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Chapter Text

There is a time in every man’s life where they wake up to the feeling of stuck . Each day for the past four or so years was a steady decline into stuck . His daily life consisted of working through the very molasses of existence and he sat here at this shoddy little park with this dirty algae covered fountain with the worst tasting tea that he could find at the canteen and drinking it between grimaces. It’s not that the tea tasted particularly bad, it’s that it was the same tea he had been drinking for four years. It tasted like glue, that sticky disgusting feeling of knowing that he was going to drink this same tea at 11:00 every day until he was six feet under. This dusty and bitter earl grey was going to be on his tongue when they interred his body in the ground.

He stared at the change in his hand, exactly two sickles and four knuts. He had a change jar at his desk that always got two sickles and four knuts every day at noon while he whittled his morning away between tea and a long lunch. His dead-end job that had been Ministry assigned after the war was a bureaucratic method of destroying a man. A prison of paperwork, the slog that was turning his life into cement.

Another sip of tea, and a grimace. The lowest form of life was to be cement, always stepped on, unable to speak up or defend themselves. The Ministry had stripped him of his humanity after the war. A forgotten rock amongst the riverbed of Britain, slowly whittling away to nothing.

Corban Yaxley sighed into his cup, as if breathing was an act of rebellion, a last bit of him left, a last bit of life left that was not written down and checked in by his probation supervisor. Even breathing was tiresome, the steam blew up in his face as he exhaled. How much longer was he going to breathe? How many more years was this going to be a thing? He swirled the tea around, the grime at the bottom of the tea cup turning into a whirlpool.

His friends all said that he was lucky. His assets weren’t touched due to some loophole. Lucius constantly bemoaned the fact that he was in Wiltshire and not Aberdeenshire. Gold was as cold as stone, both were equally as dead. He couldn’t spend his way back into living, and that was exactly what the Ministry knew when they assigned him this role four years ago. The Dementor’s Kiss had been outlawed, but this living death was worse, to be aware as your soul died was far more terrifying than existential dregs that were swirling around him and sucking him all the way down.

He took another sip.

“I’m sorry,” A woman was apologizing and he looked up to see if she was apologizing to him.

She was not. She was holding the same paper cup that she had, it had spilled over, the tea staining her blouse and the white lip of the cup. The same earl grey he was drinking, the same disgusting swill from the Ministry canteen.

“You can’t watch where you’re going?” The other woman said, yanking her child back away from the curly haired ministry witch. “You can’t even avoid a child?”

He watched the Earl Grey witch shrink away. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all you can say? Honestly.”

The Earl Grey witch looked away from the woman and towards the fountain, biting her lip, swallowing the words she intended to say. Corban decided there was one thing worse than being a stone at the bottom of the ocean of the Ministry, and that was to be the water. The Earl Grey Witch was water. Helpless group thinking bureaucrat, unable to do anything without the group pushing her through life. A single droplet without a face or personality, just a tea stained blouse and a silent mouth.

At least he sank to the bottom, perhaps she would be envious of his ability to sink at all. This made the corners of his mouth pull upwards. Perhaps there was something left of Corban Yaxley afterall. The ability to hit rock bottom was his and his alone.

The Earl Grey Witch turned towards the dingy fountain, she had two sickles and four knuts. Angrily, she threw it all into the algae fountain, the coins skittering across the slick green surface and hitting the stone before sinking.

She angrily swiped at her face, lipstick staining her fingers as she tried to clean herself off, it smeared across her face, Ministry Mauve he noted. The same drab color as all the other witches in the sea of the government. She was crying, and she stormed off, her tea sloshing over her hand as she chucked it in a bin that was already overflowing with other cups of the same type.

Perhaps he was wrong about Miss Earl Grey. Perhaps she had the ability to sink after all.

“She what?” Rodolphus was emptying an entire sugar packet into his cappuccino.

“She threw the change in the fountain.” Corban said, stirring his coffee, black with a dram of whisky, that he had snuck into this dingy restaurant near the very modest LeStrange residence that was purchased with some Tax Free Swiss Money Rodolphus had saved up.

It only had 11 bedrooms, and was a shame upon the name of LeStrange.

“So?”

“So she’s a rock, like me.”

“You watched a girl spill tea all over herself, get angry, and leave, and you believe you know her now?”

“I know what it’s like to meet another rock.” Corban said, leaning back against the worn velvet of the booth they were in. “There’s only a few of us in the world, and when you meet a rock, you know.”

“And you know this because she wasted some money in a park?” Rodolphus seemed nonplussed “Rabastan has been seeing a mind healer, I can give you a referral.”

“I thought she was water, all Ministry employees are either rocks or water, you either are part of the ocean or buried by it.”

“Ah yes,” A bell dinged somewhere in the restaurant signaling that someone had entered “I have heard this story a thousand times between the war and now, we have rocks, we have water and we have fish, and you were a fish.”

“I was a shark!”

“Oh by merlin , we are not having this insufferable conversation again.” Lucius said with a sigh as he summoned over a waitress before sitting down. “It is a Tuesday, Yaxley.”

“It is a Tuesday, and I’ve met a rock at the Ministry, is it not enough for me to have a spot of comradeship at the bottom?”

“You are only at the bottom because you choose the bottom.” Lucius waved him off as an annoyance “If you had paid the fine as we all did, then you would be free, as we all are.”

“Thirty percent of my assets or five years of public service? Lucius I thought you were good at money, doing nothing for five years and draining the system with long lunches and tea breaks is a much better deal.”

The waitress served Lucius a cappuccino as well, the same as Rodolphus, the two of them always got the same as the other. Same food, same houses, same sisters. Same smug expression when they paid their fine and he made the bad deal of five years at the Ministry.

“I am good at money, which is why the only thing I have to complain about is boredom, and you are complaining about where you stand in this delusional hierarchy.”

“You need a wife.” Rodolphus announced “A wife to distract you from this Ministry Lake.”

“It’s an ocean, and it’s not like the Black Family has any more girls to offer up, so I cannot get one from where you did.”

“What about Cecillia Zabini? Her last husband has unfortunately passed.” Rodolphus said “She is a beauty and she can give you an heir, is there more to life than this?”

“I’d rather you kill me outright than ask a woman to do it.”

“Women will kill us all in the end,” Lucius said, stirring his cappuccino next to him “It is a matter of what is the last thing you want to see before you die. This is why men choose Cecillia. They know their last moment alive will be her beautiful face as she strangles you with your own bedsheets. A man deserves a poetic death.”

“I am sure Narcissa will accommodate you.” Corban said, stirring his cup absentmindedly.

“And what of Miss Earl Grey? Can you see her killing you?” Rodolphus chimed in before Lucius could rise to Narcissa’s defense.

“If anyone was to kill me, it would be a Ministry employee.” Corban said before taking a sip of his coffee.

The whiskey burned all the way down, tearing through him, the bite of alcohol on the back of his throat was enough for now. 

The question being, would it be enough for the rest of his time here? Even alcohol seemed dulled at the bottom of the ocean. Even whiskey tastes like water at the bottom.

Miss Earl Grey took her tea precisely nine minutes after he did, and she always sat across from him, taking up as little space as possible in rundown public park that was 150 meters from one of the back entrances of the desk farm that he worked in. He was still in Law Enforcement, because of course, but he mostly filed away evidence and tagged it before sending it to archives.

She wore the same thing every day, except on Thursdays, where she wore a nicer blouse, and she would throw one knut into the fountain after she finished. Her eyes would flutter closed briefly as she held the knut in a white knuckled hand and then with a force she would slam it into the fountain.

On Tuesdays, on the day of the week he met her, she would stare into her paper cup trying to divine wisdom from it, shrinking even smaller if possible, her shoulders hunched and her head bowed over the steaming cup of a tea facsimile. Tuesdays, he decided, were the worst day to be a stone at the Ministry, because Tuesdays were also when he had to meet about his progress . Tuesdays he had to lie about his progress, because he had made none. No effort into reintigrating with society, no effort into amending his actions in the war, no effort at the Department of Law Enforcement. Ministry Mauve Tight Lips would write down his lack of progress every week, sternly looking him over like a school marm, trying to scare him into action by telling him who this report would be seen by, and yet it didn’t.

Tuesdays were tedious, and Tuesdays wore on stones like him and Miss Earl Grey. It was three Tuesdays in when he did a simple spell to clean the fountain before she arrived, muddy green turned to clear blue and grey as he sat and waited for her across the way, the smell of tea, the tiredness of another day to live through, the look on her face when the fountain was clean.

He took a sip of tea to hide his smile when she, instead of sitting by the bench trying to disappear, sat on the lip of the fountain instead. Her back to him as she placed one hand on the cold cement and every so often she would look around to see everyone else in the park, many employees were out here for a smoke, a chat, or a tea break. She never spoke to anyone, or brought anyone out here with her. She would drink her tea alone, often suffer alone, as rocks were wont to do. Today they suffered together, sitting at the bottom of this sea together, the oppressive pressure of a Tuesday ocean suffocating them in this dingy yard, stuck to the bottom by the weight of society alone.

She dropped a knut in the clear waters of the pond, and today he could see all her other donations, a small pile where she usually got up, copper sparkling on the bottom, cleaned accidentally when he charmed the water clean, when the water rippled it reflected off of the coins, and today he tool one of his knuts and gently placed it on top of her pile. Trying to put himself an Miss Earl Grey together, two knuts at the bottom of the fountain, his first meeting with her through dead metal alone. Cold and lifeless, it sank to the bottom to join her, atop a pile she made of money given by the Ministry and thus discarded.

“Scum.” A voice said, and he looked up, instinctively knowing it was addressed to him.

“Charmed.” Yaxley replied as another Ministry official passed by, his lip curling at the sight of an ex-Death Eater. Thickness was always aware of what side of bread was buttered, and Yaxley never quite liked butter.

And yet there was no scum left on the fountain. This was cleaned for Miss Earl Grey.

A name he repeated quietly every morning at 10:57am to the faceless tea cart woman when he ordered his respite from the ocean. “One Earl Grey.”

One Earl Grey for One Probationary Scum.

Did she know who he was? Or were they both anonymous grey rocks, settling to the bottom, waiting to be pulverized by the machine that employed them?

On Wednesday it became ritual, Miss Earl Grey would give her offerings to the fountain, and he would follow, hoping that their offerings would touch and their paths would cross.

After all, if metal could mingle, why couldn’t stone?

“She’s missing.” Corban bemoaned  at the pub two days later, on a Friday “She hasn’t shown up.”

“Who?”

“Earl Grey.”

“Oh for fucks sake.” Thoros Nott said, holding up two fingers for the bartender to come over and refill their pints “Rodolphus told me you had gone soft on some chit from the Ministry.”

“She is not some chit, she is Miss Earl Grey! She is my whole morning.”

“You’re hard up, mate. Do you need a girl? I have a few girls we can get for a few bits of metal.”

The thought of paying for sex with the same coins he offered up to Earl Grey made his stomach turn into knots. “No! What if something has seriously happened to her? What if she’s hurt?”

“She’s a bird with her own life, and you’re some pervert that spies on her during her tea time. You’re not a hero in this story Yaxley, you’re just a creep with a wild imagination.” Thoros said with a laugh. “You don’t even know her name and you’re worrying about her health? Start worrying about your own. Roddy said a mind healer wasn’t out of question, you’ve gone a bit queer since Antonin left for Russia.”

“Exiled to Russia.” He huffed and looked up at the shelves of whisky glimmering behind the bar “Miss Earl Grey is my friend, she’s not some bird.”

“Barmy.” Thoros Nott said, setting his pint down, half empty in one swig, with a thud. “You cannot call someone a friend without knowing her name. Do you even know what her job is? You work at the same place.”

“No.”

“Then what do you know?”

“She puts her money in the water.” Yaxley wheedled, trying to act like he knew more about her than he did. “She goes out on Fridays, and she is very punctual.”

“Amazing, I feel like I know her myself. She throws money away and she’s always on time for tea breaks.”

“She is always at tea, she never has missed one day. She is sad, and she is a small stone, and on Tuesdays she’s even smaller.” 

“Oh thank Merlin you showed up.” Thoros said to someone else and he looked up to see Rabastan who despite being timid himself, was always out drinking with Thoros who was the exact opposite “You have that private… friend that does the -” here he made a twirling motion at his forehead “give me the name.”

“I am not in need of private friends that do the-” Yaxley twirled his finger at his head “I am just worried about Miss Earl Grey.”

“Oh, you are still stalking her?” Rabastan queried in that soft voice he used that was guileless and yet incredibly cutting.

“It’s not stalking, she’s my friend.”

“Except she does not know she’s your friend.”

“Stones know other stones.” Yaxley turned to the bartender. “Three fingers of whisky, and don’t put any bloody ice in it.”

“Your brain has turned into a bloody stone.” Thoros said with a laugh “Get my friend a pint too, eh? Service around here has really gone to shit.”

Miss Earl Grey came back one week later, when October had finally turned on the calendar. She would curl herself small on Mondays too, a weathered stone that was getting battered about the ocean floor.

She had to sink to protect herself, and he wondered if she knew that.

He resolved on a Tuesday in mid-October to make his move on Miss Earl Grey.

“Excuse me,” He asked the woman who served his a swill of tea.

“Earl Grey.” She said gruffly and turned to a big copper drum that was filled with disgusting tea.

“There is a woman,” Yaxley said and cleared his throat and tried again with more confidence. “There is a curly haired woman who buys tea 9 minutes after me, I want to pay for hers.”

“Lots of women get tea here.”

“She buys earl grey, like me, every morning at 11:07” He insisted and slid over a few sickles “I want to pay for hers.”

“And what am I go’n tell her then? Some middle aged man is buying her drinks at work?”

“You can.” Yaxley said “You can tell her whatever you’d like, as long as you make sure she is not paying for this.”

The woman eyed the sickles and made a grunt as she served up his tea, sloshing it over the sides so it stained the lip of the cup. She pushed back two knuts. “Fine. No guarantee it will go to whatever bird you’re eying.”

“I have no doubt that it will, you’re a smart lady Agatha.”

“I don’t need compliments from scum like you.” The tea woman snapped suddenly angry at agreeing to this but Yaxley could not care less.

He sat on his usual bench, but this time instead of that malaise that settled over him like a bog, there was a giddiness. The knowledge that Miss Earl Grey would have her morning made by him and not even know it was him! She would come out here to the park, the dingy wet drab thing that it was, to a clean fountain with her free tea and wonder who was thinking about her. He waited for her timely arrival, and sure enough, in Ministry regimented grey she appeared with her tea and someone following her. A man with red hair.

“I am not coming to your house for Samhain, I am not going there at all.” She hissed under her breath, but it carried, and he was listening.

“Just because you’re not with me doesn’t mean my family doesn’t want you.” He had this kind of childish whine “Mum said you were allowed to come.”

“It’s been "no" for four years, and it will be No for five. I wish you would stop coming to my work.”

“It’s my work too.” He snarled, angry at the rejection. “Not everything is about you.”

“This is about me.” She said “This is about you never contacting me again. Grow up, Ron.”

This Ron whirled away from her, smacking the tea out of her hand and it clattered to the ground. Yaxley tensed when he saw his gift seep into the cobblestones around the fountain, the liquid pooling and steaming as the moss growing between the rocks swelled with his small act of kindness.

He got up to protest, to protect the other Ministry stone from whoever this Ron was and she turned towards him, separated by the fountain alone. The two of them stood now, facing eachother across the stone fountain. She was a great deal shorter than he was, even with her wild hair she did not reach his shoulders, and she had this ability to curl into herself for protection that made her seem even smaller. He noticed now that she was holding a knut between her thumb and forefinger, staring determinedly at the water beneath her.

She made her offering to the fountain and he decided to do the same, and when he fished out some change from his pocket to make sure to keep their metals together under the water of the fountain, friends in currency if not in real life, he counted out one knut and looked up to see her looking back at him.

Her head was tilted, the fingers that had held the coin were now under her chin as she regarded him and he decided there was only a few minutes where two stones could meet under the ocean before they were ripped callously away by the currents they could not control.

He gave his coin to the fountain as she had done and she offered him a smile.

“So you are wishing too?”

Oh, yes, he wished for a lot of things. The war to be different, his father to be different, his choice of slavery at the Ministry of Magic to be different. Did she know what it was like to be trapped in this misery? Could she see his misery the way he saw hers?

“For many things.”

She relaxed at this, like recognizing like. “Yes, me too.”

The two of them stood in silence and his eyes moved to her tea cup littering the ground. “Can I buy you a cup of tea?”

Her eyes regarded him warily for a moment, honeyed brown, tired and sad. “You’re here every day.”

