the bravest person in the world for not running.

“Look,” Bill says finally, chalk-hand pointing at the spine of their schematic. “Blood primes, mouth opens, binding closes. The loop doesn’t stop speech; it stops not speaking. You cannot evade; you must expel.”

Weasley grimaces. “So: you can’t hedge, can’t stall, can’t swallow. You’re forced through the narrowest part of yourself.”

Granger’s hand presses so hard the quill squeaks. “Obedience isn’t a side effect. It’s the point.”

“Do you think she built a counter?” Potter asks; too calm to be calm. “Somewhere?”

“If she did, it won’t be for us,” Bill says, and Draco watches the others hear it in their bones.

They fall quiet in that way tired people do: where silence is not absence but truce.

The box waits, open-mouthed and patient. The vault breathes through its damp teeth. The house listens, pleased.

Draco becomes uncomfortably aware that he hasn’t had to speak the whole time. The compulsion is there like a net, yes, but his own curse is older, deeper; it has planted stakes, claimed ground, shrugged at the newcomer. He is, for once, either protected or doomed in advance. He hasn’t decided.

Granger notices; of course she does. “Are you… unaffected?”

“By other people’s problems?” he says. “For once.”

“By this field,” she clarifies, murderously calm.

“It’s more of a duet,” he says. “A miserable one.”

“Noted,” she says, and he knows she will pretend not to care and then write it down later, hard enough to tear the page.

The vault clock neither of them can see ticks from work to weariness. The light changes, which in Grimmauld means the candles have decided to sulk. Everyone looks a little more like themselves and a little more like ghosts of the people who used to be them.

Then, without the smallest flourish, Draco’s world tilts, again, because the box chooses Hermione one more time and drags up a sentence so clean it could cut.

“I don’t know how to want anything that isn’t a fight,” she says, low, furious with herself, and then looks like she wishes she’d bitten through her own tongue.

No one who knows her pretends to be surprised. No one who loves her pretends not to be. Charlie’s eyes soften; Potter’s mouth pulls; Weasley stares at the floor like floors are a mercy. Theo, for once, does not joke.

Draco writes it down like it’s a rune they need later. He does not underline it. He doesn’t need to.

The air thins on the inhale. The box hums a fraction lower, as if it has fed well and will now curl up and nap. The compulsion loosens, not gone, just lazier. It will pounce again if you tempt it.

“We should shut it,” Bill says. “Without touching. I can stitch the aura down until we… know what it isn’t.”

“What if it locks,” Potter says, “with someone’s mouth still open?”

Granger’s quill clicks hard into the inkpot. “Then we run faster.” She stands, joints protesting quietly. “We’ve got enough to model the rest. We come back with better wards.”

Theo rises with a theatrical groan. “And better snacks. Compulsory confession is exhausting.”

Draco’s hand has cramped around the quill. He sets it down and flexes his fingers, discovering ink on his knuckle and the embarrassing, treacherous fact of… relief. Because the box did its trick and he did not explode and Granger blurted a sentence that included him by geometry if not intent.

Idiot, he tells himself, fondly and viciously. Try dignity for once.

They begin to back out in that practiced way soldiers do: no sudden moves, no backs to teeth. Bill spirals counter-charms into the floor with veteran accuracy; the hum tightens to a sulk. Potter watches the corners. Weasley watches Potter. Charlie watches everything. Theo watches himself in anything reflective because he understands morale is a visual medium.

Granger scoops their notes, his notes, with proprietary care that jab-warms something under his ribs.

At the threshold, the house sighs through the stones, like an old dog turning over on a bed it is sick of sharing. Draco pauses. If he were dignified, he would not.

“Granger,” he says, because apparently he is not.

She glances back, hair half fallen, eyes still sparking with the day. “What?”

He means to say nothing. He means to nod like colleagues do and invent a reason to walk two steps behind her so he can stop glancing at the curve of her wrist when she writes.

Instead, because he is cursed and terrible at preventing himself, he says, quiet, honest, surprised by it as it passes his teeth, “Thank you.”

The room pretends not to hear. Granger… doesn’t. She stops; not a flinch, not a freeze, just a little halt like a machine choosing to decelerate.

“For what?” Her voice is wary in the way of people who have learned that gratitude is often a trick.

“For all of this,” he says, hand meaningless in the air between them. “You could have given it to Potter and walked away. You didn’t. You kept… pushing. You’re the reason any of it works. Not in general.” He grimaces at himself. “Today.”

Her mouth opens, not for a retort. She looks...thrown. Not by the compliment, by the phenomenon of being thanked at all. The expression hits him like a hex; like being the first person to find a staircase in a house everyone else insists is all ladders.

“Is the curse making you say that?” she asks finally, sharp because softness frightens her.

“No,” he says, and the honesty springs out neat and calm, shocking him with its ease. “Apparently not.”

The corner of her mouth tilts. Not a smile. Not yet. A tiny tilt that says: noted. She lifts a shoulder, awkward and unbearably human. “Right. Well. You’re welcome.”

It is such a fragile sentence that Draco pockets it like contraband.

They climb.

Above, the tapestry is still breathing. The silver thread has dimmed to a private glow. Bill sets wards that make the room mutter, which is an improvement on it biting. Charlie prowls a last lap and touches two fingers briefly to Bill’s shoulder: old code, still here. Potter leans into Weasley for a second that stretches like a yawn; they look more like boys than they have in years and then remember they can’t afford it and straighten.

Theo checks his hair in a crack in the glass. “I handled that with such grace,” he announces to no one. “Ten points to me.”

“Negative fifteen,” Granger says without thinking, and then catches herself and looks over at Draco and looks away again, and he thinks, traitor organ, oh.

“Tomorrow?” Bill asks. “We’ll model the binding. Bring tea.”

“Bring biscuits,” Potter corrects.

“Bring a lot of not-talking,” Ron says fervently.

Charlie jerks his chin at Draco. “You look like you could use a steak.”

“I look like money and regret,” Draco says. “Steak would help the first.”

“Nothing helps the second,” Theo says cheerfully, clapping him on the back.

Draco lets the room unspool around him, the tired jokes, the inventory of injuries, the practiced rituals of putting tools away and not catching on old griefs as you pass. The ache in him does that obnoxious thing where it expands and calls itself longing. He has missed belonging to anything that wasn’t a curse.

Idiot, he reminds himself. Dignity. Try it.

They scatter by degrees. No one says good night like friends; no one says thank you like colleagues. They exist in that strange middle ground you don’t have a word for until someone invents a new life and hands it to you. He isn’t foolish enough to call it that. He isn’t wise enough not to want to.

On his way out, he glances sideways, the coward’s angle, and finds Granger glancing back, caught in the same theft. The look is not soft. It’s not cruel. It’s the one a climber gives another when there is still mountain and they have chosen, against reason and dignity, to keep going.

He doesn’t bow. He wants to. He is ridiculous.

The house breathes a last damp sigh as he steps into the hall. Somewhere behind him, the vault sings to its own open mouth. Somewhere ahead, the future is as narrow as a throat.

He tells himself he is above hope.

The curse, bloody thing, says nothing at all.

Bill wards the threshold on instinct, lines of light stitching the stone to keep the vault’s sulky magic where it belongs. The tapestry itself soughs in the draft, thread pretending it’s not complicit, while parchment and chalk spread across the central table like the aftermath of a surgery.

Granger is already sorting. Of course she is. She sorts grief the way other people sort cutlery: type, size, usefulness. Bill lays their field sketch beside her notes; the brittle edges kiss. Charlie posts up behind them with a protective casualness that fools no one, flipping a knife through his fingers because he dislikes having hands unoccupied around problems he can’t punch. Potter and Weasley stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the far side: habit, geometry, unshakeable. Theo drapes himself over a chair as if he’s posing for a melancholy portrait titled Man Thinking About Himself.

“Right.” Bill’s voice is rough. He taps three chalk spirals, the bridge, the binding loop. “Run it again.”

They do. Granger reads aloud, crisp and clinical, like intonation could file the teeth off the thing. Draco keeps the quill steady (ink, line, restraint) because if he doesn’t his hands will start saying worse things. The schematic they built below is cleaner in daylight, which is to say the ugliness is easier to admire.

“There’s nowhere to reverse it,” Bill says at last, the kind of calm that arrives after anger has been folded and put away for later. “No inverse path. No vent. It’s a one-way choke.”

“Like a trap you can walk out of, except you can’t,” Charlie adds. “Looks like a door. Isn’t.”

“She meant it to look like a cure,” Granger says, not looking up. The line of her mouth is so flat it could cut. “A false hinge. You think you’ve found the valve and all you’ve done is feed the mechanism.”

Theo exhales, elegant and appalled. “Innovation by disappointment. How perfectly Bellatrix.”

Weasley scowls at the chalk as if it were insultingly alive. “So all this time, anyone desperate enough to try would just… make themselves worse.”

Potter doesn’t move. He’s learned the trick of going still until the world stops shaking around him. “She didn’t need to fix people,” he says, too even. “She needed them to stop trying.”

Granger’s quill snaps. The tip shears clean off. A dot of ink lands on the table like a dropped bead of blood. She doesn’t swear. She breathes. It’s worse.

Bill rubs a hand over his eyes and drags it down his face like he wants to rearrange the bones into a different brother. “I should have seen the misdirection in the vault’s warding.”

“You cracked a layered Black lock in under an hour,” Charlie says, because eldest brothers can be soothed only by other eldest brothers. “Don’t pick a fight with the only person here who’d win it.”

The corner of Bill’s mouth ticks; absolution accepted, for now. He points with the replacement quill Draco slides across without comment. “Look here.” He taps the bridge. “This segment—if it were truly a counter-loop, we’d see an inverse of the binding runes, or at least a bleed into silence. Instead, Bellatrix copies her own spine—with the ratios tightened. It’s a decoy. She never intended an out.”

Draco watches them watch the conclusion land: Potter’s jaw set to stop something from escaping; Weasley’s hands flexing once, near uselessly; Theo blinking away the urge to make a pretty joke out of an ugly thing; Charlie calm in the way of men who expect the worst and are right too often. And Granger is fury in stationary form. She doesn’t tremble, she calibrates.

“It would have worked,” Draco says, before anyone asks him to. He can feel his curse listening, amused. “As a demolition. Open the box in a room like that and what you get is a field of compulsion—blunt, hungry. Not a cure. A flood.”

“Dead end.” Weasley’s mouth is a hard line. “By design.”

Theo sinks deeper into his chair. “Bellatrix Lestrange: patron saint of cul-de-sacs.”

“Counterfeit cure,” Bill says, more to the record than the room.

No one says we almost let it bite us twice. They all heard the hinge click when Potter’s blood hit metal. They all watched the air strip them to bone.

Potter looks at his bandage as if it might tell him a kinder story. “She’s still reaching,” he says softly. “From a decade underground.”

Granger closes her new quill around her fingers like a weapon. “Then we cut the arm off.”

The room makes a collective, exhausted sound that might once have been approval. Or surrender.

They work ten minutes longer because not-working would be a kind of loss. Granger itemizes, Bill annotates, Charlie translates ward-talk into farmer’s sense, Weasley sits with the sort of steady glower that frightens problems into taking a number. Potter marks the map they’ve made with quiet crosses—no melodrama, just an inventory of wounds. Draco writes it all in a hand that has become, against its will, serviceable.

When there’s nothing left to catalogue, the air changes. The house, bored with the human theatre, turns away. People begin to fidget in the ways that mean dispersal is coming: Bill stacks chalk with the neatness of a man closing a day; Charlie rotates his shoulder until it clicks; Weasley invents a joke he never tells; Potter watches the door and then decides not to leave yet. Theo checks himself in a flecked mirror with an absent vanity that is, absurdly, a kindness to everyone who can’t.

“We reset the perimeter and sleep,” Bill decrees, the way eldest brothers pass laws. “We go again after tea tomorrow. I’ll have a better locking lattice for the box’s aura.”

“I’ll bring biscuits,” Potter says.

“You’ll bring your bandage,” Weasley corrects, gentle as a shove.

Charlie taps two fingers against Bill’s shoulder and heads for the corridor in a long stride. Theo floats after him, throwing Draco a lazy salute that implies memoir rights and no royalties. Potter and Weasley depart together, half a conversation still dangling between them like a rope neither of them intends to let go.

Granger doesn’t move. She’s bent over the table, re-drawing two lines as if a straighter pencil mark might make Bellatrix repent retroactively. Draco hangs back because leaving would look like escape and staying looks like weakness. He compromises by pretending the floor contains runes only he can see.

He doesn’t mean to speak first. He does.

“We didn’t fail,” he says, crisp as a report. “She cheated.”

Granger doesn’t look up. “Not a comfort.”

“It’s not meant to be,” he says. “It’s an adjustment of blame.”

She huffs without humor. “You must be gorgeous at parties.”

“I am,” he says. “When the guest list is fictional.”

Silence. Then, the indefensible bravado of honesty: “You’re shaking,” he says, before he can strangle the observation.

“I’m writing,” she snaps.

“Poorly,” he replies, because the script demands it and because it keeps his voice from doing anything softer.

That gets him her eyes at last—brown, bright, livid. “All this work keeps ending in dead ends.”

“At least the truth is consistent.”

“Oh good,” she says, brittle and absurdly alive, “the philosophical consolation of a posh twat.”

“Takes one to recognize the accent,” he says, and there it is again—this thing that isn’t quite fighting and isn’t quite not. Her shoulders are too square; his hands are too still. The air between them has the weather of a summer storm deciding whether to break.

“Say it then,” she challenges, stepping in because retreat isn’t her verb. “Say whatever the curse is nagging you to spit.”

He could say any number of things: that she is frightening, that she is magnificent, that she is precisely the wrong person to save him and therefore the only person who can. He says the least disastrous variant. “You’re the reason any of this works,” he murmurs. “Not in general. Today.”

He expects her to parry. She doesn’t. Something small loosens at the corner of her mouth, not a smile; the possibility of one. “Shut up,” she says, and it arrives without venom. “We have to model the rest.”

“We will,” he says. He doesn’t know what we means and he doesn’t ask.

They tidy. It is an intimacy he recognizes too late: the choreography of not moving away. His hand lands on the same slip of parchment hers wants; her knuckles brush his; neither of them snatches back. He sets the quill in the inkwell she has already capped; she uncaps it again without looking; their fingers clink the brass. Trifles. Catastrophes.

She reaches for the stacked pages and encounters him instead—shoulder to shoulder, too close for manners. He should move. He doesn’t. She doesn’t.

“Excuse me,” she says, except the words come out like don’t.

“By all means,” he says, except the words come out like stay.

She looks up because she’s infuriatingly brave. He is already looking; he shouldn’t be. The angle brings her mouth into rational distance. He could catalogue freckles in a single breath. Her lashes make half-moons against the light. Someone has left a smear of chalk along her jaw. He wants to lick his thumb and—

No. No, he does not. He is not a man who wants things; wanting is how you get punished.

The air firms around them as if the house, hungry gossip, leans in. The distance between them contracts to a decision.

She sways, only a fraction, the kind of accidental physics bodies do when there is too much gravity. He leans—only a fraction, the kind of treachery that lives in the hinge of a neck. The room tilts into the idea.

It would be nothing to close it. It would be everything.

Her breath catches. His does something ridiculous. Inches are tyrants. A single heartbeat lasts a year.

Hermione is the one who stops it. Of course she is. She pulls back an inch like a general calling her troops off a cliff. The chalk along her jaw makes her look younger and more dangerous.

“We’ve got work to do,” she says, crisp as an order, frayed as a flag.

“Tragic, really,” he replies, killing the tremor with a posh drawl he has sharpened since infancy. “We’d have made history.”

Her glare arrives on a delay, as if she had to rebuild it from pieces. Her ears are pink. “Go home, Malfoy.”

He inclines his head. “Yes, Head Girl.”

“Grow up.”

“Impossible.”

The almost of it vibrates in the air after they step apart, like a plucked string waiting to decide whether to sing or snap. He pretends to study the tapestry; she pretends to fuss with the ward the way Bill likes it. They are fools. They are alive.

Bill and Charlie reappear at the door, ward-glow on their cuffs, looking like men who have just convinced a temperamental building not to bite children for another night. “Wrapped,” Bill says. “No one licks the artefacts until tomorrow.”

“Noted,” Granger answers, very busy with papers that do not need her.

Charlie’s gaze flicks between them like a dragon reading air currents. He doesn’t smirk. He never does. He only lifts his brows a millimeter at Draco, a look that means don’t be an idiot and I know and no, I’m not going to say it out loud.

Potter and Weasley reappear long enough to coordinate time and biscuits. They leave with the half-smile half-grimace of tired men who have learned to keep promises to the living because there were so many they couldn’t keep to the dead.

Theo slants back in through an entirely different doorway than the one he exited, purely to prove he can. “No one kissed, how dreary,” he observes, and vanishes with a bow before anyone thinks to hex him.

Bill snorts despite himself. “Tomorrow,” he repeats, because repetition is the only thing keeping the ground flat. “We go again.”

Charlie squeezes his shoulder. “We always do.”

People unspool. Coats, wands, the small rituals of leaving a scene without admitting it is a battlefield. Granger stacks Draco’s notes with the possessive neatness of a thief; he lets her steal them. At the door, she pauses in the way she did earlier when he thanked her—like a machine deciding to decelerate. She doesn’t look back. She doesn’t have to. He knows the shape of her absence.

“Good night,” she says to the room. It lands next to him.

“Night,” he says to the air. It answers with dust.

He lingers after they’ve gone because leaving too quickly would feel like running and staying too long would feel like confession. The tapestry breathes—slow, wicked, pleased. The silver line along the branch they woke has dimmed to a sullen thread. Somewhere below, the box hums to itself, fat with stolen truths.

He thinks about the counterfeit hinge, the false valve, the cruel elegance of a design that invited hope only to eat it. Bellatrix didn’t need victory in battle. She planned victory in silence: a country of mouths that couldn’t close.

There is ash in his mouth from imagining it.

He puts a hand to the table to steady himself and discovers he doesn’t need it. That is new. Or he’s noticing it for the first time. Also new.

He will not say it aloud, he isn’t that far gone, but the thought claws up regardless, hot, mortifying, impossible to shake:

Even if Bellatrix never wrote a cure, Granger might.

Dangerous, that. Worse than any curse. He knows it. He keeps it anyway, tucking it under the ribs with all the other contraband he refuses to admit is his.

The house grumbles. He ignores it like you ignore an elderly relative who has made a hobby of disapproval. Cloak, wand, door, street: the ritual of survival. He does not look back. He doesn’t have to. The almost of a kiss walks beside him all the way to the end of the lane and refuses to peel off. He tells himself he is above hope. The lie never makes it to his mouth.

Chapter Text

The Manor is too quiet.

It’s the kind of silence that drips. Every corridor leaks with the ghosts of a family who filled their halls with superiority and paranoia, and Draco has been sitting in it so long it’s started to taste like chalk.

Theo, sprawled in the long chair opposite like boredom incarnate, sighs into the ceiling. “If I don’t get alcohol soon, I’m going to hex myself just to feel something.”

Draco opens his mouth to respond, but the sound of wings cuts him off. A tawny owl sweeps through the high window, scattering dust and disdain in equal measure. It circles once, disdainful as any Malfoy elf, then drops a parchment square onto the table between them.

Drinks. Pub. —H. Granger

Underneath: a neat line giving a Muggle address.

Theo whistles low. “Oh, she hates you.”

Draco folds the parchment once, twice, until it’s a sharp square. “It’s an invitation.”

“It’s a summons,” Theo corrects, smirking. “I assume we’ll be flogged for our sins afterwards. Or, in your case, merely cross-examined until you cry.”

“I don’t cry.”

“You sulk,” Theo says cheerfully. “It’s wetter.”

Draco stands before Theo can embellish. “Come on.”

Theo raises an eyebrow. “You’re going?”

“It would be rude not to.”

Theo stretches, catlike. “You’re impossible to resist, Malfoy. Fine. I’ll be your chaperone.”

The pub is Muggle, which offends Draco on principle, but the firelight is golden and the air is thick with the smell of frying onions, and even he has to admit it feels more alive than the Manor ever has.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione are already there in a corner booth, joined by Bill and Charlie, with George leaning over the back of the bench like he belongs to the furniture. Laughter breaks off as Theo and Draco arrive, though it isn’t sharp anymore, just curious.

“Look who Granger dragged in,” George announces. “Two strays. Do they bite?”

“Only when cornered,” Theo answers smoothly, sliding into the bench with the grace of a man who has never been refused a seat in his life.

Draco remains standing, which is difficult to make look deliberate when Ron Weasley is holding out a pint toward him like it’s an olive branch.

“Beer,” Ron says, as if that explains anything.

Theo, deadpan, lifts a glass and says “Careful, honesty might be catching”.

“Suspicious,” Draco mutters, but takes it.

Hermione watches him over the rim of her own glass. For once she doesn’t scold, doesn’t sneer, just watches. It unsettles him far more than open hostility ever did.

Conversation flows the way it does among people who’ve fought wars together and survived: badly, but with loyalty. George tells an outrageous story about a cauldron that may or may not have exploded on purpose. Charlie explains why dragon keepers never wear wool (apparently dragons find it snack-like). Ron grumbles about paperwork until Harry rolls his eyes, and Bill adds dryly that curse-breaking contracts are worse.

Draco sips, listens, pretends he isn’t. Theo slides easily into the rhythm, offering commentary sharp enough to keep George entertained, which is an accomplishment.

Hermione leans across at one point and asks Charlie about Romanian flame wards, which spirals into a half-technical, half-ridiculous tangent about fireproof trousers. She laughs, head thrown back, and Draco has the ridiculous thought that if Granger ever smiled at him like that, he’d combust faster than those bloody trousers.

The alcohol loosens things, makes the air warmer. Even Draco finds his shoulders lowering half an inch.

When the pints are finished and the night is humming, someone (George, predictably), suggests dueling. “Healthy exercise,” he says with mock solemnity. “For stress.”

“Healthy for us, maybe,” Charlie mutters, already standing.

“Not the Burrow,” Ron warns, already red-eared from the thought. “Mum would string us up if she caught us hexing holes in the garden again.”

“Not the pub either,” Bill says, ever the sensible one. “The Muggles will notice when someone accidentally sets the wallpaper on fire.”

There’s a beat.

Then Theo, perfectly smug, lifts his glass. “Well, Malfoy has a whole manor practically begging to be cursed. Empty rooms, haunted halls, and far too much unused space. If we’re going to be idiots, we might as well be idiots in luxury.”

Draco pinches the bridge of his nose. “Absolutely not.”

“Absolutely yes,” George counters, already half out of his seat. “Come on, Malfoy, don’t be stingy. We’ll break in the old stones.”

Hermione sighs into her glass like she’s surrounded by children. Draco mutters something that sounds like he hopes the entire house eats them alive, but, inevitably, ten minutes later, Malfoy Manor’s dueling chamber is humming awake.

Back at the Manor, the dueling chamber hums awake as if it resents being asked to work again. Wards shimmer faintly on the stone. Draco’s robes catch the light and turn it sharp.

Teams are picked by instinct: Potter and Weasley vs. Bill and Charlie. George referees, Theo bets imaginary Galleons, Hermione rolls her eyes but doesn’t leave, and Draco watches because he pretends not to care but absolutely does.

The first volley is loud, bright, and completely unfair. Bill’s curse-breaking precision pairs with Charlie’s brute creativity in a way that makes Harry and Ron stumble from the start. A curse meant for Potter ricochets sideways when Weasley stumbles into place besides him, sparks veering as though the wards caught the two of them together. For a blink, it looks less like defense and more like magic tethering them.

“Merlin,” Draco mutters. “And I thought Aurors were meant to be competent.”

Hermione doesn’t answer; she’s too busy watching with a little half-smile that makes Draco want to hex something.

Charlie flips a hex under Ron’s guard with casual menace. Ron goes sprawling into the dust, landing in a spectacular smear of mud conjured from nowhere.

Harry grins at him, wicked and breathless. “You’ve got mud on your face, you big disgrace.”

Draco actually drops the glass of water he’d been holding. “What the fuck?”

Before anyone can explain, Theo pipes up smoothly from the sidelines: “Kicking your can all over the place.”

Hermione bursts into laughter, loud and unguarded, tipping her head back until her curls shake loose.

Draco stares between them, appalled. “What the fuck is happening?”

Hermione wipes her eyes, still laughing, and says through it, “We will rock you.”

“We?” Draco repeats blankly.

She only laughs harder.

The duel continues, spells flashing, the room roaring with the kind of energy Draco hasn’t felt in years. He leans back against the wall, heart traitorously lighter than it has any right to be, and mutters to himself: “This is a madhouse.”

And for once, it doesn’t feel entirely terrible to be part of it.

The Manor has gone quiet again.

The echoes of laughter and dueling still cling to the stones, but the people are gone: Harry and Ron together through the Floo, Bill and Charlie back to wherever men with noble jobs go, George vanishing with a last ridiculous salute. The rooms feel swollen with the absence of sound, like silence itself has stretched too far.

Draco should feel relief. Instead, he feels… restless.

Granger is still here. She lingers near the dueling chamber, arms folded tight, as though she’s holding herself together with her own elbows. The firelight etches her in copper; sharp cheekbones, stubborn jaw, hair half-tamed and still mutinous.

He doesn’t know why he stays. Habit, maybe. Punishment. Or simply that leaving before she does feels like surrender.

“You stayed,” she says finally, voice flat.

“You did,” he answers.

Her head tilts, curls spilling from the pins that never stand a chance. “I have notes to make.”

“Of course.” His mouth twists. “Always the scholar.”

“And you?” she challenges. “What’s your excuse?”

“Poor impulse control,” he says. “Or masochism. Maybe I just live here.”

That almost earns a smile. Almost. She looks away too quickly for him to be sure.

The silence stretches again. He feels it tugging on him, pulling him toward her. He takes a step, then another, until he’s close enough to see the freckles faint on her skin, the smudge of dust at her temple from the duel that wasn’t hers.

“Granger,” he says, and it comes out lower than he intended.

She looks up, eyes sharp, guarded. “What?”

There are a hundred things he could say, about the duel, about the bloody Queen song, about how absurd this night has been. Instead, what comes out is bare, humiliating truth.

“You laughed.”

Her brow furrows. “Excuse me?”

“At the pub. And just now. You laughed like you meant it.” He swallows, annoyed with himself for continuing. “You don’t usually let yourself. It… suits you.”

She blinks at him, startled, as though the words are a hex she didn’t see coming. Then her mouth hardens. “You’re drunk.”

“Not drunk enough,” he says.

Her breath catches, not in softness, but in alarm. “Don’t.”

He should listen. He should. But the curse hums in his ribs, complicit, and his own blood is louder than sense. He steps closer still, until the air between them is charged and thin.

“Don’t what?” he asks, voice dry but edged.

“Don’t do this,” she says, sharper now, as if sharpness can hide the tremor.

He tilts his head, eyes fixed on hers. “You think I’d kiss you?”

“I think you want to.” Her chin lifts, defiant. “And you shouldn’t.”

The honesty slices him open. He has no defense. “You’re right.”

Her eyes widen a fraction, caught off guard by the admission.

“You’re right,” he says again, softer now, like it costs him. “I shouldn’t. You don’t trust me. You shouldn’t trust me. And I—” His voice frays. “I don’t deserve it. But Merlin help me, Granger, I want to.”

The words hang there, raw, dangerous. He’s closer than he has any right to be. If he leaned just slightly, their mouths would meet. If she tipped forward, everything would change.

Her breathing is uneven, quick. He sees the war flickering across her face: fury, denial, something she refuses to name. Her lips part, and for one terrifying moment he thinks she might let him.

Then she whispers, barely audible, “Don’t.”

It breaks him.

Not a dramatic shatter, not fireworks:  just a quiet collapse inside his chest, the kind that leaves ruins no one else can see. He draws back a fraction, enough to put the air between them again, enough to feel the distance burn.

“Right,” he says, clipped, cold. “As you command.”

Her jaw tightens, but her eyes betray her: relief tangled with regret, fear tangled with want. She looks away, arms crossing tighter. “You’re impossible.”

“And you,” he says, forcing himself into his old dry armor, “are spectacularly predictable.”

The words don’t land like they used to. They sound hollow.

For a moment neither moves. The fire snaps, indifferent. Somewhere in the Manor a door creaks like a sigh.

Hermione exhales sharply, shoving a hand through her hair. “We can’t—” She cuts herself off, furious with the thought itself. “It’s late. I’m leaving.”