He hummed in agreement. “My tea break is at eleven.”

“I know, mine too,” She turned back towards the Ministry building a drab grey thing with Roman columns, an empire swallowed by the bureaucracy of man.

He began to follow her into the canteen, and when he caught up to walk beside her she looked up at him “I think my tea break should be at ten thirty, eleven is too close to my noon lunch.”

“That’s the brilliance of eleven tea breaks, because eleven tea breaks turn into three hour lunches.”

“How can you get anything done?”

There was a lightness in his being when Miss Earl Grey was around because he offered her a wan smile. “There is much to learn about the Ministry of Magic.”

Despite being a rock, and despite working in the dregs of the Ministry, Lucius and Corban spent a great deal of time together. There was something to be said about the survivors of the Death Eater Trials, a trauma bond after moving through the system and arriving to the other side alive. Many of their old comrades could not say the same, and things were different once you survived, everything was tinged with the memories of Azkaban and the Wizengamot. They may have pronounced you free to go, but as Lucius and all the others knew, there would never be any freedom again.

They were currently playing wizard’s chess in a cafe just off Knockturn Alley. Lucius liked to sit in the very back, where the windows were visible but he was not, and was currently attempting to take one of his knights. “So you spoke to Miss Earl Grey?”

“I did.” Yaxley sounded pleased with himself. “She works as an arithmancer for the Department of Mysteries.”

“Is she a pebble or whatever?”

“Of course she’s a stone. I can always tell.”

“Did you tell her that she is a stone?”

“You can’t tell a girl you’ve just met that she is a stone. Right now, she thinks she is water. She thinks she’s a good little employee doing good employee things-”

“But you think she’s not.”

“I know she’s not.” Yaxley said using a pawn to knock over one of Lucius’ pawn. “I can tell when someone is sinking and I am there to meet them right at the bottom.”

“How romantic.” Lucius replied leaning back to survey the board, his tea left cold. “I can tell why you’ve never wed.”

“And I can tell why your father had to pick your wife for you.” Yaxley shot back.

“Better to have a wife than hope some pretty thing hits rock bottom to be with you.”

He had never taken a wife, and it was mostly due to the rumors surrounding himself and Antonin, at first it was because women did not fit into his goals, and at second it was because women didn’t want to fit into his goals. To work in the DMLE as an Auror meant long hours and you either married another Auror or not at all, and while he had the coveted head desk for a short period during the war, afterwards, he was given another desk and another title, this one undesirable to women for a different reason than the lack of intimacy.

Miss Earl Grey did not seem to know who he was, because she spoke to him, and not many people did anymore except those that already were fucked with him after the trials, or those that wanted to fuck with him and shout obscenities and slurs. The fall from grace hit some people harder than others, and Lucius, sober now, spent the two years before Scorpius was born in an opium den, trying to smoke the war out of his system, the brand off his arm, and the memories out of his mind.

Now Lucius sometimes grew very quiet during chess, lost in the memories of a dream that seemed so tangible it was reality, and Yaxley too grew quiet, aware of the horror that another day would bring, no curses or groveling, but the horror of decay at his desk surrounded by whitewashed walls and disgusting paperwork.

“Miss Earl Grey!” Yaxley had waited a bit now that they knew each other, well sort of knew each other. Well, he bought her tea…twice. “Fancy meeting you here.”

She had ink spots on her jawline, her eyes looked tired. “Oh! It is you again: the Wisher.”

“Can I pay for your tea?”

“You’ve paid before,” She gave herself a smile to the parchment “I will pay for us this time.”
She shifted the parchments to get to some beaded bag that was at her hip and then he watched them all tumble off of the shaky pile she had and clatter to the floor near her feet. He struggled to catch them, only managing to pick up two before they hit the ground and then they both were crouched down together gathering paperwork. Miss Earl Grey did not smell like tea, she smelled like fresh laundry hung to dry on a summer afternoon.

She looked up as he handed her back a cluster of her scrolls, and their eyes met briefly before they both looked down at their hands. “You should charm them.”

“I know.” She said with a sigh “I just-”

“Don’t care enough.” He offered.

She gave a small laugh “You know, then?”

“I do know.” He agreed. “How about tea?”

“Yes, I thought about…” She let the last word hang “I thought about what you said last time, about your lunches.”

“Yeah?” He handed over four sickles for two cups of tea.

“I was thinking, I could also perhaps take a long lunch.” She said slyly. “A working lunch of course.”

He handed her the paper cup filled with steaming earl grey, but then realized she had too many papers to carry and so instead he followed her as she walked outside on a blustery fall day. Her hair caught the wind, sometimes tied back, like today, and sometimes wild, as it was wont to do on Thursdays. She looked back at him over her shoulder to check if he was still there and he offered her a small smile. 

Miss Earl Grey took long stretches of silence as they sat together on Yaxley’s bench facing the fountain. She spoke as if she was afraid to speak, sometimes she would explain her work and then peter off. The way Miss Earl Grey communicated was like a match, she would burn bright briefly and then quickly turn to smoke.

“I like to hear about your work.” He said after the fourth time she abruptly stopped talking about some calculations she was running on financial waste coming out of a sketchy “defense” department. “So, let’s hear about your work!”

She turned to him, her cup half empty, scanning him over to see if he was lying. “Not many people care about my work, even my boss doesn’t care about my work.”

“Your boss is paid not to care about your work, they all are.” Yaxley waved this off “ You care, and I want to know about it.”

She licked her lips, pink and wet she seemed to clam up further, shrinking in on herself.

“Let me tell you about a theory I have,” Yaxley said changing the subject away from something about “About the ocean.”

“I thought you worked for the DMLE?” She queried.

“And because I work for the DMLE, I cannot talk about the ocean?”

She laughed at this “Of course.”

“There are three types of people who work here: sharks, water, and rocks. Bad people, psychopaths and the like, they are the sharks, they take advantage of the water, cut through it, and use it to get where they are going. Then there is water, they support the sharks, because they do not know they have the option not to, they never do anything at all but follow. They are necessary for the sharks, but the sharks never spare them one thought. Sharks don’t even know water is there.”

“And the rocks?”

“I am a rock.” He said proudly “I am at the very bottom. I am of no use to a shark, I cannot flow like water. I am nothing to no one, and in that, I am proud.”

“This is your ocean theory?”

“It is. What are your thoughts?”

“My thought is that I wanted to be a fish, but I got eaten up, and now I am at the bottom with you.” She looked at her cup “They hired me out of Hogwarts to help people, and I ended up helping no one and getting myself into loads of trouble for my challenging attitude and now I am not a fish, or a rock, or water. I’ve just gotten pushed further and further away after they chewed me up in the Wizengamot. I am just a skeleton.”

Yaxley tensed, realizing that perhaps it was too early to spring the rock theory on Miss Earl Grey.

“My friends all became sharks.” She said quietly.

“And you didn’t?”

“And I couldn’t.”

“Well,” Yaxley leaned back, trying to hide his discomfort. “Plenty of room for more friends amongst us rocks.”

“You would accept a failed fish?”

He nudged her ankle with his foot and she looked up. “There are no failures amongst rocks, no one has ever failed as a rock.”

“Are there others?”

“Well,” He thought about Lucius and Rodolphus, they were definitely sharks. Nott Sr was just a fuck up, and Rabastan was a bit touched. “Two is enough for now I think.”

She looked at him with a smile, tired eyes and yet she was endearing. Miss Earl Grey was a precious stone if he had ever seen one. She offered her hand and he took it, it was warm from the tea.

“I’m Hermione.”

“I’m Corban.”

“I know,” She said “I was at your trial.”

He was in Flourish & Blotts reading about Miss Earl Grey, Miss Hermione Granger, who he had, at one time, tried to kill by chasing her down the very halls of the same place they worked. After his trial, after he stopped caring about the news that often painted ludicrous pictures of the Death Eater Death Cult (with many graphic depictions of sex and blood rituals to which he was never invited), she had been given a prestigious position on the Department of Creature Welfare, which the Minister at the time had created specifically for her. Her fall from grace was slow, grindingly slow. She failed to get traction for werewolves, house elves, and others who needed her help. The Wizengamot would challenge her motions as unnecessary charity and a drain on tax funds, and slowly she was demoted again and again until she became a glorified dicto-quill for the Department of Mysteries.

Hermione Granger had divorced herself from the “Golden Trio” due to some love triangle according to this old version of the Daily Prophet, but he knew what the Potter child was up to. Next in line to be Minister, many people had one word for Harry Potter and it was not suitable for saying outside a pub. He was entitled to a fault, and would call people on their “debts” to him as the only one who had weathered the war. Ronald Weasley, another Weasley, was an auror that never went on assignments, or at least, if he did go on assignments, Yaxley never heard of them.

Today’s paper which was on the bottom of the pile depicted Ginerva Weasley and a litter of children under the headline Next First Lady? . This was not what his Miss Earl Grey was meant for, no fame, no children, no entitlement. Only matchlike conversations and the fear of being told once again she was taking up too much space.

He did not doubt that she would be eaten up by these people, and now that there was nothing left to take from her, they stepped on her, like they stepped on him. Rocks.

Miss Earl Grey was not meant to be stepped on.

He got angry at the thought of her being abused by these people, by the people like the redhead who he learned he also tried to kill (and unfortunately failed at killing, it didn’t seem like his life was worth much now.) He opened pages after pages of archival daily prophets to see her, to watch her sink away from the headlines, Post-War Princess turned into “Where is She Now?” pieces and even an insulting one that said after the tragic breakup she had fled the country. This one was dated when he was first put on probation after a lengthy trial.

His fingers ran over the photo of her, it was at one of those disgusting galas that the Ministry hosted now for every major holiday, a misuse of funds with lavish food, drink, and decor that definitely came from the re-appropriation of old money for new money. She was so pretty in her plain black dress, her hair pulled up and her eyes were looking at something off-frame. She clearly was uncomfortable to be photographed, one arm crossed over her thin frame, and on her other arm, that she was attempting to hide was MUDBLOOD in red angry letters. On the same arm that held his mark, which also had turned into red angry scarring.

The decay of Hermione Granger was well detailed by the Prophet. When she didn’t meet their expectations they began to destroy her. Her breakup with the redhead he did not kill, Ronald Weasley, began her downward spiral. The press ate her alive while he moved on from witch to witch. Her only value to the wizarding world clearly had come from her relation to this man, and his friend. Corban tapped his fingers on the last photo of the three of them, this one from the seventh anniversary of the “reformation”, she was standing awkwardly off to the side, and then the photo panned to Harry Potter taking the hand of the red headed girl who was the brother of the red headed boy. That in itself was suspect.

“Corban fucking Yaxley.”

He shut the book.

“Alastor.”

“Do you prefer that I call you sir ? Or Boss ?”

The table shook as the other man kicked it with one boot. He smelled vile, like alcohol and musty wool.

“I’d prefer you didn’t call me at all.” Yaxley said as he stood up quickly, pulling the book away from the table before Alastor could take a grab at it.

One of the things when he was first on the force was get Alastor fired for killing whoever he deemed necessary . It was on one of Yaxley’s first ride alongs that he saw Alastor Moody kill an innocent due to “bad blood” when it was discovered that the father had been on the wrong side of the war. The child was ten and Alastor had a laugh about Slytherin having another empty bed.

Yaxley’s stomach churned a bit at the sight of him, at the smell of him. Alastor Moody knew his wand was bound, and that made Yaxley an excellent punching bag for a drunken fool of an auror. He did not want trouble so close to the end date of his imprisonment at the Ministry, three months and after the turn of Yule, he was back to nothing.

The auror kicked the table again and he could hear the leg splintering and his eyes moved towards the proprietor who was now looking up from his book at the register to see what the commotion was about. Yaxley, not pressing his luck, moved back through the aisles of books to return the one he was reading to the shelves, but there was the chime of the door opening and shut and Alastor began to advance on him down the narrow corridor, the crazed auror’s jackets brushed against the shelves as he hobbled towards Yaxley.

Yaxley was not frightened so much as he was frustrated, before the Ministry put him on this probation the only decision he would have had to make in regards to this nutcase was whether to maim or kill, and now it was either run away like a coward, or make a stand like a fool. Another problem with the DMLE, and something that Yaxley himself took advantage of during his tenure of being the boss was that if you had a problem, there was no problem officially recorded.

“Corban!” A small female voice, that of his Miss Earl Grey.

The two men froze, like cats caught fighting and she had three books in her arms, her eyes were bright and then narrowed. “Professor Moody.”

“You know this piece of scum?”

“I do.” She said “And I also know what hasn’t been written in the records but is gossip around the office, Professor. However, I am not one of your buddies at work, and I know all about what you did to Draco Malfoy last summer, and I will file a formal complaint if you seek to repeat your actions in this bookstore. Mr. Flourish is in agreement.”

Alastor’s magical eye swirled around in irritation before fixating on her and Yaxley, for all that he could do, stepped in front of his line of vision. “Just leave.” She said re-shelving a book angrily “There’s nothing you could possibly want here.”

Corban’s eyes widened at the dig and he let out a snarl.

“Uppity bitch, I-”

“Get on then.” Yaxley barked, anger surging at the insult “I’ll choose Azkaban before you insult her again.”

“I promise you would n’er live that long.” Alastor whipped out his wand and then Miss Earl Grey, who was quiet as a mouse and apologized for living at work, whipped out her own, stepping in front of him, leveling him with her wand.

“What makes you so sure that you will be able to do anything about it, Professor?” She hissed, still mindful of the atmosphere of the bookstore. “Leave, or I will expose your dirty secrets about the children of the death eaters that have trumped up charges and the after effects of the cruciatus on their case files.”

This seemed to have an effect on Alastor because he shoved his wand in his pocket, shooting her another dirty look before hobbling out of the book store. He could see the proprietor, Mr. Flourish, relaxing at his register and turning back to his book.

She let out a shaky breath and turned back to the shelves, her shoulders tense, and he wished he could comfort her, or protect her from his former coworker, his former subordinate. She was so small, her hair curly and haphazardly pulled backwards away from her face. She wore navy robes even on her day off and she looked so unassuming. Yet, when push came to shove she was more dangerous than Bellatrix, with blackmail material that had even deterred the crazy Alastor Moody from his favorite pastime: torture.

Yaxley, at a loss of what to do, stood next to her silently as the hand that was grabbing the deep oak shelf relaxed and she leaned her head against the lip of it, trying to breathe easily. Quietly he spoke: “Would you like some tea?”

He took her to Lucius’ favorite cafe, a quiet spot that was far away from the crowds so that the Malfoy family, often hounded by the press, could enjoy some privacy while they ate. This privacy came at a price, and that was not listed on the menu, but she ordered tea, and a croissant, which she began to pick apart and eat like a bird in small pieces. No words passed between the two of them in the booth in the back of the cafe. She had three books: Unified Set Arithmancy, Reactive Agents in Neurosis Potions, Detective Dee . He smiled at the last one, a popular book series that he read a lot when he was younger.

Miss Earl Grey, or Miss Hermione Granger was comfortable to be with, in the silence she found comfort and eventually after half the pot of decent earl grey was gone she had relaxed and was beginning to read the inside cover page, torn between being rude and interested in her purchases.

“Read.” Yaxley said, calling the waiter over and asking for the paper. “There is no hurry this afternoon, my dove.”

“Does he do that often?” She said, looking up from the book she was shyly pretending not to read. “Terrorize you.”

“To the victors go the spoils.” Yaxley replied as the paper was laid down in front of him. Harry Potter was the headline again today for an opium bust in South London.

“How is it that we’ve made such a mess of things?” She huffed and finally, relented, cracking open the Artihmancy book on top of the pile “When I found out about what was happening to Daphne, I wanted to put something in writing to protect innocent children of Death Eaters from retaliation. How can house elves have more rights than people?”

Yaxley’s eyes went up from the headline. “I see now.”

Brown eyes met his “What?”

“Why they buried you.”

“Why?”

“Because you saw the truth of what it means to be the winners of the war. To write history, and to omit it too.”

“People choose to be blind, but I cannot.”

“You’re a smart girl, Miss Hermione.”

She gave him a wan smile: “Brightest Witch of Her Age.”

“A blessing, and a curse, I see.”

Chapter Text

Corban Yaxley could pinpoint the day his life changed because there is a moment when you become stuck, and when you become unstuck. Like a rat caught in a glue trap and gratefully freed, he too, was freed. He came down at his usual time to the tea cart, hoping to buy Hermione and himself tea before she came down for her break, only to find her waiting for him with two cups. A warm smile on her face, one he returned.

“Tea?” She asked, holding his out to him.

“Of course, my dove.” He replied and took the warm cup from her, bundling up as the two of them stepped out into the windy fall day, only to see that it was raining. The smokers were gathered under the overhangs of the Ministry building, a tiny porch with hard stone benches built into the architecture.

She sat down on a small ledge against the gray stone building, looking out over the rainy park that she usually spent her mornings in with him. His whole day now revolved around her, the build up to seeing her at eleven, and the painful long wait until eleven came around again.

He sat down with her, the ledge was so low that his knees came up to his chest, but she sat so close to him in this moment that he could feel how warm she was, their arms touched and she sipped her hot tea, steam tendrils rising and obscuring her features. He smiled looking at the ink spots on her jaw, always on the same side of her face where she must rest her chin on her hand while thinking. He reached over and rubbed it off, the ink streaking under his touch.

She turned to look at him, startled and then her cheeks grew red with embarrassment. “More ink?”

“Always ink.” He commented, continuing to wipe it off her face.

“It gets on my fingers, and I always forget.” She said sheepishly, but even so, she tilted her head to allow him more access. “Gone?”

The rain pitter pattered on the stone sidewalks around them, there was the smell of tobacco and wet leaves in the air, and he realized he loved her. He stroked her jawline carefully before stopping, afraid to scare her with his affections. “Gone.”

“I’d be a mess without you,” She said, taking a sip of her tea “Us rocks have to stick together.”

Hermione would complain a lot about Arithmancy, of which he did not know, but she would get incredibly animated as she spoke about this, her matchstick conversation style was turning into candlelight, bright and long lasting. Instead of starting and then stopping, trying to find something they shared in common (which he found oftentimes incredibly boring and forced), she now would speak about frustrations she had with something called Determinancy which was a new branch of Arithmancy that used something called a Set.

It was during this conversation where she was explaining a wizard named Russell’s Paradox, that he realized he was going to have to start applying for a job, after the new year turned, which was now less than seventy days away, he would no longer have a position. His probation completed and therefore his time with Hermione would come to a close. 

“I think I am going to publish my findings directly.” She said quietly and his plans of trying to find a job at the Ministry were interrupted.

“How will you do that?”

“I don’t know, I obviously need some funding, to submit to a journal is no small cost, and I have to create a larger study…” She trailed off, back to matchstick conversation, afraid of her own wants.

“How much? A million galleons?”

“Oh, heavens no!” She laughed “It is arithmancy not potions making, but it is a dangerous proposition. It will mean you can now determine the outcome of conflicts and games, even the election most likely.”

“I will fund it.”

“You are on a Ministry salary as I am.”

“I am not paid to be here, my dove, I am punished to be here. If it is a million galleons, fine, if it is ten million galleons-” Here he gave her a devilish smile “Also fine, but perhaps my father will spin in his grave.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Nonsense, if you will not let me fund it, I will make one of my friends fund it secretly, so let us cut out the games and give you what you need.”

“You know,” She looked down at her tea, her eyes bright. “This is what I wished for the day we met, that I would be able to be a real Arthimancer and finally finish my mastery. What did you wish for?”
The first answer, the truth, was that he wished for her.

“Oh, my dove, I wished that I could meet a real arithmancer.”

She nudged him with a laugh “You’re ridiculous.”

“So?” He asked with a smile “Are you going to make my dream come true?”

She ho-hummed on this, taking a sip of her tea, before nodding. “Ok, I will do my best for you.”

“The mudblood.” Rodolphus almost choked on his coffee the next day, a Tuesday. “Your Miss Early Great is a mudblood.”

“Miss Earl Grey is Miss Hermione Granger, and I won’t have you disparage her at the table, not after what she’s done after the war.”

“Oh yes,” Rabastan tapped on the table, a nervous tick. “Creature welfare and…pissing off Harry Potter with that scandal.”

“What scandal?”

“Roddy you never read the paper.” Rabastan said with a sigh, annoyed with his older brother. “She tried to pass some legislation…Anti-Discrimination or Anti…Retaliation. Some big word to basically say “Stop fucking with people associated with Death Eaters, the war is over.” It really put a bee in Potter’s bonnet, that was when Daphne Greengrass was tortured to half insanity because she was…well an “overreach” of the DMLE.”

“Yes! Lucius was really in a way, they thought Daphne was Astoria, Draco’s wife.” Rodolphus said, understanding dawning. “And the mud- Sorry, Yax, Early Greta-”

“Earl Grey”

“Miss Earl Grey was branded a blood traitor. I remember this now.”

“Self hating mudblood,” Rabastan recalled quietly “She was in France with Draco and his wife for a few months because of the threats or something, I saw her there quite often 4 or 5 years ago, but it must have subsided if she’s back at the Ministry.”

“Threats?” Yaxley said, alarmed.

“You only know your real friends when the world is against you.” Rabastan said sagely, and then went back to drinking his Italian soda, a bright green thing that contrasted with how he often tried to pass himself off as a hermit scholar. “It looks like your tea partner doesn’t have many left.”

“Well, she has me.”

“If she did right by Draco, then I guess I’ll be friends with tea chit.” Rodolphus said magnanimously

“Hermione, and I have rejected your offer of friendship, Rodolphus.”

Rodolphus kicked him under the table. “You’re a real bother, Yax, I don’t know why I even talk to you.”

“Because you only have two friends left on this island, Lucius, and myself.” Yaxley raised his tea cup and clinked it against Rodolphus’ mug of cappuccino. Cheers to being the last option left alive.”

“What of Lucius?”

“Isn’t he the first option?”

“What about me?” Lucius asked as he shrugged off his robes, handing them to the waiter.

“Hermione fucking Granger.” Rodolphus said, taking a sip of his cappuccino.

Lucius had this sinister smile, often it would make people who he did business with tense up, knowing a predator had caught his prey, but this smile to his old friends was I told you so .

“Miss Earl Grey, I told you so Rabastan, pay up.”

“Lucius!” Rodolphus cried, affronted.

“I said I am busy.” She hissed to someone he could not see.

Corban started walking faster towards her. She was stuck at the doorway of the canteen, tensed up

“And you don’t have to pretend to be busy if you just apologize.”

“I am not apologizing for what’s right, leave me alone.”

“Hermione?” Corban queried, stepping through the door into the main hall where she was.

When Hermione was upset, she hid it from people, and the only way she hid it from people was to shrink as small as possible away from them, trying to blend in with her surroundings as she avoided the conflict. She took a step back, her shoulders hunched, a protective stance, one arm across her waist, trying to prevent herself from violence.

His fingers rested on the middle of her back, stopping her, and then his hand flat against her spine. He looked up to see a surprised redhead, the man she had a confrontation with last time.

“Who’re you?” It came out in one breath, Ron seemed irritated that he even had to ask.

Hermione’s spine became ramrod straight, bracing for impact, but Yaxley bent down and ignored him “Are you ready for tea?”

She looked up, surprised. “Of course, it’s eleven.”

“Hey!” Ron shouted, his voice echoing off the walls “Is this some bloke you’re seeing?”

“I am not apologizing, and I am not continuing this conversation.” She said stubbornly “I don’t want to be seen with you Ronald Weasley, and I don’t want to go to your house for Samhain at all.” She shifted slightly so she was facing more towards Yaxley, it was these small things that Hermione did that he would think about for hours at his desk in the afternoon.

Sometimes, when one of them handed tea to the others, their fingers would touch, and she wouldn’t flinch away from him, but linger a few seconds while the paper cups traded hands. Even this small turn of her body, seeking comfort and protection would play out in a thousand more dramatic ways in his dreams at night. His Hermione.

The two of them turned away from Ron to enter the cafeteria, he kept his hand on her back, guiding her away, offering what comfort he could under the guise of friend when she was jerked back to a stop.

Yaxley turned his head back to see a red headed speckled hand on his Hermione’s wrist. “You’re being a stubborn cow about this, ‘Mione.”

A lot of people attributed the body count of Yaxley in his time in the war to the tutelage of Lord Voldemort himself, but there was no more deadlier training ground than the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

The hand in the middle of Hermione’s back grabbed onto Ron’s wrist and began to squeeze, the small bones in the wrist trying to rearrange under the pressure until there was a sharp breath of air.

“Oy!” Ron yelped, trying to let go of her wrist and pull away from Yaxley

“We haven’t met before,” Yaxley said, leaning close to him “I’m Corban.”

Hermione now free, took one step, then two, before disappearing into the next room.

“Corban bloody who ?”

“Corban fucking Yaxley, and we’re late to tea.”

Ronald Weasley recoiled as if the touch of a Death Eater burned, but Yaxley already decided to leave before he could sputter any sort of response, out of the empty hallway and into the crowded canteen, where Hermione was already in line.

“I am sorry,” She said quietly, without turning back to him, her head bowed in shame. “Obviously you know who he is, but not who he has become.”

“It doesn’t matter who he is or what he is, he obviously is annoying you.”

She let out a breath of laughter and then looked up at him. “Usually people are afraid of mouthing off to the Weasleys at the Ministry these days. There are rumors that Arthur has a direct line to the Minster.”

“And Harry Potter doesn't?”

She made a non-committal humming noise and shuffled a bit closer to him, he looked up from counting the freckles on her nose to see what she was shuffling away from. 

Ronald Weasley had brought two aurors down to the canteen with him and the were cutting up to the front of the tea line, he shot Hermione a dirty look and mouthed to her Later which was so exaggerated, he might as well have shouted it but she huffed and turned back to Yaxley as if she hadn’t seen him at all

He paid for tea today and she let out a sigh as they stepped into the park.

“We were supposed to end up together,” She said, standing in front of the wishing fountain and throwing another bit of change into it angrily. “I didn’t want to end up together. I don’t want people to tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing. I don’t want to be someone’s duty, I want to be someone’s choice.”

“Understandable.”

She looked up from the clean water in the fountain, a carpet of change underwater from her previous offerings. “Did you ever marry?”

“No time, and when I finally had time, I was not very desirable .”

She snorted “I keep finding time to not be around people too.”

“On purpose?”

“Of course, look at my choices of company. I either have Harry and Ron trying to shack me up with Ron and Ron’s family, Draco and Astoria fawning over me like a broken bird, or Ginny trying to get me to forgive Ron. It’s easier to pretend that my mastery is taking up my free time when the reality is no one will publish my work after what I did with Daphne. If I am not published, I will never get my mastery, not one British journal will take me.”

He handed her a knut and she tossed it in the water.

“If the Determinacy experiment works out, then it would be negligent to not publish me.”

 “What are you doing for Samhain?”

“Busy.”

“Oh.”

Hermione had a sense of humor that was only seen in her eyes, they would crinkle up slightly, searching his eyes briefly before she delivered her next line, usually a scathing, cutting remark. Her eyes slid sideways to the bench they usually sat on, before a smile spread across her face.

“ We’re busy.”

“We’re busy?” He asked with a laugh “Since when are we busy on Saturdays.”

“Well, I am sure between now and Saturday you will know what we are doing on Samhain. We can come up with something.”

It was of course, something that Yaxley would note, that on October 25th, Hermione started referring to them as we .

“Well?”

“Well what? Take her to Horatio’s and buy her the most expensive bottle of champagne, get the price fixe dinner and wait for her to fall in your lap.” Lucius said as the two of them perused the wine cellar of a boutique sommelier off Knockturn. He was currently looking at a bottle of fairy wine from the 18th century as if he could determine the taste from the label alone.

“She’s not the kind of girl to go for that sort of stuff. She is a smart girl.”

“Smart girls can’t taste expensive champagne?”

“Smart girls don’t care that it is expensive.” Yaxley stressed “and it’s not like she said it was a date, it’s just so she can say she’s busy to all her friends. We’re not like that.”

“Do you want to seduce her, or not?” Lucius said, reshelving the wine.

“I don’t want to look like I am seducing her.”

Lucius pulled out another bottle of wine. “Then L'Arpège in Wiltshire, if she doesn’t know what it is, she won’t know what you are trying to do.”

“She’s friends with your son.”

“But not until after he was married, so he wouldn’t have tried L’Arpège. World class service and secrecy in a hole in the wall.” Lucius took the lull in the conversation to wave over the sommelier and hand him a bottle of 19th century Merlot.

“Stop pulling your hair back so tightly.”

“It’s practical.” Yaxley said, suddenly, indescribably vain. “She’s never complained.”

“Narcissa says my hair is the only reason she married me, and take this.” He handed him another eye-wateringly expensive sauvignon blanc “Give to Gabriel for the table. If she tastes this and does not fall in love with you. She will fall in love with your waiter instead for bringing it to her.”

“Only 400 galleons.”

“You cannot put a price tag on romance.” Lucius ho-hummed.

“Is it easy to say that when your wife spends a Ministry salary in an afternoon.”

“Some of the things she buys on a Ministry salary are worth more than that when I see her in them.” Lucius pulled down another bottle of wine and handed it to the waiting sommelier. “Who knows, Corban, perhaps you will feel the same way with Miss Earl Grey.”

He wrote to Antonin two days before he was to see Hermione for their “busy night” of Samhain. He did not tell her to dress nicely, despite the price-fixed menu at L’Arpege costing a week of her salary per person. He called ahead and made sure that they knew that it wasn’t a date but two friends, one friend who thought about the other friend almost constantly, and knew how many times she fidgeted when her boss was mentioned, or how she tried to hide her smile when they were in public.

He didn’t know quite how to describe Hermione to Antonin in a way that didn’t seem like he was trying to emulate Byron. To describe her was to speak poetry and so he settled for something that was short and sweet.

Antonin,

This Samhain, I will be with another. She says we will be busy together, but I do not think she knows how I feel about her. Everytime we meet, I feel lighter, and I am thinking to extend my time in this prison just to take tea with her every day. She likes Earl Grey and throwing her money into water. Write back when you can, as I cannot wait to hear you call me a fool.

Cheers,

Yaxley

For some reason he could not really put pen to paper when it came to his dove. Her hair curled like wild ivy down her back, and when she wore her dark burgundy robes they hugged her figure and he wished to have it immortalized in marble. She was sly in a way that came from hiding her true nature for so long, and sometimes even he was surprised at her mischievousness. When she was cold she would lean towards him, their arms and thighs touching. She existed to be admired by him, and for every fault he could find only virtue in them, a perfect madonna at the Ministry.

He sat at his table alone in Yaxley Hall, playing with his empty whiskey glass whilst thinking of her, the murmur of portraits the only background noise and tried to picture her walking from room to room in this mausoleum that was left to him. Could she breathe life back into this museum of antiquities the way she had managed to breathe life back into him?

He idealized her, perhaps, but a man needed something to idealize, and if there was anything to idealize, it would be Hermione as she was now, a bright flame that he nurtured with attention and tea, protection and company. Every day together she grew a little brighter.

After all, a rock needs company.

She had dressed nicely, in a tight black dress that flared out a bit at her hips, her hair pinned up a bit sloppily but in an endearing way that made her real and not the faux perfection that Narcissa often entreated at dinner parties. She was fidgeting, nervous as she was, while waiting for him at the apparition point for the small hamlet of Dauntsey. She hadn’t seen him yet, he was six meters away sitting on the ledge of a concrete planter.

She walked around the apparition point twice and kept saying things like: “Nice to meet you?” and “It’s a beautiful Samhain.” In different pitches, and emotions.

She fidgeted with her hair while she did this, finally pulling out enough curls that it didn’t seem like it was an updo anymore, and then, frustrated after her second circle, she tried to redo the updo to be even more haphazard.

He approached her after her third turn about the statue that served as the apparition point with a smile.

“It’s beautiful to me-…your hair!” She said, shocked.

He had, in a fit of vanity, followed Lucius advice and unbraided his long hair, but that left it a crinkled mess that kind of went everywhere. It reminded him of hers and hoped that the look wasn’t some kind of vain recapture of his youth where he often looked like Lucius. The DMLE of course told him to cut it or braid it, and he kind of forgot about it for a long while. At her comment he started to pull it back away from his face, riotous waves of cornsilk blonde hair were a little much for a not date.

“It suits you.” She said with a smile, finally stepping close to him, small inky fingers tugging gently at one strand which went taut and then relaxed when she released.

“You think so?” He asked as the two of them began walking.

“This is the true Corban, not the one I see at the Ministry, all buttoned up and trying to file the 20th report for illegal possession of mind altering potions .” She teased.

He rolled his eyes “We shouldn’t even enforce that, it is just a pile of paperwork.”

“You would be out of a job if they didn’t enforce it.” She said as they fell into step together, down cobblestone streets, a few people milled about, going hither and thither to get last minute items for their own Samhain parties.