“Good,” Draco says, because it’s easier than don’t.

She sweeps past him, and he doesn’t reach out. The air she leaves behind is colder than the Manor’s silence.

When the door closes and the echo fades, Draco lets his head drop back against the wall, eyes shut. His chest aches with the unsaid, with the almost, with the fact that wanting her doesn’t stop just because she told him not to.

She’s right, he tells himself savagely. Not like this. Not yet.

But another thought, traitorous and undeniable, curls underneath:

Soon.

Grimmauld Place is waiting for them the next day, which is never a comfort.

They come back in waves: Potter and Weasley first, an old two-man flanking maneuver that doorways seem to remember; Bill and Charlie close behind, talking in the shorthand of brothers who can argue with their eyebrows; George sauntering in with a grin that looks painted on until you notice the corners; Theo floating like he owns the carpet; and last, Granger, who does not look at Draco when she passes him in the hall, which somehow feels louder than if she’d hexed him.

They are all less tidy than they’d like: shirts untucked, hair misbehaving. Yesterday's laughter has burned off; the kind of tired you can’t sleep off has replaced it. Someone (likely George) smells like chips. Someone else (definitely Charlie) smells like dragon smoke, which is impressive in North London.

“Back to work,” Bill says, not bothering to disguise that the words comfort him. He cuts through the gloom towards the tapestry room like a man who has made peace with terrible wallpaper.

The tapestry is breathing again. Not dramatic gulps, just the faint rise and fall of a thing that knows it’s being watched. Across its faded branches the silver thread, Bellatrix’s concealed wardline, has bled further than it had last time, trickling across generations as though it has found a new route in the old blood.

“Where’s it going?” Potter asks, because he prefers enemies you can punch and maps you can follow.

“Hold,” Bill says, already raising his wand. “Don’t bump the weft. If we tear it, the whole room will have a tantrum.”

“Like you,” Charlie murmurs, earning him a flat older-brother look and then, after a beat, something that nearly qualifies as amusement.

Granger steps in beside Bill, eyes flint bright. She isn’t flushed anymore; she’s sharpened. Draco stands on the other side of the wall and pretends not to mark the half-curl escaping behind her ear. Theo stations himself near the door and adopts the air of a man who would love to help but has been tragically disqualified by beauty.

The silver seam has slid past the neat deaths and names of respectable Blacks, into the scorched bit of wall where Andromeda was burned off the tree for the sin of marrying a good man. The wardline hesitates there, falters, then threads itself through the scorch as if the burn were a veil and not a boundary.

“Of course,” Granger murmurs. “Disowning doesn’t remove ancestry. It just removes ink.”

“Blood remembers what tapestry denies,” Bill says, tapping along the glow. The hum deepens…a tuning fork inside old stone. “Look. It comes past the scorch and splits.”

The thread doesn’t travel straight. It stutters: a double-beat, like a heartbeat that can’t decide on a rhythm. It veers into the branch for Nymphadora Tonks; the careful little “Tonks” stitched in long after someone had scorched her mother’s name away. Then, across one more knot of woven dates and tidy little tragedies, the silver line wavers again, as though the wall itself can’t determine what face it should wear.

It stutters into Ted Tonks and then, newer thread, lighter hand, a small annotation added after the war, jumps to Theodore Remus Lupin.

Teddy.

“The line’s… blinking,” George says, head cocked. “Like it can’t pin him down.”

“Metamorphmagus,” Granger says, quick as breath. “Identity is fluid at the cellular level. Magic that insists on fixed edges will always… slip.”

“Magic that hates ambiguity,” Draco says, dry as dust. “Bellatrix built a machine for certainty and it’s offended by a child.”

The tapestry hums agreement, which is not reassuring.

Weasley leans closer, careful of the weft. “Is it pointing, or having a fit?”

Bill frowns, running the flat of his wand across the silver to catch the flavor of it. “Not a fit. An index. She set a key that looks for ‘Black blood, unfixed form.’”

“Unfixed,” Potter repeats, heartbeat suddenly in his voice. He looks briefly like he’s back in a tent with a radio and a future he can’t see. “So Teddy…?”

Granger’s mouth does a small, involuntary tilt at one corner, the look of someone who can sense a proof collapsing into place. “Teddy is Black blood by Andromeda, but he isn’t a Black by design. He doesn’t sit neatly in their categories. The code keeps slipping when it tries to taxonomize him.”

“The tapestry is a bigot,” Theo announces. “Color me shocked.”

“It’s an opportunity,” Bill says, mind already three rooms ahead. “If the ward can’t settle on him, it can’t lock him. If it can’t lock him, he can pass through bits of it, touch the binding lines without getting caught.”

“Like grease on gears,” Charlie says, squinting at the glow the way other men squint at a horizon. “Slips the catch so the teeth don’t bite.”

Potter scrubs the back of his neck. “We’re not putting Teddy in a vault.”

“No,” Granger says at once, fierce. “We are not risking a child.”

“Not a child,” Bill says, and there’s something careful in his tone, older-brother gentle. “He’s what—nearly twelve? But we’re not risking him either way.”

Potter’s shoulder eases half an inch, which in Potter is relief verging on a holiday.

Draco is quiet, because saying anything will turn into an admission he hasn’t earned. The line flaring across Andromeda’s scorch mark is a small, bright insult to the aunt who installed his curse. The stutter into Teddy’s name looks like a future refusing to be nailed down. He wants to put his finger on the glow and feel it warm under his skin. He does not.

Granger glances at him once as if to check he’s still there. He resents the tiny, ridiculous way his chest answer: yes.

“Let’s map what it’s indexing,” she says to Bill, briskly. “If we can model the ‘slip’ in runes, we might not need Teddy at all. We could simulate the quality.”

Theo perks. “At last, a role for me: simulated quality.”

George, who has been unusually quiet, taps the thread with the back of his knuckle and watches the light pulse. “Feels like a Weasley product problem,” he says, almost to himself. “Make the wrong thing. Sell it anyway. Reverse engineer a fault into a feature.”

“You’re not making a truth-bomb,” Potter says, without looking around.

“No,” George says, and his grin is realer than usual. “Just saying I know a knot when I see one.”

“Alright,” Bill decides. “We copy the pattern. We test with straw dummies, not people. We don’t put any living breathing anything near a box until we can switch the field on and off like a lamp.”

“Merlin forbid we act with caution,” Theo murmurs.

“Merlin forbade nothing,” Granger says. “He left the paperwork to me.”

It should feel like progress. It feels like standing on a bridge that has discovered its fear of heights.

They work the way tired soldiers work when they’re daring themselves to rest: with ruthless efficiency so they don’t think too much. Bill chalks along the weft, small marks that only curse-breakers would call delicate. Granger sketches, mouth moving around the arithmetic of dread. Potter keeps time without meaning to, as if marches are written into his bones. Weasley takes notes in that surprisingly neat hand Draco will never admit he respects. Charlie keeps a hand near Bill’s shoulder without touching; George prowls for new angles like a fox with better social skills. Theo announces he’s supervising and somehow does.

Draco… watches the glow. He tells himself it is out of professional curiosity. The curse inside him stretches like a cat, awake, interested. The tapestry hums like a machine deciding whether to accept a coin that isn’t exact change.

“Explain the blink,” Weasley says finally, because he has learned to translate brilliance into English. “If it stutters on Teddy, what happens if we poke it properly?”

“Depends,” Bill says. “If the stutter is truly about identity, a strong enough push might make the line… choose. For a moment. That’s the opening we’d need to thread a counter-measure through.”

“And if it chooses the wrong way?” Potter asks.

“Then we stop pushing,” Bill says. “You lot are good at that. Sometimes.”

Granger keeps tracing and re-tracing the stutter, as if repetition itself might crunch the variables. Draco can smell ink and hot stone and the singed-wool odour of old magic thinking about behaving.

“Tomorrow,” she says at last, voice hoarse in the interesting way, “we bring Andromeda. She’ll know what Bellatrix did to the family wards, what the House does to her name when she tries to pass. We don’t go near a child until an adult who knows this place signs off.”

Potter nods, decisive. “I can ask her.”

“You’ll tell her,” Granger corrects. “And you’ll give her time to refuse. Then we’ll find another angle.”

“She won’t refuse,” Potter says, with that calm that means he’s already decided to be persuasive. “Not if it means ending something that started with Bella.”

“Bring her with a minder,” Bill says. “If the House tries to bite—”

“It bites me first,” Draco says, before he can stop himself. “I’m the one it keeps opening for.”

Seven faces turn toward him. He manages not to flinch.

It is, annoyingly, the truth. The room has learned his blood. It has opinions about it. It will not waste a chance to drink him.

“Not happening,” Granger says flatly. “No more blood taxes.”

“Already paid,” Draco answers, equally flat. “With arrears.”

The moment stretches. Potter breaks it with a small nod. “We’ll plan it. We’ll be careful.”

Granger’s mouth tightens as if to forbid the entire concept of careful from existing, then eases. “Fine. Tomorrow. Early.”

“Dawn?” Theo asks, tragic.

“Civilized early,” Granger amends, which in her mouth still sounds like dawn.

For a fraction of a second, they look like a unit. Like a plan has been made and will be followed. Like tomorrow will arrive the way it is meant to.

The tapestry, which despises being left out, decides to contribute.

The silver thread brightens: sudden, pulsing, as if someone has pressed harder on a vein. The glow travels back up its own length to the scorch of Andromeda. It pauses there—drinking, thinking. and then lashes sideways along a knot of names Draco knows too well. Bellatrix Lestrange flares briefly (ugly, pleased) before the light darts on, quicker now, like a thought deciding it knows the answer.

“Bill,” Granger says, warning and thrill braided tight.

“Don’t touch,” Bill breathes, already lifting his wand to layer a containment net between wall and people.

The glow doesn’t care about nets. It races down the Tonks line, flickers at Nymphadora, skims across Ted, and gathers itself over Theodore Remus Lupin like a storm deciding where to break.

It doesn’t break.

It… draws.

Two runes, thin as hair, etch themselves in the silver. One is a jagged hook that belongs to the old, ugly family of Thurisaz, the thorn that rips—Bellatrix’s favourite. The other is a cleaner thing, double-lines moving in tandem: Ehwaz. Horse. Partnership. Movement by two.

“Partnership,” Granger whispers, like she’s lost and found a word in the same breath. “Of course.”

“Thorn and twin,” Bill adds, furious at the beauty of a hateful design. “Damage and driver. She anchored the lock with a wound and designed the key as a pair.”

“And kept the second half to herself,” George says softly. “Classic product strategy.”

Theo tips his head. “So: the machine wants two things moving together to unlatch it—two parts in concert—to slide past the thorn. If one half is Teddy—”

“—the other half,” Granger says, “is…” She stops, eyes cutting fast across the names. “We don’t know. But it’s in the bloodline.”

“Andromeda,” Potter says. “Or—”

“Narcissa,” Draco says, because the thought has arrived and it isn’t leaving. His throat feels raw with saying it. “Sisters. The name that burned off and the name that stayed. The House will recognize both.”

The room does a complicated shift. It isn’t all sympathy. It is, however, all attention.

Granger doesn’t tell him he’s wrong. She looks at the scorch where Andromeda used to be and at Narcissa where she still is, and then at the small blinking runes over a boy who changes his face like other people change shirts.

“We’ll need both,” she says at last. “The disowned and the heir. The branch that cut itself free and the one that pretended it was still healthy.”

Charlie exhales, long and low. “Which means two women who haven’t had a proper conversation since before the war.”

“Since before Draco was tall,” Theo offers, perhaps not helpfully.

Bill sets his jaw. “I can ward the room six ways and stitch a seventh while we’re standing in it. But if the House chooses sides, we’ll need fallback plans.”

“I’ll bring Andromeda,” Potter says again, steadier now, as if repetition is a vow. “And I’ll ask her to bring Teddy. We won’t use him. We’ll… look at him. We’ll see if the thread still slips when he’s in the room.”

“And I,” Draco says, each word feeling like a step toward a precipice, “will write to my mother.”

No one tells him not to. No one says are you sure. No one does him the insult of assuming he hasn’t considered the permutations of that choice every night since he started this.

Granger’s eyes find his, level. Not soft; never soft. But there is a steadiness there that wasn’t, quite, before. “Thank you,” she says.

Two words. They hit with the force of a binding.

He nods, because anything else will come out of him wrong.

The tapestry, meanwhile, is not finished having opinions. The light over Teddy’s name sharpens, the Ehwaz rune brightening until the whole little annotation glows like a star someone drew with a shaking hand. Thurisaz flares in reply, a thorn flashing inside the silver.

“Careful,” Bill says, though no one has moved. “It’s thinking.”

“Like a very stupid god,” George offers.

The hum in the wall changes pitch, higher, thinner. Draco recognizes the tone a half-second too late: the same greedy curiosity the House had when it made him bleed on the step. His skin prickles.

He steps instinctively between the wall and the people who don’t have the right kind of blood to make the House happy. Granger swears; too late to stop him, too early to fix him, and then the thread does exactly what he knew it would: it reaches.

Not a claw. Not even a bite. Just a little needle of brightness that pricks the pad of his finger as he lifts a hand in warning.

There isn’t even time to yelp. A drop of blood beads, astonished. The tapestry drinks it like a miser with a penny.

The glow over Narcissa leaps as if someone fed it. The line streaks bright along her name, then back to Andromeda’s scorch, then forward again to Teddy’s annotation, faster now, as if Draco’s blood has convinced it that the experiment is permitted.

Potter is already braced beside him, Weasley a half-pace off his shoulder, Bill’s wand poised, Charlie a wall of human hazard between all of them and the House. Theo moves in a long, elegant step that somehow puts his ridiculous self squarely between the nearest danger and Granger, which is very Theo.

The tapestry finishes drinking.

For a heartbeat nothing happens.

Then the silver redraws itself, clean as a new signature. The stutter remains over Teddy’s name, blink, blink, but now the line has weight. It no longer guesses at the route; it declares it: from the thorn of Bellatrix, through the burn of Andromeda, along the living name of Narcissa, and onto the little boy whose magic won’t sit still long enough to be categorized.

Thurisaz. Ehwaz. Thorn and twin.

“Two keys,” Bill says, breathless. “Two carriers. It’s telling us how to turn it.”

“No,” Granger says, equally breathless. “It’s telling us what kind of turning. The people—the blood—are just… conductors.”

“We’ll need all three,” Potter says, voice going low with decision. “Andromeda, Narcissa, Teddy. In a room we control. With wards we trust.”

“We’ll need a plan that doesn’t get anyone killed,” Weasley adds, because someone has to say it.

George’s grin is back, feral. “And a product name. ‘Project Thorn & Twin.’ Limited release. No refunds.”

Charlie looks at Draco. Not unkind. Not easy. “You sure?”

No, Draco thinks, with the clarity of a man staring at his own cliff. The House has eaten a drop of him and smiled. The vault under their feet still purrs when he comes near. The rune for “pair” is bright over the name of a boy who deserves a childhood free of rooms like this. And somewhere in the heat of his skin is the echo of a woman saying don’t, and another echo that wanted to ignore it.

“Yes,” he hears himself say, and the curse lets it through without a shove, which is somehow worse and somehow better. “I’m sure.”

Granger’s hand is still on his wrist. She realizes it and drops it, angry at herself for forgetting and angrier for remembering. Her voice, when it comes, is steady enough to walk on. “Tomorrow we contact Andromeda. Draco, you write to your mother tonight.”

“Tonight,” he says, and feels it land.

“Good,” Bill says, on a breath that shakes just once. “We’ve got a way in. We’ll build the way out.”

The room exhales. It doesn’t relax. It acknowledges a cliff and the madmen who intend to build a bridge across it.

They start to disperse with the careful, clumsy tenderness of people who like each other but would rather bite iron than say so. Potter and Weasley argue about who’s making tea; George pockets a crumb of chalk and winks at the tapestry like he’s nicked a crown jewel; Theo compliments his own courage; Charlie claps Bill’s shoulder, code for still here.

Granger shuffles the papers and sketches they’ve made, lips moving around a plan even as her eyes burn a hole in tomorrow. When she turns to go, she looks at Draco—not past him, not through him. At him. It isn’t soft. It isn’t kind. It is an acknowledgement; a ledger entry about to become a promise.

“Don’t bleed on anything else,” she says, because she has no other sentence that won’t kill them both.

“I’ll try,” he says, because he has no other sentence that won’t set the wall on fire.

They are all halfway out when the tapestry hums one last note—as if clearing its throat before the aria. The silver over Theodore Remus Lupin flashes once, twice, and then—cocky as a signature—draws a single, tiny dot beside the runes.

A period. Or an eye. Or a star.

“Cliffhanger,” George says, unable to help himself.

“Shut up,” three people say, affectionate.

In the corridor, the house sighs. The lights dip and steady. Draco’s pulse doesn’t.

He thinks of writing to his mother and of the answer that may come back. He thinks of Andromeda, scorch-mark become doorway. He thinks of a boy who couldn’t be pinned to a single face if you nailed him to the wall. He thinks of a rune for partnership and a woman who told him don’t for reasons that make terrible sense and entirely new kinds of want.

He leans a shoulder into the cold stone, swallowing the taste of metal that hope leaves in his mouth. He does not say it aloud. He does not need to. The thought claws up anyway, shameless and alive:

Even if Bellatrix never wrote a cure, Hermione might.

He has not called her Hermione in his head before.

The name burns a little. The hope burns worse.

It is, he realizes, more dangerous than any curse he has ever carried. And he is carrying it now.

Chapter Text

Grimmauld Place is grey in the morning, which feels on-brand. The house does dawn like it does everything else, reluctantly, with a faint air of insult that anyone would force it to be visible. A few weak lanes of light slant through the grimy windows of the tapestry room and pool in the dust like tired flags.

Draco arrives first because of course he does. The House likes him. It has made this clear in ways that involve minor bloodletting and doors that open when he glares at them. Today the front step coughs once, approves, and lets him through with that faint little prickle he has learned to recognize as you again.

Theo ghosts in two minutes later, immaculate and useless. He has a paper bag that smells like strong coffee and a moral stance against mornings.

“Anything?” he asks, which is Theo for good morning, I hate this.

“No,” Draco says, which is Draco for good morning, the world has disappointed me on schedule.

They don’t sit. Sitting looks like waiting. They stand at opposite ends of the long table and pretend to read last night’s notes. Truth: Draco has already read every line on these pages until the ink might as well be carved into his retinas. Thurisaz. Ehwaz. Thorn and twin. He could recite the ugly elegance of it in his sleep.

Boots on the stairs. The Gryffindors descend like a three-man weather pattern. Potter first, jaw set, sleeves rolled, the air around him already making lists. Weasley behind, hair pointing in six directions, carrying a tin of biscuits like he’s bringing tribute to a god that might bite. Granger last, crisp shirt rolled to the elbow, ink on her fingers, a quill already tucked into her hair like a stiletto. She clocks the room in a glance and lands on the maps as if the night in between never happened.

“News?” she asks. Not to anyone in particular. To the day.

Potter lifts a scrap of parchment; the handwriting is tidy and spare: Andromeda’s. “She’ll come,” he says, and the words are relief wrapped in caution. “But not today. She wants to speak to me first.”

Weasley exhales. “Fair.”

Granger’s shoulders ease a fraction. Draco watches it happen and hates that he notices. “Good,” she says. “Tomorrow, then.”

Potter’s mouth twists. “She didn’t say tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Granger says, and it isn’t disappointment so much as recalibration; you can watch her mind pick up the fallen piece and put it somewhere else on the board. “Alright. We wait.”

“And your mother?” Potter asks, too casually. 

It’s a neat sentence. It doesn’t shake on the way out, which Draco considers a personal triumph.

He glances at Potter, then away. “Nothing yet. Owls can be… delayed.”

“Or lost,” tries Ron, almost out of pity. 

“They can also be ignored,” Draco says, and the curse lets it through smooth as silk. Honest, then. Splendid.

An unimportant silence settles. Grimmauld enjoys those. It eats them like sweets.

Theo breaks it with a sigh and a flourish of the paper bag. “I brought salvation,” he announces, doling out coffees with the blithe self-regard of a saint passing out indulgences. 

He hands a cup to Granger last because he likes to be dramatic; she takes it without looking, says, “Thank you, Theo,” and actually means it. Theo is so startled by this unusual alignment of manners that he forgets to preen for a full three seconds.

Bill arrives with the precise haste of an eldest brother doing triage, sleeves shoved up, hair caught back, ink on his wristbones like tally marks. Charlie follows, big and easy, smelling faintly of smoke that has no business existing in North London. George saunters in behind them, all grin and not-quite-jokes. He says, “Morning, sinners,” and steals a biscuit before Ron can swat him.

“State of play,” Bill says, already reaching for the chalk. “We don’t move the tapestry until we understand the stutter. We test nothing living. We write to no one we can’t debrief before the room starts making opinions.”

“Room opinions,” George says gravely. “The worst kind.”

“We’re waiting on Andromeda,” Potter says. “Not pressing. Not pushing. Listening first.”

“And Narcissa?” Bill asks, because he remembers to be gentle only after he’s been thorough.

Draco watches his fingers, which are very interested in rearranging paper that doesn’t need rearranging. “Silent,” he says. “Perhaps she’s composing herself. Or composing a refusal.”

No one says we’ll deal with that when it arrives. No one pats his arm like he’s fragile porcelain. Draco is both ferociously grateful and slightly offended.

They set to work the way people who cannot act decide to act anyway: reorganizing notes, copying runes into clean columns, chalking last night’s schematic onto the cracked floor with Bill’s steady hand and Hermione’s ruthless mouth naming structures as if giving them words will keep them from biting.

Theo holds a ruler at a jaunty angle and announces he is supervising. George critiqued the layout (“your spacing is discriminatory”) until Hermione threatened to assign him alphabetization duty. Charlie leans his hip against the table and watches the chalk climb into a map; every few minutes Bill tilts his head and Charlie makes a small grunt that is apparently the precise unit of agreement required for curse-breakers to remain married to their sanity.

Draco pretends indifference with what he considers to be considerable skill. He looks at the clock (stopped, forever three minutes to midnight), at the damp stain in the ceiling that looks like a hanged man if you squint, at the way Potter and Weasley move around each other without colliding like they’ve been choreographed by grief. He tries to not look at Granger.

He fails at that.

She stands with one hip braced against the table, reading the chalk like it might whisper. There’s a smear of black ink along the outside of her thumb where a pen has exploded on its owner. Her hair is pinned; it won’t stay. A little curl has escaped and is sharpening itself by her jaw. She has a line between her eyebrows that wasn’t there when they were seventeen and rules were simpler and transgressions were more imaginative.

“What?” she says, without glancing up.

“Nothing,” he says, and the curse does not punish him, which is annoying. It’s not a lie. It’s several smaller truths that refuse to combine into a confession.

They slog for an hour. It feels like three. The house has decided to participate by humming just enough to put your teeth on edge. Every now and then the silver line under the tapestry’s skin brightens like a smirk and then dims again. Once, Teddy’s name flickered brighter than the rest. George dismissed it as a glitch, but Draco felt the curse still in his veins as though it were listening. His curse went oddly still whenever Teddy’s stitch flared, as if pausing to listen. Draco imagines it whispering you again in a voice that belongs to an aunt who made knives out of vowels.

Eventually Potter lowers his hands in surrender. “We’re spinning,” he says, not to the room, not as an accusation; as a diagnosis. “We need an hour away from the wall.”

“Tea,” Ron says, which is his answer to several categories of emergency. “Or food.”

“And sleep,” Bill adds, with the authority of a man who has prized curse-breakers off floors at noon and told them to go lie on grass until their brains stop glowing.

“We can’t sleep,” Hermione says, and because she knows that’s unfair she corrects herself immediately: “I can’t.”

“You can,” Bill returns, voice gentler. “You won’t.”

She opens her mouth on an argument; shuts it again. The line between her eyebrows deepens. She looks like a woman wrestling a bull and being angry with herself for not winning by now.

“We’ll be upstairs,” Potter says. He tips his head towards the corridor. “Kettle. Ten minutes.”

Charlie nudges Bill. “Cabinet door, second from the left. The one that bites. Tea’s worth it.”

George murmurs, “If the cupboard wins, I get the shop,” and evades Hermione’s swat with excellent footwork.

They trickle out in the practiced way of people who know how to give each other mercy by pretending it’s logistics. Theo drapes himself after them with a sigh about lighting and the insult of mornings. Bill and Charlie go last; Bill gives the tapestry the kind of look he usually saves for faulty ward-stones and rebellious siblings. The door shuts with a mutter.

Silence lands. Not comfortable. Not hostile. Just… thick.

It is only then that Draco realizes how carefully he has been not breathing near her.

They are alone.

He regrets it immediately.

Granger doesn’t look up from the chalked spiral. “You don’t have to hover.”

“I’m supervising,” he says, because reflexes die last.

“You said that yesterday,” she returns, and the tiredness in her mouth snags something under his ribs. “I suppose you could supervise the chalk.”

“Someone must,” he says. “It’s slippery.”

A sound escapes her; it wants to be a laugh. It fails. She sets the charcoal down as if putting something gentle on a plate. “I hate waiting,” she says, so low the house might miss it if it weren’t nosy. “I hate that the solution might exist and we’re sitting here behaving because the world insists on courtesy.”

“It’s not courtesy,” Draco says. “It’s respect. And caution. And wanting people to survive their morning intact.”

“I know,” she says, fierce at herself, not him. “I know that. I do know that. It’s just—”

She stops. The breath she takes after the stopping is too high in her chest. Draco knows that breath. He’s owned varieties of it for years. Panic is a thoroughbred; he can hear its hoofbeats before it barrels into the room.

The next sentence doesn’t come out like language so much as a spill: “It’s just that we are there—right there—we have the line and the keys and the bloody shape of it and I cannot stand being this close when every hour is another hour you—” She flings a hand at him as if he’s an equation gone wrong. “—you’re still being eaten alive by a thing that should have died with her.”

He hadn’t planned for his name to feel like a slap when it doesn’t arrive, but it does. “I am not being eaten alive,” he says. The curse allows it, which is magnanimous of it.

“Fine,” she snaps. “Being nibbled. Slowly. Over years. That’s better, is it?”

He could tell her he has had worse mornings. He could tell her he’s stood in rooms with louder malice. He could tell her he prefers the slow hand of a curse to the fast one of a Dark Lord who enjoyed theatre. He doesn’t. He says, “It’s fairly efficient, as attrition goes.”

Her eyes flash. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Make jokes at the edges of a cliff. It’s Gryffindor of me to say, but it’s disgusting.”

“Everything about me is,” he says mildly. “Ask your House rota.”

The corner of her mouth twitches; the near-smile he is beginning to ration like sugar. She kills it herself. “This isn’t funny.”

“No,” he says. “But it is survivable.”

“And how would you know?” She doesn’t spit it. She folds it in, small and tight and trembling, and the restraint is worse than shouting. “You won’t— You just— You grin and sneer and supervise, and if I hadn’t gone and fetched you out of your mausoleum you’d still be there narrating your own decay.”

The breath leaves him all at once, like someone pulled a plug. For a second he thinks the curse will haul a worse sentence out of his throat. It doesn’t. Perhaps even the curse is impressed by the efficiency with which Granger has gutted him.

He angles a shoulder against the table. He isn’t dignified. “You didn’t fetch me,” he says, calm out of spite. “You sent a note. I obeyed.”

She looks like she might throw the charcoal at his head. “You came.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “So did you.”

The line between her eyebrows deepens again. “We are not doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“This—this—” She gestures between them, and for a miraculously coherent second he sees it as she does: the stitched path from Hogwarts corridors filled with slurs and hex smoke, through Manor rooms with screaming and splintering wands, to a grim London house where two people who should only ever have looked at each other over wands are now looking at each other over runes. “Whatever this is.”

“Work,” he says. “A hobby. A shared grievance with wallpaper.”

Her breath hitches. “Don’t.”

He picks up the charcoal out of pettiness and twirls it because his fingers have to do something. “You don’t like jokes at cliff-edges. I don’t like panic. How equitable of us.”

“Equitable,” she repeats, like she’s tasting the syllables to see which ones have poison in them. “You want equitable, Malfoy? Fine. Equitable: I am terrified we’re wrong. I am terrified we’ll put Andromeda or your mother or—” It costs her something to say the next name; he sees the price deducted from her eyes. “—Teddy in a room with this House and the House will decide to win. And I am equally terrified of waiting long enough to do nothing but watch you rot from the inside.”

He hadn’t known that a person could make the word rot sound like a prayer.