“I hope to be out of a job soon, then I can join my friends in being professional layabouts.” Corban placed his hand on her lower back to turn her down the lane where L’Arpege was.

“That is when?” She asked, and his hand lingered as they walked.’

“After Yule.”

“I really will be happy that you will be done with your probation, and yet it will be incredibly lonely in the mornings.”

“Sorry, my dove, I am going into sponsorship after Yule, and I have a promising first scholar who needs my help.”

She nudged him with her shoulder “It’s not necessary, and I have a proposal, since I have been trying to get funded for the last step of the mastery for…four years.” The last words were said with venom “Since before Daphne was cursed into insanity by the DMLE.”

“No need to worry about that tonight, my dove. It is Samhain, and we are busy.”

The darkness that passed over her face brightened up “Do you want to see the proposal?”

“I propose that we do not talk about things like proposals, or the Ministry, but only things you wish to talk about tonight.” He pulled open the door for her “This is our night, after all.”

“You will want to see a proposal though, Corban.”

“I will not.”

“Absurd, how will you know what you are sponsoring?”

“I don’t sponsor a “what”. I sponsor a “who”. Come along now, Hermione, I have heard good things about the wine here.”

Because he had purchased three bottles of wine, a red, a white, a champagne. Unsure of what Hermione would order, or what she preferred. After the afternoon at the sommelier that Lucius favored Corban had winced at the total while his friend told him what a “good deal” he was getting on his future wife by starting a first date so cheaply.

She sat down across from him, her cheeks tinged pink and very little makeup, but his Hermione at night had a different air about her, this freedom from the ground the Ministry stood on freed her as well, and in the isolated booth of this restaurant that only could seat twelve at a time her smiles flowed freely and her brown eyes sparkled. 

“What was it like when you went to Hogwarts?” She asked, in her second glass of white wine between the third and the fourth course “Mine was miserable.”

“I do not think someone has left Hogwarts with their time not being miserable.” He replied twirling the stem of his wine glass “If you thought Dumbledore was blind to what was going on, Dippet was blind and deaf.”

She rolled her eyes at the comparison, but he continued. “I didn’t care much for school, I already knew what was going to happen after I left, so it didn’t seem like there was much of a point to trying too hard when I was going to be shoved into the family profession, Bernard, my father, was head of the DMLE while I was in school, and my grandfather had retired from the head of the DMLE before that. Yaxley is the name of law and order, or was the name of Law and Order for quite a long time, going a hundred years or more back.”

“Did you want to be an auror?”

“Does anyone?” He said as their plates were served before them.

“Plenty.”

“Fools then. You are signing up to sacrifice yourself to any political game the current Minister has going on, no better than being under the imperius curse, at least with the imperius curse you can reason that it is not really your will. When you are an auror, you make the choice every day to obey.”

“And yet you were head of the DMLE during the war, when we met the first time.”

He froze at the mention, hoping she forgot, or would not bring it up.

“I am an idealist, love.” He said, his eyes flicking up to hers, she had her fork in her mouth, savoring the taste, and the conversation. “I think everyone who gets to the Head of the DMLE is before they sit down the first day. There is no difference between an auror and the head auror. You have no more power as one or the other, except you are one step removed from getting blood on your hands, instead, it is soulless paperwork.”

She regarded him, in that way that she regarded all strangers, where she was trying to discern their true intentions. “Would you return?”

“Fuck no.”

She smiled around her next bite.

“You must have discovered this too, in your crusade against the DMLE.”

“A lot of money disappears into the DMLE, they are expensive puppets.” She said tapping her plate with her fork thoughtfully “They are a black box. I might as well feed my budget calculations into a shredder. No one really knows what is going on inside that department.”

“Because there is no one watching the DMLE.”

“Because they want no one watching the DMLE.” She corrected. “No eyes, no ears, no questions.”

“Quite clever of you, Hermione.”

She hummed in agreement, “That’s why they have imprisoned me.”

“I know.” He said simply “We’re simply cell mates passing the time until they execute us or we die.”

“But, Corban,” She said, picking up her wine and leaning close, her head on her hand as their eyes met. “Rocks cannot die.”

He picked up his glass “To eternity together.”

She blushed prettily.

Their glasses clinked.

While he had pledged his life to his Miss Earl Grey on Saturday, on Monday he was nervous to see her again. However, Hermione was like clockwork, coming in now exactly at eleven, when he arrived after skivving off a bit early to get to the canteen. She wore his favorite set of her work robes, the burgundy dress that clung to her hips and the small of her waist. She smiled every time she saw him. He was starting to believe there was something to what Lucius had said a few months prior. If he was given the choice of anything to see before he died, it would be Hermione’s face.

She handed him a stack of paperwork. “This is my project proposal.”

He waved her off. “I don’t need to see this, let me just write the check and see your name published in some expensive journal at Flourish & Blotts.”

“At least read it.” She teased as the two of them got in line. “Pretend like you are not just throwing money away on me.”

“What do you believe will be cheaper, my dove, tea for the two of us for a year, or your project?” He waved the paper at her “Hurry up and choose, I will only tell Gringotts to fund one.”

She stepped closer to him “This tea or?”

“Tea that doesn’t make you gag if it gets too cold.”

“That is impossible at the Ministry of Magic, my project will actually be attainable.” She pointed at the title “Deterimancy with Practical Applications, review it!”

He would review it, despite not knowing much about arithmancy, if only to have something more to talk about with her. He had already applied to a few low level positions around the Ministry last week, but with the final say on his probation not until mid-December, he doubted there would be much traction. While they stood in line he read over the synopsis, at first due to genuine interest, and then because when people stepped forward and the line moved, she would touch his arm.

“You really think there will be results before March?” He asked, reading over her timeline as they edged closer. “I was expecting years.”

“Most of the project was funded, but the results are…dangerous to say the least, it is why no one will go through with the rest.”

“Dangerous as in lose-your-life dangerous?”

“No,” She laughed, waving it off as absurd “As in change the course of history dangerous.”

This seemed a bit absurd, as arithmancy was only for budgets and making money create more money, or curses to be less cursed. However, he flipped the pages back into order there was a commotion in the canteen. He looked up, and then around to see that Harry Potter had made an appearance.

Harry Potter was also an auror, but he had his own squad in the aurory that was only dispatched for special investigations. These often ended up nowhere with no evidence. Just like Ronald Weasley, nothing ever came to evidence tagging, and often many people did not come out alive. Colloquially, Potter’s squad was called the “Dark Ops” because if he was assigned to your case, everything around it would go dark, just like your future.

He tapped the stack of papers on his hand and looked over at Hermione who was trying to disappear behind him, and he stepped just so that she was completely hidden. He could feel her forehead resting between his shoulder blades, a hand on the lower part of his back, twisting into his robes, and just as Harry Potter came through the canteen, he left, obviously looking for the girl that was hidden behind him.

“It’s not that I hate Harry, and I don’t.” She said as they sat on the bench together, she was almost tucked into his side, her eyes would move from her tea to the door. “It’s just that he is not the same as he was at Hogwarts.”

“He is an auror.”

“It’s not even that, he’s not Harry Potter. He’s Harry Potter .” She emphasized his name “So many people have given him everything that he isn’t aware that he isn’t owed everything. Kingsley created that division for Ron and Harry because it made good publicity, but it’s become a murder squad with no oversight. The boy who lived has become the boy who will be the last to see you alive. I’ve heard it all.”

“But surely you are not at risk.” Yaxley said as she blew on her coffee.

“Oh no, I am never at risk, but he thinks I owe him something, all the time, they all do.” Her voice grew quiet “I didn’t marry Ron, so I have become a villain that needs to get back into their good graces. If I am the bad guy for realizing that I didn’t want a cock that’d been in four other women before I got home, then fine.”

“Ridiculous.” He huffed.

“They come around, the three of them, and tag team this guilt trip, it must be an aurory technique. Ron came on Friday as a last chance to get out of this haranguing that they will do now for all of November until I relent for an awkward Yule.”

“You’re busy for Yule.”

“I am?”

“We’re busy for Yule.”

The way her face grew red, and happiness eased over her features, the worry from Harry Potter replaced with the idea of spending time with him.

“We are busy,” She agreed, sitting back smugly. “I am terribly busy all Yule holiday, boxing day, even for New Years, and of course I have a date for the Ministry New Years Gala.”

“You do?”

“We do.” She insisted “Unless that was-”

“We do.” 

Lucius once told Corban, very drunk on a Saturday night, when things were going to shit during the war, that he would have done anything that Narcissa asked, walked through fire, swam to the bottom of the ocean, scaled the alps in nothing but a three piece suit and loafers. However, he could not figure a way out of the war that could preserve them, and it was her that he suffered for.

“To be married is to know that your only goal is to serve your wife’s happiness, whether by money or by means.” Lucius was unable to open another bottle of firewhiskey as he gave this wise advice, struggling to open a cap that was no longer there. “To fail means that you are neither a man, nor deserving. Remember this when you trick a woman into your bed, fuck why won’t this open?”

“Have you been to one of the galas before? I’ve always had to go.” She asked, pulling him from his thoughts.

“I am not often on the guest list these days, but I have been before, I promise.”

“And you know how to dance?”

“Yes.”

“Oh good, because I don’t. It’s always in the papers.”

“I believe, my dove, that if you take me to this gala with you, you will be in the papers anyways.”

She licked her lips and smiled to herself. Mischievous eyes darted to meet his, and then she got up and tossed a knut in the fountain. She quickly reseated herself, picking up her tea again and looking at the fountain.

“What was that about?”

“I wished that you would have your hair down for the gala.”

He laughed.

“Do not waste your wishes on my hair, Hermione, it will be down if you like.”

Rodolphus, Rabastan, and Lucius all were taking turns on the project proposal that Hermione had given him at dinner on a Friday later. Lucius would read a page and then handed it to Rodolphus, who then handed it to Rabastan.

“It seems sound, the timelines are all correct, and it looks as if the bulk of the work was done four or five years ago, and it got hung up due to lack of funding, she details this here. Funding pulled due to political climate around discovery. ” Lucius showed the paper to Yaxley, pointing to some impossibly fine print at the bottom of the fourth page.

“What political climate could there be around arithmancy? It’s just numbers.”

“This was cut when Daphne was cursed.” Lucius said as he handed the paper off “I remember because Draco’s wife was pregnant at the time. Daphne was also getting her mastery. There was quite a shake up about it.”

“It looks all to be in order, Yax.” Rodolphus said as he picked up his cappuccino to take another sip while he read it. “If you weren’t funding this, I would be. It says here that given enough inputs, there is an 82.333% chance of predicting the correct outcomes. That means if you give your Miss Earl Grey enough information about a business, she’ll be able to determine if it’s going to fail or not. Her uses here are so benign ‘determining Ministry strategy’ and ‘deciding on medical trials’ but it’s really a limitless idea.”

Rabastan was scribbling in the margins of the paper with a quill, checking over the proof of work that was done on page sixteen. When the younger LeStrange spoke it was into the papers. “The calculations are sound, she is right, 80% chance of determining the outcome based on strategy alone.”

“What does she do at the Ministry?” Lucius asked as he flipped over another page.

“Budgets.”

Lucius coughed “Incredible, it’d be like putting Severus as a groundskeeper. She is not a master?”

“She said her mastery was denied twice, due to lack of publishing, or something like that.”

Lucius put his chin in his hand as he read another page that was riddled with calculations, summations down the page with no notes. “This is dangerous arithmancy. The question is: do you think the Ministry turned her into an accountant because of the Retaliation Laws that she proposed, or because of this?”

“How can it be dangerous? She said it was dangerous but-”

“This is to see the future. Crimes before they are committed, elections before they are won. Divination with no Seers.” Lucius continued “You can determine people’s lives before they are lived.”

“Is she safe now?”

“That’s the puzzling thing, isn’t it?” Rodolphus said, signaling the waiter over to bring more drinks for the table “If the Ministry knew about this and was blocking it, wouldn’t they be using it now? In this proposal she shows almost everything she has. However, they have just buried her down into budgets, hoping she would never see the light of day. I don’t think the Ministry knows yet, no, but they might.”

“How much is she asking?”

“3,000 galleons to conduct three trials and to pay for the publishers fee.”

“I’ll give her Thirty.” Lucius countered.

“Thirty Galleons?”

“Thirty Thousand.”

“For the math?”

“Tell her to quit her ridiculous job at the Ministry and finish her mastery, Yaxley. Miss Earl Grey has a way to predict the future, and if she has a way to predict the future, then it means we can change the future in our favor by doing one thing or another. Determinacy can make every wish you have come true.”

“I’ll match it.” Rodolphus insisted “Lucius is right.”

“I’m not having you fuck ups around her if you are just planning to use her as some get rich quick scheme.” Yaxley countered “She wants to be an arithmancer, not a genie.”

Rabastan shook his head even as he continued to check her calculations. “You may have discovered a genie, Yaxley, but if we don’t bring her to us, the Ministry is going to find out eventually. She cannot publish this while she is employed there. It is their intellectual property, and therefore they can use it to determine elections, or rig laws. If she quits, then we can decide what to do with this, if it works, but it’s looking promising.”

“Will she become an arithmancer?” Yaxley insisted “I want her to get her mastery.”

“That,” Rabastan said looking up from the paper he was scribbling on. “Is a given.”

“Thirty thousand each?”

They all agreed.

That night, in his library at home, the weekend after he got the project proposal he began to pull down books on arithmancy that he could brush up on to talk to Hermione about. He was not Rabastan, who had four masteries in various fields, none of which had any grounding in skill or reality, but only that the LeStrange name paid for masters to pretend to care. He picked up the book and grimaced. 

Hermione looked at the check, and looked at him, she was huddled up against his side on the bench, it was a cold November morning and she was lamenting the idea of going inside for tea in the winter before he handed the check.

“This is so large, Corban.” She whispered. “This is not what I asked for.”

“This is not what I intended to give.” He said “But I spoke to some of my friends about it, and they told me something about Ministry laws and intellectual property.”

She seemed to chew this over for a moment “Right.”

“That if you publish this paper than the knowledge is owned by the Ministry and my friends are not keen on the Ministry owning this.”
“Does this money come with strings?” She said turning the paper over, there was no contract.

“The string is that you will quit the Ministry before you publish so that the rights over the discovery are yours.” He braced himself for her rejection.

“Malfoy?”

“And others.”

She pursed her lips, considering it. “When do I have to quit by?”

The next response was selfish. Yaxley was a selfish man, to be so close to something so perfect and to lament it’s departure. “If you have no objections, we could quit together when my probation ends after Yule.”

Hermione was often a surprising and delightful little creature, because unlike many he knew, her emotions played out on her face, each thought process seemed to flow like ticker tape through her eyes, and yet even though he felt like he could read her, she would say something completely unexpected.

“I don’t want to be here anymore if you are gone.” She said quietly folding up the check “Your friends are right, the Ministry would own the discovery, but I feel like I have no other choice.”

And that is the tribulations of being a rock and being a rock for so long that you think you are worthless. His fingers, both timid and cold reached out and played with one errant curl, to try and comfort her without becoming overbearing. Rocks didn’t know that the world relied on them to be there. Her curl wrapped around his finger and she let out a shuddering sigh.

“Why would they give me this money?”

Yaxley pushed the hair back away from her face gently before releasing it. “I agree with them in principle, if the Ministry owns it, they could possibly block you from getting your mastery. However, my dove, that will most likely be their string.”

“To not give it to the Ministry?”

“To not give it to the Ministry,” He insisted. “Even though, and I have read that you outline several applications for the Ministry here, including streamlining government processes.”

“You believe it is dangerous?”

“Yes, I can see this being used as a weapon for the courts, and for the DMLE.”

She grew very quiet.

“Corban?”

“Yes, my dove.”

“Should we prove this at all?”

“It is proven already, it is in this paperwork, and Rabastan-”

“Rabastan LeStrange?”

“Yes, he is also an arithmancer, or got someone to claim he is an arithmancer, and he says it is sound. You are not meant to be a stone with me at the Ministry, you are meant for great things, and it is obvious to everyone with eyes and a working brain.”

She looked frantic. “Then I don’t want to do it.”

“What?” He asked, alarmed that he offended her in some way, his hand went to her leg, holding her still “Of course you must do it! Is it because the money is from Lucius and the LeStranges? You do not have to meet them. I can give you the funds, no strings attached.”

She did not respond for awhile, the tea growing cold in his free hand, a wind blowing her hair every so often that it would brush against his cheek. Panic beat in his ears as he tried to regulate his breathing. Maybe he should not have shown her proposal to Lucius and Rodolphus after all, he just wanted some deeper understanding of what he needed to do to get her what she wanted. To give her something that would bring her closer to him, be it tea, or a mastery, or protection from her friends (albeit not much protection until Yule.)

“I do not want to do something that means we cannot be together.” She said into the paper cup of tea, not daring to look at him. “You were the first person who has looked at me and spoken to me as if I am real for years at this stupid place. If doing this means we cannot have tea every morning, then I would rather not.”

He coughed on her admission, his throat closing up. “You would give up your mastery so we can have elevenses?”

“I don’t have anything else.” She admitted, her voice watery. “Right now, I don’t have any friends or family, my cat died last year, and everyone who knew me treats me like a criminal. All I have right now are elevenses.”

A long pause between the two of them, Yaxley unsure of what to say to his importance to something that he gave all importance to, and his Miss Earl Grey seemed to be trying to find composure.

Whispered words almost swallowed by the bubbling of the fountain nearby: “I am a failure.”

Gloved fingers came under her chin, bloodshot brown eyes met his, and panic mixed with anger surged through him. “Listen to me, Miss Hermione Bloody Granger is not a failure, and I will give you a million galleons and elevenses, noon lunches, late breakfasts, early dinners, midnight snacks, or whatever you desire, as long as you realize that you have much more than elevenses with me.”

Her eyes searched his, and they closed, two tears tracking down her face. “How did I get this?”

“This building is made to destroy people. It’s not you in particular, it’s everyone, if you are not a cog, you get eaten up and fall to the bottom of the machine.”

She shook her head.

“Someone like you.”

The fingers under her chin pushed her hair back away from her face to prevent it from getting wet. She was pretty even when she cried. “You had to fall to the bottom of the machine, it’s the only way out. All the best people are on the bottom.”

“You?”

“Us.”

Chapter Text

She was stabbing at some pasta for an Italian place that she favored on Tuesdays. She called it “eating her feelings” and he was used to their strange schedule by now, as they have now been tea friends for six weeks. Every day they would meet at eleven, a race to see who could get to the register and pay for the tea first. On Tuesdays, they were both horribly depressed and would take a long lunch at a small hole in the wall. On Thursdays, she would spend part of their tea hour, and part of his lunch hour at Flourish & Blotts. On Fridays, she always wanted to hit a pub and get something incredibly unhealthy like fish and chips.

“My dove,” Her eyes went up to him immediately. “What are you up to on Friday?”

“We are going to the pub for lunch, and then I will get a horrible amount of work to do over the weekend. This of course I will try to cram in on Friday night, so I can pretend like I will use my weekend days for some kind of freedom.”

He licked his lips. It had been two weeks since Samhain. “Are you up to dinner again? And perhaps you could help me pick something out to match you for the gala?”

“Oh!” Her eyes went down to her plate, indicating that he had asked a question she had not thought of ahead of time. She was thinking now, her eyes tracing the spaghetti on her plate. “Yes, but I haven’t picked anything either.”

He had, of course, picked no less than seven fabrics to have tailored to him depending on her choices, of which, in typical Hermione style, would not notice. These seven choices picked out by a team of both Lucius and Rodolphus on a rainy Sunday directly after she had mentioned they would go to the gala together, were ready to be picked up, but he was hoping that Hermione would be able to pick which .

“Well, if I have not picked anything, and you have not picked anything, we can pick something together?”

“Do you know much about style?” She asked, twirling her spaghetti around her fork “I have been wearing the same dress for four years, and the papers have noticed. They think I am poor, but Ginny told me that one looked the best on me back from before we fell out, and I don’t know much about robes.”

Yaxley did not know anything about style, but he had enough funds and enough friends to figure out both.

“Stones stick together.” He reiterated their motto “We can find something.”

She flashed him an uneasy smile “Something with a high neckline, to hide the curse scar, and long sleeves, to hide the other curse scar.”

He licked his lips, his eyes falling down to where she touched absentmindedly, underneath her dress. He never noticed but she had always worn high necked dresses. It lent to her prim and proper Ministry Witch lock.

“Everyone knows about the one on my arm, Bellatrix of course had to find some infamy, but the one on my chest is from a man named Antonin Dolohov, and I’d rather not give him infamy.”

His blood went cold as ice.

“Antonin cursed you?”

She nodded, like this was as simple as discussing the rainy weather. “When I was fifteen at the Department of Mysteries.” She took another bite of her pasta, her brow furrowing in annoyance. “Department of Mysteries can’t even balance a bloody budget. More of my blood has been spilled over their expenditures this year than when I was cursed there.”

Yaxley bowed his head, looking at his hands holding the silverware. He had always known simple truths about Hermione. She was on the opposite side of the war, and yet she had compassion for the Death Eaters that had escaped the persecution of the Wizengamot. She was a mudblo-muggleborn, and yet she cherished the culture of Wizarding Britain. She was brilliant despite her heritage, and kind despite her time at the war. And yet, a part of him, a large part of him, was blind to her time in the war, where she was a child soldier for Albus Dumbledore.

Antonin was incredibly fearsome in a duel, even Yaxley didn’t duel him after a certain age because it was like asking for punishment. He would never become an auror because it was an insult to his abilities, and only a cursebreaker because he thought it was the closest thing to dueling magic itself. Yet, his fragile little dove sat across from him, eating pasta and drinking water (as she never drank during the week), the victor of a battle Yaxley himself could not have won. A victor against his best friend since he was eleven. A victor against the exiled man that Yaxley was most bitter about even now. Without Antonin in his life, he had become bereft, and now, he had filled it with his best friend’s enemy.

It was not as if there was a slim chance to meet an enemy of Antonin Dolohov, there are a thousand of them by now.

“Do you know him?”

“I do.”

“Well?”

He could hear the unasked question: are you friends with the man that attempted to murder me? And yet he could not lie to her, his rescuer, his Miss Earl Grey.

“Very.”

In usual Hermione fashion, she did not react as he expected. “Do not worry yourself sick, Corban. After all, I know what Harry has done to you. It would be hypocritical to have grudges for that which was done during wartime.”

She was referring to his arrest, that had happened two years after the war had ended, and after he was excused from charges. After all, when he had followed the Dark Lord he did not do much but run the DMLE as the Minister wanted. At the time, the Minister was merely a puppet, but all crimes committed by the DMLE were inadmissible because the DMLE did not keep records. It still didn’t. Yaxley was well aware he was living on a technicality, and technicalities ended up being razor thin edges.

Edges that Aurors can cut you with.

“Corban?” She asked, concerned. “Do you think I am angry with you?”

“No, I was just thinking.”

“Bad memories?”

“Every memory seems to lead to now.” He said as he withdrew his wallet, only to see that Hermione had already paid “And every time I look away, you seem to be paying for this and that!”

She bit her lip, trying to suppress a smile “I don’t want you to feel like you owe me anything, not after you are paying for my research.”

“At least you owe me some dignity of letting me pay for your lunch, the waitress probably thinks you’re taking pity on some vagabond.”

“In those robes? You don’t fool me anymore.” She rolled her eyes as the waitress came back with a receipt.

When Yaxley was arrested by Harry Potter he was held under the cruciatus for, as the reports said: two and a half minutes. He couldn’t remember (because losing one’s memories are always the side effects of the curse) who exactly cursed him, but he did remember the pain. Later, Daphne Greengrass would be tortured to insanity by being held under the cruciatius for three minutes and fourty five seconds after an earlier bout of the curse twenty minutes prior that only lasted for one minute. Insanity for Yaxley was seconds away, and he missed it.

Alastor Moody had explained when he was a new auror that cruciatus was the most effective tool to interrogate a suspect, not because they would crack under pressure, but their body would be tricked into thinking it was dying and memory would leak out, which you could then capture. In one of his first interrogations against a soldier of Grindelwald’s, far after that war had ended, Moody used the cruciatus on a suspect.

The suspect, a man of near fifty, looked at Yaxley, brown wide eyes, pleading with him. And so Yaxley stupidly thought he could save the man his torture if he retrieved the memories via legillimency, but stupidly forgot, as a boy of 21 would, that when you enter the mind of someone under torture, you also experience their torture. Yaxley never made the mistake twice, and he never cast the cruciatus once.

Death Eaters in the early days consisted of aurory, their fathers were soldiers in the war against Grindelwald and the DMLE was the closest thing to fulfilling their father’s war stories, and it was these war stories that were the last thing that Yaxley remembered before he woke up in an interrogation room with the Boy Who Lived.

Possession of a Dark Object, Intent to Harm and Befuddle Muggles, and Collusion with Known Enemies of the State. They had said it so many times while his thoughts, scattered like cockroaches when light was shown on them, attempted to order themselves back into some kind of working function. Harry Potter was an intimidating auror, he was well over six foot two and you could see your reflection in his glasses: sweaty, bleeding, and desperate.

Afraid of what would happen if they had also come out of the woodwork to defend him, his friends wrote to him near constantly, frantic to get him help without being seen themselves, Lucius must have hired six separate barristers, on the continent and off to help him put together a case. The charge of “Collusion” hung over his head, there was no way to prove that he wasn’t colluding, and the Ministry could easily make up some evidence that he was. The cadre of barristers often argued on how best to prove or disprove the collusion, but besides the barristers he sat alone in the deepest bowels of the Ministry, waiting to die, by accident or by the law.

He had tried and testified at many cases, but there was something more sinister in the room that day when he was put on the chair for the stand. It seemed as if everyone had turned out to see yet another Death Eater hang, and he could not see if any of his friends, polyjuiced or not, had turned up in the crowd. 

And then, by sheer luck, the evidence that was supposed to be filed for his case could not be found. The barrister pushed for a mistrial, but the Wizengamot thought it was justice to make him sort and file all evidence for the DMLE for the next five years.

Whatever they had on collusion was gone, and he was spared the kiss. His lawyers told him that it was the DMLE’s shoddy record keeping that allowed them to get away with so much, but the DMLE now had a record keeper.

On Friday morning, before he was going to meet his Hermione, he walked to file some evidence away and out of curiosity, and perhaps because his time at the Ministry was coming to a close, he decided to check what evidence was stored under his name.

Y was stored far far back in the evidence locker, a seemingly endless warehouse of shelves and boxes. The further back he went, the less prying eyes, and then his fingers tripped over his own name: Corban, Yaxley.

His box contained only one piece of parchment in it: “Audit.”

He flipped it over to see if there was more information, but nothing, just red, loopy text, a neat clean hand that he had probably seen a thousand times during his time at the Ministry as the head. The audit team only came when you were in serious trouble.

He never thought that a regulatory audit would save him, which meant that whatever evidence of collusion they had was missed in his first trial after the war and was in his Ministry Paper Trail as Department Head.

However, audits often took upwards of five years to complete, which means if they were looking into stuff from his tenure, they would be looking for him next.

Hermione seemed nervous when they met on Diagon Alley that evening, despite spending only four to five hours apart from their usual Fish and Chips Fridays. The alley was packed as always on Friday nights, clumps of people going to dinner or drinks. It was already dark and the oil lamps gave her a warm glow. She gave him a smile when he appeared from the apparition point, his hair down instead of in its usual braid, leather gloves on his hands, dark black robes that were subtly finer than what he wore at the Ministry.

Sometimes he felt like seducing her was like coaxing a deer from the wood.

“Good evening my dove, are you cold?”

“No! I have not been shopping in many years, and now I am here shopping now!” She said, stepping closer to him, getting out of the churn of the crowd. He put his arm around her to protect her from people bumping into her, not touching, not yet, but close.

“Let’s get out of these crowds and go up to the Upper West Side, my tailor is there and maybe we may find you something as well.”

Narcissa told him very pointedly last weekend over dinner at Malfoy Manor that if he bought Hermione something from a high street shop that he was not welcome for dinner again. She gave a referral card of no less than three luxury stores on the Upper West Side of Diagon Alley, and made sure they would have time for him and Hermione to browse.

“They do not have prices, and you will not let her pay.” Narcissa warned, fond of Hermione since she had helped Daphne and Lucius had relayed the entire saga of Miss Earl Grey to his wife. “While the Malfoys are no longer welcome at that gaudy gala, I do remember what it was like. It is no wonder the press are eating her alive.”

They stepped into his tailor and the two of them sat down on a brown leather couch that was in front of the large shop windows. Corban studied the two of them together in the fitting mirror, noticing that Hermione was staring over at the fabric swatches at the wall, her button nose and full lips well defined in her silhouette, a petite figure next to him that then turned to look at him, a silent confirmation that he was still with her.

His eyes were still drawn to the portrait of them in the mirror. In the shop it was as if the mirror or erised was laid out before him. His little dove beside him, comfortable at Yaxley Hall, a book in her hand, a dog at their feet, and she would ask him what he wanted for dinner, and he would simply say her .

A portly wizard came out with a rack of dress robes behind him, all suits that Yaxley had made this week before Hermione even was asked. “Mr. Yaxley, let’s find something that will suit you in the Daily Prophet next month, mmm?”

Hermione was playing with the fabric swatch book, turning each swatch over and then comparing it with what was on the rack.

She paused at a black fabric that had celtic runes brocaded in black, the subtlety was one of Yaxley’s favorites. “You must be a regular, Corban.”

“Caught again.” He said getting up and inspecting each suit before holding it up “What do you think of the grey?”

She shook her head.

“It must be black.”

The tailor took three sets of robes off the rack and Yaxley picked up the first black set, velvet and silk, and went to go change.

He tried to pinpoint what in particular he loved about Hermione while he changed, hanging up his work robes and beginning to undress. She was pretty, but not overwhelming, and her beauty is not what he admired about her. She had this familiarity with him that he did not encounter before in another. Like they had met in a thousand lives before this one, and he had known her in each one. She fit into his life seamlessly, there was not a point before Hermione that he wished to remember, because it must have been very difficult to live indeed.

He slid on the pants first and wondered how he could be thinking about the rest of his life with her when they hadn’t even been out on one official date, but there was really no other option for him anymore. He had to make things work with her, even if it was friendship, even if it was just colleagues.

He buttoned up the shirt and the vest quickly, stressing himself out with imagined scenarios where she would not be part of his life, and then finally when he stepped out of the changing room, he had convinced himself that she would be gone.

She was sitting on the oversized brown leather couch by herself, the store empty, the tailor waiting for him by the mirrors. Her eyes lit up when she saw him.

“It does look good, but it makes you look like Draco’s father, don’t you think?”

Draco’s father picked out this set. Yaxley could kill Lucius for his gaudy taste at this moment.

“Yes, Mr. Malfoy is a patron as well, Miss.” The tailor seemed to think that this was a compliment.

“Yes, this seems like his type of place.” She said politely before standing up and beginning to feel each of the robes, rubbing the fabric between her forefinger and thumb. “This one is soft.”

“Cashmere.” The tailor offered helpfully.

“My dove, do you care about looks, or about how it feels?”

“The feeling.”

“Then I will take the cashmere and wool set.” Yaxley said.

“But I want to see you try it on.” She said, biting her lip as she played with it.

He picked it off the rack, preening at her interest in him at a suit store of all things, and went back into the changing room, carefully undressing and redressing in the cashmere robes and wool suit.

Perhaps one of his favorite memories of the last five years was when Hermione stood next to him, three mirrors around them and she threaded her arm through his, holding her own robes as they stood on the small wooden platform in the cramped tailor’s shop.

“Mr. Yaxley, who is your companion this evening?” She asked in a mock interview.

“This is Miss Earl Grey, she is an expert on all teas at the canteen, and only has the finest taste for the worst teas Britain has on offer.”

She laughed.

Hermione was standing in front of the rack at Mistress Gloucester with her finger on her lips. She seemed uneasy, pacing back and forth trying to pick something off a rack while an entire team of sales associates waited patiently for the biggest fish that they would get today. A referral client from Lady Malfoy was unheard of in these post-war times, and yet with Lady Malfoy as their biggest customer, they cleared the calendar for Hermione.

She had, of course, been the referral client at three other high end boutiques, and had left all of them without trying anything on.

“Miss, if you will take to the platform here, we can make suggestions as to what would suit you.” The manager, Mistress Gloucester herself, was pleading with his Hermione who was trying to decide between six different black dresses.

“What do you think, Corban?”

He had never been shopping with any woman before, but Lucius had prepped him on everything he needed to know: “We can buy all of them.”
She shot him a dirty look over his shoulder. “I don’t know if I want even one of them.”

“My dove, you cannot know if you like something when it is just hanging there. It’s got no life in it, try one on and see if you change your mind.”

All the sales associates gave him a grateful look when she dutifully when from the rack on the far wall to a raised white podium, much sleeker than the one in his tailor’s shop, it was a white circle that raised up from the floor, mirrors floating around like a carousel.