“Understood,” he says. The curse lets it by because it’s smug.

“Don’t understand me,” she flares. “Help me.”

“How?” It comes out sharper than he meant, because he always wanted how when other people offered him sympathy wrapped as interference. “Would you like me to bleed on more architecture? I’m very good at that. Perhaps I should write to my mother again and demand she reply in a timeframe convenient for your spiraling.”

“That’s not—” She draws breath and the panic horse bolts. It’s not dramatic. It’s just ruthless. Words start running and refuse to obey. “I know she doesn’t owe us—doesn’t owe me—anything, and Andromeda owes us less, and the world does not reorganise itself because Hermione Granger wrote a list and yet—yet—every hour I am not working is an hour this thing is winning and I cannot—I cannot—”

He steps because the part of his mind that does triage gets there before pride. He catches her arms just above the elbows. Warm. Solid. He has the dizzy thought that he knows exactly the span of her bones. His thumbs feel the fine tendons there fluttering like trapped birds.

“Granger,” he says. Not loud. Not gentle either. Just there. “Stop.”

“Don’t tell me to stop.” No snarl. No sneer. A crack across porcelain.

His mouth moves faster than sense. “You’re an unstoppable force either way,” he says, and it sounds absurd in his voice, he’s too drawling, too well-bred, too tired, but the curse slides under it and props it up. “Just… stay calm. Everything’s going to be all right.”

He hadn’t meant that. He hadn’t even believed he could say that. It comes out smooth and cold and absolutely true. It shocks him so much he nearly lets go of her.

She blinks. The panic stumbles. The birds in her tendons settle, not landing, but circling lower. “Don’t lie to me,” she says, desperate and small.

“I can’t,” he says with a hollow laugh. It’s a failure and a vow.

“Don’t promise,” she says.

“I didn’t.”

“You just said—”

“I said it’s going to be all right,” he answers, discovering as he speaks that the sentence has decided to own him. “Not easy. Not clean. Not gentle. All right.”

Her face does something traitorous and human. The line between her eyebrows softens. Her mouth opens and closes; a sound escapes on the exhale like the quiet version of a sob.

“Breathe,” he says, because Potter says it and it works and egos can be shared in emergencies. “In through your nose. Out through your mouth. You know how lungs work, Granger.”

“You’re an arse,” she says, but obediently inhales.

“Frequently,” he agrees.

Her shoulders drop. Not far. A fraction. It feels like the House leans in, interested.

His hands are still on her arms. He notices this with detained alarm. He should remove them. It would be wise. It would be adult. It would be… so much less necessary than it feels.

“Let go,” she says, after a heartbeat, which is fair.

He doesn’t.

She looks up at him then. Properly up, which is not something he is sure she’s allowed him before. Close like this her lashes are ridiculous; her pupils are blown wide; there is a faint constellation of freckles near her left temple he has never catalogued because he has never been permitted this distance. Or rather, this lack of distance.

“Malfoy,” she says, and it is not a warning and not permission. It is just his name, as if she has finally worked out that it belongs in her mouth.

He realizes, with the clarity of someone spotting a precipice while already falling, that she is not the only one spiraling. The band under his skin that has been humming since last night—since weeks ago, since the moment she told him to stop bleeding on the world and start bleeding towards a solution, tightens to a pitch he can feel in his molars.

This is the part where he jokes. Where he calls her bossy. Where he lifts a brow and refuses to give the House the spectacle it wants. He tries to find that version of himself. The room offers only hunger in reply.

“You’re shaking,” she says, oddly gentle.

“Am I,” he says, because interrogation is his last remaining armor.

“Your hands.” She looks down at where his fingers hold her. “You’re shaking.”

“Touch-starved,” he says, and the wrong word slips the right truth into the room. “For contact.”

“Don’t,” she says, and it flays him open anyway. “Don’t make this about pity.”

“It isn’t,” he says, able to be cruel now, which he dislikes. “Trust me, I have been pitied by worse people.”

Her mouth curves; not a smile. A baring of teeth. “Name them.”

“The House,” he says.

“That’s not a person.”

“It is here,” he says.

“Let go,” she says again. It’s gentler this time. Worse for him.

He should. He knows this. He has passed eighteen levels of knowing this. He does not.

“What are we doing,” she asks, soft and furious, “standing in a room that hates us with your hands on me like—”

“A man who can’t think of a better place to put them,” he says, and the curse lets it through because today is apparently theatre.

“You’re impossible,” she says.

“You’re intolerable,” he returns.

They are very close.

It is astounding how many details a person can notice when they are a fraction of an inch from doing something inadvisable. Her hair smells like smoke and ink. There is a smear of chalk on her sleeve; he wants to rub it off with his thumb; he also wants to press his mouth to it like a ridiculous oath. Her lips are parted, not for him, for air, but the distinction is unhelpful. He remembers, like a blow to the ribs, the tiny sound she made last night when she stretched in the alcove and his mind files it stupidly under useful research.

Outside the door someone laughs, George, probably, and Hermione flinches as if a spell went off. The House hums like it’s scoring the scene. A draught lifts the edge of the tapestry; the silver line blinks once, twice, as if to say I am watching.

“Granger,” he says, and it comes out hoarse and stupid with want.

“Don’t,” she says, and the word is so thin he could break it with his teeth.

“You don’t even know what I’m going to do,” he says, which is foolish because they both do.

“I do,” she says, and her eyes are a color that makes him think of the forest behind the Quidditch pitch right before rain. “And so do you.”

He breathes. He tries to be a man with dignity. He fails. He leans, not much, a small tilt of a body that has not been allowed to be a body for a very long time.

“Don’t,” she says again, but softer, and his name inside the word, though she doesn’t speak it.

“Right,” he says, and stops. He can. He does. His hands remain on her arms because letting go would feel like cutting lines in water and watching her float away.

“Thank you,” she says, which should not be the phrase that destroys him more efficiently than any curse Bellatrix ever designed.

“For what,” he manages, ridiculous.

“For stopping,” she says. “And for… not stopping. Until now.”

He laughs, quiet, broken, unhelpful. “Make up your mind.”

“No,” she says, and there’s your Hermione Granger. “That’s your job.”

“My job is supervising,” he says, and it’s so awful it makes her huff air that could almost be called a laugh.

The panic has edged back. His own hunger has edged forward. They are both, for a moment, held in a terrible equilibrium that feels exactly like the second before you jump from a height and discover the air has hands.

Footsteps return in the hall. Potter’s voice—“We’ll bring the pot up; the cupboard is feral”—and Ron saying “it bit me” with bewildered outrage, and Bill chuckling, which is always a little alarming.

“Let go,” Hermione says for the third time, very quietly, before the door opens.

He does.

His fingers remember her shape for several seconds after they’ve moved. He tucks them into his pockets to prevent further misbehavior. She tips her chin up, scrapes her sleeve over her cheekbone as if nothing has happened, and picks up the charcoal like a weapon she is finally allowed to use.

The door opens. Potter and Weasley enter with the kettle like a trophy; Bill and Charlie behind with cups; George with a biscuit he has liberated from some improbable shelf; Theo last, already rolling his eyes at the betrayal of steam.

“Progress?” Potter asks, because he is constitutionally unable to enter a room without asking that question of fate.

Hermione answers. Not with a near-kiss and a shudder and a vow that none of them consented to make. With a perfectly acceptable lie-by-omission: “We recalibrated.” She gestures at the chalk like it has behaved since they left. “We’re not going to move the bind until we can simulate the slip. Andromeda first. After we understand what the House will try when she’s in the hall.”

“And Narcissa?” Potter asks, and there is no cruelty in it; just the duty to keep the timetable in the room where everyone can see it.

Draco weighs a dozen answers that vary in their degree of performance. He chooses the only one his curse is willing to pass. “Still silent.”

Ron passes him a cup without looking like he’s doing anything kind. “Milk?” he asks, and Draco almost laughs at the banality of being offered milk in the middle of a war done in whispers.

“Black,” Draco says, because it’s fitting, and resigns himself to being alive for another hour in a house that prefers him that way.

They drink terrible tea. The wall hums. The silver line under the tapestry’s skin pretends not to watch.

Hermione stands so close their sleeves nearly touch and does not move away. He is not fool enough to call it comfort. He is, however, only human. He lets the not-moving be what it is.

“Back to it,” Bill says, when the cups are empty and the House has judged their offering and found it adequate. “We’ve got a slip to model.”

“And patience to misplace,” George adds, because someone has to say the thing they’ll all do next.

Draco sets his cup down. The porcelain clicks against wood like a small decision. He looks at the chalked loop, thorn and twin, and decides to breathe in and out in a rhythm that sounds like a promise he never meant to make: all right, all right, all right.

He does not look at her mouth.

He does not need to.

The room is a lung. The House inhales. They exhale into its teeth and call it morning.

The others peel away in sensible order. Bill and Charlie take the chalk map downstairs to re-draw it on real wardstone where the house can argue back with proper acoustics. Potter has an appointment at the Auror Office with a man who says “best practices” like it’s a spell; Weasley goes with him on the grounds that Harry shouldn’t be left alone with anyone who collects binders. George kisses two of his own fingers and taps the tapestry’s corner like he’s warding off bad luck, then vanishes in the general direction of commerce and mischief. Theo claims he has a liaison with culture (which is to say, a nap) and drifts off humming.

Granger stays.

Draco does too. It’s not a choice so much as an inevitability. The House doesn’t toss him out when she remains; if anything the corridor lights steady, as if Grimmauld disapproves of abandonment on a philosophical level.

They tidy in a silence that pretends to be about parchment. Quills go back into their tin; the charmed string that holds Bill’s chalk snaps taut again around the bundle; two empty tea cups migrate to the edge of the mantel and sit there with the air of being judged. Granger stacks their notes into piles so clean you could take measurements off the corners. Draco folds the spare vellum in half and then half again, and then realizes he’s doing origami on an empty stomach and stops before the habit looks like a confession.

“Thank you,” she says at last, eyes still on the table.

“For what?” he says, prepared to find the answer inadmissible.

“For not trying to drag Andromeda in faster. Or your mother.” The name sits on the wood like a ring left behind. “For not trying to make a solution out of people.”

He shrugs because the alternative is to say you don’t make solutions out of people; you make casualties. “I like my casualties to be inanimate.”

“Try harder,” she says, dry, and the edge in it is gentler than any compliment.

A draught snakes under the door. The tapestry’s silver thread blinks once, as if it feels ignored. There is a smear of chalk at the edge of Granger’s jaw, a pale crescent where she must have propped her hand while thinking. He notices it the way one notices a loose thread on a sleeve and wants, illogically, to tuck it back into the garment of her.

“Hold still,” he says, which is, on any day, an absurd thing to say to Hermione Granger.

She stiffens, wary as a cat. “Why?”

“You’re dirty,” he says, because tact is not a Malfoy survival skill. He lifts his thumb. “Chalk.”

Her chin lifts like he has issued a challenge. She doesn’t step back. “That better not be a euphemism.”

“I would never,” he says, the opposite of sincere, and his hand is already near her cheek before his sense of self-preservation has the chance to draft a memo.

He brushes her jaw with his thumb. It is the smallest of touches—nothing to write home about, if you had a home you could name without flinching—but he feels it all the way down his ribs. The chalk gives; the skin underneath does not. Warm. Alive. He has the absurd thought that he could learn every version of her, from library to battlefield to kitchen at three in the morning when the tea is burnt and the paper is tired and she is angriest at herself for being the person who still wants to fix what other people broke.

“There,” he says, because words must go somewhere.

She doesn’t move. He should be grateful. He is not. He is greedy. The chalk smear has become an anchor and he is a man adrift.

“Thank you,” she says again, and he cannot tell whether she means the thumb or the morning or the whole of the last several months.

“Don’t start,” he says softly. “I have a finite compliment tolerance.”

“You and me both,” she says, even softer.

Silence folds. Not comfortable. Not cruel. Just tight, like a band that has been stretching all day and finally remembers it is elastic.

“Malfoy,” she says. His name fits in her mouth like it has learned English there and nowhere else.

He should step back. He should make a remark about professionalism or people management or the appropriate handling of House-induced nervous breakdowns. He should remember the room has teeth.

He doesn’t.

He leans. Not a swoop. Not theatre. Just the degree and a half a body travels when it has done the mathematics and discovered that the shortest distance between two points is the one the world has been conspiring toward since January.

“Don’t,” she whispers, and the syllable is frayed in the middle.

“Tell me to stop,” he says, and he hates the way it comes out: raw, earnest, not a single layer of irony to hide under.

She inhales. He can feel it on his lip. “If I—” The sentence frays too. “If I tell you, you will.”

“Yes.” He is grateful to the curse for once. It will not let him make heroics out of falsehood. “Immediately.”

“Don’t humor me,” she says, almost pleading.

“I can’t,” he answers, and for once the prison of his mouth feels like a backbone.

Her eyes close like a door deciding whether to open. “Then don’t talk.”

He stops talking.

They collide; not like a duel, not like a collision of houses, but with the rude honesty of magnets that have finally given up pretending the table between them is sufficient resistance. Her mouth tastes of tea and fury and the kind of laughter she doesn’t permit herself often enough. He has the humiliating thought that he might actually make a sound; his body solves the problem by making it for him, a low and startled noise he hasn’t heard from his own throat in years.

She is not small. She is not fragile. He is grateful for this beyond language. She comes into him with intention; her fingers are already in his hair and the other hand is at his shoulder and then his collar and then his jaw. He had forgotten the way competent people touch when they stop pretending they are only competent: direct, unafraid, precise. A good hand knows where the hinge is. He has been starving for it.

He answers like a man who has been left alone in a beautiful kitchen and told to choose one thing to eat and discovers that what he wanted was not bread or sugar but heat itself. He maps her mouth in small blasphemies, learns the give of her bottom lip, the place along her teeth where he can make her breathe like she has been running. She makes a sound, quiet, furious, helpless, and he has to press his palm flat against the table to keep from hauling her bodily into him and finding out what gravity they share.

“Here,” she mutters against his mouth, and rotates them without letting him think, so his spine meets the edge of the table and the House grumbles at their impudence and he doesn’t care. The wood is a bruise waiting to happen across his lower back; the thought that the mark will be from a table and not a curse feels like wealth.

He runs out of places to put his hands. This is not poetic. It is logistics. She is solid everywhere; his palms keep discovering new versions of her, hip, shoulder, the small of her back where strength gathers, the angle of her ribs where she has always kept so much of herself under armor. He slides one hand under the hem of her jumper (not to be scandalous; wreckage stopped being interesting years ago), but because skin is a country he has not visited in too long. Her warmth shocks him. He discovers gooseflesh under his palm and wants to turn it into a thesis and then forgets language again.

“Don’t,” she says, without heat.

“Stop me,” he says, willing and able.

She does not. Her hand goes under his collar, finds the patch of skin just below the hinge of his jaw, and presses her mouth there. His knees nearly misbehave. Her teeth discover his pulse; it swears loyalty without consulting him. He hears someone groan; he hopes it isn’t him; it is definitely him.

He kisses her like he wants to take a copy home. She steals his breath and gives it back the way competent people always see a problem: in portions that make the impossible manageable. He thinks, in a ridiculous, lucid flash, that if she told him to hold very still while she mapped and dismantled the structure of him, he would thank her for the efficiency.

The curse does not intervene. Why would it. There is no lie in this. There is only the miserable, dazzling truth that his mouth has found something to do that is not punishable by law or family.

She shifts. Her thigh slides between his. He has the terrible, adolescent urge to say please. Instead he drags his mouth along her jaw and finds the place just under her ear where her breath stutters and he files that away alongside useful intelligence like house hates laughter and Bill can stitch a ward blindfolded and Theo will flirt with anything reflective. He is a man who makes lists now. He adds Hermione Granger’s pulse at her throat when she is being terrible and underlines it.

“Merlin,” she says against his collar, not religious; annoyed with herself. “This is—”

“Yes,” he says, which is not helpful.

“—a terrible idea,” she finishes, even more annoyed with herself.

“Undoubtedly,” he agrees, and therefore pulls her closer, which is probably the worst argument for anything he has ever made and also the most honest.

Her hand has found his shoulder blade under the cloth and splayed there as if to check whether his architecture is trustworthy. There is a noise in the room that could be the House purring or could be his nervous system doing something asinine like singing. The tapestry is breathing. He is not. He forgets to. He remembers again only when she pulls off his mouth and breathes at him, as if in demonstration.

“Malfoy,” she says, and it is not a warning and not a benediction. Just the shape of him, which feels dangerous in her mouth, like a spell she could break him with if she chose.

He looks at her, really looks, because if this is going to ruin them both he would at least like to take an accurate inventory. Her cheeks are flushed the precise color of a stupid decision; her hair has half-fallen and is plotting revolution; the chalk crescent is gone from her jaw and the print of his thumb is there instead, which is a kind of vandalism he never learned to stop wanting. There’s ink on her fingers; he wants to lick it off, which is not rational by any metric.

“Don’t,” she says again, and this time there is the tiniest thread of steel through it; the part of her that can put down a wand, close a book, and step into a room filled with men and curses and insist on living anyway.

He stops moving. He doesn’t step back. He tilts his head, because if he must be a man at the edge of a cliff he can at least pretend it’s for the view. “Tell me where the line is.”

Her eyes darken. “You can’t help yourself.”

“No,” he says, and the curse approves of him as it hasn’t approved of him in years.

She breathes out. A decision forms between them like frost. 

“Don’t call it a mistake,” he says, voice low and she’s Hermione already retreating into the fortress she knows how to run. “And if you’re going to, then don’t call it anything.”

It hits harder than a hex. Perhaps because it isn’t one. She could argue. He could deflect. He could offer her a name that doesn’t taste like regret. 

They do none of these things. He does the only honorable thing left in a room with too much history and not enough future.

“Fine,” he says, and he means it. He does not say I won’t. He would be punished for the lie.

She steps back. Not far. The distance is a measurement only people who have kissed each other would understand. She doesn’t straighten her hair. She doesn’t fix her collar. She doesn’t tidy any of the things that would tell the room nothing happened. She meets his eyes for exactly one heartbeat of candor and then looks at the table as if a very interesting rune has developed out of nowhere.

“You may call that what you want,” she says. “Let’s just forget it.”

He laughs. It is an ugly sound. It is also a fair one. “Can’t,” he says lightly, and the curse signs the permission slip in his blood. “Faulty equipment.”

She exasperates at him. It’s not a word. It’s a phenomenon. “Then don’t talk about it.”

“Ever?” He keeps his voice bland. He has never been so careful with a blade that lives in his own mouth.

“Ever,” she says, and if she is sentencing herself with him, she does not flinch.

He nods as if this is a reasonable contingency plan and not a building made for collapse. “Noted.”

They both stand there and are very adult about it for fifteen seconds. Grimmauld makes a small approving sound, which is intolerable. Draco clears his throat, which is worse.

“Work,” she says, snatching at the rope that always hauls her back to the surface. “We should—” She gestures at the chalk and the notes and the problem that has the indecency to exist alongside human frailty. “We should.”

“We should,” he echoes, because language is easy; living with it is the complicated part.

They step around one another with the kind of care that gets you accused of choreography. She takes the far edge of the table; he takes the near, which is ridiculous because they were just occupying the same square foot like greedy thieves. Her quill scratches. His hand finds a blank sheet and pretends to deserve it. The room rearranges itself with a sigh that suggests disapproval of drama.

There is, of course, a practical problem. His mouth is… altered. He tastes tea and ink and the kind of electricity old houses hoard, and her, and he would very much like to scrub his face on the wall until he resembles a respectable citizen. He does not. He picks up a pen instead, which is either heroism or cowardice; he cannot tell which.

“Draco,” she says after a minute, and the first use of his first name should not by rights make the world go quiet in a house this noisy. It does anyway.

He doesn’t look up. Looking up would be an event. “Yes.”

“You did not imagine that.”

He laughs again: quieter, and it mangles something on the way out. “No.”

“And I’m not—” She exhales the word sorry and catches it with both hands before it hits the floor. She replaces it with, “I am not prepared to… discuss it.”

“Ever,” he says, already filed under policies and procedures.

“For now,” she says, and that for now is either a gift or a cruelty and he cannot tell which and the curse declines to adjudicate.

“Understood,” he says.

She makes a small, inarticulate noise that might be gratitude in a language no one else in the house speaks. “And if you attempt to be gallant about it, I will hex you.”

“Gallantry died with my father’s tailor,” he says, deadpan.

“That explains the tie,” she mutters, without thinking, and the normalcy of it is so luscious he almost sits down on the floor and waits for the House to be as confused by his happiness as he is.

Footsteps in the corridor. Potter’s laugh, which is always a little surprised to find itself out in public; Weasley’s commentary on biscuit distribution; Bill’s voice doing that elder-brother trick where it turns calm into a resource you can borrow. The kettle clatters against a tray. The click of a cup against a saucer. A rhythm of a life you build out of people who should have been dead and decided to be something else.

She snaps another stack of papers into alignment. “We don’t have time to be stupid,” she says, without looking at him.

“We never did,” he returns.

The door opens. The house exhales. They turn towards the work as if it has always been the only thing in the room.

The taste of her does not leave his mouth. He suspects this is partly chemistry and partly malice on the part of whichever god presides over men who are learning about hope at an inconvenient age. He drinks the tea Ron puts into his hand and nods along with Bill’s analysis of the slip, and when George makes a joke about product names he even finds the corner of his mouth doing something approximate to up.

He does not look at her again in a way anyone else could prosecute in a court of law.

The House hums approval. Or hunger. Or both. The tapestry’s silver thread blinks once, amused, and then settles back into its watch.

No one calls anything a mistake.

No one calls it anything at all.

The return to Grimmauld Place the day after feels like a punishment disguised as habit.

They arrive in pieces. Harry and Ron first, instinctively bracketing the door as if the walls might lunge. Bill and Charlie after them, talking in short, brotherly code. George sauntering, whistling, pretending nothing weighs on him. Theo drifting with the elegance of a man allergic to manual labor. And Hermione—Hermione walking past Draco without looking at him, which is somehow more violent than hexes.

Draco keeps his face marble. He doesn’t trust the cracks.

Bill gets to work immediately. “We map what we know, then we stop. No more improvising.” He drops his chalk like a verdict.

The tapestry has no interest in restraint. Its silver thread is brighter, humming under the candlelight like veins strung too tight. It snakes through Bellatrix’s name, hisses over Andromeda’s scorch-mark, splits, stutters, and blinks at Teddy Lupin’s neat annotation. Thurisaz and Ehwaz flare faintly: thorn and twin, wound and partnership.

Hermione sketches, eyes sharp, hair pinned back like armor. She doesn’t fidget, doesn’t falter, doesn’t glance across the table. Draco watches anyway, pretending he’s only checking her diagrams for accuracy.

Bill crouches, reading the thread’s hum like other men read sheet music. “Bellatrix designed this to force two conduits. The thorn sits, the twin moves. It wants two carriers, two lines acting as one.”

“So an evil group project,” Draco mutters.

George snorts. “She would’ve thrived at Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes.”

“She’d have murdered your customers,” Charlie says.

“Same thing,” George replies.

The room mutters with chalk and quill, with brotherly jabs and Theo’s commentary, but the undercurrent is steady: they’re building a model of a curse that still wants to bite.

Ron squints at the blinking thread. “So Teddy’s part of it. The tapestry can’t pin him down.”

“But not Teddy alone,” Hermione says. Her hand doesn’t pause. “The other half has to be bloodline too: Narcissa, Andromeda, maybe both. Until we test it, we won’t know.”

Bill’s jaw sets. “And we don’t test it with people until we’re ready. Mannequins first.”

“Finally,” George says, “a market for my rejects.”

Theo smooths his sleeve. “As long as the mannequins are handsome.”

The humor burns off quickly. The truth doesn’t.

Harry brings out the letters: Andromeda’s reply, neat and hard-edged. Yes, I’ll come. But I speak with you first, Harry. No experiments until then.

Relief flickers. Small. Fragile. Real.

Then Draco has nothing to show. Narcissa’s silence is an empty perch in the owlery. He shrugs when George asks, as if it doesn’t matter. Pretends indifference, feels abandoned. The wall hums smugly, as though agreeing with him.

Hermione notices. She doesn’t press. That hurts more.

Bill folds the letters. “One yes, one void. We work with what we have. Harry, talk to Andromeda. The rest of us keep modelling.”

Charlie nods, grim. “No one feeds themselves to this wall until we’ve starved it first.”

Hermione keeps writing, relentless. Draco thinks, with the clarity of someone about to ruin himself: if anyone can build a cure out of wreckage, it’s her.

They work until tea goes cold. The chalk skeleton grows: thorn, twin, blood, movement. They argue, refine, copy, discard. The tapestry hums and blinks, impatient.

At last the group draws together, as if by gravity. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the wall, watching the silver thread pulse through its hateful embroidery.

“So,” George says, for once without a joke. “What do we call it?”

Bill exhales. “A binding that runs on obedience. A lock that only opens when two halves move as one. Thorn and twin. That’s the spine of it.”

“Which means,” Harry adds quietly, “that Bellatrix designed it so no one person could end it. You always need another. You can’t break free alone.”

The room feels colder. The tapestry hums, smug.

Hermione’s voice cuts through, steady, dry. “Then we do what she never imagined. We work together. We break it anyway.”

No one argues.

Silence stretches. Not hopeless, not triumphant: just heavy with the weight of what they’ve admitted.

Draco stands a little apart, watching them. Watching her. His curse doesn’t stir. His chest does.

The conclusion is simple, cruel, and more terrifying than any rune on the wall: the curse might not kill him.

Hermione will.

And Merlin help him, he will thank her for it.

Chapter Text

The month teaches him new ways to count.

Not days; he stops those early on because the calendar becomes a threat, but the shapes of absence. Narcissa doesn’t answer the first owl, won’t answer the second, punishes the third with silence as formal as a signature. Every time he writes her name, the curse prickled under his skin, like it noticed. The Manor takes it personally, becoming colder in small, practical ways: fires a little lazier to catch, windows a fraction more stubborn, doorknobs offering your reflection back a beat too slowly, as if trying to keep it.

Andromeda will come, she writes, but she will speak to Harry first. Draco reads that copy three times and discovers it is possible to feel relieved and unwanted in the same fourteen seconds. Impressive economy.

Grimmauld Place sulks. Of course it does. The tapestry is quieter, but only in the way predators are quiet: watching. The silver line still blinks on Teddy Lupin’s name, Ehwaz gleaming in that unnerving twin-stroke. Sometimes the thread brightens when Draco enters, the way a dog lifts its head when it recognizes a footfall. Lovely. He’s domesticated the walls.

People become weather patterns.

Bill looks carved thinner by work: curse-breaker concentration edged with the brittleness of a man who has been too long between deserts. He’s sharper with parchment, gentler with Charlie; the contrast makes Draco’s teeth ache. When Bill says “careful,” the room behaves. When he says “enough,” no one argues, which is how you know they’re all exhausted.

Charlie disappears east for two weeks because dragons don’t keep schedules for your little human crises. Every owl he sends back is two sentences and a scorch mark: alive; don’t touch anything that hums. On the third owl, he adds a lopsided smile charmed into the parchment margin. Hermione keeps the scrap tucked into a book and pretends she doesn’t.

Harry and Ron turn the Grimmauld basements into a map of suspicion. They vanish for hours into rooms that think they’re centuries; they reappear smelling of stone and very old water, with ink on their hands and a particular quiet only the two of them share. Sometimes Harry has dust in his hair and a faraway look Draco recognizes from war photographs. Ron says “tea” like it’s a counter-curse and, somehow, it is.

Theo arrives and evaporates on a schedule which, if charted, would be either catastrophic or elegant. He is there for the wrong jokes and the right sudden silences, lounging in doorways with the grace of a man for whom doors have always been suggestions. He steals quills, reappears with pastries, flirts absently with danger, and slips a bottle into Draco’s pocket on the nights when the Manor’s quiet feels too sharp to swallow.

Hermione is not there every day.

She is the constant that refuses to behave like one. Some evenings she sends a brisk owl (“Working late, field site, don’t touch the bloody box”), and Draco discovers another new kind of counting: how long it takes a room to feel emptier after you realize someone won’t be in it. Other nights she arrives long after the hour they’d agreed on, hair pinned and escaping in the same act, knuckles inked with runes, that particular scent of old paper and clean soap and iron determination trailing in behind her like a standard. On those nights she doesn’t say sorry; she says “right” and picks up the work mid-verb, and the room, unreasonably, steadies.