Mistress Gloucester tugged on Hermione’s robes and she was instantly in a flowing glittering nude and gold gown that was woven with starlight. It shimmered as the mirrors passed between her and Yaxley. She looked like an angel, in a plunging neckline and tight silk that bunched up and fell into every dip and curve of her body. Raphael would weep. She made a gasp and held her hands to her chest, attempting to cover an angry red scar that was reaching up to her collarbone.

“It has to be full coverage.” She squawked, curling into herself to try and hide, bending her knees as she bent over. “High collar.”

Mistress Gloucester pulled on the silk and it was replaced by a striking white wool dress with long sleeves and a high collar, and as one mirror passed behind her, while it was full coverage on the front, it was backless, the dress only beginning at the swell of her rear, tapering down into a skirt that ended at her ankles.

He would dream of her often in this dress over the next few weeks, even as she turned around on the white platform trying to inspect herself, he was not sure if he was truly living a life or a dream with her in it. Would she look like this if they wed?

She was salvation in a dress shop on a dark Friday night in November, and salvation looked over at him, a timid smile on her face as she looked for his approval. Shoes were added, then costume jewelry, and then a matching cashmere cloak.

They must have known he was a fool for her, because he easily paid the 6,000 galleons, and if he was there any longer, he would have bought out the shop.

As they looked at a menu together posted on a restaurant a little ways down the street she looked up at him. “How much do I owe you?”

He waved it off “However much I owe you for paying for lunch on Tuesday.”

“Corban, that shop was the Mistress of Gloucester, Ginny told me she had to wait four months to get an appointment and that was years ago, and that was Mrs. Potter . I can’t imagine it’s gotten any better.”

“And yet you had to wait only until Friday.” He said before changing the subject. He tapped on the menu that was underneath some lit glass on the side of the brick building. “French cuisine or no?”

“Not French again? I feel like when we go out we only ever eat French food.” She said as they walked down the lamplit street, she was swinging the bag from the boutique as she walked, head tilted upwards to the sky. “I could really go for a pizza.”

Over the next week at the Ministry he started to try and find evidence of the audit in the evidence room, not wanting to raise suspicion but also concerned that the audit team was going to come for him and he would be callously torn away from his Hermione. He got lucky twice, but he was sure that his luck was going to start to run out.

He tried to think of everything that had happened six years ago at the end of the war. Towards the end, with that Umbridge woman roaming around like a feral cat, things had gotten hazy. He hadn’t embezzled any money, remembering that this often would get heads in trouble, and instead scheduled a blackmail bonus scheme with the Minster. He was pretending to file away a cursed comb for three hours this morning as he sifted through Lucius’ multiple evidence boxes. He had been charged and tried for many different charges, considered the white whale of the DMLE currently because to take down Malfoy would take down the figurehead of the Death Eaters, and similarly, case files related to his last two cases: bribery, and coercion of an elected official had empty folders, both had the same scrap of paper, marked audit .

Lucius and Corban worked closely during the reign of the Dark Lord within the Ministry, keeping things flowing without raising widespread panic that the Minister was merely a puppet. So there was a chance that Lucius played “fixer” and screwed up something for the both of them five years down the line. If the audit was still running through his trials it must have been quite a large audit of things that had happened during the Dark Lord’s reign, and he had not caught wind of it during his time here so it was classified. Would Hermione know? Could he ask her something like this? She seemed to know quite a lot about the goings ons around the office despite being a glorified accountant.

By the time he was done re-boxing Lucius’ evidence it was a few minutes before eleven and he rushed to meet Hermione in the hall, and stopped short when he saw her with Harry Potter who was holding the Daily Prophet in his hand and shaking it at her.

He would hiss a word at her and she would step back, but he would only step forward, offering a smile to those that passed, his eyes darkening as his attention was drawn back towards her. Corban approached the two of them slowly.

“What are you thinking? Are you mad?”

“What business is it of yours Harry Potter?” She hissed quietly “I am not your wife, I am not your friend. Leave me alone.”

“Hermione Granger will always be synonymous with Harry Potter, you will always be my business.”

Corban reached her, fingers on her back for reassurance. She needn’t back up anymore, because he was here. “Is there an issue?”

Harry Potter was frightening, not because of who he was but what he was at the Ministry, a man with unchecked power and slavering fans that could never say no. Hermione was not one of those fans, and it seemed to drive Potter absolutely insane.

“You.” Potter hissed. “Yaxley, aren’t you stepping a little above your station to try and sleep with my best friend?”

Hermione made an offended noise and tried to move back away from Harry, but Yaxley’s hand stopped her. “Tell me Potter, do you think the Prophet would like to know how you think you own your best friend?”

“If you get the press involved, Glasgow is going to look like a love potion.”

“Harry James Potter.” Hermione said, not caring how loud she was in the hallway outside of the canteen. “I am not one of your Ministry cronies, and I do not stand by while you threaten others. Speak to Corban again like that and I will remind you who got you through the war, and it wasn’t the Ministry of fucking Magic.”

It was because of Hermione’s shrill voice that people started to take notice of who was in the hallway, whispers and points as they passed the great Harry Potter who tried to put on his persona for others, a warm smile, unassuming eyes. He was after all, in the running for the Minister's seat and couldn't be seen in altercations. He shoved the paper at Hermione, but Yaxley was faster, catching the paper and his hand before it got to her.

“I expect to see you at the Burrow this weekend for Bill’s birthday.”

“Then you will be waiting.” She said, looking down at the crumpled up prophet that was now in Yaxley’s hand. “Because I will never go back to the Weasleys.”

“They are your family, and you should apologize.”

“They are your family, they are not mine.”

Harry’s green eyes cut to Yaxley who glared right back. “Don’t think your probationary officer won-”

“And don’t think the Minister won’t hear about it if you decide to retaliate.” Hermione cut him off.

“It’s always about retaliation with you.” He said snidely “Don’t think I forgot.”

“I hope you won’t forget,” She replied, tilting her head up “For every action you do Harry Potter, there is someone who will hold you accountable, someone who isn’t afraid of your name. You are no savior to me, and for as long as I am alive, I will not let you do what you did again.”

Enough people had stopped to see the two heroes of the wizarding war outside the canteen that Harry Potter no longer could continue the conversation without rumors and so he schooled his features and pushed past Hermione, his robes billowing behind him.

Yaxley checked her over to make sure she was ok, but she was staring at the far wall, her breathing heavy. He looked down at the paper in his hands, and there was a photo of the two of them, a paparazzi shot through a pizza shop window, she was toasting his slice of pizza with her own, laughing as she tried to eat a long string of melted cheese off her own slice.

It seemed a shame that the image was crinkled, her smile was priceless. This image was not front page news, buried in the society pages as a has-been war hero. The byline: Heroine Hermione Granger dines with disgraced DMLE Head Corban Yaxley. It seemed to put them in such stark contrast with each other. To be observed by the public and to watch them eat her apart for their association made his stomach twist inside out. He felt unworthy of her friendship, and doubly so for desiring her because of her kindness. His eyes traced over the words Disgraced DMLE Head. Is that all he was anymore outside of this building?

It was too cold today for his dove to sit outside, so she sat in the far corner of the canteen near the dish washers, his thoughts rhythmically interrupted by the clanging of cups and plates and silverware as they were washed. Hermione stared into her tea cup, divining from it.

“It’s ok,” She said finally, looking up at him “If you don’t want to be with me after this.”

The Daily Prophet was a wall between them.

“Draco tried to be friends with me too, after Daphne was cursed, but he was torn to pieces, Astoria couldn’t take the paparazzi hounding her, and so we just…we write. We can also write to each other. I have a lot of pen friends.”

He twisted the paper cup in his hands, sitting across from her.

“I will tell you this only once, my dove,” He said quietly. “There is nothing on this earth or the next that will come between us, not paparazzi, not Harry Potter, nothing . We are two of a kind, two stones that the Ministry has tried and failed to grind into dust.” A gloved hand came and brushed against her knuckles in subtle reassurance “Draco Malfoy is inconvenienced when the tailor runs out of specific gold buttons, I am not Draco Malfoy.”

“The gala will be worse.” She said glumly “It always is.”

“It will not matter because we are together.” He reassured. “By definition we must be together, right?”

“Of course.” She said with a sigh, her eyes meeting his for some sign that he was telling the truth. “Some days are just so hard.”

Yaxley was not sure what was more interesting, this manufactured isolation of Hermione Granger, or that it seemed to be perpetuated from the DMLE itself. This gave him something to go on, but he had little ways of friends in the department. After all, who cared that Corban Yaxley used to be part of the DMLE, when he was a Death Eater?

Narcissa, Lucius, Draco, and Astoria had dinner with himself and the LeStranges, Scorpius who was now 4 years old and running around behind a house elf and shouting every so often in another room would come in and out of the dining hall. Every time he did this, a small smile would play at Lucius’ lips.

“Yes,” Draco confirmed Hermione's story “They were positively predatory, that Creevy boy in particular would sleep outside the townhome every night in a little tent and wait for Astoria to come out and snap photos. It was a terror.”

“And then you lost your job at the Ministry.”

“Yes, there was a complaint about “hostile working conditions” written by my superior, some nobody who was always social climbing, it mattered little, I was only there to move that bill through the pipeline in order to decrease taxation on potion supplies for the company.” Draco waved his fork around. “However, Granger said that it was all due to her, and when I left the Ministry we never saw each other again. I've told you once Father: The Ministry is the new Azkaban.”

“Hermione writes.” Astoria offered helpfully “She writes on Sundays. She is a dear friend, but she is not… We are not able to see her. I think she thinks it is her fault somehow, what happened to Daphne.”

“It’s not.” Draco said quickly.

“It’s not, but Daphne was working in the same library as Hermione for her mastery in charms.” Astoria pointed out “You know that Hermione thinks that there was a mix up.”

“A mix up?” Yaxley asked, looking up from his plate.

“Yeah, Hermione liked to spend time in a certain study room in the library, but Daphne was in it when she was cursed by the DMLE. Hermione was out for the week at a conference.”

“It was never documented.” Lucius scowled. “It still was never documented.”

Rodolphus tapped his fork on the plate “So you’re telling me, that Miss Earl Grey, has had her mastery blocked, has been isolated from everyone who has attempted to make contact with her, and also Astoria’s sister has been tortured in a place where Miss Earl Grey usually is and no one thinks it is a bit suspicious?”

“You obviously do.” Yaxley replied.

“You said that the Potter boy tried to scare you off today too?” Rodolphus pointed his fork that had one pea stuck to one of the tines on it at Yaxley “ You don’t think this isn’t a bit suspicious?”

Yaxley stabbed at his peas “There are two things that are a bit suspicious, someone has been looking into our time at the Ministry, yes Lucius, our , and someone does not want anyone to know about Hermione.”

Lucius looked startled at this claim.

“But you will know.” Rabastan said helpfully beside him.

“I will know.” Yaxley insisted “And I will stop it.”

“Your Miss Earl Grey is much more than some Ministry accountant,” Rodolphus mused as he picked up the bottle of wine on the table, pouring himself another glass of red “The question is what is she?”

“It is a bit strange,” mused Draco’s young wife as she broke bread “That the brightest witch of our age is completely isolated and completely buried.”

Yaxley hadn’t thought of it this way. Hermione was incredibly smart, he knew this of course from spending time with her almost every day for weeks, but he thought that she had just been chewed up by the machine, as most people are in the Ministry of Magic. Astoria was right, Hermione was a war heroine, incredibly beautiful, and if her proposal was to believed, probably one of the most gifted arithmancers to grace Britain. However, she had been shunted this way and that after she tried to pass the Retaliation Laws four years back.

Later, after dinner, Astoria, a fine fragile pureblood if there was any, stopped him on his way out. In the large marble foyer, the two of them were illuminated only by the thin beam of light that fell out of the open door of the dining hall. “I know Hermione blames herself, but if I hadn’t married Draco, Daphne never would have been targeted. She sacrificed her entire career to get justice for my sister, and all I can do is write letters with Draco.” She looked away from him, attempting to regain some composure “I am a coward, we all are here, but you will tell her, right? To stop punishing herself for what that auror Weasley did to my sister?”

“Of course.” Yaxley replied, shrugging on his outer robes.

Her hand laid on his arm, perfectly manicured fingers. Her voice dropped to a murmur, her eyes looking at her hand. “And be careful, no one will say it in there, but I will say it to you. It is dangerous to be seen with Hermione, not just the paparazzi, the threats come later, and you know as well as I do what position we are in after the fall of the Dark Lord.”

“What threats?”

“You’ll get them soon, and the DMLE won’t protect people like us.”

“Astoria-”

“Draco didn’t want me to say anything, but I want you to be prepared.”

Yaxley had a million questions but he knew that Astoria had been raised to be the perfect pureblood society wife. This was as much information as he was going to get out of her, and he was surprised that Astoria had even disagreed with Draco enough to confide in him about it. Pureblood couples were always a united front. Whatever had happened to Draco and Astoria during their brief public friendship must have scared Astoria enough to break with the traditions and spill her secrets in the Malfoy Foyer.

Yaxley patted her hand “I understand.”

He left Malfoy Manor that night, his head full of questions about the life Hermione led before they met. She seemed so unassuming, an arithmancer that had been all but forgotten. However, the more he looked into her, the more it seemed like forgetting about Hermione Granger was someone’s wish, and not a coincidence.

He found the written recordings of the failed Retaliation Bill in the Wizengamot Library on Monday afternoon, using the excuse that he needed to look up the case number to file a particular piece of evidence. His eyes scanned the page.

“Miss Hermione Granger, the Ministry’s shining star of efficiency and proficiency , is here to propose a bill.” Minister Kingsley opened the session “The Retaliation Laws that would limit the reach of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement in trials concerning Death Eaters that have found innocent and children of Death Eaters.”

“Thank you Minister.”

“And what would a schoolgirl know about law?” Henry Gamp the IV asked.

“I have seen the result of the lack of laws in the Janus Thickey Ward at Saint Mungo's, Mr. Gamp, have you?”

“This is not how we propose bills here, young lady.” Elphias Doge chastised. “I guess Hogwarts has really fallen off since Dumbledore kicked the bucket.”

“Due to overreach by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, I propose that in the case of those who have been found innocent by the Wizengamot, and those who are related to criminals that there be additional investigations by an impartial department to make sure that the aurory-”

“Silence!”

“That the aurory has used the minimum amount of force necessary in order to carry out their duties safely!”

“You will tie the hands of the wizards that protect our community and let Death Eaters run roughshod over the peace we have fought hard to gain?” Augusta Longbottom asked.

“I will not, and I am more than aware of what I have fought for, Mrs. Longbottom. I am asking that we behave better than Death Eaters. The Janus Thickey Ward says we have become worse than the Death Eaters, as the DMLE has cursed four people beyond repair this year alone.”

“The Ministry is about Law and Order, do you believe that we should allow criminals to roam free? We have kept the peace because those who would do harm are afraid of the consequences. Without consequences, you can have no civil society.” Griselda Marchbanks countered “It is nice to have idealism, Miss Granger, but we are faced the reality of criminals every day at the Ministry.”

“Because you are turning good men into criminals at the DMLE? With no oversight, there is no way to find out if the DMLE is acting on behalf of the public or on behalf of their grudges? We need oversight.”

“Order!” Kingsley shouted “We will let Miss Granger, who was one of the Golden Trio, present her bill, and then we will pass judgment.”

“I am asking that the Ministry fund and pass a governing body for the DMLE only on cases where there is cause to believe that an auror could have ulterior motives, in the cases of the children of Death Eaters in a division entirely staffed by the enemies of their parents.”

“Are you not an enemy of the Death Eaters, Miss Granger?” Kingsley asked.

“If I may be frank, Minister, the war is over. There are no Death Eaters, and there is no Dark Lord. We must hold ourselves to a higher standard than our enemies. This is no longer a war, we cannot act like soldiers!”

“The DMLE will not be handicapped by some committee that does not understand our work, or what it is like to make decisions while someone is trying to kill you.” Frank Williamson argued “Until Miss Granger is faced with the same decisions our auror’s have to make when a Death Eater is trying to kill Ministry employees, then she cannot make laws.”

“I have faced Death Eaters that are much scarier and much more numerous than the members of this council. I am not talking about taking agency away from the aurory. I am talking about accountability. Will I live to see the Ministry become monsters?”

There was a clatter somewhere else in the library and Corban looked up to see a witch he knew from the audit team passing through trying to pick up a caseload of files. He quickly refiled the record and walked over to her, helping her pick up a file and stacking it on top of her pile. “Margret, you are looking lovely this afternoon.”