They develop rituals because people do. Potter leans the same shoulder against the same bookcase; Ron takes notes on the same side of the table because his hand won’t smudge there. Bill says “last pass” three passes before the last one. Theo declares himself supervisor whenever the air gets too tight. Draco stands too close to the tapestry because it likes him, and because if there’s going to be a bite, better it be his.

They don’t duel this month. Hermione decrees it (“We’re burning energy we need”), and for once the Gryffindors pretend to be sensible. George even sends a note that reads, fine, but only because I’m developing something called Project Unclench and the prototype isn’t ready. No one asks.

Every second day or so the silver line in the weave brightens and then dulls, as if remembering something important and then misplacing it. Draco wonders whether memory fatigue applies to fabric. He doesn’t ask; he has learned not to anthropomorphise anything in this house unless you want it to talk back.

Progress becomes a tone of voice. When Bill says “hm” like an old hinge, it’s good. When Hermione says “oh,” very softly, everyone looks up, even Potter. When Draco says nothing, it means the curse has decided the obvious truth doesn’t need his mouth tonight.

And through all of it, the owls.

Narcissa’s absence grows a shape. He knows the geometry of her silence: its angles, the way it directs you down hallways of maybe and if. He drafts two letters he doesn’t send because they sound like accusations and one he doesn’t send because it sounds like begging. The one he does send says, Mother, and then the facts, and then I ask only for your answer. It is a perfect letter. It makes no difference at all.

It is Theo who names it one evening, not unkind. “You’re being ignored by blood.”

“Do shut up,” Draco says, not really managing a glare.

“I’m right here if you need a fake mother,” Theo offers. “I do a terrible Narcissa but a fabulous sense of entitlement.”

“Truly, the friend of dreams.”

“Of nightmares,” Theo says, pleased.

Somewhere in the middle of the month a storm rolls over London, enormous and useless. The Manor’s roof makes a sound like someone dragging chairs across a ballroom floor. Draco stands under a leak in the west corridor and watches the rain misbehave. He wonders what it would be to have a house that minded being wet because it was fond of you, not proud of its ceilings.

And then, one ragged afternoon that isn’t one thing or the other, overcast, undecided, they end up at Hermione’s flat.

It happens without a plan. Bill calls an early stop, runic fatigue, bad idea to push. Potter and Ron slope off for a long, necessary argument with a wall that refuses to admit it’s a door. Theo declares a cultural excursion and vanishes in the direction of trousers that will make old men scowl. The day should end; it doesn’t.

“Come on,” Hermione says, voice rough with having not talked enough or too much. “We can carry the model and my notes are there.”

“‘There’?” Draco says, wary.

“My flat,” she says, like it’s not a small disclosure disguised as a convenience. “Unless you’d prefer to read on a damp stair.”

He should prefer that. He doesn’t. “After you.”

Her building is four flights up because of course it is. The stairs are painted the officious white of landlords and lit like a polite interrogation. The hallway smells faintly of lemon and the history of other people’s dinners. She conjures the key from a trouser pocket with a flick that suggests she sometimes forgets which world expects which gestures.

The door swings into brightness.

He has been here before, but only as a problem and an idea. Today it is a space that breathes. Sun through tall windows. Plants that look like they’d obey a cease-and-desist letter. There are mugs, clean and drying, and a coat on the chair back that isn’t elegant and therefore must be beloved. The colors are the quiet ones Muggles like to pretend are neutral; Hermione has bullied them into feeling warm.

It is all very… her. Competence given rooms and a kettle. It irritates him because he envies it.

“You don’t live like a cursed object,” he says, because compliments are clearly beyond him.

“I’m renting,” she says, dropping her bag on the table and flipping the clasp open. “I refuse to make a landlord’s paint look good. Tea?”

“The most Gryffindor question.”

He takes the mug anyway, because he is only petty, not dead. She moves around the kitchen like she understands angles: drawers open and close with obedient economy, the kettle comes to the boil right as she finds the strainer, the teaspoon lives where logic would put it. It is unfair, that this too should be competent.

Draco leans a hip against the table and pretends to study the schematics they carted over. He is, wildly, aware of the domestic sounds: the clink of ceramic, the metal-of-the-lid, the small, precise sigh of water over leaves. It is the kind of scene he understands only in negative. His childhood home could do orchestras and operas; it never learned kitchen noises.

“Sugar?” she asks.

“Are you trying to sweeten my disposition?”

“Merlin, no,” she says, a snort-laugh catching her unguarded. “Just the tea.”

He doesn’t smile. He does mentally circle the sound like a collector who has obtained a rare specimen through legal means and is trying not to look smug.

They work, at first, because that is the mechanic of their truce. The model of the binding sits between them, chalk-sketched and annotated in three hands. Hermione spreads her notebooks in a precise arc: color-coded tabs (obsessive), corners uncurled (fastidious), a smear of dragon ash across one margin from a day she swears was unrelated to Charlie (unconvincing).

He needles her because he is uncomfortable. “Color-coding. Revolutionary. Did the world thank you?”

“The world would be chaos without me,” she says, factual and unoffended. “You’d drown in your own adjectives.”

“I don’t have adjectives. I have standards.”

“You have adjectives,” she says, dry as a field guide. “They just all think they’re nouns.”

He tips his head to concede impact. “And your bookshelf has dust.”

She makes a properly horrified noise. “Liar.” She says without heat, because they both know, he can’t fucking lie. 

He rubs a fingertip along the top of a sociology volume and reveals a blameless sheen. “Shame, Granger. I expected better.”

She huffs and returns to the runes. “At least I have a shelf.”

He thinks of the Manor’s libraries; dozens of rooms of tidy malignancy, and lets the cheapshot go by like a bird he will not shoot on principle. “You have several,” he says. “With a system. Color-coded.”

She pretends not to be pleased he noticed. “Drink your tea.”

They fall into the brittle ease of people who need friction to keep them from admitting the silence has a heartbeat.

“Your plant is judging me,” he says after a minute, because the ficus is absolutely doing that.

“It judges everyone,” Hermione says. “It’s a ficus.”

“Of course it is.”

He means to stop at that. He doesn’t. “You live in a place that looks like you earn it.”

“It’s called paying rent,” she says. “Everyone should try it.”

“Some of us tried being cursed,” he returns. “We overachieved.”

Her mouth does a tiny twist. “Don’t be charming, Malfoy.”

“I’m not,” he says, affronted. “I’m being accurate.”

“Worse.”

He should be able to settle into the work; he can’t. His body knows there’s no tapestry here, no box licking at the air, no House holding its breath for his blood. He is not an amenity. He is… company. It rattles him in ways he refuses to define.

They argue, but asymmetrically: not over ethics or survival (those old familiar cliffs) but over edge conditions in a runic series, whether Bellatrix would have bound a loop clockwise or counter, whether the “slip” in Ehwaz can be induced with a chimeric charm or must be genuinely embodied. It is ridiculous to be irritated by someone else’s brilliance when you keep needing it. He manages. Hermione’s quill ticks faster when he needles; it is probably the closest he has ever come to playing an instrument.

At some point he stands to reach a book on her top shelf; unsurprisingly, the top shelf, because of course she stores the difficult things where the long-armed must be involved. She stands at the same moment to fetch the folio a shelf down. They occupy the same vertical line. Each reaches. Sleeves brush. His shoulder meets the plane of her shoulder blade. Where her hand graces his, the faint ink-dark lines on the parchment nearby blur, as if reacting. She wipes them quickly, unsettled. The book dislodges; so does the breath he wasn’t monitoring.

They could step back. They don’t.

He doesn’t think of the alcove at Grimmauld. He absolutely does. That press of space narrowing until the body is the only map left. Here, the light is too clean for tricks. He can see the individual stray hairs that have escaped her clip. He can smell green tea and ink and the memory of the storm with a city washed out behind it.

“Granger,” he says, which is criminally insufficient.

She doesn’t look up. “Malfoy.”

“Your shelf organization is tyrannical.”

“You’re in my kitchen.”

“I notice,” he says, and hears the sentence as if it’s coming from a better-behaved man and hates him a little for it.

Her hand, reaching, steadies on the book edge. His hand, traitor, excellent, finds the same edge from the other side. The back of his knuckles touches the back of hers. It is nothing. It is a sentence worth underlining twice.

“Do you ever sit,” he asks, too even, “without a task?”

“Do you ever speak,” she returns, equally steady, “without a dig?”

“Once every three months,” he says. “And only if bribed.”

“Tea isn’t a bribe, Malfoy.”

“It worked,” he says, and it’s almost, almost, easy.

She exhales. Not a laugh. Not a scoff. Something between. “Gently. The paper’s old.”

He eases the book free. He does not move back at once, which is either foolishness or experiment. She doesn’t either, which is either oversight or consent. The air shifts to the precise temperature of It Would Be Very Easy To Be Stupid. He is not, on reputation, a difficult mark for stupidity.

“Your flat is… bright,” he says, because words are what he has left. “Distractingly.”

“Thank you,” she says, automatically defensive against the compliment.

“I didn’t mean it nicely.”

“You did.”

She lifts the folio. The movement brings her closer for a second and then further again. The second expands like an arrogant universe.

“This is ridiculous,” she says to the air between them.

“Yes,” he says. “But better than fate.”

She turns her head, finally, to look at him. Her eyes are not gentle. They never have been. That is, he suspects, a portion of the point. “You don’t get to say that like you don’t believe in it.”

“I believe in bad luck,” he says. “And discipline.”

“And what is this?”

“A lapse,” he says. “In discipline.”

“Yours or mine?”

“Yes.”

Her mouth almost turns. “Helpful.”

It would be so easy; his mouth knows where hers is even when his eyes are closed. But he has lived too long in houses that bite. He has learned to step back by a fraction when the floorboards creak.

He doesn’t step back.

“Galvanic,” she says abruptly.

“What?”

“The slip. The Ehwaz anomaly. We might be able to induce the quality with a galvanic charm anchored in a chimeric frame. It wouldn’t be stable, but it would be instructional.”

He stares at her. “You just—”

“Thought of it when we were both being idiots,” she says crisply. “We can trial on straw dummies. It might mimic the way Teddy’s magic slips identity. For five seconds. Maybe seven.”

He ought to be furious at the timing. He is, affectionately. “If you solve a war crime by nearly giving me a heart attack, I will… do something very dramatic.”

“You always do,” she says, and walks back to the table without looking to see if he follows.

He does. Because that is apparently who he is now: a man who follows Granger to tables in bright rooms to discuss how to make a monstrous machine misfire.

They sketch. They argue with their eyebrows. They attempt not to notice when their knees touch under the table because the table is not very wide and also because neither of them moves away.

Outside, London tries out a blue sky it will not commit to. Inside, Hermione’s kettle refuses to reboil until it is asked very politely.

He is, he realizes, warm.

It is disorienting.

At some point she goes to the bookshelf again and retrieves a muggle book he couldn’t possibly care about: The Double Helix. She props it under a folio to make the angle less ugly. The title sits in his peripheral vision like a dare.

“Cheerful bedtime reading?” he asks.

“Discovery is mostly tedium,” she says. “And the odd theft.”

“I wouldn’t know,” he says. “Malfoys outsource their theft.”

“Clearly.”

They last another twenty minutes pretending this is only work.

Then the friction tips.

It happens over nothing; her quill blotting, his hand darting without thinking to take it from her before the blot can catch the edge of the page. He holds her quill an inch too long; she holds his gaze a beat too many. The sound the city makes when the buses change gears slides in through the window and does something treacherous to the air.

“Granger,” he says again, because apparently that’s his entire vocabulary.

“Malfoy,” she answers, which is less a word than a diagnosis.

“Do you—” he begins, and, miraculously, stops. He isn’t sixteen. He has learned some things. For instance: asking a question that presumes consent is only romantic in the imaginations of mediocre poets.

She doesn’t answer his unfinished question. She sets the quill down. She inhales, as if preparing to be clever. Her mouth fails her by being a mouth.

“Do not mistake my address for an invitation,” she says, which is either a very clear instruction or the way people phrase invitations when they don’t want to own them.

He hears himself say, dry as dust, “I didn’t. I mistook the tea.”

“And the kitchen noises,” she says, which, frankly, feels like plagiarism out of his skull.

His mouth compromises by tugging at one corner. “Don’t.”

“I’m not smiling at you,” she says, not smiling at him. “I’m smiling at my ability to tolerate your presence.”

“Impressive,” he says. “You should put it on your CV.”

“Special skills,” she says. “Endurance.”

He could say something foolish. He does not. He reaches for the folio and his knuckles brush hers again and the warmth through that one square inch of contact becomes the entire map of the afternoon.

She exhales, a sound nearer to a growl than a sigh. “We’re not doing this.”

“Of course not,” he says.

They absolutely are.

The kettle, sainted thing, chooses this moment to thrum its little throat. It keeps them from the stupid decision for another five minutes. Hermione pours. Draco watches the steam. He is, he decides, both ridiculous and in danger of becoming something worse.

“Your plant is still judging me,” he says, because there must always be a joke within arm’s reach or he will grab a wrist instead.

“It will judge you more if you spill,” she says, handing him a mug with the concentration of a surgeon passing a scalpel.

He doesn’t spill. He also doesn’t sit back down. She doesn’t either.

The flat is bright. The room is warm. The work sits between them behaving as if it could be picked up again at any second. He realises, with terrible clarity, that this—whatever this is—isn’t a reprieve from the curse. It is the only part of the month that has felt like air.

“Your taste is… good,” he says, which, in Draco, is confessional.

“Don’t be nice to me,” she says at once, a flinch disguised as a warning.

“Perish the thought,” he says, obedient.

They stare at the same page because neither of them is ready to look up.

“Galvanic,” he repeats, as if the word will keep his mouth from doing worse things. “We’ll build it tomorrow.”

“Tonight,” she says, stubbornness disguised as practicality.

“Tonight, then.”

They don’t talk about the owls. They don’t talk about the way his eyes keep finding the line of her throat when she swallows tea. They don’t talk about why she invited him here when the day had already failed to end on time. They don’t talk about the way her flat has space enough for two and still feels like a room built for one person who never sits down.

He finishes his tea. She finishes hers. The sun tips from afternoon to that grey London makes when it has forgotten courage. Street noise leans in through the window and changes the cadence of their breathing by a fraction.

“Granger,” he says a third time, low, a man trying not to reach for a door he absolutely will open if he puts a hand on it.

She looks up. Meets him fully. It is not a soft look. It is a look that has stood its ground in battles he never saw and stayed standing when other things fell. He has a sudden, terrible thought: perhaps the House isn’t the only thing that chose him because he bleeds neatly.

“We’re not doing this,” she repeats, but the sentence lands differently now; less declaration, more dare.

“Of course not,” he says again, entirely sincere.

They stand there too long for politeness and not long enough for sense. And then, because neither of them will break first, they both reach for the same page a third time and their fingers tangle and neither of them pretends it was an accident.

The room does not applaud. It does, however, forget to breathe.

Draco leans against the wall like a man waiting to be executed.

“You’re sulking,” Hermione says without looking up from her notes.

“I am brooding,” Draco corrects. “Sulking is for children.”

“You sound like one.”

He huffs. “You sound like you’ve been lecturing me for six months straight.”

“Maybe I have.” She flicks her quill down, eyes flashing. “And maybe if you weren’t so bloody—”

“So bloody what?” He pushes off the wall, stalking closer. “So bloody cursed? So bloody broken? Or is it just so bloody pathetic?”

Her jaw clenches. “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

“Then give me some new ones,” he snaps, and he’s close enough now that the heat of her body is leaking through the air between them.

She stands abruptly, chair scraping. “You’re infuriating.”

“And you’re everywhere,” he growls. “In my head, in my blood, in every miserable corner of this curse. I can’t—” He breaks off, breath ragged. “I can’t breathe without you in it.”

Her laugh is sharp, almost cruel. “Listen to yourself.”

“Yes,” he says, stepping into her space, eyes wild. “Listen. Pathetic, isn’t it? Do you enjoy watching me unravel?”

She tilts her chin, lips twitching with a mocking sort of amusement. “A little.”

That’s when the tension snaps. She shoves him, hard, into the wall. He laughs (low, unhinged) and drags her against him. Their mouths crash, teeth clacking, lips bruising. It isn’t gentle; it’s war fought with tongues and breath.

“Fuck,” Draco groans against her mouth. His hands are everywhere; her waist, her back, the curve of her hip. He’s greedy, reverent, desperate all at once, like he’s afraid she’ll disappear if he doesn’t hold every inch of her.

Hermione fists his shirt, yanks him down harder, angrier. She nips his lip and he gasps, embarrassingly loud. She half-laughs against his mouth, breathless.

“Merlin, Malfoy,” she pants. “You’re desperate.”

“Yes,” he admits, raw. “For you.”

Her nails rake his scalp as she drags him back into another kiss. His knees nearly buckle. He mouths down her throat, open-mouthed and needy, sucking bruises like prayers. She lets him, arching slightly, and it’s enough to make him moan into her skin.

“Please,” he whispers, voice cracked. “Tell me how. Tell me what you want. Let me see.”

Her laugh is shaky now, half-mocking but hot. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Say it again,” he begs, mouthing at her collarbone, fingers slipping under her jumper. “Call me pathetic, call me ridiculous, I don’t care. Just—fuck—don’t stop.”

She pulls his shirt up, palms skating over his chest. He’s trembling. When her hand dips lower, brushing the waistband of his trousers, he nearly sobs with relief. “Granger,” he gasps, head falling back, “fuck—yes.”

Her hand works him, rough and efficient, and he’s clutching at her waist like a drowning man. His hips jerk helplessly into her grip. “Gods—yes—Hermione—” The name tears out of him before he can stop it.

She doesn’t scold him for it. Instead, she drags her own trousers down with her free hand, kicks them aside, and grabs his wrist. “Here,” she says, low and commanding, pressing his fingers between her thighs.

He groans like he’s been handed salvation. “Fuck. Warm—fuck, you’re—” Words scatter as he feels her wet around his fingers. “You’re going to kill me.”

“Maybe,” she mutters, breath stuttering when he rubs just right.

They’re a mess, rutting against each other, mouths crashing, breath sharp. He fucks her with his fingers while she works him with her hand, and it’s so raw, so consuming he’s dizzy.

“You’re—” he pants, forehead pressed to hers. “You’re everywhere. If the curse is an anchor, you’re—fuck—you’re keeping me from drowning.”

That does it. His voice breaks, his body shudders, and he spills into her hand with a groan that sounds like surrender. She gasps, claws at his shoulder, and comes with him, wet and hot around his fingers, biting his neck to stifle the sound.

For a long moment, the only noise is ragged breathing, their bodies pressed together, sweat and ink and desperation between them.

Then Hermione pulls back, face flushed, eyes too sharp for softness. She yanks her trousers up with quick, precise hands. “Don’t make this more than it is.”

His chest heaves. He looks wrecked. “It already is.”

“Go,” she says, steady.

He swallows, nods once, curt. Dignity is all he has left. He gathers himself, buttons askew, hair ruined, and walks out.

The door shuts. He laughs once, bitter, under his breath.

Morning comes with no hangover, which feels like a cosmic joke. Draco almost wishes his head did hurt, because then at least there’d be an excuse for the wreckage inside his chest. Instead, he’s sharp as a blade and twice as useless.

Grimmauld Place greets him like it always does—sullen wallpaper, sighing portraits, the faint smell of mould and regret. The others are already gathered in the tapestry room when he arrives. He notes it automatically: Harry and Ron flanking like bodyguards, Bill crouched in curse-breaker pose, Charlie restless as if the walls are dragon hides waiting to tear, Theo perched on a chair that clearly isn’t his, George doodling obscenities in chalk on the floor until Hermione swats him with a glare.

Hermione doesn’t look at Draco when he walks in. Which is louder than a hex.

“Any word?” Harry asks, cutting straight into it.

Draco keeps his tone flat. “Mother hasn’t answered.”

Hermione says, brisk, “Andromeda wrote to me. She insists. She’ll come, but only after she’s spoken to Harry.”

Harry nods once, already bracing himself. “I’ll go to her tomorrow.”

There’s a murmur of approval. Plans slotting into place, scaffolding to keep the ceiling from collapsing. Draco stands with his hands behind his back like he’s still at school presenting homework he didn’t want to do.

Bill gestures at the silver thread that still flickers along the tapestry. “It’s stable for now. I’ve anchored the flare into the wall. We can study it safely until Andromeda’s ready.”

“Define safely,” Theo drawls.

“Safely means you don’t touch it, Nott,” Bill says without looking up.

Theo salutes lazily. “Tragic.”

Charlie circles the wall with narrowed eyes. “It’s feeding. Not much, but enough. We’ll need to keep rotations. Don’t want it gorging while no one’s looking.”

Hermione finally speaks, but still not to Draco. “I’ll map the runes tonight. Cross-reference with the Grimshaw fragments.”

“Good,” Bill says, and the way he defers to her doesn’t sting Draco anymore. It just confirms what he already knows: she’s the center of this whole bloody thing.

George pipes up, cheerful menace. “So when do we blow it up?”

“No,” Hermione and Bill snap in unison.

Ron mutters, “Worth a try.”

The conversation spirals into logistics; warding rotations, rune translations, whether to bring in additional curse-breakers from Gringotts. Draco half listens, half watches Hermione’s hands as she sketches in the air, quick and precise, her mouth moving silently around calculations. His chest aches with the memory of those same hands clawing at his shirt, pulling him closer, demanding more.

He looks away before anyone notices. Charlie notices it. 

Hours pass in that peculiar rhythm of grim work; ink bleeding into parchment, muttered equations, sparks as Bill prods the weft. Theo narrates his own brilliance. George cheats at a game no one else is playing. Harry and Ron lean into each other in the way of men who’ve forgotten how not to. Charlie mutters dragon facts no one asked for.

Hermione doesn’t falter once.

When the session finally winds down, people stretch, groan, peel themselves off chairs. Bill mutters something about sleep; Charlie drags him out by the elbow. George whistles, promises fireworks. Theo yawns elaborately, swearing he’s been carrying the group’s morale single-handedly. The room empties in a slow, creaky exodus.

Draco lingers, because of course he does.

Hermione is still at the table, quill scratching, hair falling forward in wild curls she hasn’t noticed. She doesn’t look up when she says, “You should go too.”

He should. Gods, he should.

But his mouth betrays him, as usual. “The curse is not killing me,” he says, low, sardonic. “But it doesn’t feel like I’m dying anymore, either.”

She freezes. Her quill stills, ink blotting the parchment. Slowly, she looks at him: sharp, unreadable, eyes dark with something that could be fury or could be fear.

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He leaves, dignity frayed but intact, and lets the door shut on whatever she might have said.

The curse thrums under his ribs like a laugh.

Chapter Text

The worst thing about Andromeda Tonks’s kitchen is that it is ordinary.

Sunlight. Real sunlight, not the filtered, aristocratic kind that oozes down Black marble like an apology. A square of table scrubbed thin with years of elbows. A vase of something cheerful that looks like daisies but is probably a Muggle plant with an aggressively reasonable name. Tiles that have been mopped so often the grout has opinions. The sort of room where people have birthdays, and headaches, and toast.

Draco hates it on sight. He also wants to sit down and never move again. He chooses the only third option: he stands like a coat rack that has succeeded at Slytherin.

Harry knocks twice and lets himself in on the second out-breath, which says this is a house he’s been welcome in long enough to forget knocking is a skill. Hermione comes in behind him carrying a folder already bristling with tabs (color-coded, because of course they are). Draco follows because someone has to be the specter that makes the sun nervous. He rehearses a joke about burglars and bloodlines and decides not to spend honesty on material that weak before tea.

Andromeda Tonks looks up from the kettle and takes them in like a general examining a skirmish: Potter first (history), Granger second (danger), Malfoy last (liability). Her face is lighter than he remembers from a courtroom years ago, fewer nights carved into the skin, yet there’s still that settled calm of someone who has already survived her worst thing and politely dares the universe to try again.

“Andromeda,” Harry says, gentle and familiar.

“Harry.” She nods at Hermione, warm but measuring, and then at Draco, cool but not cruel. “Mr. Malfoy.”

“Aunt—” he starts, then swallows the word. She is not his aunt, and the room would throw him out by the collar if he pretended she was.

“Tea,” she says, because the linchpin of civilization is kettles. “Sit, or stand and make me nervous.”

He sits. The chair does not bite. He resents how relieved he is.

Hermione lays the folder on the table. “We think we understand the framework now,” she says without preamble. Her voice is the one she uses with curse-breaking clients and angry bureaucrats: clipped, almost kind. “Bellatrix braided a compulsion engine into the House. Blood to prime, mouth to open, binding to force compliance. We’ve seen a prototype; we’ve mapped the runes.”

“Of course she did,” Andromeda says, in the tone of someone who once did homework for a sister and learned to recognize signatures. She pours tea as if it is an antidote. “What do you need from me?”

Harry slides a look across at Draco, the kind that doesn’t ask but warns, and then says it himself because Gryffindors believe in speaking aloud. “The tapestry is indexing on your branch. The scorch over your name doesn’t stop the thread. It passes through. It… stutters at Teddy.”

Andromeda’s hand stills on the saucer for the length of a blink. “Stutters.”

“Metamorphmagus,” Hermione says, quick and apologetic for the fact of magic. “Systems that insist on fixed identity have trouble with fluid forms. The code slips when it tries to pin Teddy down.”

“Good for him.” Andromeda sets Draco’s tea in front of him anyway, which is either mercy or a test. The cup smells like the kind of Earl Grey that has opinions about bergamot. “You want me to walk into the House.”

“We want you to decide if you’ll even consider it,” Harry says, and Draco registers distantly that he’s learned. This is not Potter at nineteen. This is a man who has been told no enough times to fold it into his script.

Draco stares at the steam and tries not to count how many times grimy sunlight has failed to penetrate Grimmauld Place. The idea of Andromeda in that corridor makes the House in his head bristle like a bad dog.

“The rules,” she says, and there they are: boundaries laid out like the terms of a duel. “Teddy does not go near that room until I have seen it and you can switch your curse-field off and on like a lamp. If the House so much as sniffs at him, you will find out what Tonks temper looks like without the comic relief.”

As if on cue, Teddy (playing with his reflection in the polished kettle) lets his features ripple into Draco’s pale face. The kettle rattles so hard on the hob that the water splashes onto the tiles. 

Harry nods. “Agreed.”

“If it tries to bite me,” she continues, a flat statement rather than a dare, “Bill will have structures in place, and your dragon brother will be standing close enough to test them.”

“Can do,” Charlie says from the doorway, because of course he appears when he is useful. Draco didn’t hear him arrive; perhaps dragon keepers learn to move like weather.

“George,” Andromeda adds, “will keep his inventions in his pockets until we are safely at the laughing-about-it stage.”

George, leaning in the frame beside Charlie with a grin that is always four parts bravado to one part ache, salutes. “Cross my heart and… no, I won’t finish that sentence.”

“And Mr. Malfoy,” she says at last, turning the full weight of her attention on Draco. “You will not get between me and your aunt’s ghost and assume your blood will purchase me out of it.”

It is unfair how much the sentence lands. He sips tea like it’s armor. “Noted.”

“Good.” She settles with her own cup. The scent of bergamot lifts the tired out of the corners. “Now. You said the thread ‘passes through’ my scorch. That tracks. Scorch marks are signatures for the living; they don’t delete ancestry. Blood is inconvenient like that.”

“Useful,” Hermione says. Her quill is already poised, the point a small blade. “Anything else you can tell us about the House’s behavior with you? Wards that misfire? Stairs that… judge?”

Andromeda’s mouth does the small tilt that Ted Tonks must have fallen in love with. “Recognitions are coded into the older Black architecture. Sisters were often designed as paired nodes. One to cut, one to hold. Bellatrix always liked being a knife.”

“And Narcissa was a clasp,” Draco says before he can stop himself—a memory in his mouth, not a thought. Mother smoothing wards like bedcovers. Mother pausing with her palm on the lintel as if listening to a sleeping child. “She held doors. Bella opened them.”

Andromeda studies his face for several seconds too long. “Yes,” she says at last, and it is not kindness that makes it gentler. It is accuracy. “Which is why if your mother comes, she comes with me, and no one says the word forgiveness out loud.”

“Forgiveness is not—” Draco begins, and then discovers that he cannot finish the sentence in a room where the sugar bowl has a chip in it. “—on the agenda.”

Hermione’s eyes flick to him. He does not meet them. She writes: paired nodes: cut/hold and underlines it once. The page will carry the weight of the day; it deserves to.