The plain looking middle aged woman looked at him shrewdly, pursing her lips into a thin line, Ministry Mauve disappearing as she regarded him with suspicion.

“Corban Yaxley.”

“Margret, you know I have kept mum on your little fling with Williamson from seven years back, I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

“You don’t need to blackmail me at ten in the morning, Corban Yaxley, and it’s not like people would believe you anymore anyways.”

Yaxley gave her a predatory smile, two fingers tapping on the pile of papers and files stacked high in her arms. “Oh, but I am sure you know how fast rumors go around this place.”

Margaret hoisted the papers again, finally relenting to the rumor mill of the Ministry. “Ask.”

“Who is running the audit on Malfoy and myself?”

Her eyes slid sideways, looking for evidence that someone else was in the library.

“There are rumors that a great deal of money went missing during the transfer between Thicknesse and Kingsley. Some shadow department had to get paid, or maybe embezzlement from the Death Eaters from the Ministry.”

“Embezzlement?”

“It was too great a sum for Thicknesse, embezzlement is unlikely. The money must have been misallocated, but no one can find it.” Margaret hissed and then pushed past Yaxley “That’s all I can say.”

“How big?” Yaxley called, not bothering to turn and watch her walk out of the library.

“Big enough for even Lucius Malfoy to be tempted.” Was her parting shot.

“So let me get this straight,” Rodolphus said in the cafe after work later that day “A great deal of money has gone missing, and the Ministry of Magic is trying to pin it on you and Lucius Malfoy who both have more money than a small country, and this money conveniently went missing during the transfer of power to The Order, and you are dating-”

“Friends with.”

“Friends with possibly the only person who would be able to tell if there is money missing because she’s a fucking accountant for the Ministry of Bloody Magic.”

“No need to be so crude, Rodolphus.” Lucius chastised. “Maybe her research isn’t the reason she has been buried, maybe she knows that The Order stole all this money, the Weasley family is rather well off now.”

“Someone has the ability to predict any future with 82% certainty but you think an accounting error is why they don’t want her to speak to anyone?” Rabastan scoffed. “Ridiculous.”

“But they stopped her from finishing her mastery, we could be the only people who have seen her research.” Rodolphus pointed out “Look at the timeline.”

He began to count the events on his fingers “Daphne was cursed. The Retaliation Laws failed to pass. Miss Earl Grey was kicked out of society and school. Yaxley was arrested. Lucius was arrested.”

“She was never published. Rodolphus is right. W e might be the only people who knows she can predict the outcome between two choices. I think she knows what happened to those funds, Yaxley. The only people giving her a hard time are these ex-Order members that want to keep the public from finding out. How much? One million? Ten Million?”

Yaxley shook his head “She wasn’t sure, she said that it was “big enough even Malfoy would be tempted.”” He spoke with air quotes.

Lucius scratched his chin and stared blankly at a wall. “So more than a hundred million.”

“Shit.” Rodolphus whispered at the amount.

“To the victors go the spoils.” Rabastan quoted and took a sip of his coffee “So what do we do with this information?”

“Nothing,” Lucius said “If we are under audit, that means that it can go either way. No one knows when the money went missing, if it was under Thicknesse or Kingsley. We just as easily can be blamed for the missing funds as The Order.”

“What do we do for Hermione?” Rabastan insisted.

“We are getting her out,” Yaxley said, spooning sugar into his coffee. “They have backed her into a corner at the Ministry, and she thinks she has no options. Well, I am here to provide some, as many options as she needs, and as much money as she needs to do it.”

“The Order will still have the funds.”

“If they stole the funds during the transfer of power, then the funds are long gone now.” Lucius said, picking up his cappuccino and then gesturing towards Yaxley “The continent is always an option.”

“Yes!” Rabastan said, a thought occurred to him “I will contact my old master in Bagni De Lucca, and see if he can accept her as an apprentice so she can be published faster.”

“Yeah, but is this arithmancer a master of his field or a master that the LeStrange family has bought?”

“It matters little, it only matters that she get published in the journals. It is easier to get published with a master’s name attached.” Rabastan waved it off “Count me in on this plan, Yaxley.”

“What plan?”

“Getting Miss Earl Grey out.” Rodolphus replied as if it was obvious “So she can become your wife.”

Chapter Text

Hermione often was in a cheery mood on Wednesdays because half the week was over and the other half was a downhill slide. She greeted him with a smile when he came down to the canteen, two teas already in hand. “If I didn’t know any better,” He said as they met up “I would think you are leaving early to get here first.”

“You don’t know any better, then.” She said walking out towards the side doors of the canteen that faced the little park “Because I did.”

She smelled like tea and vanilla, the shampoo she used must have the latter. He felt like he was close and far away on days like these. He sat next to her, with a pile of secrets, and a pile of worries he could not talk to her about. The Ministry audit looming over him like a dementor, threatening to pull him far away from his only salvation from this hell of an office. He wanted to ask her if she knew about the audit, if she could tell him the truth of the missing money and whether the cadre of Order Members that ran the show here were going to arrest him again.

With the freedom of life with Hermione Granger, came the fear of losing that freedom.

“It is cold today, even though it is sunny.” She commented, and he realized he had been silently staring at her for a few minutes too long. “Even the tea can’t warm my hands.”
“Winter is here,” He said tugging his gloves off, supple leather that cost a small fortune. “You should be wearing heavier clothes.”

It wasn’t until he had gotten both of them off that she noticed his hands, lightning scars, spiderwebs of raised skin from where curses tried to seek their way out of his body, the curled around his fingers and went to his fingertips.

Her hands red from the cold met his, warm and scarred. She turned it over so his palm was facing up, studying the patterns in his skin. “Is this also from Glasgow?”

“Alastor Moody.” He said as she turned his hand back over in hers, the tea sandwiched between her knees. “When he was in charge of the regiment, there were hazing exercises and since my father was the head of the DMLE at the time, I guess there were different hazing exercises for me. I touched a warded wall near my desk, and now it’s always been this way, and I always am this way.”

“Unnecessarily cruel.” She said, fingertips running over his skin in a way that was so innocent it became erotic. “The more I learn about The Order, the more I wonder if the War was not inevitable on its own.”

Expecting her to stop, she did not, instead, fingers laced with his and his gloves were left on her lap next to the steaming tea. She looked out over the fountain. “It seems like we didn’t make anything better after the war for muggleborns, or for blood traitors . No laws were passed to protect werewolves, or all the creatures we bargained with to remain neutral. Dumbledore revealed to Harry Voldemort’s past and it seemed like Dumbledore himself was a key figure in raising the monster that was the Dark Lord.”

He squeezed her hand.

“Now, it has been more than five years since I stood on that battlefield and I can only see the same. The same corruption, the same deals, the same persecution of a new sect of people while nothing got better for the ones that were being persecuted before. It was just a race to hold the Ministry, something that Dumbledore wanted and was thrice denied.”

“But surely something is better for you.”

“People don’t want muggleborns around, Corban. Even you do not care for us that much.” She said with a side eye “We dilute the culture, or bring risk to secrecy that is there only because of a persecution muggles did two hundred years ago.”

His eyes traced where her fingers overlaid on his scarred hands, pristine white fingertips, clean pink nails. He did not know when he first met her that she was a mudb-muggleborn witch, and yet when he found out he couldn’t summon the courage to care.

“It doesn’t seem to matter much,” He said finally, swallowing long held ideals “It doesn’t matter much when it comes to you.”

And despite his fear of becoming some kind of monster, or weaker for loving her, for loving her exactly as she was. There was nothing, no grand transformation, the world did not become brighter for accepting muggleborns, and there wasn’t some deep tranquility that came with the conversion. For all the fighting of wizards for hundreds of years, he expected something monumental.

“We traded one Ministry for the next.”

“This is not your Ministry?”

“And no longer my Minister.” She sighed, “With the elections coming up, it’s a race to the bottom.”

“Harry Potter is supposed to win.” He said, rubbing his thumb against her index finger, relishing in the small amount of intimacy. “Isn’t that what the papers are saying?”

“The papers say a lot of things, but it doesn’t mean it is true.” She commented and tilted her head as if she was thinking. “The papers haven’t noticed that we keep electing the aurory to Minister either. It is either one auror or another. Muggles would never stand for this type of law and order candidate.”

“The order being one auror and then the next?”

“It is strange, don’t you think? That we trust someone whose job is to take away freedoms to rule over all?” She took a sip of her tea and looked at him, her eyes meeting his, a test of his trust. “Perhaps it’s because the DMLE and the Minister work the same way. No eyes, no ears, no voices to say no .”

Yaxley huffed “With no ears, how can you hear them say no?”

It was a testament to how little people paid attention to him at his job that when he returned without his gloves that he had worn for decades upon decades that there was no mention of it. Hermione had taken them, and they parted, the last to leave was their hands, inexplicably intertwined, not as friends, but as two otters would, holding each other so that they did not drift away on the sea.

He flexed his own hands as he walked quickly back to the evidence locker, lighting shaped scars arcing all over the backs of his hands, purple and disfiguring. He pulled his sleeves down in a case of vanity. She often brought out the vanity in him, first his hair, now his hands. He wore nicer robes to work now, knowing that she would see him in it. His hair, now no longer tightly braided out of necessity, lay flat in a low ponytail at his neck.

He pulled down the case file of Walden MacNair, another Ministry employee during Thicknesse’s reign. He was indicted shortly before Yaxley was, during a Death Eater Sweep after the Dark Operations Squad had come into its own. Illegal Animal Trade. He opened the box and of course he found nothing inside. Audit .

“Fuck.” He hissed through his teeth, reshelving the box.

What were The Order going to pin on him? How long did he have? Each day with Hermione was more precious than the last. How could he see her again with all these secrets? How could he tell her that they would only have one gala together before he was thrown in jail?

Hermione gifted his freedom, but soon, the audit team would find him. It was a matter of time.

He had found three more Death Eater case files that were completely emptied, all from the sweep the Potter’s squad did before and after he arrested Yaxley. Hermione seemed to sense something was wrong with him about a week before the gala was to take place.

“Are you too nervous to attend with me?” She asked finally on the Monday before the gala. “I understand if you don’t want to come.”

There had been several more articles about Hermione in the Prophet, one of which suspected her to be dating him in some rebellious phase but Hermione did not possess a rebellious phase. She was a creature of habit, and followed the rules to the letter. There were mornings where she whispered to him that she left her desk three minutes before her tea break. Even her rebellious long lunches with him were often considered working lunches and he would sit and read the paper, or a book, as she did piles and piles of equations by hand. It mattered little to him what she was doing as long as she was doing it with him. The scratching of her quill, the small noises she made when she was trying to process a difficult thought. The way her eyes would travel up to his every so often to see if he was there. He wanted to provide her company without strings, comfort without clauses. 

“The gala will be fine, my dove.” He reassured her, his fingertips brushing her own, still too afraid to approach her, still afraid of scaring her off from him. “It is the end of our time at this prison together, doesn’t it feel a bit melancholic?”

This also was something that weighed on him, albeit not so much as the thought of being sent back to Azkaban on some made up charges.

She looked a bit panicked at this. “You said we would still get to see each other often, right?”

“My dove, you can see me from dawn until dusk, or vice versa. Whichever you prefer.”

Her fingers brushed his pant leg on the bench, trying to get closer to him, but feeling the same hesitation he did, and then she looked down at her cup.

“I am thinking of moving to Glasgow. You said you lived near there? Maybe we can find a park.”

He brightened at the idea. “Maybe you can visit the old manor and see if you like any of the rooms there? We do not always have to meet outside, and I have plenty of elv-”

“That you pay?”

That he paid? Who paid house elves? He furrowed his brow trying to understand if he missed some big moment in time where everyone had started to pay elves. He would have to ask Lucius.

“‘Mione!”

The both of them snapped their head up to see who was shouting and he saw a very brassed off redhead storming out from the doors of the canteen, each stride longer than the last, his arm outstretched as he beckoned at her like a dog. 

“Hermione.” She corrected, taking a sip of her tea, but shifted slightly closer to Yaxley in the process.

A toothless protector, he cursed internally.

“What’s this? More of this shit with this old man?”

It stung, and it would have stung more if the Weasley wasn’t so red in the face as he stormed over here.

“Leave me alone Ron.” She said, tilting her head upwards, her eyes shuttering, the usual kindness and openness leaving it for something cold. “You don’t come out here and dine with us lowlifes on your DMLE salary, so don’t start now.”

“And you’re going to the gala with him? It says here that you RSVP’d plus one .” He held up a scrap of parchment.

“And which secretary did you use the old war hero story on for that information?” She asked hotly. “Or was there more?”

“You cow-”

Yaxley sipped his cup, his eyes meeting Ron’s red face. Red hair, red face, and little else. “You know, I have found something quite interesting in the evidence room.”

“The fuck are you on about?”

“I am just saying the evidence seems to keep leading back to you for a very troublesome problem.”

He crumpled the paper in his hand and turned all the ire that was directed towards Hermione towards Yaxley “The fuck you know about that?”

“I know that you’re under investigation for one.” Yaxley looked over at the building “Would be a shame if someone else found out about all this? I see your father around the Leaky, and it is quite interesting how the Weasley name is connected to all of this, isn’t it?”

Ron was quiet for a few moments, Yaxley supposed that it was him calculating his odds. “We’re going to talk about this later when your Death Eater isn’t around.”

“Oh, I assure you, there will be little time when that is true.” Yaxley said and raised his cup “Keep one eye open, Weasley, after all, I have all the evidence.”

Ron threw the paper at Hermione, the crumpled bit of parchment landing on the ground next to her feet. She threw him a look.

“I guess I can see why you are the head of the DMLE?”

“My good looks?”

“Well,” She smiled “That and you are quite good at blackmail.”

His heart skipped a beat.

“Anything for you, my dove.”

Lucius and Yaxley looked more like brothers lately due to Yaxley’s change in hairstyle being almost identical to Lucius’ own, a low slung blonde ponytail. He did not have the vanity that Lucius had and so often braided his own hair while he slept which kept his hair unruly. Lucius ordered coffee for four and a plate of biscuits and pastries as they nestled into the back booth of the cafe.

There were never any customers here, and he supposed that was the appeal of the place to Lucius and why they were always here. Before the war, and even during, Lucius Malfoy was hounded by press and paparazzi, every move he and Narcissa made were documented in the society pages.

Rodolphus and Rabastan, brothers who had been joined at the hip since Hogwarts and since Bellatrix died, came in as the coffee was being set down on the table by a young waiter who looked completely bored with the idea of working a job at all.

Rodolphus slid into the booth first: “We’ve done some investigations of our own.”

“As have I.” Lucius said and pulled out his own brown file folder “After all, you are not about to be thrown in prison for crimes you haven’t committed.”

Yaxley opened the folder with one hand as he took a sip of coffee with the other. A stack of Wizengamot cases dating back five years with Mistrial - Lack of Evidence stamped on the corner of each one.

“The audit is ongoing,” Lucius pulled out a case file on the very bottom “Here is one for Mulciber, some trumped up charge from the Potter Squad for Endangerment by Misadventure or Magic . Dated June had a mistrial due to lack of evidence, the same can be said for yours and mine.”

“The war really never ended for him, did it?” Yaxley snorted “They won’t stop until we’re all dead.”

“Yours was the first by what I can tell.” Lucius pulled out Yaxley’s case, a few bits of parchment paper stapled together “Something you had in your evidence triggered this audit. It’s managed to keep us out of prison, but if The Order found something to pin on us through your case, the audit team is going to do a lot worse than crucio you in a windowless room.”

Yaxley looked at his own court papers, his name in swooping large text at the top, half obscured by the mistrial stamp. This was almost five years ago now, it was almost the term for an audit.

“We can’t tell the others.” Lucius said quietly flipping through each court filing. “We can’t tell them because then we’ll be arrested for organizing. I have already looked for ways to warn them about the audit, but even if we start mass owling, I think it is likely we will be caught.”

Rodolphus produced a pile of clippings from the Daily Prophet. “I looked through the history of the paper for five years, and I couldn’t find lavish spending from any of The Order. No new house purchases, land, or any parties. If they have the money, even if it was split between them, they have not used it.”

“The Minister is probably aware an audit will be done on the funds. If I was the Minister, I’d wait until they have someone to blame for the missing money and then spend it.” Lucius said now looking at his own most recent court papers from four years ago.

He saw Hermione on one of the clippings and tugged the article from the pile. Golden Girl Attends Gala Alone . Hermione was wearing a green dress in the article and there were four paragraphs about how she was secretly dating a Slytherin ex-classmate and was sending signals to Death Eaters for her support. He frowned as the Hermione in the photo tried to walk quickly away from the photographers and into the building, shielding her face with her hand. So, this is why she wore black.