“Right,” Harry says, exhaling a beat of tension that has not lessened. “Will you come to Grimmauld. Today. We’ll keep Teddy out of it. We’ll set nets. We just… need to see what the thread does.”

Andromeda considers her teacup like it is an instrument panel. “You will keep my grandson out of it,” she repeats, polite the way a knife-edge is polite just before you press. “You will have structures in place. Bill will stand where I can see him. Mr Malfoy will not try to bleed on anything as a shortcut. And I will walk into your haunted wallpaper and say hello.”

“Thank you,” Hermione says, fierce in a way Draco recognizes from third year and every war after. The room makes a noise that is not a cheer. It is relief being careful with itself.

Draco looks at the sunlight pooling on the clean tile and has the uncharitable thought that this kitchen would be improved by a scratch, so it would stop being smug. He is tired of rooms that have already learned how to forgive.

They finish tea like a ritual; cups rinsed; spoons nested; the everyday dignity of dishes done. Andromeda vanishes for a scarf and returns with a bright wool thing that Teddy has clearly picked because it is illegal under several taste statutes. She ties it with hands that do not shake. Draco files that away under standards.

On the step, she pauses. “I don’t do ghosts,” she says. “If the House tries to speak in her voice, tell it I speak fluent shut up.”

“Yesss,” George breathes, reverent. “Adopting that for customer service.”

They go.

Grimmauld Place resents their arrival, which is comforting. Rooms that hate you are honest rooms. The hallway inhales, holds, decides it cannot actually spit Andromeda Tonks back out without losing face, and exhales again like an old aristocrat forced to accept a new neighbor who shops at the wrong grocer.

The tapestry room is already prepped. Bill has strung a containment net three inches off the wall; fine as a cobweb, lethal as a thesis. He has chalked sigils into the floorboards where only a curse-breaker would dare; the lines nesting like ribs around a heart. Charlie lurks near the scorch with the loose, coiled stance of a man who can pick up a dragon by the scruff if asked nicely. George has promised not to invent anything until someone else survives first. Ron is by the door, posture broadcasting last man out is an idiot. Theo is leaning on the mantelpiece like a portrait who has hired himself to improve the view.

Draco takes his place opposite the scorch and pretends this is strategic rather than inevitable. The House has learned his blood; it opens like a cat’s eye at dawn when he moves. He is a key that fits too many locks.

“Ready,” Bill says, which is a lie. He can make nets and chalk spines and prayers into geometry, but no one is ever ready for a House that learned English by listening to your aunt.

Andromeda steps forward. She does not grandstand. She does not bless herself with old names. She simply walks inside the perimeter Bill has defined for safety and says, to the wall, “Bellatrix.”

Nothing happens for a breath long enough to make everyone recalculate their options. Then the silver seam in the weft brightens like a vein pressed by a thumb. The hum in the stone rises a half-note, a tuning fork in old bone. The thread routes cleanly through the scorch where Andromeda’s name used to be, and something almost like a snarl drags across the sense of the room, as if the House is offended that reality has been pointed out to it in public.

“Of course,” Hermione murmurs, voice all angles. “Silence isn’t deletion.”

Bill’s wand is steady. “Net holding.” He throws a glance at Draco like a hand on a shoulder: don’t move unless you have to. Draco, unhelpful by reflex, moves his weight to the balls of his feet.

The glow shivers where it slides through the burn and, for a moment, brief as a blink, two hair-thin runes scratch themselves into the light. Not the thorn this time; not the twin. A smaller glyph, sharp as a breath drawn for a speech.

“Ansuz,” Hermione says, reverent. “Message. Mouth. Voice.”

George mutters, “Tell me she didn’t build a talking wall.”

“She built a listening one,” Draco says, and the curse lets him because the line is nasty and true. “It wants to hear her, either sister. Both. It’s a machine that pretends to be ancestry when it is really a microphone.”

Andromeda’s face does nothing that could be called a flinch. “Get on with it,” she tells the House, which is a better exorcism than Latin.

Bill touches the net with the side of his wand, making the mesh hum an octave below the wall’s song. “Testing poke,” he warns, and flicks a thread of power across the glow like a tuning strike.

No compulsion surge. No box waking. No greedy little grab for tongues. If anything, the pathway smooths, a channel oiled. The thread’s light loses its spit and slides along the line towards the names below the scorch with the embarrassed momentum of a person forced to continue a rant after the audience has changed.

“Her presence lowers the coercion threshold,” Hermione says, jaw tight with the sort of exultation that doesn’t smile. “She offends the binding by existing.”

“Excellent,” Theo says, deeply pleased. “We shall weaponize survival.”

Ron, eyes on the door, snorts. “Put that on a poster.”

Charlie doesn’t take his eyes off Andromeda. “You alright?”

“Standing,” she says, which is a very Andromeda answer. “The day I’m not, you will notice.”

Draco watches the way the light behaves around her, less bristle, more flow, and thinks of riverbeds and knives and the fact that the House has spent decades pretending the Tonkses were a smudge on a family photograph while the blood kept a ledger. Bellatrix built an engine for obedience and forgot that stubbornness runs in families too.

“Record it,” Bill says, and Hermione is already writing, the quill moving fast, that small crease appearing between her brows that Draco has started, unhelpfully, to imagine smoothing with his thumb. He looks back at the wall so he can go on living.

“Net stable,” Bill adds, and layers three more standing charms into his chalk spine. “We’re done for today. Andromeda: out and breathe.”

She steps back over the chalk with the grace of someone who trusts math more than priests. The hum in the wall drops to its ordinary sullen complaint. The silver seam dims to a manageable insult.

Harry’s shoulders fall a fraction, the kind of looseness that means didn’t die, fine. He looks at Andromeda not as savior or relic but as person, which is his old trick and still the most radical one he owns. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she says, and then, because she is kind without being foolish, “Don’t mistake that for permission to be stupid.”

“We never do,” George lies.

“Constantly,” Ron corrects.

Hermione caps the ink. “We can model this,” she tells Bill, already moving to the small table in the corner where Grimmauld keeps the least cursed chairs. “If the path is smoother when she’s present, we copy the profile. The House is less likely to throw a tantrum if it believes it’s being respected.”

“Make the machine think it’s winning,” Draco says, dry. “We have family experience.”

Andromeda looks at him again, and this time there is something in it he does not have the vocabulary for that does not involve either pity or knives. “Write to your mother,” she says, as if he hasn’t already composed five drafts and binned four. “Do not apologize. Do not beg. Do not, for the love of Ted, try to be clever. State the situation. Offer terms. Ask for the time and place she chooses. And tell her I will be there.”

Under her breath, too low for anyone but Draco and the stones to hear, Andromeda mutters “The house always wanted us back inside it”.

He nods because the alternative is to attempt words and fail. The curse inside him stirs—not cruel, not kind. Just awake, as if it too wants to see what Narcissa Malfoy becomes in a room that remembers.

“Twenty minutes,” Bill says, rolling his shoulders as if he can unpinch responsibility with bones. “Then we stand down. No one so much as breathes on the weft until we’ve built the model.”

Charlie steps in close enough to clap Bill’s shoulder and not be told off for it. Code exchanged: still here. Ron wedges himself in the doorway because he cannot help it; it’s in the job description. George wanders off with a frown he thinks no one notices, which means he’s about to make something terrible and useful. Theo announces he has performed spectacularly by not fainting and asks if anyone else noticed.

Andromeda ties Teddy’s scarf tighter and gives the wall one last look so full of contempt that it could be framed. “Tell your House,” she says to Draco, “that if it wants to keep playing ancestor, it will have to cope with the parts of its descendants that learned to love things it tried to burn.”

“I’ll pass it on,” Draco says. His mouth tastes like iron, which is inconvenient when one is trying to look insouciant.

She leaves with Harry, because of course she does, and the corridor swallows their footfalls like it always wanted to learn silence from good people. Hermione is still writing. Draco stands where he is because moving would reveal that he wants to be useful and the day has already been humiliating.

The silver seam in the tapestry, now dimmed, looks very pleased with itself, like a cat that has just confirmed you will continue to feed it despite the mauling. The House hums. The room breathes. The net holds.

Draco exhales, which he did not approve.

“Don’t bleed on anything,” Hermione says without looking up, the sentence so familiar he could put it on a brooch.

He considers three bleak jokes and picks something like honesty instead. “I’ll try.”

“Try harder,” she says, and then glances up, the briefest cut of eye to eye. Whatever passed between them last night has not died; it has simply learned to stand in a different room. His chest hurts like a pulled muscle in a place without muscles.

He wonders if hope is a symptom or an infection. He decides not to ask the nearest Healer. He also decides not to touch the wall, the net, the quill, or the woman. He is not, contrary to rumor, suicidal.

Bill’s chalk clicks against wood. The runes they’ve half-solved wait like polite knives. Somewhere in North London a boy with hair that changes like weather is doing homework he doesn’t want to do. Somewhere else, Narcissa Malfoy is unfolding a letter and deciding whether to attend a family reunion designed by mathematicians and fools.

Draco adjusts his cuffs as if that will fix his blood. The House hums to itself, smug as a cat. He hums back, tuneless and spiteful, because there are worse things than being a man in a room with people who intend to be clever on his behalf.

The worst thing is kitchens with sunlight. The second-worst is hope.

He stands anyway.

They do not celebrate.

They never do; it isn’t that kind of war. They stack teacups in Andromeda’s stead and put away chalk like they’re disarming the floor. Bill rolls his shoulders with the grim relief of a man who has found the thread and is now obliged to follow it into a loom. Charlie prowls a last lap of the perimeter, touching ward-anchors as if they’re fence posts that might decide to wander. George fiddles with a rubber band in a way that suggests product development. Ron guards the door from concepts. Potter’s stillness is the particular kind that marks the end of a day he’d like to call victory but refuses to in case the universe hears. Theo declares he has been brave and should be allowed to faint attractively on the settee; no one grants permission.

Draco stays where he is because moving might imply volunteering. Also because Grimmauld has learned his blood and responds to him with the greedy politeness of a cat who knows which human fills the bowl.

Hermione has already relocated to the small side table judicially labelled least cursed. She spreads fresh parchment and, with the precision of a surgeon laying out instruments, draws the spine of their model: paired nodes—cut/hold, reduce field coercion, a clean Ehwaz above the scorched line in tiny, severe script. The quill moves like a weapon. It’s an aesthetic, and he hates how much it suits her.

“Talk me through the ‘on/off like a lamp’ part,” she says without looking up.

“Switch-bind,” Bill answers, crouched by his chalk skeleton. “Set a cap on field amplitude. Tie it to a mechanical anchor we control, not the tapestry’s mood.”

“Clapper charm?” George suggests, perky. “Clap on, clap off—”

“No,” Hermione and Bill say together, which is how you keep the building.

“Lever then,” Charlie says. “Physical. If the field’s a river, you want a sluice-gate. Up is ‘behave,’ down is ‘sleep.’”

Bill makes a mark: sluice—physical anchor, field cap. “I can build that,” he says, which is Weasley for I will build it and destroy my back doing it.

“Where?” Ron asks. “In the room, or external?”

“In the room,” Bill says, grimacing. “External gives the House veto. We put the handle where we can reach it when everything goes stupid.”

“Optimism noted,” Theo murmurs.

Hermione glances across the parchment at Draco. “You’ll write to her tonight.”

He doesn’t ask who her is; they’re fresh out of pronouns. “Yes.”

“And you’ll keep it simple.”

“I know how to speak to my mother,” he says, which is bravado dressed as etiquette.

“Just checking,” she says, eyes back on the model, which is somehow worse.

Theo slides into Draco’s peripheral vision like a Venetian blind. “Do you want me to draft it in tasteful sarcasm? I can end every sentence with ‘Mother dearest, do pop by the family horror.’”

“Tempting,” Draco says. “If only because it would kill her, solve the problem, and free the House from her perfume.”

Theo pats his shoulder. “There’s my optimist.”

Potter pushes off the jamb. “I’ll go back to Andromeda after supper. Explain the nets. Give her time to say no and then ask again.”

“She won’t say no,” Hermione says, which is faith; then, brisker, “But we plan for it anyway. Bill—finish the cap. Charlie—fetch what you need from the Burrow and the shed. George—no prototypes in pockets.”

George sighs. “I am tragically misunderstood. Also, noted.”

Ron tips his head at Draco. “And you—don’t bleed on anything.”

“It’s like you all think I’m incontinent,” Draco mutters. He earns a small, private look from Hermione that says we noticed you tried not to. He files it away, which is undignified.

They break. Not dismiss, not disperse—just loosen. The room always feels bigger after that. Either the walls breathe or the people do; impossible to tell.

He writes the letter at the long table whose varnish is a palimpsest of Black dinners and Black decisions. The quill scratches in a way that suggests disapproval, which is traditional for everything in this house.

Mother,

You will have guessed from the seal that this is not idle. I have learned things about the House you would prefer stilled, and I intend to still them. To do so, I require your presence, briefly and safely, under terms we control—not the House, and not Andromeda. I am aware of the irony in those words; I am fresh out of better ones.

Andromeda Tonks will attend, at my invitation. Bill Weasley will provide ward structures that manage the coercion field. You will surrender nothing; you will not be examined; you will not be asked to defend what you did or did not do in a decade I cannot stop remembering. You will be asked to stand in a room and let the architecture acknowledge that you exist. It has done so my entire life. Consider this professional courtesy returned.

You may choose the hour. The place must be Grimmauld Place; the mechanism is anchored there. You may bring a minder. If you bring lawyers, I shall understand and pretend not to laugh.

I am not begging. I am also not threatening. I am offering you the opportunity to have the last word with a sister who would have spoken for you forever if we let her. Say yes. Say no. Do not send an emissary. Please do not send peacocks.

Your son,

Draco

He sands the signature because some habits have grip. He does not reread. Rereading will replace verbs with apologies and adverbs with lies. He folds the parchment, presses the Malfoy seal with a ring he keeps in a drawer and pretends not to. The wax cools into the cobra crest; clever choice for a family that likes to pretend it sheds.

The owl they’ve been using for unwise correspondence eyes him like a judge. “Don’t judge,” he tells it. “Just fly.”

It flies.

Theo appears in the doorway with the talent of a man who knows where every curtain ends. “How dreadful was it?”

“Family,” Draco says. “Grim.”

“Perfect,” Theo says. “Fits the décor.”

He leaves Draco to his pacing, which is kind of him considering Draco prefers to pace with an audience.

A sound arrives in the corridor that everyone has learned to fear: the House making up its mind. The tapestry room hums; Hermione’s quill goes still; Bill’s chalk draws a line by itself, which is not reassuring. Nobody dies, so it’s an improvement on last week.

Draco fails to sleep. He is practiced at this. He knows which floorboards creak and which do you the courtesy of pretending you don’t exist. At 3 a.m. he goes to stand opposite the scorch and inform the wall that it is a worse person than he is. The wall hums, which is smugness in stone.

By morning, the owl returns.

Malfoy owls know where to find Malfoys even when Malfoys don’t. This one comes to the tapestry room like the dignified courier of a humiliating verdict. It wears Narcissa’s signature like perfume.

The seal is neither green nor black. It is mother-of-pearl, which is a very Narcissa way of saying if you thought you understood me from the last decade, think again.

He breaks it with the side of his thumb.

Draco,

No peacocks.

Fifteen minutes past two. I will not disarm. I will not be touched. I will not be prayed at.

Your aunt may breathe.

If the House uses my name against me, I will burn your wallpaper.

Narcissa

P.S.: Bring the Muggleborn with the hair.

He stares at the page long enough to forget how to blink. Of all the humiliations the curse has engineered, having to say “she means you” to Hermione might be the one that kills him.

He does it anyway.

“She means you,” he tells Hermione.

Hermione huffs a laugh she doesn’t mean, then bites it back on reflex. “Of course she does.”

“Do you want me to reply and say you’re busy with… hair?”

“No,” she says, and he hates how the word flicks through him like relief. “I want you to say we accept. Bill, can you be ready.”

Bill checks his watch and the steady thrum of his own back pain. “I’ll be ready.”

Charlie cracks his knuckles in a way that suggests reassurance to people who find thunder reassuring. George pulls a box from his pocket, changes his mind, and pushes it back. Ron arranges his face into polite unamused; he wears it the way he wears ties—earnest, slightly strangled. Potter’s mouth does the set-line it does when he decides not to be afraid where anyone can see.

“Fifteen past two,” Hermione repeats, making it real with the saying. “We have four hours to make this room less homicidal.”

Theo checks his reflection in an unhelpful picture-frame. “I shall support morale.”

“You will stand where I tell you,” Hermione says, not looking up from her notes. “And if Narcissa hexes you, that will be an instructional moment.”

“Understood,” Theo says gravely. “I shall choose a flattering angle.”

Bill works like a man who would prefer to be a bridge and cannot, so builds one. He lays down the cap-charm like a lid on a pot—tight, tested, something you can hear settle if you know how to listen. The sluice rises from the floor beside the tapestry, an elegantly ugly handle of dull metal tied to a stack of runes that look like they resent modern plumbing. He taps the post with his wand; the field hum lifts, lowers. There and gone. On and off.

“Don’t tell George it’s basically a giant light switch,” Bill says, which is also how you keep the building.

George has already clocked it. “I won’t say a word,” he lies.

Charlie lays a second perimeter in dragon handler shorthand, which mostly involves being in the right place at the right time and daring stupid things to try their luck. Ron sets a third—Auror simple: traffic control for curses. Potter checks the exits; there are three, which is two more than the room wants you to remember. Hermione and Draco double the model, then double it again, as if copying a thing could make it truer.

At ten past two, Andromeda arrives with the air of a woman who has already decided what she will tolerate and would like the room to know that it will enjoy the honor of staying within those limits.

At twelve past, someone knocks.

Grimmauld Place does not usually require a courtesy as bourgeois as knock. Doors here prefer to suck you in. The sound—deliberate, measured—makes the hallway rear its head like a hound forced to sit.

Bill meets Narcissa on the threshold, not because he’s the most senior but because he has built a sluice and would like to demonstrate that the water respects him.

She is, of course, luminous. Not the brittle shine of people who varnish over rot; something harder. The light that comes from a woman who was built to be a clasp and has learned how to be a blade when the forge demanded it. Her robes are winter and her mouth is summer; she has chosen to look like the better parts of a house that still stinks of the worst. She carries her wand like a parasol that could blind.

Her gaze lands on Andromeda first. The sisters consider each other in a silence that makes even Grimmauld’s wallpaper recalibrate its pattern. It is not affection. It is not hate. It is an inventory.

“Andromeda,” Narcissa says. Her voice is the precise temperature of cordiality that could thaw or frost depending on barometric pressure.

“Narcissa,” Andromeda returns, in the tone of a woman who would rather alphabetize knives but can be counted on to do this instead.

Narcissa’s eyes pass over Harry and Ron the way one notes brooms in a corridor one might or might not need. She gives Bill a nod that privately acknowledges competence. She examines George in a blink and chooses to pretend he is safe, which is bold. She clocks Charlie and promptly decides to ignore him because he makes ignoring things look like a talent.

Then she turns to Draco.

The last time she looked at him in this house, everything he owned was melting. Today, she inspects him as if someone else might have borrowed him and she is considering charging a fee. Something in her gaze eases by an atom. It is the most affection he expects all week.

“Mother,” he says.

“Draco,” she says. “You look thin.”

It lands. He deserves the hit for writing that letter.

“And you,” she continues, the corner of her mouth tilting almost imperceptibly, “did not send peacocks.”

“I was tempted.”

“I know.”

He does not die. This is progress.

Narcissa turns last to Hermione. Her eyes—grey, clear, appraising—take in the hair (down), the ink on the fingers (fresh), the burn on the cuff (old), the spine (unbent). She has the courtesy to let her mouth find a line that is neither approval nor disappointment.

“Girl,” she says, as promised.

“Curse breaker,” Hermione answers.

“Mm,” Narcissa says, which in that accent means this will be interesting.

Bill clears his throat, a quiet reclaiming. “Terms,” he says, and gestures to the chalk perimeter. “You don’t cross the chalk until I say. You don’t touch the wall. If the field rises—” a nod toward the metal handle “—I cap it. If the House reaches, Charlie knocks it back. If you decide you’ve had enough, say enough and we leave.”

“Very Auror of you,” Narcissa says, not unkind.

“I married sensibly,” Bill answers, which in Weasley means I married a woman who would murder me if I didn’t.

She steps to the line. The House inhales, tastes, decides it remembers this name. Draco feels the shift like a string being tuned; the same old pitch, a different hand on the peg.

“Do it,” Hermione says softly, to Bill.

He flicks power into the net. The rune-post hums. The sluice handle trembles once and settles.

Narcissa crosses the chalk.

The silver in the weft wakes as if it has been starving. It races through the burn where Andromeda’s name used to be with a petty little thrill and hits Narcissa’s stitched name like an animal locating the familiar scent it has been denied.

The room braces. Bill sets his stance. Charlie goes very still. Potter’s eyes narrow. Ron’s weight shifts forward. George’s grin tightens into the real thing.

Draco does nothing. He has learned how to be a piece of furniture the House respects: expensive, heavy, inconvenient to move.

The seam brightens along Narcissa’s name. No lash of compulsion. No mouth opening in the paint. Just a steadying. As if the line is saying ah, yes, the clasp; about time.

Hermione’s voice comes low with proof: “Coercion drops further.”

“Good,” Bill says between his teeth, and feeds another inch of power into the cap. “Sluice responds. If the field swells, I can curb it.”

Andromeda, outside the chalk, says nothing. She stands with her hands loose at her sides, the scarf Teddy chose a ridiculous, defiant stripe at her throat.

Narcissa puts one palm—just one—near the weft. Not touching. Close enough to insult the House without giving it anything to drink.

“Bellatrix,” she says, like a woman calling a dog she never wanted. “You were always vulgar.”

If ancient stone could flinch, Grimmauld would have. The hum wobbles, steadies. The thread hums back.

Ehwaz lights over Teddy’s name again, small and stubborn as a star.

Hermione and Bill move together as if cued: pencils sketching, chalk adjusting, the runic skeleton gaining a new brace, a different weight. Theo holds his breath so hard he nearly passes out from philanthropy. George whispers “Clap off” and then pretends he didn’t.

The cap holds. The field settles. The House decides it will permit this outrage for the duration of Narcissa Malfoy’s patience, and if that isn’t the most Black sentence Draco has ever thought, he will eat a monogram.

“Enough,” Narcissa says after a precise minute and twelve seconds, because of course she has internal clocks for dignity. “You may have your data. You may not have my hand.”

Bill flicks the sluice. The hum drops. The seam dims. Draco releases a breath he didn’t approve, which is becoming a habit.

Narcissa steps back across the chalk and the room exhales its sullen relief. She looks toward Andromeda, something unnameable and unsayable passing between them like a very old bird crossing a very old sky.

“Tea,” Andromeda says.

“Yes,” Narcissa says.

It is the most progress Draco has witnessed between them since he learned the definition of progress.

Potter, with his decades-old magic trick of turning apocalypses into errands, says, “Ron?”

“On it,” Ron replies, and goes to bully Grimmauld’s kitchen into civilization.

Charlie touches Bill’s shoulder: code for good; Bill’s mouth softens into the kind of smile you can only see sideways. George produces a biscuit from nowhere and, catching Hermione’s look, actually eats it himself instead of experimenting on an unsuspecting cousin.

Narcissa turns to Draco again. There is a question in her face and an answer he is not brave enough to guess. “You are still thin,” she says.

“I’m cursed,” he says.

“Most people are,” she says. It’s almost humor. Then: “Do not ever let this house mistake your blood for permission.”

He inclines his head. “Yes, Mother.”

She glances at Hermione without moving her eyes. The small tilt returns. “Curse-breaker,” she says, as if the title is a proof and a warning.

“Mrs. Black,” Hermione returns, as if the name is both obligation and weapon.

They do not smile. They do not need to.

Tea appears as if the kitchen decided to earn a reprieve. The fine, ordinary sound of cups touching saucers fills a room where people once counted screams. It is obscene and necessary; Draco is developing a taste for obscenity when it behaves.

Hermione writes cap holds under clasp; paired nodes confirm. Bill circles lever responsive. Charlie scrawls a picture of the sluice and labels it bite stick because dragons have ruined metaphor for him. George doodles Project Thorn & Twin in a corner and adds a little star. Theo signs his name on the air and bows to his own signature because morale.

Narcissa drinks tea like a woman who has allowed herself to be seen doing a menial thing and will pretend she hasn’t if asked. Andromeda drinks tea like a weapon.

When the cups are empty and the proofs have been converted into nouns, Narcissa stands. “You may request this again,” she says to no one and to all of them. “You may not assume it.”

“Understood,” Hermione says.

“Understood,” Draco echoes, even though the curse doesn’t require it. The word earns him a fractional glance from Narcissa that means you are not hopeless and stop being dramatic. He will take both.

Narcissa leaves the way she arrived: acknowledging Bill with a nod, ignoring George because she prefers to sleep, skimming past Charlie because he has the energy of a large, well-meaning dog, ticking Potter and Weasley off a list she keeps in her head under men who persist, and pausing, just for one heartbeat, at the scorch where Andromeda’s name used to be. She does not look at it. That would be theatre. She lets it look at her. That is family.

The door closes behind her with the dignified sigh of a house that has been forced to endure tea and did not die of it.

Silence lands.

Then everyone does the things they do after surviving their own relatives: Bill stretches his spine, which complains in Runes; Charlie announces he is going to eat something enormous and people may watch for morale; George pockets the rubber band and a biscuit; Ron returns with more tea and pretends he didn’t burn his fingers; Potter leans his head against the wall for a second and is a boy for exactly fifteen seconds; Theo praises his own restraint at volume; Andromeda ties her ridiculous scarf with martial neatness.

Hermione caps the ink and turns to Draco.

“We have the profile,” she says. “We can replicate the drop without a sister in the room.”

He wants to say good. He says, very dryly, because it’s the only register left, “Lovely. I adore being unnecessary.”

“You’re not,” she says, immediate, which is a mistake because it lands. She corrects herself without softening. “Your blood primes the House. We can’t fake that. We can only cap it and bully it and make it predictable.”

“Bullying is a Weasley specialty,” George offers.

“Predictable is mine,” Bill says.

“Prime is me,” Draco says, bleak and accurate.

“Movement is me,” Hermione says, looking at Ehwaz. “Pairing.”

He looks at the rune and thinks don’t and thinks too late and thinks nothing out loud. His mouth is learning. Progress.

Ron leans a shoulder into Harry like they are a hinge for the room. “So what’s next,” he says, practical as bread.

Hermione pulls a clean sheet forward. “Now we map the full pathway. Blood—mouth—binding. We set the sluice in a closed position. We invite Andromeda under cap. We add Narcissa if and only if Bill says the structure can take it. Then we model the slip with a proxy—no child—until the engine gives us a seam we can exploit.”

“And when it does?” Potter asks, not gentle.

“We drive a wedge,” she says, in a tone that makes even Grimmauld consider its choices. “And then we pull.”

Draco watches her mouth shape the plan and has the unhelpful, ridiculous thought that the curse will not be the end of him. He has a worse problem: a woman who refuses to lose.

He files the thought under hazards.

It does not stay there.

When the room empties—slowly, then all at once—the tapestry hums to itself, pleased. Bill will come back after supper to talk to his chalk. Theo will return when he can be applauded for it. Potter will take Andromeda home and not ask her to be braver than she has chosen. Ron will charm the kettle to stop sulking. George will lie to a shop ledger. Charlie will go find meat and eat it like a man who has won, which he has not. Hermione will keep writing until the page tells her the thing she already knows.

Draco will stand here and listen to a house that thinks it’s a person and decide—once more, and again tomorrow—to be stupider than doom and stay.

He glances at the rune over Teddy’s name—Ehwaz, bright, stubborn—and at the thorn pretending it has the last word.

The curse hasn’t killed him. Dangerous to say; truer to think. He has a different hazard now: a plan with her handwriting on it.

He tells himself it’s just ink.

He doesn’t believe himself, which is a nuisance.

He buttons his cuff as if that will keep anything in—blood, truth, the particular ache that has learned how to sit behind his ribs. The House hums. The sluice gleams, practical and ugly and ready.

“Tomorrow,” Hermione says, somewhere behind him, voice frayed and relentless. “Nine.”

He nods without turning.

He will be here. He will open the door that wants his blood. He will pretend this is about architecture. He will fail at pretending. He will try again.

The House, smug creature, breathes.

So does he.

Chapter Text

Grimmauld Place sulks when it’s empty. The house has a talent for it, soaking up footsteps and letting the silence get fat on whatever you don’t say. By the time the last of them Disapparates (Weasley calling back “lock up!” like they’re leaving a shop; Potter patting the doorjamb as if it’s a loyal dog; Theo blowing the tapestry a kiss because of course he does), there are only two people left to keep the walls from closing their teeth.

Granger does not look at Draco when the corridor stills. She drops her satchel on the long table and lays out parchment like a surgeon setting steel. The quill is already ink-stained from three other lives she’s lived today: curse-breaker, reluctant coordinator, person who pretends tea counts as sleep. Draco watches, because apparently that’s a vice now.

“You don’t have to hover,” she says, not glancing up.

“I’m not,” he answers, immediately hovering more. “I’m… preventing the house from eating you out of spite.”

“It’s learned not to chew me.” She flips a page with the crisp finality of a guillotine. “You, it still fancies.”

“Flattered.” He says it like a joke and hears the bleak undernote too late.

The tapestry breathes in its corner, that faint rise-fall Draco will never accept as normal. The silver line they teased out of the weft last week glows with the smug patience of a trap. It has opinions. So does he.

He should leave. Sensible people go when the others go, let the house cool, let the bones of it stop remembering. But sensible people don’t fit in this room; Gryffindors and their strays do. He takes the chair opposite her instead, because self-sabotage has become an aesthetic.

They work in silence that pretends to be professional. She writes runes from memory without looking at the reference; he maps the ward logic from the tapestry’s stutter onto a grid that keeps refusing to behave. Quill-scratch, breath, the occasional hiss from the gas sconces. The sort of quiet that makes a person start narrating in their head just to prove they still exist.

Granger breaks first: not the quiet, the truce. “Bellatrix couldn’t abide uncertainty.” She says it like a verdict, eyes on the page. “So she tried to make truth a weapon. Not truth...obedience. The truth was just the leash.”

“Control,” Draco says. “All those years and it’s still the only word in the room.”

“Rooms like this keep it.” The nib squeaks. She doesn’t apologize to the parchment for hurting it. “She built a system where no one could betray him because no one could think sideways long enough to try. And we’re still unpicking it.”

The corner of his mouth pulls without permission. “Consider it family therapy.”

She goes very still. It’s the kind of stillness that means the next sentence will have edges. “You joke like it doesn’t still own you.”

“Everything owns me a little,” he says, easy, which costs him. “Why not the family I didn’t choose.”

The quill taps twice, a metronome restarting. “You did choose to come here.”

He looks at the silver line humming across Andromeda’s scorch, into Tonks, toward Teddy’s unruly little star. “I’ve noticed.”

That should defuse them. It doesn’t. Something in the air had been waiting for the door to close and the others to vanish—something that prefers two people to many, because two makes a better fight.

Granger exhales a humorless breath. “We are not closer.”

“We are,” he says. “And also not. It’s an exciting position; progress that feels like drowning.”

“You would know.” She doesn’t soften the barb. “You’re good at drowning beautifully.”

He takes it; it lands like a stone with his name on it. “And you’re good at pretending oxygen is a personality trait.”

She looks up then, finally. Her eyes are bright with the sort of fury that doesn’t shout; it refines. “Don’t condescend to me because you’re scared.”

“Of what?” He keeps the tone mild and watches it make her angrier. “Your competence? The décor? Our chances?”

“Of wanting it too much.” She lifts her chin a fraction. “Of needing a cure only some terrifying amount.”

He laughs, quiet, sharp. “You’re accusing me of needing this? I’m the one with a curse stapled to the underside of his mouth, Granger. I’m not performing desperation for the aesthetic.”

“You’ve been performing something,” she says, standing. She’s small only if you measure her in inches. “Wit. Detachment. Posh martyrdom.”

“Posh martyrdom?” He leans back, a slight, theatrical gesture to keep from leaning forward. “I prefer ‘stylish suffering.’”

“Of course you do.” She shoves the chair in with a half-inch too much force; the scrape complains across the floor. “You make a joke out of everything so you never have to admit you’re angry.”

“I’m always angry,” he says, and the curse pulls it clean. “You’re the one who muzzles it and calls it professionalism.”

That lands. It’s petty of him to be pleased. He is petty.

“You want anger?” she says, stepping around the table, paper crackling in her wake. “Fine. I’m furious. I’m furious that she still has us dancing to her tune. I’m furious that every time I look at this wall I see a machine for turning people into furniture. I’m furious that I spend my life fixing what I didn’t break and the world keeps handing me more rubble as if I ordered it.”

“Good,” he says, because he’s stopped being clever and become honest enough to qualify as dangerous. “Stay angry. It suits you.”

She stops opposite him, close enough that he can count the freckles the candles make new. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Needing me,” she says, low. “Letting me see you need me.”

The room becomes very clear. The gaslight hum. The grain in the table like old scars. The line of ink on her thumb where she caught the nib wrong five minutes ago and didn’t notice. His breath is a fraction too loud, which is humiliating.

“Shall I put a bag over my head,” he says, dry, “so you don’t have to look at it?”

“Stop.” She isn’t pleading. She never pleads. It’s something else: command and terror, braided. “You make everything a performance and then resent me for being the audience.”

“You’re accusing me of choreography,” he says, standing because it’s that or stay seated and drown; because the height makes him feel less like prey. “I put one foot in front of the other and hope the floor is real. If that’s performance, I’m an artist.”

She steps closer. The house approves; the air warms like blood. “You came here long before I asked you.”

“I ran out of rooms to ruin,” he returns, light. “Grimmauld had vacancies.”

“You’re impossible.”

“And you’re inevitable,” he says, too fast, without the internal check that sometimes spares him. The moment the words land he wants them back; the curse smiles with all its empty teeth.

Something cracks in the quiet. It isn’t furniture. It’s the distance that pretended to be professional. They’re an arm’s length apart and it feels like standing on either side of a blade’s edge.

“Don’t do that,” she says, voice roughened. “Don’t make this about...about anything except the work.”

“You brought us to a haunted family tree to exorcise an aunt from my mouth,” he says, not moving. “It was always about more than the work.”

Her nostrils flare. He catalogues it with other survivals: a tiny, human tell that she doesn’t usually permit. “Then let me make it simple. We are nowhere near done. And you—” she points at his chest, not touching, “—don’t get to collapse now and expect me to hold us both up.”

He looks down at the empty air where her finger isn’t quite pressing his shirt. “If I collapsed, Granger, it would be strategic. I’d choose something ottoman-adjacent.”

“Gods, you’re infuriating.”

“And you’re—” He stops before he says beautiful like an idiot. “Intense.”

“You’re terrified.” It’s an accusation and an embrace if you twist it right. “And you’re pretending not to be because you think if you stop pretending, you’ll never start again.”

“Projection looks hideous on you.”

“And the truth looks good on you,” she fires back. “Which is unfortunate, given the curse.”

“That’s the first compliment you’ve given me that wasn’t about my handwriting,” he says.

“It was not a compliment,” she says, a little breathless, like the sentence had farther to run than she allowed it.

The house leans in. They feel it. You always do when Grimmauld decides your argument is enriching its character. A draft sneaks through the doorjamb, cooler than the rest of the air, and lifts a curl at her temple. Draco’s hand betrays him by wanting to smooth it back. He keeps it where it belongs by an effort that costs more than the gesture would have.

“You should go,” she says abruptly. “We’ll pick this up tomorrow at a reasonable hour and with other people to say ‘stop’ when we forget.”

“Do you forget often?” he asks, as if he isn’t fishing, as if he could stand it either way.

“I forget nothing,” she says, then ruins that with honesty. “Sometimes.”

“Reasonable hours don’t suit me,” he says. “Sulkers prefer the witching.”

“You’re not sulking,” she says, and it’s so unexpected he blinks. “You’re pacing the edge. Make up your mind which side of it you want.”

“Your side,” he says before strategy can intervene.

Her breath catches, audible, damn her for being human, and she turns it into a scoff with visible will. “You want whatever side looks least like losing.”

“I always lose,” he says, conversational. “It’s practically a kink.”

“Stop.” She says it like a spell this time, low and precise. “You don’t get to make light of it and then put it in my hands when it gets heavy.”

“You’re the one who likes heavy things,” he says. “Curses. Laws. Men with too much history.”

“Don’t mistake competence for preference.” She turns as if to retrieve sanity from the papers and forgets that sanity is not filed by surname. The motion brings her nearer again, unhelpful. “I didn’t choose any of this.”

“You chose all of it,” he says, quiet, because the curse will drag it out anyway. “You saw something broken and assumed it was yours until proven otherwise.”

“And you saw something broken and decided to be it,” she snaps.

The hit lands. He doesn’t dodge. “Yes.”

“Don’t.” Her throat moves; she swallows the word as if its edges cut. “Don’t say it like that.”

“How should I say it?” He’s gentler than he meant to be. “You want me to pretty it up? I’m a ruin with good tailoring. Congratulations, Granger. You found a project with great cheekbones.”

She laughs, helpless, shocked at herself, a sound that knocks his knees together from the inside. It’s not kind; it’s real.

“How do you do that?” she demands.

“Ruin rooms?” he suggests.

“Turn knives into jokes.”

“Practice.” He lets the corner of his mouth tilt. “Envy?”

She holds the look an instant too long and breaks it like a plate. “We are circling. It’s getting us nowhere.”

“Not nowhere,” he says. The honesty tastes like iron. “Just closer to something neither of us intends to look at.”

Her jaw flexes. She looks like a woman who has walked all night and found dawn waiting with questions. “Then don’t look.”

“You first.”

She closes the distance an inch—two—until the sensible parts of him begin screaming into a void that does not echo. He can smell ink and soap and that electric scent that lives at the edge of a storm. She doesn’t sway. He doesn’t either, though it feels like a lie he’s telling his legs.

“You’re not the only one who’s tired,” she says, and in her mouth it is not a complaint. It is an admission. “I am so very tired of being reasonable.”

“So be unreasonable,” he says, softly. “You wear it well.”

Her eyes search his face like she’s reading an old inscription rubbed thin. Whatever she finds isn’t soothing. It isn’t terrifying either. It’s worse. It’s simple.

“This is a bad idea,” she says.

“The worst,” he agrees, relief and hunger detonating under the same ribs.

“Say something sensible,” she orders, last line of defense.

“I never do.”

For a long, narrow second, the world holds a balance: the work on the table, the family machine on the wall, the two people in its shadow who are no one’s machine but have learned to mimic one. If the house breathed louder, it would become farce. If either of them took a step back, the spell would break.

Neither does.

“I’m going,” she says, which is brave and not true.

“I’ll let you,” he says, which is brave and sadly true.

They don’t move.

It’s almost funny; the high, perilous comedy of two intelligent people trapped in their own logic. He could laugh. He does not. He says, very quietly, because he has run out of clever angles and remains cursed besides, “Say my name.”

Her pupils widen. It isn’t lust, or not only; it’s decision. “Draco.”

He feels it, Gods help him, like a key turned in a lock that shouldn’t belong to him.

After that, there is no sense in the air left to breathe. The argument has burned to a coal. What remains throws heat.

“Bad idea,” she says again, hoarse.

“The worst,” he agrees, hoarser.

And the house, thrilled with the melodrama, leans in further—thickening the quiet, sweetening the lamp-smell, turning the floor very slightly into a slope that tips them toward ruin.

They let it.

The quiet after a fight is the loudest kind. Grimmauld holds it like a trophy, the walls smug with echo, the tapestry smugger still. Draco leans back against the edge of the table, palms braced flat on the scarred wood, watching Granger pace. She’s pacing in that tight, exact rhythm of hers: one, two, turn; one, two, turn. She could wear the stone thin if she gave it a year.

It should irritate him. It usually does. Tonight it’s unbearable for other reasons entirely.

“Say something,” she snaps, whirling mid-step. The curl by her temple has escaped again. He wants to tuck it back. He wants to kiss it. He wants a hundred things that the curse has no interest in forcing out of him. That’s how he knows they’re true.

He swallows once, hard. And then he does what he does worst: he opens his mouth.

“Ask everything of me,” he says, low, hoarse, like it costs him. “If you want, Granger. Ask anything and I’ll give it to you.”

Her brows flick, startled, but she doesn’t cut in. He rushes on, because he has to, because the curse drags him to the marrow and his heart has decided it likes the exposure.

“There is nothing I won’t give you. Nothing I won’t tell you. You’ve kept me breathing long enough for me to feel alive again, and I hate you for it. Do you understand?” His laugh is cracked, empty at the edges. “I hated you for it. Gods, I hated you.”

She stops pacing, sharp, like the words have pulled a cord taut across the room.

“And yet—” his voice catches, then steadies with the reckless inevitability of a drunk leaning into a fall, “then you come into my life. All competent. All strong. All bloody brilliant. You walk into my ruins and start rearranging them like you have the right. Call me a fool. Call me an idiot. But say my name while you do it.”

The last line lands in the air like a hex gone still. He feels wrecked by it, emptied. The curse has no pity; it didn’t choke him, didn’t stop him, because every syllable was as true as marrow.

Granger is staring at him. Not furious. Not even stunned. Just… staring, like she doesn’t know what language he’s speaking but she knows it’s important. Her chest is rising and falling too fast. She’s braced her fists against her thighs like she can anchor herself by muscle alone.

“Draco…” she says at last, and his stupid heart kicks like it’s been promised air. Just the sound of it. His name, her mouth, this room. He’s ridiculous.

“Yes,” he says, and it’s pathetic, but he doesn’t care.

She shakes her head, slow, disbelieving. “You can’t—”

“I can’t lie,” he cuts in, not loud, but firm. “Not to you. Not to me. Not to anyone. It’s the one bloody gift the curse gives me. So when I tell you this, understand: I mean every word.”

Her lips part, but no protest comes out. The silence is its own pressure.

“You drive me mad,” he says, softer now. “Every day. Every damn day. And every day I still want more. Do you understand how insulting that is? I wake up in the morning and my first thought is whether you’ll hex me for breathing too loud, and my second thought is that I hope you do, just so you’ll look at me.”

The room tightens. He can feel the house listening. He doesn’t care. He couldn’t stop if he tried.

“You’ve kept me alive,” he says. “Not just with the research, not just with the bloody parchments and runes and clever theories. You. You, being you. And if you told me to burn the whole world tonight, I would. And if you told me to stay, I would. And if you told me to go—” His voice cracks. He doesn’t let it collapse. “I would. But it would kill me.”

Her throat works. She doesn’t look away. She should. She doesn’t.

The distance between them is a chasm the width of two feet. He’s shaking with the effort of not crossing it, not dragging her to him like a starving man. He can’t decide if restraint is dignity or cowardice.

“Say something,” he manages. It comes out thinner than he likes. “Tell me I’m a fool. Tell me you despise me. Tell me—something.”

She exhales, shaky, a sound dragged out of stone. “You are impossible.”

He laughs, bitter and relieved all at once. “Yes. But I’m yours, if you’ll have me.”

For one mad second, he thinks she might. Her eyes are glassy with thought she won’t say, her mouth unguarded, her whole stance torn between retreat and something much more dangerous. He’s ready to move if she shifts even an inch closer. He’s ready to fall, to ruin, to whatever comes next.

The moment hangs; bright, unbearable.

Then she closes her eyes, lashes cutting shadows. “This is insane.”

“Yes,” he whispers. “Completely.”

“And it’s wrong.”

“Of course.” His chest is caving in. “Doesn’t make it less true.”

Her breath stutters. Her hands curl. For the first time in years, Draco Malfoy feels what it is to stand stripped, empty-handed, waiting on someone else’s verdict.

If she tells him to go now, he will. If she calls him a fool, he will wear it. If she calls him nothing, he will still think her voice a hymn.

“Draco,” she says again, quieter, and his ribs almost break around it.

“Always,” he answers, helpless.

The thing about arguing with Hermione Granger is that it’s foreplay with footnotes. She stands in front of him like a thesis on the nature of fury: curls lawless, eyes lit like hex-fire, mouth set for victory. Draco (unfortunately a person now) is complicit in his own destruction.

“You’re impossible,” she says. “You make everything worse.”

He gives her the smallest bow, because if he doesn’t joke he’ll beg. “I’m very consistent.”

“You twist the truth until it flatters you.”

“That would be a lovely hobby,” he says, soft, “if I were capable of lying.”

Her jaw tightens. “Don’t hide behind your curse.”

“I hide behind absolutely nothing,” he answers, and the honesty snaps out of him like a fault line. “I’m all ragged edges and unfortunate sincerity. Not my best era.”

“Say it,” she challenges. “Say the thing you keep making me hear between the lines.”

“Gladly.” He feels absurdly calm, the kind of calm that happens when you’re already falling. “I started loving you even before I stopped hating you, Granger. You’re everywhere. There’s nothing you could ask I’d deny you. My body is yours, my heart—useless until six months ago, only remembers how to beat when you’re near. You invade my days with your bloody presence and my nights when you haunt my dreams. If there’s a life after this curse, the only way it’s worth living is with you in it. Each day I don’t see you is a waste.”

She looks at the wall, the floor, anywhere but him. “You’re only saying this because you’ve no choice. You’re letting me listen to how the curse wrecks you.”

He tries to laugh; the curse vetoes it. “I lov—.”

Her eyes lift to his. The room is a kiln. Something softens, then steels. “Stop talking.”

“Efficient,” he says, and kisses her like a prayer he never learned the words to.

It’s not gentle. They collide, mouths, breath, the clumsy first crash of two people who’ve been standing too close to a fire for months and have finally stepped into it. Her hands bunch in his shirt, hauling; his find her waist, her back, the small decisive line of her spine. They don’t negotiate. They take.

“Merlin,” he breathes against her mouth, then her cheek, then lower where her pulse hits his lips. “You’re beautiful.”

“Shut up,” she says, which he does not, cannot.

“You always tell me where to put my hands,” he murmurs, drunk on the rightness of her, the shape of her shoulder under his palm. “It’s very helpful.”

“Up,” she orders, and he lifts his arms without argument as she drags his shirt off with a vindictive little sound that would humiliate him if it didn’t thrill him. Buttons ping into exile. He mourns them with appropriate gravity. “Tragedy,” he says against her jaw. “I liked that shirt.”

“You have others,” she says, already kissing him again, which makes a superb argument.

He finds the warm edge of skin beneath her jumper and groans—pathetic, honest. She makes a startled sound that slides straight down his spine. He catalogues it, triumphant: that one means yes. He does it again, properly; her breath stutters; he files that, too. He is a scholar now, apparently, and she is the only subject that ever mattered.

“I love your mind,” he tells her throat, reverent. “If I ever say anything clever, it’s because you put it there.”

She half-laughs, half-gasps. “You’re a menace.”

“Consistent,” he repeats, then gives up on commentary because she’s walking him backwards by the belt and kissing like she intends to confiscate his soul. He allows the robbery. He encourages it.

The wall meets his shoulders; she meets his ribs; the world narrows to her mouth and the shocked mercy of her hands. He drags her jumper up and the sight of her—hair wild, cheeks flushed, chin lifted as if daring him to find her perfect—makes his knees consider mutiny.

“Tell me,” he asks, useless, hoarse. “Let me”.

She shows him like she’s been planning this lesson: the angle, the pace, the places that make her swear softly, then keep going; the path of his mouth down to the place she can’t help arching into. He is a very good student. He is also shameless. He praises what he adores, and he adores all of it.

“Like that?” he manages.

“Like that,” she says, fierce, and digs nails into his shoulder in a way that will absolutely be visible tomorrow and which he will treasure like a medal.

There’s a moment when they simply look at each other—ridiculous, hungry, wrecked—and then the moment bursts. They become motion and noise: breath gone ragged, hands forgetting grace in favor of honesty, the rhythm of two people who have run out of ways not to want.

He’s starved. She knows it. She lets him show it; lets him kiss like he’s drowning and she’s the harbor; lets him hold like he’s been freezing and she’s the hearth. She takes what she wants as well, and he gives it, because there was never any world in which he wouldn’t.

“Say my name,” he asks, pathetic.

“Draco,” she says, like a verdict that acquits him.

He swears and laughs, wrecked. “Again.”

She does, softer, closer to his ear, and he nearly buckles from it—pathetic, yes, but honest, and the curse purrs because for once it approves of his choices.

They stumble, tangle, rediscover the sofa as if it was designed for sacrilege. She climbs into his lap like she owns him—correct—and he says a lot of unfortunate, reverent things into her shoulder about the wicked miracle of her weight, the way she moves against him, the sound she makes when his hands learn something new. She answers in action instead of words—fingers in his hair, mouth at his throat, that murderous little roll of her hips that makes the room tilt. He lets her grind him to atoms. He thanks her for it.

“Being inside you feels like the heaven I’ll never know,” he blurts, awful, sincere.

She doesn’t flinch. She chases his mouth and kisses him like the sentiment isn’t an embarrassment but a fact, and he thinks that must be what joy is, this brief reprieve where the world forgets to be cruel.

They ruin each other. Deliberate. Thorough. Clothes become a landscape; skin, the map. He guides and begs; she commands and gives; breath breaks; rhythm builds; the room goes white around the edges.

When the crest finds them, it’s not fireworks; it’s a bell tolling through bone. He holds on and says her name like devotion; she lets go and says his like permission. The world stops being unbearable for a handful of heartbeats. It will resume shortly. He will remember this when it does.

They don’t collapse so much as lean out of necessity, foreheads touching, breath sawing, a ridiculous tangle of limbs and confession.

“Stay,” he whispers, plea disguised as suggestion, dignity in shreds. He could blame the curse. He doesn’t.

She doesn’t let go. She doesn’t promise either. Her hand rests at his jaw for three heartbeats, thumb brushing once like she is checking that he’s real. Then the armor shutters back into place behind her eyes, and he watches it happen with the sort of detached horror reserved for falling crockery.

“You’re only saying all of this because you’ve no choice,” she says, calm that tries to be cruelty. “You’re not giving me truth...you’re letting me hear how the curse is forcing you.”

He huffs, because laughter isn’t permitted. “Do you want me to tell you this didn’t mean anything? That seeing you naked is a bloody miracle? I would give you my truth gladly if you wanted it, but you don’t. I would give the rest of my life, because it started the moment you pointed your bloody wand at me and made me kneel in front of you. Before that, I was just… existing.”

Her eyes close, briefly; opens them sharpened. It almost kills him, how much he loves the person she insists on being.

“Go,” she says, quietly. Not a shove, an order she hates giving and he hates obeying.

He nods once (curt, soldierly, pathetic) and untangles himself with more care than he has ever shown anything breakable. He finds his shirt on the floor and does not curse the buttons that have fled the scene. He does not kiss her again; he is not a thief.

He gets to the door before he risks looking back.

She’s there on the edge of the sofa, hair a storm, cheeks flushed, mouth unforgivable. She stares at her own hands like she isn’t sure what they’ve done, which is offensive because they’ve performed miracles and should be thanked with a plaque.

“Goodnight, Granger,” he says, and makes it sound like surrender.

She swallows, nods once, does not say it back.

The corridor is colder than any dungeon he’s ever known. He walks it with his shirt open and his heart in his hands because apparently that’s who he is now: a man who tells the truth and bleeds quietly afterwards.

At the lift, he leans his head against cool brass and exhales the kind of laugh that gets arrested for indecency. Idiot. Wretched, luckless idiot. He should feel ashamed. Instead he feels—God help him—alive. Scorched, but breathing. Ravaged, but moving.

He presses the heel of his hand to his eyes and says it in the privacy of his skull, because the thought has teeth and demands to be fed: I love her. The curse doesn’t punish him for it. It simply notes the data, adds it to the ledger, and lets him continue.

He leaves without looking back again because he isn’t strong enough to survive seeing her change her mind.

Outside, the night is unseasonably warm. The stars are showing off. He hates them for it and is secretly grateful, the way you hate a kindness when you don’t think you deserve it.

On the pavement, he nearly laughs again because now he has to live with this. With wanting. With the knowledge that for a handful of minutes, hell went quiet and he could hear her breathing under his palm. With the certainty that the house will wake in the morning and the curse will still be the curse and he will still be Draco Malfoy, which is rarely good news.

He straightens the ruin of his shirt, finds a coat that pretends to fix it, and Apparates home before he says something unforgivable like goodnight, Hermione, out loud where the world might hear.

In the Manor’s hall, the portraits sniff, the marble sulks, the air tastes of old decisions. He looks up at the ceiling he has loathed since childhood and, because he cannot lie, says softly into the empty: “Worth it.”

The house disapproves in silence. The curse purrs in its sleep. And somewhere in the stupid miracle of his chest, hope starts doing sit-ups, which is extremely rude.

He lets it. Just for tonight. Tomorrow he will go back to work, and she will be brilliant, and he will speak only when he must. If the curse is an anchor, he has finally decided which way is shore.

He goes to bed aching and grinning like a lunatic and thinks, very dryly, that if this doesn’t kill him, Hermione will. It is, he decides, the best possible way to go.

Grimmauld Place has always smelled faintly of wet dog and old sins. Draco has stopped caring which is which. Some days he thinks he prefers the dog.

It has been days since the flat. Days since her hands, her mouth, her. Days since she shoved him out with a look that managed to be both mortified and infuriated. He hasn’t stopped showing up to Grimmauld, of course, what else does he have? But she has perfected the art of absence.

Her handwriting is everywhere: catalogued runes stacked in neat piles, ink still fresh enough to smudge if he brushed a careless sleeve against it. Her voice lingers in the parchment margins, brisk notes and impossible connections. But she herself manages to avoid him with surgical precision. When she does turn up, she drags Potter or Weasley like human shields, and he’s left wondering if she’s punishing him or herself.

Not that it matters. He still comes. Like a bad habit or a curse you stop pretending you’ll outgrow.

They’re all here tonight. Bill and Charlie argue over the translation of a runic thorn—apparently the sort of thing worth raising voices over, as though shouting at an ancient symbol will make it less spiteful. Harry’s shoulders look like he’s carrying Teddy already, while Weasley keeps sighing into parchment like bureaucracy personally offended him. Theo reclines in his usual sprawl, offering commentary sharp enough to draw blood.

Hermione? All business. Efficient. Precise. Not one glance wasted on him.

Which is, naturally, how he knows she hasn’t stopped thinking about it either. Because no one ignores someone that thoroughly unless they’re fighting themselves harder than they’re fighting him.

He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t dare. But Merlin help him, it stings worse than open hostility ever did.

Later, somehow, the others scatter into side rooms—Potter interrogating Bill about ward strengths, Weasley whining about something only George finds funny, Theo lighting up a cigarette out the window and pretending it’s aesthetic rather than pathetic. Which leaves Draco and Hermione in the tapestry room. Alone.

The tapestry breathes. He pretends not to.

She keeps her back to him, running fingers down the new chalk lines Bill left behind. “It was a lapse,” she says, clinical, like she’s reciting from a textbook. “It won’t happen again.”

He leans a shoulder against the wall, palms shoved deep in his pockets, casual enough to irritate saints. “If you’re trying to convince yourself, Granger, at least look me in the eye while you do it.”

Her hand freezes on the weft. “It doesn’t matter what I convince myself of.”

“Oh, it does,” he says, dry as dust. “You think ignoring me makes it less true? If I could lie about this, I would. Believe me, I’d prefer it.”

She turns then, sharp, curls frizzed from the candle heat. “You’re not giving me a choice. That curse doesn’t leave room for anything but brutal honesty.”

He shrugs, humorless. “Then let me save you the suspense. I’m in love with you.”

The words drop between them like a guillotine. No flourish. No plea. Just weather.

Her throat works. “You can’t know that. Not really. The curse—”

“The curse doesn’t make me feel it,” he cuts in, voice low and sharp. “It only stops me pretending I don’t.”

She takes a half-step back, which would wound if it weren’t so bloody predictable. “You’re only saying these things because you haven’t any choice.”

He almost laughs, but the curse strangles it into honesty instead. The irony. “You have my truth because I can’t give you anything else. So you’ll have to make do with the truth you clearly don’t want.”

Her hands curl into fists. “Draco—”

“I would give you my life,” he presses on, reckless, because when has he ever been anything else? “And I’d ask nothing in return.”

The silence between them thickens until it could be bottled.

At last, she whispers, “And if I can’t—if I never—”

“Then I’ll wait,” he says simply. “Centuries, if it comes to that. I’ll love you enough for both of us until you decide it isn’t inconvenient anymore.”

Her eyes flare: anger, sorrow, fear, all of it tangled. But she doesn’t argue. Not really.

The others drift back in, loud enough to break the tension without ever knowing it was there. Plans about Narcissa and Andromeda. Calculations. Wards. Strategies. The usual drone of hope dressed up as bureaucracy.

Draco listens with half an ear, his eyes still on the woman who refuses to look at him.

And in that quiet, treacherous corner of himself, he realizes:

He has survived the war, the trial, the year in house arrest. Years of destruction disguised as penance, and more years of honest self-destruction. And all of it, somehow, only to arrive here; at the mercy of Hermione Granger, who is still deciding if he’s worth the trouble. (He isn’t.)

But the single glint of hope she gives him (barely there, almost cruel) will keep him tethered to this earth. Bound, willingly, to whatever corner of her life she chooses to fit him in.

He doesn’t call it love. He doesn’t need to. The curse sits smugly in his chest, silent proof that it already knows.

Chapter Text

The tapestry is breathing again.

Not loud, not obvious;  just that faint, hateful suggestion of movement in the threads, as if some part of Grimmauld Place has taken to inhaling whenever they walk in. Draco has started to imagine it sighs louder when it sees him. He hasn’t told anyone; the last thing he needs is Theo finding fresh material.

The group files into the room with all the enthusiasm of condemned men revisiting the gallows. Potter and Weasley first, side by side like they’ve rehearsed it, even if their shoulders sag with a month’s worth of exhaustion. Bill and Charlie behind them, Bill carrying chalk and parchment like armor, Charlie with that deceptively lazy stride that says try me, I’ll break the wall before it breaks you. Theo drifts last, of course, managing to look like he’s arrived by accident, probably because it’s a Tuesday and he was bored.

And Hermione, already there. At the far table, ink smudges along her fingers, sleeves rolled, hair pinned badly, eyes sharp on the parchment she’s spread out like a general’s maps. She doesn’t look up when they enter. Doesn’t need to.

She says, clipped, “We’ll start by tracing the wardline backwards. Bill, you take the anchoring sigils. I’ll cross-check the runic repeats. Harry, Ron, perimeter. Malfoy, notes.”

Notes. As if he’s her secretary.

Draco slides into a chair anyway, quill poised, expression carefully blank. If he pretends it doesn’t sting, it almost doesn’t. Almost.

Hermione hasn’t looked at him properly in days. She’ll speak to him, sure; sharp directives, efficient corrections, but not look. Not the way she used to, when she’d glare him into behaving or roll her eyes like she was giving him the gift of patience. Now it’s as though eye contact itself might compromise her calculations.

Theo, of course, notices. He notices everything inconvenient. “Is it just me,” he drawls from the doorway, “or has our glorious commander discovered the joys of silent treatment?”

Hermione doesn’t answer. She flicks her wand and a stack of reference tomes floats neatly to the table. The slam of leather on oak is louder than necessary.

“Just me, then,” Theo says cheerfully, wandering over to perch on the edge of a chair. “Do carry on ignoring him, Granger. It keeps him humble.”

“Ignore Nott as well, while you’re at it,” Draco mutters. “Do the world a favor.”

Theo grins. 

The air in the room is heavy with weariness. Bill’s chalk squeaks against the stone floor as he sketches another pattern. Potter rubs at his temples. Weasley yawns so aggressively it looks like he’s trying to swallow the wall. Charlie watches all of them with the detached calm of someone who wrestles dragons for a living and thinks this is, comparatively, a tea break.

Draco bends over his parchment. Quill scratching, notes precise, his handwriting settling into a careful script. It’s almost pleasant, if he ignores the part where he’s essentially playing scribe to people who used to throw hexes at his head for sport.

Granger finally speaks, voice brisk: “Bill, I think the corner repeat is misaligned. Try shifting to the secondary family. No, left. Yes.”

Her hair has come loose at the nape of her neck, and Draco tells himself not to notice. He fails.

Theo leans closer to him, sotto voce: “Do you think she’s punishing you for something, or is this her natural charm?”

Draco doesn’t look up. “Both.”

“Touché.”

They’ve been at this nearly half a year. Six months of chalk dust, candle smoke, endless muttered runes. Six months of Grimmauld Place creaking around them like a resentful beast. Six months of Granger stubbornly refusing to admit defeat while the rest of them circle exhaustion like vultures.

Draco is many things (bitter, sarcastic, allegedly dramatic), but he isn’t blind. He sees what the work is doing to her. The tightness around her eyes. The way her hand trembles just slightly when she sets down her quill. The fact that she’s stopped laughing at Theo’s jokes.

And yet she keeps at it, driving them forward, refusing to let the curse win.

It should inspire admiration. Instead it leaves him with the bitter taste of something like guilt.

“Malfoy.” Her voice cuts through his thoughts like a scalpel. “Keep up.”

He looks down. His quill has stalled mid-word. Ink pools into a blot. Perfect.

“Of course,” he says, dry as dust. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint my supervisor.”

If she hears the bite, she doesn’t react. She’s already bent over the tapestry again, wand-tip illuminating faint lines of silver as if she can coax secrets out of cloth.

Bill straightens, stretching the stiffness from his shoulders. “Every time we come back, I think the wards will look weaker,” he mutters. “Instead they’re stronger. Like they feed on us being here.”

“Cheerful,” Charlie says.

“It’s true.” Bill wipes his hand against his trousers. “This is the last attempt without outside input. If we don’t find something today, we stop wasting energy.”

That lands heavy. No one contradicts him. Even Theo, eternal optimist, only presses his lips together and nods once.

Hermione doesn’t nod. She doesn’t even blink. Just says, calm and sharp, “Then let’s find something.”

Draco watches her (because he can’t not, because apparently he’s a masochist) and thinks, not for the first time: if anyone can beat Bellatrix from beyond the grave, it will be her. And she’ll do it without ever sparing him a glance.

The tapestry breathes. The house listens. And Draco writes, pretending his ink-blotted notes matter.

The room smells of chalk and old stone, the particular kind of dust that gets into the lungs and convinces you that you’ve already aged a century. Draco tells himself that’s why he feels heavy. Not because of the parchment Granger is shredding with her quill as though she can force sense into the world by stabbing ink into it.

Bill crouches at the edge of the tapestry, wand out, reading the faint shimmer of wardlines like a physician pressing at a pulse. “Cadence,” he mutters. “It’s not one spell, it’s rhythm. Structured.”

Granger, predictably, seizes the word. She’s already sketching symbols in the air with her finger, muttering as if she’s scolding the fabric for misbehaving. “It isn’t one leash. It’s a drumbeat. Look…look here, see how the rune repeats? That isn’t accident. It’s deliberate cadence.”

Draco leans against the wall, arms folded, letting his voice fall dry as chalk dust. “Of course. Why leash a single mongrel when you can conduct an orchestra? Typical Bellatrix. Couldn’t conquer the world, so she tried to choreograph it.”

No one laughs. Good. They shouldn’t.

Granger doesn’t even glance at him. Her quill races, hand smudged with ink. She’s half whispering, half chanting: “Path. Cadence. Inheritance. Ley.”

The silver line on the tapestry hums in agreement. For a moment Draco swears it vibrates with her voice, like the bloody house itself is listening.

It’s a curse inside a curse. Bellatrix never wanted one heir in chains. She wanted obedience woven into the ley-lines themselves, a poison dream smuggled into the bloodstream of the world. Generations shackled not by choice, not by birth, but by cadence.

Draco’s stomach twists. He’s lived with leashes. This is worse.

Granger keeps writing, faster, as if the air is running out. The words sharpen, her hand jerks. “It’s not families,” she breathes, fever-bright. “It’s everyone. All bloodlines. She wanted a drumbeat under every life, so no one ever danced off-beat again—”

Her quill snaps against parchment. Ink spatters her sleeve. She doesn’t notice. She’s scribbling faster, muttering cadence under her breath like the word itself is pulling her under.

Draco takes a step forward before he’s even thought it through. Something in her voice doesn’t sound like her anymore. It sounds like the house, like the vault, like obedience getting clever.

“Granger,” he says, sharp.

She doesn’t hear. The rhythm hums back at her. She scrawls the last rune; sharp, jagged, furious, and then her body just… stops.

The quill clatters to the floor. For a beat she sways, suspended in nothing, and then folds.

Draco catches her. He doesn’t think; his hands are there, arms bracing, pulling her against his chest before the stone floor can claim her. As his grip closes around her wrist, faint runes crawl up her skin before sinking back into nothing. He blinks. Her hair brushes his jaw, warm and static with curse energy.

“Brilliant,” he mutters, lowering her with a care that betrays him. “You can wrestle an empire but the one thing you can’t fight is gravity. Typical.”

Her face is pale against the shadow of the room.

Bill swears, already at her side, fingers pressing to her wrist. “Pulse: steady. Just backlash. She pushed too hard.”

Harry is there a heartbeat later, eyes wide and frantic. “Hermione?” He sounds seventeen again.

Ron hovers behind him, fists clenching and unclenching like he wants to punch the air until it apologizes.

Theo strolls over, pretending to be bored, and opens his mouth; something sarcastic ready on his tongue. Draco looks up at him, sharp as a blade. Theo closes his mouth again. Miraculous.

Charlie leans on his wand like it’s a crutch and says, calm, practical: “She’s breathing. Give her air.”

But Draco doesn’t move. He hasn’t let go of her arm. His thumb is still pressed into the curve of her sleeve, knuckles white, like if he lets go the curse will slither back and take her.

“She’s not just a bloody quill in your arsenal,” he says, low, not for them, not for anyone. For her. For himself.

Except the words carry. They always do.

Ron stiffens. Harry blinks at him. Bill’s eyes flick, sharp, calculating. Theo smirks in the corner, smug bastard, but doesn’t speak.

Draco should cover it; he’s had decades of practice in scorn, in sneers, in misdirection. He doesn’t. He keeps his hands on her shoulders like the world is balanced there.

She stirs faintly. Her lashes twitch. Relief hits him so hard it nearly knocks him back.

“Easy,” he murmurs, too quiet to matter. “Don’t you dare—”

She doesn’t wake. She just breathes. It’s enough. For now.

The others mutter plans: Bill already sketching runes in the air to seal the backlash, Harry insisting they pull back for the night, Ron demanding answers from a tapestry that will never give them. Draco ignores them.

His whole world is pale against his chest, stubborn even in unconsciousness, ink-stained and brilliant and infuriating.

He thinks, vicious and quiet: I can stomach being its prisoner. But not her. Never her.

And the curse inside him, smug parasite, says nothing, because for once it doesn’t need to.

Hermione comes back to herself the way drowning people surface: not with grace, but with noise in the lungs and light that hurts. The first thing she registers is stone under her shoulder blades and the second is heat, a hand braced hard at the back of her skull like someone has decided her head is, in fact, valuable.

“Don’t move,” Draco says, voice low and unhelpfully steady. “I’m attempting heroism. It doesn’t suit me.”

Her eyes slit open. The ceiling is older than sin. Draco’s face is nearer than policy allows. He looks furious, which is how he disguises being terrified.

She tries to sit; his hand tightens.

“Granger.”

“Malfoy,” she says, crisp out of habit. “I’m fine.”

“Ludicrous claim,” he replies. “Try again.”

“Let her up,” Bill says, kneeling fast on her other side, wand already flicking through diagnostic charms that make the air smell like pepper and ozone. “Slowly. Head first. Keep her anchored.”

“I am anchoring,” Draco says, as if he’s been doing it all his life. He gentles her upright, one forearm a bar behind her shoulders until the world stops tilting. The room crowds in: Harry, Ron, Charlie, Theo, George in the doorway pretending not to hover. The tapestry hums like a organ.

Hermione breathes. It’s an argument with gravity. “How long—?”

“Forty-three seconds,” Bill answers. “Too long for my taste.”

She pushes her hair back with an unsteady hand. “I’m fine,” she repeats, more for herself than anyone. She looks at the parchment scattered where she dropped it and the ink that has streaked like tear tracks across the runes. “The cadence—”

“Nearly used you as a tuning fork,” Bill says, not unkind. “You hit the lattice at the wrong harmonic. It bounced.”

“Backlash,” Charlie adds, blunt. “You took the brunt.”

Her mouth compresses. “It was close. We need to trace it again while it’s bright in my head.”

Draco makes a sound that starts as a laugh and dies as something that isn’t. “No.”

She turns on him, heat returning on principle. “I beg your—”

“No,” he says again, tone flat enough to set a table on. “You don’t get to throw yourself into a live field twice in ten minutes because you’re allergic to mortality.”

“Since when,” Hermione mutters, temper reasserting, “do you get a vote?”

“Since I pulled you off the floor,” he says, dry as salt, “and my hand is still shaking.”

That shuts the room up in a way no hex ever could. The pipes overhead give a low, whimpering sigh, as though the house leans closer to listen to their quarrel. 

Harry clears his throat. “We can— we should pause. Eat something. Come back.”

Hermione drags her eyes to him, and there’s apology in the look and refusal under it. “If we stop now we lose the line. It fades. I can feel;  it’s humming, Harry. It has a… rhythm.”

Bill holds up both hands like he’s calming a dragon. “And we will map it. But we’ll do it with you not tied into the feed. We switch roles. I trace while you call sequence. Charlie anchors my line. Ron, you keep Harry from touching anything that blinks.”

“Oi,” Harry protests automatically. Then, quieter: “Yeah. Alright.”

George, from the door, gestures with a piece of chalk he’s certainly stolen from Bill. “And I’ll provide executive oversight and snacks.”

Theo fans himself with a ledger. “And I’ll be morale.”

“You’ll be quiet,” Draco says without looking round, which for him is intimate.

Theo’s eyebrows climb. “You’re rattled,” he murmurs, almost admiring.

“Observant,” Draco murmurs back, not denying it.

Hermione sets her jaw. Standing is possible now. Admitting weakness is not. She pushes off Draco’s arm in a point of pride; he lets her, then shadows half a step behind like the world might list again and he intends to be gravity. Irritatingly competent when he decides to be.

Bill runs another diagnostic, then nods once. “You’re clean. No residue. Lucky.” The word is dry. He straightens and looks over the room like a foreman. “Right. We do this the safe way before the house eats someone.” He cuts a look at Draco that says I heard you and I’m pretending not to agree out loud.

They reset the table: parchment smoothed, quills re-inked, Hermione’s scrawl corralled into a grid. The silver seam in the tapestry is still brighter than it has any right to be, pulsing faintly in a beat that sets Draco’s teeth on edge. Bill draws three tight circles in chalk on the floor at fixed points of the wall, their triangulation anchors, then steps into the first circle, wand lifted to a careful, surgeon’s angle.

“On your call,” he says.

Hermione studies the page, shoulders tight. She doesn’t look at Draco, which is proof she knows he’s still looking at her. “Start at Bellatrix’s thorn—Thurisaz, mark the strike, then follow the energy sink along the family burn to Andromeda. The cadence crosses that scorch like water through muslin. It shouldn’t, but it does.”

“Because blood remembers,” Draco says softly, mostly to the wall. “The thread is a liar; the house is not.”

Her head tilts a fraction. Not a nod. An acknowledgement.

Bill breathes out, breathes in, and begins.

It’s not dramatic this time. The wandlight doesn’t flare; it insists. He strokes the glow rather than pokes it, tapping along the runic bones like a farrier reading fetlocks. At each mark Hermione calls, he lays a thread of his own magic parallel to the old one; never crossing, never crowding, until the room hums with two frequencies: the tapestry’s old tune and Bill’s careful counter-melody.

Charlie stands at his shoulder, big-shouldered solidity bent into delicacy, feeding Bill grounding pulses the way you hand bricks up a scaffold. Harry stalks the periphery, gaze sharp, hearing alarms only he can hear. Ron writes with determined neatness, translating brilliance into sentences that won’t combust if you look away. Theo perches, composing witticisms and, for once, not spending them. George has vanished and reappears with tea, because someone has to be human in this mausoleum.

Draco does nothing. Which is to say he does the one thing he can: he watches Hermione watch the work, notes every micro-flinch when Bill’s line brushes close to the cadence, every fraction of breath she forgets to take. He stands close enough to catch her if she slants again and far enough that she can pretend she doesn’t need catching. It is an art form, this distance.

“Alright,” Bill says, voice thinner now with concentration. “Coming up on the split. The blink. If I push, it will try to decide.”

“Don’t force it,” Hermione says, quick. “We want the behavior, not the lock. Nudge the cadence. Don’t challenge it.”

“I can nudge,” Bill says, as if that’s ever been in question. He tips the wand. The silver in the weft flickers at Teddy’s annotation, that bright little star they did not draw. It blinks once, twice, and steadies.

Ron leans nearer, cautious as a man eyeing a sleeping cat. “Feels like… waiting.”

“Cadence,” Hermione murmurs. “It’s not a key. It’s a beat. It expects a matching beat from the world before it opens. If the world is out of rhythm, it clamps down. Obedience by metronome.”

Harry’s mouth tightens. “Marches.”

“Courts,” Draco says, unsurprised. “Classrooms. Offices. The places that teach you not to raise your hand at the wrong time.”

George reappears silently with a tray. “And shops that queue.”

“Shut up,” four people say, but without teeth.

Bill keeps his wand moving. “We’re through the stutter,” he says, sweat at his hairline. “Past Andromeda’s scorch, along Narcissa’s thread. The pull changes here. There’s a… torque. Like a brace trying to tighten.”

Hermione’s quill skates. “That’s the system seeking compliance. It wants to cinch the loop around any bloodline that fits the parameters. It’s not looking for a person. It’s looking for pattern.”

“And once it finds it,” Charlie says, eyes narrowed at the wall like it’s a treacherous horizon, “it holds.”

A muscle jumps in Hermione’s jaw. “Indefinitely.”

Harry’s grip whitens on his wand. “We break it.”

“Yes,” Hermione says, the word a blade. “But not by pulling.” She looks over at Draco like it’s a compulsion of her own. “If you rip a cadence, you make a louder one.”

“Echoes,” he says. “You teach the walls to sing back.”

She doesn’t smile. She does, briefly, look less alone inside her clever head.

They work another ten minutes on nerve and willpower, teasing out the last of what’s safe to learn without giving the thing a target. Twice Bill pauses when the tapestry hum lifts to an unfriendly pitch; twice Hermione calls a halt before he can be brave. The chalk under Bill’s feet is a smear of white; the wandlight a thin, controlled line that would be a shout if it weren’t too well-bred.

“Enough,” Bill says at last, breath ragged. “Any further and we risk it latching to someone.”

“Me,” Hermione says, unapologetic.

“No,” Draco and Harry say together, which is frankly mortifying for everyone.

Ron blows out a breath and scrubs a hand over his face. “Right. So we know it’s a rhythm stitched into places and bloodlines, not a one-off curse. We know it expects a partner beat to open, pair-work, and we know Teddy breaks its brain because it can’t fix on him.”

“Not breaks,” Hermione corrects, softer now, some of the fight draining under the weight of sense. “He slips. And if we can model the slip…simulate it, we may not need to put him in the room. We can make the cadence miss.”

Charlie nods. “Grease on gears.”

George shades his eyes theatrically. “I can see the product pamphlet: ‘Now with added slippage.’”

Bill, who is sweating on behalf of the entire human race, points his wand at George without heat. “Leave my field.”

“Never,” George says sweetly, and hands him a cup of tea.

The humor takes the top layer off the panic. Not much, but enough to look at without swallowing wrong.

Harry looks between Hermione and Bill. “We stop. We write this up. Then we plan the Andromeda and Narcissa bit correctly. I’ll go to Andromeda tonight and explain. She can refuse if she wants. We’ll find another way.”

“She won’t,” Ron says with quiet certainty. “Not with what it’s doing. Not if she can help stop it.”

Hermione’s hand trembles once as she sets her quill down, a betrayal only Draco, rudely close, sees. He shifts fractionally; doesn’t speak. If he says anything that sounds like care, the curse will rip it out of him without poetry.

Bill rotates his shoulders, grimacing. “We also need fallback. If the House selects a side when they’re both here, we retreat and we burn.”

Charlie half-smiles. “A day out for the family, then.”

Theo, who has been uncharacteristically quiet for almost four minutes, rouses. “Since we are all practicing emotional literacy, I’d like to register that I hated watching Granger collapse, I despised watching Malfoy go white, and I am appalled at how invested I am.”

“You’re a good friend,” Hermione says, tone dry enough to be mistaken for an insult if you didn’t know where to look.

Theo preens. “I contain multitudes.”

“Contain them quieter,” Draco says, too late to hide the fondness.

Hermione stands fully, steadier now. Her eyes are lit the way they get when she’s lined the dragon up and intends to stick it between the plates. “We have enough for tonight.”

It sounds like surrender. It isn’t.

No one argues. Even the house seems to decide they’re not delicious this hour. The tapestry’s hum eases from predatory to merely pleased-with-itself, which is an improvement by a very low bar.

Bill wipes chalk from his hands and glances at Hermione. “You don’t go near the lattice again without a second set of wards on you. In fact—” He rummages in his bag and comes up with a thin leather cuff etched in runes. It looks like something charmingly illegal sold in a Cairo night market. “This.”

Hermione lifts an eyebrow. “Fashion?”

“Insulation,” Bill says. “It’ll eat the first rebound before it eats you.”

She takes it. Doesn’t argue. Buckles it one-handed. Draco files that away under miracles.

They start the slow, ritualistic business of shutting a dangerous room down without waking it. Wands stowed. Chalk capped. Pages ordered. George pockets something (of course). Theo kisses his own reflection in a cracked pane to keep morale up (it works for him). Ron claps Harry’s shoulder; Harry doesn’t shake him off.

Draco should move. He doesn’t. He stands his post half a step at Hermione’s flank like someone carved his feet there. She notices, which is intolerable.

“You can stop,” she says, not looking at him as she caps the ink. “I’m upright.”

“Are you,” he says mildly, “sure?”

She risks a glance at him then; too brief to be classified as a truce, too honest to be war. “Yes,” she says. “For now.”

He nods. “Good. Try not to be flattened again. It makes the tea go cold.”

Her mouth almost tilts. “Noted.”

Charlie appears at Hermione’s other side with a brother’s casual gravity. He doesn’t ask if she’s alright. He says, “Come breathe by a window,” which is how people who know you well enough don’t make you explain yourself. She goes with him for three paced breaths; comes back less white.

Bill catches Draco’s eye as he passes, a minimal dip of the chin that means: I saw. Thank you. Draco answers with the barest lift of an eyebrow that means: Yes, well, don’t make it a habit.

Harry lingers last. “We’re done for tonight,” he says to the air, to Hermione, to Draco, to the bloody house. “Tomorrow I’ll speak to Andromeda.”

“And I’ll write to my mother,” Draco says, equally to the room and to his own throat.

Hermione doesn’t flinch. “Good,” she says, which is a word with far too much in it.

After they go; Potter and Weasley in their two-man symmetry, Bill and Charlie with a little shoulder-squeeze exchanged mid-stride, George whistling something rude, Theo floating like a decadent balloon, what remains is the low breath of the house and the quiet mechanical sound of parchment settling.

Hermione watches the silver thread once more. “It’s an architecture,” she says, half to herself, half to the wall, and a very small part to him. “She wanted obedience to outlast her.”

“Arrogant,” Draco says. “Even for a Black.”

“Effective,” Hermione counters.

He hums. “We’ll make it stop.”

She nods. It’s not thanks. It’s not a promise. It’s the agreement of two people who have discovered that their stubbornness is, regrettably, aligned.

“Don’t die,” he says lightly, because levity is a kind of prayer.

“You first,” she returns, which for her is affection.

They blow the candles. The tapestry’s glow dims to something like a vein under skin. The house makes its old-dog sigh. As they step into the corridor, the cold draft lifts a strand of her hair and lays it briefly across his wrist like an accident. He could move away faster. He doesn’t.

In the darkness between rooms, he lets himself admit it: he would rather be terrified with her than comfortable anywhere else.

It’s not noble. It’s merely true.

He keeps walking.

The room smells of ink and old wool, the kind of odor that makes you want to sneeze and swear simultaneously. Draco has been staring at the tapestry long enough to feel every fiber mocking him.

“This is what comes of being raised on needlework,” he mutters, quill hovering above parchment. “Bellatrix thought embroidery was the pinnacle of permanence. Write it in a book, it burns; stitch it into the wall, it survives wars.”

“Not wrong,” Bill says, crouched near the flare of silver that has bled further since yesterday. His hands move like a surgeon’s, chalk trailing marks across the floor in protective arcs. “Not clever either, but not wrong.”

Draco flicks the quill in irritation. “She wasn’t clever. She was ambitious. There’s a difference. Clever tells you when to stop.”

Theo, sprawled at the far end of the bench with all the lazy menace of a cat who owns the sofa, hums approval. “Ambition without brakes. Yes, that’s Bella in three words. Though if you give me five, I’d add: and terrible taste in cousins.”

Charlie snorts. George chokes on his tea. Hermione doesn’t even twitch. She’s seated cross-legged by the glow itself, parchment in her lap, lips moving as she works through the arithmetic of ruin.

Draco, for once, doesn’t interrupt her. He knows the look: the pinched mouth, the way she scribbles so hard the nib bites through fibres. He has watched her lose herself in numbers and names until the air thickens. There is something almost holy about it, which of course infuriates him.

“Here,” Bill says, gesturing. “Look at the bend.”

They crowd closer. The silver thread hums along the branch of Andromeda’s scorch mark, then falters, fractal-splitting into two directions. One leads predictably back through the Black bloodlines; the other wavers, uncertain, like a hand hovering over two doors at once.

Hermione squints. “It shouldn’t do that. Wards are designed for stability. Split routes mean instability; failure points.”

“Or choice,” Theo says idly, tapping the bench with one long finger. “A fork in the road. A yes or no.”

“Except it isn’t yes or no,” Draco says, stepping closer to the wall. “Look. The stutter isn’t clean. It doesn’t know which way to go.”

He points, careful not to brush the glow. His own curse hums irritably inside his ribs, recognizing kin. “Bellatrix was obsessed with certainty. Purity. She would never leave a fork.”

Hermione looks up at him, eyes sharper than the light. “Then why is there one?”

Draco almost says because she was fallible, but Theo gets there first.

“Because she overreached,” Theo drawls. “She wanted permanence across bloodlines, not just her own. The arrogance is almost admirable. Almost.”

Bill frowns. “Across bloodlines?”

“Look at the sigil,” Draco cuts in, quill stabbing at the shape that wavers faintly beneath the glow. “It isn’t a Black crest rune. It’s older. Scandinavian, maybe. She rewrote an heir-binding charm to hook not just one house but any house. Any name threaded by blood.”

Ron lets out a low whistle. “She wasn’t trying to leash you, Malfoy. She was trying to leash everyone.”

Draco grimaces. “Comforting, isn’t it, knowing I’m not special?”

Theo pats his shoulder without rising from the bench. “You’re plenty special. Just not in the way you’d like.”

Harry ignores them both, eyes narrowed at the glow. “If it was meant to bind everyone, why is it tripping here? Why Teddy?”

At the mention of the boy’s name, the silver thread flickers again, as though embarrassed to be caught stammering.

Hermione’s quill stills. “Because Teddy doesn’t… stay still.”

Draco exhales, the truth landing before he can help himself. “The curse wants certainty. Teddy Lupin is the antithesis of certainty.”

Theo’s smile sharpens. “A boy who won’t sit still in his own skin. Hair one color in the morning, another by lunch. Of course Bellatrix’s neat little leash chokes on him.”

Bill’s chalk pauses mid-circle. “Metamorphmagus,” he says, low. “The magic looks for permanence. He’s built of flux. The system short-circuits.”

“Exactly,” Hermione whispers, eyes alight with something that terrifies Draco more than any curse. “The runes want a pair: a thorn and a twin. The thorn is the wound; Bellatrix’s violence. The twin is a shifting form. Teddy is the twin.”

There’s a hush, the kind that follows bad weather.

“Bloody hell,” Ron mutters.

Charlie folds his arms. “We are not putting a kid in front of this.”

“No one’s suggesting—” Harry starts, too quickly.

“The tapestry is,” George interrupts, grinning without humor. He gestures at the glow. “Look at it. Practically begging us to bring him in.”

Hermione’s shoulders square. “We’re not risking him. But it tells us what Bella built. The lock was never meant for one person. It was designed to outlast death itself. To preserve obedience across generations. And the one thing she didn’t anticipate was… him.”

Draco studies the thread until his eyes ache. Teddy Lupin: half-orphan, half-metamorph, all anomaly. A boy too mercurial for Bellatrix’s vision of permanence.

He should feel relief. Instead he feels something colder, sharper: awe at Bella’s ambition, disgust at her reach, and a bone-deep awareness that their only chance now rests on a thirteen-year-old boy who likes to dye his hair green for Quidditch matches.

He says, before anyone else can: “Her masterpiece, undone by a child who refuses to stand still.”

The words fall like a verdict.

Theo goes very quiet, which is never the good kind of quiet.

He has been sprawled across the far edge of the table like a decadent gargoyle, idly flipping through a ledger that should have died with the last Head of House. Now, though, he leans forward, pinning three copied runes with two fingers, lips moving as if he is tasting them. “You see the mirror here?” he says, almost to himself. “It’s not two of the same; it’s two that only appear the same at distance.”

Draco tips his chair back until the rear legs threaten to betray him. “Philosophy at this hour, Nott?”

“Geometry,” Theo answers, eyes still on the ink. “And arrogance. She wants certainty so badly she builds a trick to pretend ambiguity isn’t real.”

He slides the sheet across. The old, hateful thorn of Thurisaz sits nestled where it can do the most damage, and there, subtle as a cough in a cathedral, the doubled lines of Ehwaz: a pair in motion, two moving-as-one, a carriage that only rolls if it has both wheels. Draco has stared at this diagram for days, the way one stares at a locked door. Theo, naturally, has the indecency to jiggle the handle and find it open.

“Not symmetry,” Theo continues. “Twinship. But one twin is false.”

Draco’s voice is flat. “False twin. So Bellatrix sets a join that looks like it wants two of the same: Black to Black, blood to blood, but what it actually wants is ‘two in concert,’ regardless of the labels.”

“Labels comfort tyrants,” Theo says. “Machinery isn’t sentimental.”

Across the table, Granger looks up from her scrawl of references, ink on her fingers, hair escaping the bun in mutinous coils. She has clearly heard every word without needing to look. “Show me.”

Theo rotates the sheet so she can see how the bridge bites into the spirals. Draco points at the thorn. “Primary anchor. Cuts resistance. Opens the mouth. All charming.”

She leans in. For a moment the crown of her head is an inch from his chin; his chest does something pathetic. “And then the pair,” she murmurs. “Not identity. Function. Movement by two.”

Bill is already chalking the floor like a man preparing a gallows. “Which means the lock expects two cooperating inputs to slide the teeth past the thorn.”

Weasley groans. “Speak English.”

“Two things push together and the trap doesn’t spring,” Granger translates, patient and surgical at once. “One alone gets shredded.”

“Ugly genius,” Bill says, hating himself for the respect in his tone.

Draco hates himself for feeling the same lick of reluctant admiration. Bellatrix likes puzzles that hum when you touch them. She likes obedience more than breath.

George taps the parchment with a knuckle, lightly, as if trying to wake a sulking product. “So the counterfeit twin…what could pass as ‘moving with you’ without actually being… you?”

“Blood,” Draco says. “If you’re a bigot with a family tree for a mirror, you assume sameness is blood.”

Granger’s gaze snaps to the tapestry. The silver thread they have woken earlier still glows across the scorches. “But the House trips on Teddy,” she says. “It can’t settle.”

“Because he won’t sit still long enough to be categorized,” Theo says, a little admiring. “Metamorphmagus: identity in motion. The lock demands definition. He denies it by existing.”

Draco doesn’t mean to look at Potter, but he does. Potter stands braced, jaw set, pretending that being brave is just another domestic chore. The hum in the stones deepens in Draco’s bones. Even the House is listening.

Bill draws a second pair of lines, overlaid, barely-there. “So the key is pair-work. A second presence that is neither mirror nor match, but a moving harmony. If you present it with a face that shifts—”

“It can’t bite,” Granger finishes, and her voice sounds like victory soldered to fury. She looks at the page she has been building for hours, the neat brutality of her logic, and picks up her quill.

Draco knows before she writes that the House is going to hate it.

She writes anyway. OBEDIENCE BY LATTICE: THORN + TWIN; LOCK REQUIRES TWO—ONE FIXED, ONE SLIPPING. She underlines slipping until the parchment indents. She adds the thing none of them have wanted to put in ink: TEDDY = AMBIGUITY INDEX. Then, below, the conclusion Draco has felt in marrow: KEY CAN PASS THROUGH BINDING IF THE HOUSE CANNOT CLASSIFY THE PAIR.

She stops. Breathes. Ink stains her hand. A smudge of graphite marks her jaw. Draco wants to erase it with his mouth. Instead, he stares at the diagram because dignity is a dying habit.

Potter looks from the page to the glowing thread. “So if Teddy stands next to—what?—Andromeda? Narcissa? Draco? The lock gets confused and lets them through?”

The thought lands like air after drowning. For Draco, it is obscene luxury: wanting something. There is, for the first time, a path through this that ends with him able to lie again; to keep a thought in his head without it being dragged out by the roots. It is so loud in his skull he almost misses the older voice beneath it—his mother’s, calm as winter: remember what it cost other people last time you wanted something.

The others are looking at him. He could play coy, make someone coax the morality out of him. Or he could say the thing in his mouth before the curse makes a performance of it.

“No,” he says, and it is surprisingly easy to set the word on the table. “We are not risking a child just to solve this. Not for my curse. Not for my benefit.” His eyes find Potter, steady. “We’ve had enough boy heroes…and one Potter was already more than enough.”

Recognition flickers across Potter’s face. Offense, then acceptance. “Agreed.”

Granger’s shoulders drop a fraction, the line of her mouth easing. “We model it first,” she says briskly. “We can simulate the slip. We don’t need Teddy. We don’t need anyone’s child.”

Theo raises two fingers. “I volunteer as decorative twin.”

“Sit down,” half the room says.

He sits, smiling.

Granger writes faster now, words acquiring teeth when she owns them: PAIR-WORK = SAFE KEY; SIMULATION VIA RUNIC SLIP; NO LIVING SUBJECT UNTIL FIELD CONTROLLED. Each stroke is a rebellion. Draco feels the House frown.

“Let’s copy it to a clean sheet,” Bill says, reaching for parchment. “If the building has a tantrum, let it chew on a duplicate.”

We aren’t wise enough. The House has learned to read over their shoulders.

The moment Granger finishes the last sentence, the air goes tight. The temperature ticks down a degree, as if the walls have inhaled and forgotten to exhale. The silver thread in the tapestry brightens. The Floo gutters once, twice, and goes out with a spiteful hiss.

“Bill,” Granger says, already moving, already raising her wand.

Draco feels it a heartbeat later; a pressure against the skin, as if the house has turned into a diving bell. Apparition is suddenly the idea of a door in a wall that refuses to acknowledge doors as a species. Potter’s stag flickers into being, half-light and memory, and then collapses. The House has shut the sky.

“We’re sealed,” Bill says, calm with effort. “Do not panic.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Theo says faintly.

The doors answer with mechanical clanks, bolts sliding home with obscene satisfaction. Somewhere, something larger than a latch settles, like a lid.

Granger doesn’t flinch. She turns to Draco, eyes furious in the useful way. “Containment net; left of the shelf. Now.”

He crosses the floor before the curse can make a remark about obedience. They’ve prepared nets for the vault; apparently they aren’t idiots. He drags the copper frame from behind the desk, shoulders its weight, and carries it to Bill. The mesh hums with a sane frequency; human work, not ancestral spite.

The House hates being named. It loathes diagnosis. The parchment browns at the edges like a leaf remembering autumn.

“Not today,” Granger tells it, savage, and reaches to snatch it away—

—and sways.

At first, it is small, the kind of sway you’d mistake for a pivot to reach another quill. Then the quill slips. Ink rocks. The exact line of her mouth blurs. Her knees go.

Draco is moving before he thinks. He drops the frame, Bill swears, and slides an arm around her waist as she sags. She is hot, furious, human: and the fear that tears through him is indecent.

“I’ve got you,” he says, unusually earnest for a man who enjoys lying to himself.

“Don’t—” she manages, not moral command this time but protest against physiology. Her eyelids flutter like she wants to bite the room.

The parchment crinkles from her hand. Potter catches it before the fire does. Bill hauls the net up over the table. Weasley leans close, then steps back to give Draco the space he never gives anyone. Charlie fills the doorway, steady. George stops joking.

“She’s not cursed,” Draco says quickly. “Backlash. The building’s pushing against her head for writing its weakness.”

“Sit her,” Bill says. “Head up. Keep her talking.”

Draco lowers her to the rug. Fever and winter at once. Ink smears her mouth; he wipes it away before his brain reminds him that’s intimate and idiotic.

“Granger,” he says sharply. “Eyes. Now.”

They open, stubborn on cue. Brown, angry, alive. He can breathe again. Barely.

“Say something clever,” she mutters. Proof of life.

Theo kneels, fanning her with a ledger. “If you expire, I shall never forgive you. Think of the paperwork.”

She swallows. Strength ripples back through her like a tide reconsidering. “Not dying. Just…the House has opinions.”

“Join the club,” Draco says, tone dry enough to convince himself.

Bill’s net steadies the parchment. The browning halts. The hum in the boards shifts from violent to sullen. The House sulks.

Potter holds the page high inside the net. “This is it. This is the map.”

“Careful,” Granger says, weak but fierce. “It’s the idea of a map. We’re not using a child.”

The curse inside Draco stays silent at that, which is reward enough.

She forces herself upright, still pale, but alive. Draco keeps a hand on her shoulder anyway. She doesn’t shrug it off.

For the first time, there is a line through the dark, drawn in Granger’s clean hand. The House hates it. Draco thinks he might just survive it.

The room tightens its grip. Walls that used to be wallpaper and sighs now hum like a lung about to collapse. The silver seam in the tapestry keeps brightening in little pulses, as if it is rehearsing for a climax.

Bill presses his palms to his thighs and mutters, “Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Fleur’s going to murder me.” It isn’t bitter, just the dry fatalism of a man making peace with his obituary.

Harry huffs a laugh that has no humor in it. “Yeah? At least you’re not trying to explain this to a pregnant wife. I’m dead before we even get out.”

Ron lifts both hands, referee calm. “Oi. No one’s dying, not here, not in this bloody house. You’ll both live long enough to regret marrying terrifying women.”

“Encouraging,” Theo says, all mock-solemn.

The tension in the room wobbles, not quite laughter, not quite despair.

Hermione is sitting because Charlie made her, though her chin is set like stone. Charlie stays crouched at her side for a while, until he sees the tremor in her fingers stilling when Draco shifts closer. He sits back then, expression tightening: not jealousy, not surrender, just the recognition that he isn’t the right anchor. 

The others give space without saying it. Harry and Ron keep station at the door, George patrols the edges like a fox pretending to be harmless, Bill wards the floor in neat spirals that hum back at him, and Theo makes himself ornamental and indispensable all at once.

Draco doesn’t bother pretending indifference anymore. He stays beside her, not touching, but close enough to catch her if she folds again. He can feel the house watching them both with the kind of interest parasites reserve for blood.

The silver seam in the tapestry flickers—once, twice—and then claws brighter, stuttering like a heartbeat out of rhythm. Runes ghost in and out of the light, ugly and half-born.

“Not good,” Bill mutters.

“Define good,” Draco says, dry as gin.

The house creaks like an old beast shifting its weight, and dust sprinkles down in lazy mockery. Everyone tenses, even Theo, who covers it with a sigh about his hair.

“Right,” Hermione says, voice iron despite the tremor in her hands. “We hold. We protect the notes. We don’t give it anything else.”

It is a plan as much as it is a dare.

They spread out: Harry and Ron close to the entrance, Charlie keeping quiet watch on the ceiling as if he expects it to drop teeth, George whistling tunelessly to annoy the wallpaper, Bill carving one more net of runes into the skirting board, Theo pretending he invented the idea of supervision.

Draco holds position at Hermione’s side, because he has decided that if the house means to take anything tonight, it will have to go through him first.

The tapestry hums louder, petulant and smug. The walls lean in. The floor ripples.

“Lovely,” Draco mutters to no one in particular. “Exactly what this madhouse needed. A tantrum.”

And the house answers, slamming the last of its locks into place.

Chapter Text

Grimmauld Place sulks when it has prey.

The walls breathe damp and mean, the stair groans as though it resents carrying them, and the portraits; most of them blank, scorched, or in some permanent sulk of their own, whisper faint complaints. The house does not shout. It waits.

They’ve been waiting with it for days now. A week, perhaps. Draco has stopped counting. He has only ever been a connoisseur of cages, and this one tastes like mould and chalk.

The first morning after the wards sealed, they did the usual. Patronus: vanished before the fog of it had even cleared. Floo, dead and black as tar. Apparition: a rebound so violent Bill staggered into the wall with blood on his lip. By mid-morning, they had exhausted the predictable exits and been left with the predictable truth: the House isn’t letting them leave.

And so, like any number of weary prisoners, they fall into routines.

Meals are cooked by Weasley, because the alternative is George, and nobody trusts George with a kitchen. Weasley insists he isn’t a cook, but the meals arrive hot, filling, and edible, which already outpaces what Draco has produced in his life. He does not say thank you, though Granger glares him into swallowing it.

Bill prowls the walls like a man working a second job no one pays him for, eyes narrowed, wand out, muttering diagnostics in a voice that sounds older than his years. Charlie trails after him half the time, correcting him, which is brother-speak for I’m worried you’re overdoing it.

Theo, of course, lounges. No chair has been safe from him since the moment they arrived. He drapes himself like furniture is an art form. His commentary fills silences better left empty. When Potter paces, Theo counts the steps aloud. When Bill lectures, Theo nods gravely and offers, “Very cursed. I can tell by the way it curses.”

Potter does not laugh, he is busy being the Chosen One again, and Draco, who has survived him this long, finds the performance even drearier the second time.

Weasley (Ron, the tall one) is steady. Surprisingly so. When tempers spike (and they do, like clockwork), Weasley is the one who sits between Potter and Theo with the calm of a man who has survived worse than bickering. He makes tea with the same stubbornness with which he blocks hexes. Draco does not admit it, but he finds this infuriatingly useful.

And Granger, Hermione bloody Granger, has retreated behind her own thoughts. She still works, of course; quill scratching, parchment piling, calculations layered on runes layered on scrawled shorthand that only she can read. But her edges are blurred, her focus turned inward. She speaks less. Smiles not at all.

Draco notices. Unfortunately.

Night falls. And rises. And falls again.

They are sleeping in the same rooms they once did, during the Order’s long winter. Draco hadn’t been here then, but the house remembers. Regulus’s old room welcomes him with a chill that feels like recognition. Granger claims hers, up near the top, where the ceiling sags and the wallpaper has faded to ghosts of flowers.

It is in that room, on the fourth or fifth night (time has no manners here), that Draco finds himself awake. Of course he is. He has not slept properly in years. The curse keeps him sharp, raw-edged, like a knife someone forgot to sheath.

He hears her pacing before he sees her. Bare feet on warped floorboards, steady, then frantic. A match flares, catches on a candle stub. The faint light sketches her in outline: curls wild, jumper sliding off one shoulder, hands restless as though the thoughts in her head can’t find parchment fast enough.

“Granger,” he says from the doorway, voice rough with disuse. “You’ll wear a hole through the floor.”

She startles, then narrows her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“Not sleeping,” he says dryly. “It’s a hobby of mine.”

Her glare sharpens. “Go back to your room.”

“Tempting,” he says, stepping inside anyway. “But your pacing is louder than the voices in my head.”

Her mouth opens, likely to scold, but shuts again. She folds her arms instead. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I shouldn’t be many things,” he says, and leans against the doorframe like the room belongs to him. “Alive, for one. Upright, for another. I’m full of surprises.”

The flicker of her mouth is not quite a smile. Not yet.

It begins with words, as their worst moments always do.

She tells him he’s infuriating. He tells her she’s unbearable. She calls him arrogant, reckless, posh to the point of parody. He answers that she’s bossy, obsessive, incapable of sleeping without cataloguing the faults of everyone within a mile radius.

It builds, sharp and sparking, until the argument feels like standing too close to a storm. And then, because there’s nowhere else for it to go, it snaps.

She pushes him, sharp-fingered to his chest. He catches her wrist without thinking. Her eyes blaze up at him, furious, unflinching. His pulse, traitorous, trips into a gallop.

“Careful,” he says, voice gone low. “You might start something.”

“Maybe I want to,” she snaps back, and that is the end of it.

The door clicks behind them and the house breathes like an old animal settling in its sleep. Rain needles the window, pattering a rhythm that sounds like someone else’s heartbeat: too fast, too near, everywhere at once. They stand very still, not from caution but from impact, the kind you feel in your ribs when the argument has already burned off and something heavier is left in the ash.

Hermione has her back to the door. One palm is braced against it as if she must physically keep the rest of the world out. Her lips are parted, the ghost of a retort dying there, and her eyes have that iron steadiness he pretends not to worship. Draco doesn’t reach for her. He’ll take what she offers and nothing more. He told himself this a dozen times on the way up the stairs. He’s telling himself again now.

“You don’t make it easy,” she says, voice all edges.

“I’m not easy,” he answers, almost apologetic. “I’m… here.”

“That’s the problem.”

He swallows, tastes copper and rain. “Say the word and I go.”

A beat. Two. She doesn’t say it.

He steps closer. Not a lunge, he knows better than to startle her, but a decision placed gently on the floorboards. She watches him come with the composure of someone clocking a storm’s trajectory: not frightened, merely unwilling to be surprised. When he reaches her, he doesn’t touch. He stands in front of her with both hands open at his sides, showing how empty they are, how empty he is.

“I’m not asking you to give me anything you don’t want to give,” he says, quietly. “I’m asking you to let me carry what you already do.”

“Spare me the poetry,” she says, but the words are softer than the tone.

“No poetry,” he says. “Just—” He lets the sentence fall apart. Truth is too heavy to carry all the way to the end.

Her chin tilts, dismissive and fragile at once. “You’ll take what I can’t name.”

“Yes.”

“And you won’t ask me to make it into something else.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it”. 

“You’ll be content with that.”

He smiles with his mouth and not his eyes. “Content is a word people use when they’ve lost hope, I just started gaining it.”

She is the first to move. She pushes off the door and into him, her hand finding the front of his shirt as if to close a fist around his resolve. Her mouth catches his with no warning and less technique, not careful, not neat; hungry, furious, necessary. He makes a sound that is neither brave nor clever and holds himself utterly still while she takes what she wants. He’ll not ruin the clean violence of it by turning supplicant; he’s already bowed at enough altars at her feet.

When she breaks for air he whispers against her cheek, “I won’t ask for love,” the words rasping like bark. “I’ll take you. I’ll keep you safe from your own second thoughts.”

“Arrogant,” she breathes.

“Invested,” he corrects, but there’s no triumph in it, only terror he refuses to decorate.

Her fingers are at his collar. The top button goes. Then another. His hands lift, hover, lower: question marks written in the small space between them. “Is this real?” “Yes”, she answers by taking one of those hands and setting it at her breast, anchoring his palm where heat blooms through fabric like a truth she can’t deny on paper. He doesn’t squeeze. He just rests there, and the rest of him learns patience in tiny, painful lessons.

“Tell me you want me, Hermione,” he murmurs, steady now, as though he has found the place inside himself that doesn’t shake. He is close enough that the words touch the corner of her mouth before the air does.

Her reply is not a sentence. It is breath that falters and deepens, a sound scraped from somewhere too honest to be rehearsed. It is enough to pull his eyes shut.

His thumb strokes a nipple he has no right to know by heart. “Tell me you need me,” he says, lower. He doesn’t pull her; he lets the shape of the request be the pull, and if she walks away he’ll build dignity out of what’s left.

She doesn’t walk. She tilts, a small, unmistakable shift into him that routes lightning through his bones. The old house hears the change and sighs, timber remembering weight, wallpaper remembering heat. Her hands are at his shoulders, then at the back of his neck, then fisted in his hair, small grips that say stay, stay, stay without wasting a syllable.

He kisses along her jaw as if the route were a map back to himself. “Then tell me you’ll let me love you like this,” he whispers, “without words.”

She answers with movement rather than speech, urgency rising clean through her like a flare. He wraps her in it, carries the flare carefully, and the room tilts around them into a geography that knows only the nearness of two people and the long, slow echo of rain.

They back across the rug in the graceless choreography of two stubborn creatures refusing to be careful. The bed catches behind his knees and he sits, startled into a rough laugh that lives and dies against her mouth. She follows, knee to mattress, a second heartbeat drumming through the frame. It feels like standing on the lip of something that has been waiting for months, a cliff with no sign and no railing and a view that might be ruin or mercy depending on where you put your feet.

“Fucking tell me something,” he gets out, because there is a pressure behind his tongue he will not win a fight against. “Anything. A truth, a lie, a curse—”

“Please shut up,” she says, almost tender, and pushes him back.

The ceiling is cracked in one corner, the crack shaped like a spring whose tension has never been released. He stares at it for a second as the mattress takes them and thinks: I know. I know what you are. Then he stops thinking because her hands are under his shirt, hot palms to colder skin, and the rest of the room walks out on them with a bored shrug.

He works at her buttons with a clumsy care that would be funny on any other night. He’s steady in disaster; he’s shaky in grace. She helps, impatient with hesitation, batting his fingers away to do it herself, and he learns how her breath sounds when she grows frustrated with cloth. When she drags him down again her mouth is salt and rain and the metallic taste of almost-arguments. He drinks it like medicine.

There is nothing tender in the way their bodies find one another. There doesn’t have to be. The certainty arrives all at once, like a door blown open by weather: the shift of weight and the catch of breath and the unambiguous, silent consent in the way she pulls him closer without asking him to name any of it. He holds where he must hold, waits where he must wait, and the steadiness he offers is the only skill he trusts tonight.

When his composure frays he doesn’t hide it. She feels the tremor, the way he braces and then unbraces, how he forces stillness across his shoulders so she can choose the direction of the fall. He is a man who has practiced cruelty, occasionally even against himself; he chooses gentleness now like a rebellion with teeth.

“Draco,” she says, and his name is not a plea or a warning but a decision spoken aloud.

“Here,” he says, not to correct but to locate, and lets the moment claim them.

There is no mistaking what happens next. The bed gives a single offended sound as if it has heard worse, and then all sound siphons into breathing: hers hitching into his, his resetting to match hers. They do not speak. They don’t have to. The rhythm they find is not something anyone would write down for instructions; it is a series of negotiated silences, his restraint pressed to the edge and held there, her insistence stabbing through both of them until they yield in the same breath.

He is careful in the way that costs him. He holds still long enough that the world seems to stop with him: rain suspended between glass and sky, the house poised on one creaking board, his body a single line of heat that would become greed if he let it. He doesn’t. He waits for her to move first, and when she does (an economical, devastating choice) it knocks everything else out of the room.

She buries her face against his neck like the air might be too cold for declarations. He turns enough to kiss her hairline, a brief contact that feels like promising something he shouldn’t. The scent of her, soap and rain and the iron tang of adrenaline, burns him through.

“Tell me you want me,” he says again because the question keeps him honest. It is a wound and he sticks his finger in it on purpose. He’s barely inside of her and already misses her. 

Her answer is a noise small enough to shame him for needing more. Then she says, against his skin, “I hate that I do,” and the honesty is so bright it hurts. 

“That will do,” he breathes, and swallows the sound he makes after it. He pushes all the way in and decides that he can die a happy mean if Death knocks at his door today. 

They move. The bed protests softly and then adjusts, indulgent. The window fogs at the edges like a secret keeping itself. Somewhere in the corridor a floorboard reports a shift in weather. He keeps his hands exactly where they have been asked to live: one at her spine, one at her jaw, both of them learning her as if comprehension were a spell. When she trembles he doesn’t mistake it for delicacy. He knows strength when it shakes.

“You’re not careful,” she manages, a sliver of humor somehow finding them. “For a man pretending at patience.”

“I am trying to deserve the next minute,” he says, voice wrecked and plain. “One at a time.” And, because he’s him and he’s cursed and he can’t help himself, he adds, “And I am trying very hard to make you come before I do”. The curse retreats, satisfied with this. 

She makes a sound that might be a laugh or a sob. He cannot tell and doesn’t ask. Asking would require stepping back, and all the stepping back was done before this door closed.

He loses the thread of himself for a moment and finds it in the same breath when she catches his shoulder and presses her forehead to his, the smallest anchor, the most necessary one. “Here,” she says again, not sure if it’s a direction or a benediction, and he follows her words and her hand, guiding him between her thighs and into all the gods that have forgotten him, like a spell finally flourishing after years of failing to spark.

When she breaks, it isn’t pretty. It isn’t something you would put in a story to seduce anyone but the truth. It is human and messy and honest in the only way that ever counts. She clutches at him and says his name in a way that makes it sound like a decision that will last until morning, and his whole body answers with a gratitude so fierce it could be mistaken for pain. He holds her through it, past it, into the soft collapse after, his own undoing following like weather across a hill; late, inevitable, thunder rolling over the top once the lightning has already done its work.

Silence returns in tiers. First the bone-deep kind, the body’s temporary absence from language. Then the soft world: rain, the distant hush of a city pretending it has nothing to do with either of them, wood shrinking around old nails. Last comes breath, ordinary again, one of his favorite miracles.

He stays where he is because moving would seem like a trick, and he has promised not to trick her. Her face is turned into his shoulder. He feels the steady return of her composure as an engine cooling; click by click, order reasserting itself over chaos, discipline rehabilitated from ruin. He doesn’t resent it. It is who she is. He loves her for it, though he will not name that aloud, not here.

“Stay,” he says, not an order. More a plea from a man that has learned that his prayers aren’t usually answered. 

“Don’t make it a habit,” she says, voice sanded down to pragmatism.

“I am already a bad habit,” he says. “I’m just trying to be one you can live with.”

She huffs against his skin. Too close to a laugh to be safe. She lifts enough to steal air and the mean light from the window spills across her shoulder where fabric has failed to behave. He pretends he is not watching the shape of it, the way her pulse still writes itself beneath skin. He pretends lots of things; the truth keeps its arms crossed and lets him.

He brushes his thumb along the back of her hand, barely a stroke, a thought of touch, and feels the minute answering flex that tells him she is not leaving yet. He closes his eyes against the sting that answer brings him.

The morning comes and they reorganize themselves without ceremony, rediscovering shirts and buttons and the public arrangement of bodies. He goes slowly, not to make it tender but to keep from startling the fragile animal between them, the one that spooks when named. She fixes one of his buttons with an economy that burns straight through him. Her fingers are deft and impersonal; he feels the opposite of impersonal everywhere he is made of nerve.

“Look at me,” he says, and the request comes out in a voice that should not be used in a house this old. She does. The look is not soft. It is accurate: a full survey of a man she does not trust and cannot quite stop trusting.

“Tell me you want me,” he says for the last time, because rituals are how you learn which gods answer.

“I want—” She stops, shakes her head once, small and furious with herself. Then, plain as a fact on parchment: “I want you.”

The room presses in around that sentence with a kind of reverence. He nods once, not letting himself make a ceremony of it even as his ribs try to light candles. “Thank you,” he says, rude to his own dignity and grateful past the point of taste.

She studies him as if tempted to call him a liar and then remembers the years he has spent being physically incapable of that. Something ugly and tender flickers in her eye at once. She looks away first. He lets her win that one and every one like it.

“We should go back downstairs,” she says, gathering herself up with the terrifying efficiency of a woman who has been keeping the world spinning for years. “We’ve been absent long enough to cause comment.”

“Let them comment,” he says, and then sighs. “Fine. Yes. Sensible.”

She reaches for the door, then pauses, fingers still on the knob. “Draco.”

He straightens as though called to account. “Hermione.”

“If I decide,” she says carefully, each word individually earned, “you will be the first to know.”

“I would prefer to hear it from you rather than, say, from a Weasley,” he says lightly. 

She rolls her eyes, but her mouth betrays her with the tiniest curve. “Go to hell.”

“I’ve been,” he says, stepping close enough to brush his knuckles down the inside of her wrist like an oath he won’t write. “Then I found you.”

“Flirt with damnation on your own time,” she mutters, and opens the door.

The house takes one sniff of them and makes a noise that might be disdain, might be approbation. The corridor is cold and respectful. They step out together, not touching, calibrated back into the world’s grammar. On the landing, rain sheeted across the window blurs London into a smear of light and intention. He glances at her in the glass, at the double of them there, transparent and inevitable.

He inclines his head. “I’ll try not to ask for more than what you’ve given.”

“You’ll fail.”

“Spectacularly.”

“Attractively,” she corrects, and he almost laughs.