“Trust you to focus on a girl, when we are all about to go to prison.” Rodolphus snapped.

“You have to ask her about the financial audit, she might know someone in the Ministry who can tell us what we need to do to prepare before they press charges.” Lucius urged.

Rabastan handed him another article: Granger seen solo after beau flees to France .

“It is a dangerous proposition, going to the gala with her. All her dates seem to disappear soon after.”

“She is the key in this.” Rodolphus said tapping the picture “The Order knows it, and now we know it. She knows where the money is and that is why she is being controlled.”

“I have to go.” Yaxley said, putting the paper down. “It’s more dangerous for her without me. The shit that the DMLE has been doing to her…” He took a sip before he got angry, hot coffee replacing hot anger. “I have no way to defend her besides empty threats and blackmail. My wand is bound until the first.”

Rabastan placed his wand on the table. “Then take mine.”

The table grew quiet as everyone understood the gravity of what was being offered. The extension of his magic lay on the dingy table.

Rodolphus put his on the table as well “Our wands are similar, but choose which one works best.”

Lucius gave a heavy sigh and popped the head off of his silver snake cane and put his on the table as well: “We need Hermione. I am done taking this abuse of power, and I am not going to sit idly by while some child cooks up another charge to pin on me so they can get rich on tax dollars.”

In the end, it was Rabastan’s wand after all that listened to him best, and the two of them traded wands in the cafe, something deeper passed between the four men. They had been in dangerous situations before, this was true, but today there was desperation. They knew the Ministry was coming to swallow them up, and the only thing that stood between them and a final charge that would stick was an arithmancer who the Ministry was trying its hardest to make people forget existed.

Between a rock and a hard place.

Yaxley had grown up around magic, and so not much could surprise him with what magic could and could not do. Antonin was a curse-breaker and would tell him intricate spells and complicated magic that both awed him and left him confused. Lucius was excellent at transfiguration, and Rabastan would explain herbology that seemed unreal. However, when Hermione Granger showed up at their agreed meeting place, the fountain outside the Ministry on the night of the gala, he decided that magic before was nothing compared to her.

He sat on their usual bench, in his dress robes under a blanket of stars and the dim glow of oil lamps alongside the administration offices on the backside of the Ministry of Magic. She pushed the door open to the canteen in a white flowing dress, high necked and figure hugging, her hair piled up on her head with curls framing her face. She was looking for him immediately and smiled when their eyes met.

“Your hair! My wish came true.”

He laughed as she played with the ends, even in her heels her head only came up to his chin. “I hope all your wishes can remain so easy to fulfill.”

“I don’t doubt it.” She said before stepping back “What do you think?”

He couldn’t.

“I think they didn’t charge me enough at that store if you look as good as this in their clothing.”

It was a testament to his will as a man that he did not run his palms down the curves of her body, white woolen fabric was a stark contrast to the night that surrounded them. She was an angel, as if Raphael had painted her himself. He contented himself with touching her waist, and then, when that wasn’t enough he leaned over so that her lips were near her ear, so close he could hear her breathing.

She leaned into him. The first time in a long time that anyone had willingly gotten closer to ex-Death Eater Corban Yaxley.

“Let’s go raise hell, my dove.”

She let out a puff of air. “I don’t think you truly know what you’ve gotten yourself into, but you’re stuck with me now.”

There was irony in the woman he felt freed him from all the shackles of his willing imprisonment at this institution tell him that he was stuck was not lost on him. Small fingers pressed against his chest, her head bowed so he could feel her nose on his shoulder.

An arm came around her, warm skin against cool leather gloves as he pulled her into a hug, tentative at first, but stronger when he felt her fingers twisting into the fabric of his robes. “We don’t have to go.”

“I have to, I always have to, I am by invitation of the Minister, but it never gets any easier.”

“If we must go, let’s go for ten minutes, and after ten minutes, we can pop ‘round the pub and get something fried in a load of grease, and some whisky.” He promised, his hand running down her spine, tracing each vertebrae, trying to memorize the shape of her for his dreams later.

“If we even make it to ten minutes.” She looked up at them, their noses inches apart and then there was a bang as doors opened behind them and revelers also looking for privacy to smoke and gossip entered out into the private back courtyard.

Yaxley was not a stranger to the press, after all, when you are the head of the DMLE about 70% of your job is dealing with the Prophet and feeding them lines to sway an investigation one way or another. Being the one signing off on media smear campaigns, and being at the end of a smear campaign was so vastly different it made his head spin.

Hermione squeezed his hand and looked up at him, worry in her brown eyes before she pushed open the door to the atrium, and as soon as she stepped foot into the main hall, it was like spells had gone off in front of his eyes. It reminded him of the war, and this thought was not lost on him as his dove shrank behind him, trying to shield herself from the press who began to shout her name and his.

“Montgomery!” He barked and one reporter for the prophet stopped shouting, eyes turning to Yaxley. Montgomery was on the take for the DMLE. “Get your bloody cameras out of my face before I smash them.”

There was a silence and then Montgomery spoke up. “One photo, one comment and then we’ll be on our way!”

Hermione. who was half hidden behind him shielding her eyes from the flashbulbs, spoke up. “One comment: mind your own business and tell Creevy that if I see his tent in front of my house tonight I am going to call the aurory.”

“Does Harry Potter know you are sleeping with the enemy?” Montgomery spoke up, his quick quotes quill writing like lightning speed.

Yaxley reached over and grabbed the quill from where it was suspended, struggling in his fingers like a live salmon and snapped it. “ One comment.”

“A photo!” 

A flashbulb went off and Hermione was pulled off to the side by Yaxley who was already irritated with the paparazzi that was haranguing them. Later, he would change his mind about the press when they were front page on the Prophet. He would not see it then, but later, he would study the way Hermione would look to him in the photo, and how their hands were intertwined.

“I told you,” She laughed as they entered the main ballroom “They’re nothing you can handle. Absolutely no one can handle them.”

“Oh, I am sure someone is handling them, my dove.” He said holding open the door for her to pass through.

This was something he also knew, after all, the dogs he used to send to attack others were now attacking him and Hermione. However, this solidified his opinion that the DMLE and more importantly The Order were isolating Hermione for some reason, and most likely the false audit had something to do with it. He longed to ask her what she knew, but as the string quartet began to strike up a lively waltz he knew now was not the time.

The Ministry Gala was a prime example of how you pay enough taxes for people to play at being wealthy. Many of the people he saw in fine dress robes were not wealthy by any means other than taxes. Hermione was dressed in finer robes than many of the wives of Ministry officials, who opted for gaudy displays of new money, unaware of the vulgarity. Narcissa always bemoaned the society pages after the gala since the fall of the Dark Lord. “The real sacrifice in the war was not 30% of our wealth.” She would say at Christmas. “But that the rest of the world thinks this is what Britain has to offer. We are a laughingstock.”

Hermione placed herself between the wall and him, which he was happy to oblige as the two of them walked over to get glasses of champagne as the dances commenced and many of the people milling idly about were pushed away from the main floor and onto the sidelines. Yaxley handed her a glass of champagne and faced her so that she would be shielded from prying eyes.

She clinked her glass against his, offering him a shy smile. “To us.”

“To you, my dove.” He replied as she took a sip.

He would catch glances out of the corner of his eye, years of aurory training had him on edge tonight, expecting at any minute for some threat to swoop down upon them like a dementor and tear them apart. However, every so often, Hermione would touch him, the small bit of exposed skin on his wrist between his glove and his sleeve that would pull him back to her.

“If they want to fight, let them. But you and I both know that they won’t, not with the press here.”

Nothing the DMLE did was in front of the press, only behind it. He covered the hand on his wrist with his own. “It is because they do it to you so often that I feel like they will do it tonight.”

She nodded her head off to his left. “They can only stare in this room. Look at Ron and Lavender.”

He took a sip from his glass and tried to surreptitiously take a look at who she was mentioning and saw of course, the redhead that always wanted to terrorize Hermione was with a shapely brunette who was currently arguing with him over the music. She kept pointing at Harry Potter who was taking turns around the room with Ginerva Weasley, dressed in another one of those new money dresses covered in gemstones that Narcissa detested.

After Lavender grabbed the fabric of her dress robes, plain, but pretty, Ron tore his eyes from Hermione and stormed away.

“Hermione! You are looking lovely.”

“Tonks, it is good to see you.”

“Do you need any help here?” Tonks, an auror who was mostly assigned to Moody’s team, was terribly clumsy and during the exchange of power she was put onto investigative work which was more desk work than not. 

The metamorphagus’ eyes moved to Yaxley and Hermione tried to hide a smile with her glass.

“What do you think Corban, do we need any help from the DMLE this evening?”

“It’s interesting that you have a security detail that rivals the Minister of Magic this evening, my dove. If there was an assassination attempt, no one would be able to stop it because they’d be counting your blinks for secret messages.”

Tonks was peeved by this answer because her roots began to turn scarlet, giving her blonde hair tonight a distinctive stripe. “I am not here in an official capacity.” 

“Good, us neither.” Hermione said cheekily as she stepped closer to him, her hand resting lightly on his forearm.

“Then will you walk in the garden with me? Just us girls?”

Hermione made a small huff of annoyance. “Tonks, I believe during the last two galas you did not as much say hello to me. I haven’t spoken to you in three years. If you are here as an auror, please charge me, or Corban. If you are here as a friend, we are not.”

“Hermion-”

“If you are here to ruin the evening, please make your attempt and leave.” Yaxley said sharply. “We could use some amusement.”

“Yaxley, I don’t know how you got away with an imperius but the DMLE already knows about your little games with Miss Granger.” Tonks reprimanded him sharply, one finger pointing at his chest. “And we won’t tolerate you taking advantage of our friend.”

Hermione was incensed, her cheeks tinging pink with embarrassment and Yaxley’s free hand went into his robes, looking for Rabastan’s wand. These kind of confrontations were normal after the war, a natural power rebalance from the oppressed to get revenge on the oppressors. Lucius at the time thought that to be ostracized from society would be a temporary reaction, but as time wore on, it was obvious that this was not a reaction, but the true intent of the victors. Hate came in different flavors, and it was bitter only when it was turned on him.

“The DMLE can mind their own bloody business!” Her voice was raised and a few people turned to look at them. “I am not a friend of the DMLE. I am not a pet for you to keep on a leash and to yank on it when you feel like it.”

“Hermione, we are all concerned with your time with Yaxley, he’s tried to kill you once before.”

“And I’d rather he’d have tried to kill me again instead of the slow death from suffocation that my so-called DMLE friends have been doing for years.” She snapped and then handed Nymphadora her empty champagne glass which the stunned auror took. “I’m not stupid, Tonks. And you can tell Harry that. Come on, Corban.”

Nymphadora’s hair now was bright scarlet from root to tip and she made a start towards Hermione but Yaxley maneuvered between them as his witch stormed off through the nearest doors. “I do not need magic to deal with you, Nymphadora. Follow me, and we’ll revisit your time in field training.”

“Death Eater.”

Yaxley shrugged and handed her his champagne glass. Tonks’ face grew red with anger. A smile spread on his lips. “Don’t forget it.”

Hermione was pacing back and forth outside on a long terraced porch. She would disappear in and out of shadows cast by Roman columns. He watched her walk in front of him, not aware of his presence, clearly peeved by the confrontation. He didn’t realize she knew what the DMLE was up to. She always seemed to tolerant and hopeless when it came to dealing with her friends, but in retrospect it seemed like it was not naïveté but kindness that kept her in front of them each time. She let them cage her and now that she was well and truly caged by her relationships from the war, she was beginning to realize how small the prison was.

“Hermione.” He said as she passed him a third time. “If Nymphadora is bothering you, then you will have let her win.”

“It’s not her, it’s never just her. I feel like I am being wrapped further and further up with chains from the people who were my allies. It wasn’t until you that I thought I even had a chance at something other than watching them bind me.”

Yaxley grabbed her arm and pulled her close to him in the shadows of one of the column, her hair caught moonlight in a halo. “It wasn’t until you that I thought I had a chance at something other .”

“Well,” She tilted her head up, their noses brushed against each other “I guess we needed each other, then.”

He kissed her there. It was stupid, and perhaps it was only stupid because everything was screaming at him in his head that there was no way that someone so divine and perfect as Hermione Granger would be with a washed up has-been like him. However, all doubts were silenced when her lips smiled against his own and she kissed him back, small hands against his chest as she leaned into him in the dark alcove outside the Ministry ball, the din of conversation and music faded away as he realized that she kissed him back.

He broke the kiss but she closed the gap again and gave him a quick peck on the lips. “Finally.” She breathed.

“Finally.” He replied.

There were footsteps and he pulled her into him, afraid of the DMLE’s promise of retaliation. Hermione made a small noise and grabbed his robes to steady herself.

“Kathy, I thought we talked about this. That you and I are together are no one’s business but you and I .”

Hermione’s head moved and she tried to peer behind her. Yaxley leaned out slightly, the alcove providing them enough to stay hidden in the shadow of the column directly across from them.

He caught a flash of red hair as two people walked the opposite direction from

“Ronniekins, I didn’t tell anyone! It’s our little secret, well I guess it’s not so little.”

“Don’t! People may see. Someone saw us, that old codger Yaxley told me he knew about it.”

“Well, the evidence room is not as private as a hotel, I told you that last time.” Kathy whined, her heels clicking as they walked further away.

“Lucky for you, I have a hotel tonight.”

Hermione rolled her eyes and took a step back from him.

“Some things never change.”

The two of them walked out of the Ministry of Magic hand in hand, he kept looking down at where their hands met, gloved hand with hers, to check if this was really happening to him. He was not a particularly attractive man, and his personality was not incredibly charming. Yet, Hermione would often look up at him like he was England’s Most Eligible Bachelor. The constant appraisal of her eyes was the same he would give her.

“You really meant to kiss me?” He asked “How many glasses of champagne did you have?”

“Even if I was completely drunk, I would kiss you again.” She laughed as they walked down a mostly empty Diagon Alley outside the Ministry.

“Ridiculous.” He chided her before pulling her close and kissing her temple “I have heard that I am using the imperius curse on you, even now.”

“It is very good, so good, I can’t feel it.”

“What can you feel?”

She tugged on his hand and took two steps ahead of him. She made a humming noise as she thought about the words she wanted to say. “Unsatisfied?”

“What? Were my kisses not enough?”

“I want some crisps instead.”

A pause.

“And then more kisses.”

The Ministry was dead between Christmas and New Year, as he exited his final interview before the probation was over he made a beeline for the evidence room, hoping to use his last days at the Ministry to hopefully get some idea of the audit so that he could be better prepared. Mentally, as he walked to the evidence room, he wondered how he could convince Hermione to move to Russia if the audit implicated himself and Lucius.

He pulled down Rosier’s file and flipped through the evidence chain of custody. Lead Auror - Harry Potter .

In fact, in MacNair's case, it was also tied to Potter’s team. He re-shelved it and walked down the evidence room, boxes upon boxes stacked in neat shelves around narrow aisles. White walls with neat script of criminal’s names, he picked up LeStrange and did not even bother with the box, but instead pulled down the chain of custody sheet first. Harry Potter .

He pulled his own, Lucius’ and several others, before moving on to his own time in the DMLE, remembering a particularly nasty case where a secretary was found embezzling funds from St. Mungos to pay for opium. However, her case file was not included.

He shut the folder with the chain of custody, his own name written as the Lead Auror. No, this was not about the war, or the “clean up” team that was the Dark Operations unit. This was about Harry Potter himself. 

If it was a true financial audit then non-Death Eater related cases would also fall under the audit as everything under his tenure as head would have been pulled. He was not a stranger to these futile exercises of transparency in the government. However, only ex-Death Eaters that had been arrested by Potter’s team himself had their evidence go missing. This led Yaxley to two conclusions: The Order was withholding the evidence in these lesser trials to build up a larger and more ironclad case against the rest of the “free” Death Eaters that had been arrested directly by Potter during his time, or Potter himself was in some kind of hot water.

The second idea made him snort at how far-fetched it was. There was no way the hero of the last wizarding war, and most likely future Minister of Magic was in any type of water, cold or hot. No, it was a sure thing, they were going to be arrested for the embezzlement in no time, it just was a matter of The Order cooking up evidence.

He rested his forehead against the lip of the metal shelf that held another row of boxes. How is it that for years he had struggled, trapped and stuck in the muck and the mire of the Ministry and there were no threats to his life when he so badly wished to die? Now that he had Hermione, now that she had him . 

He was such a mistake of a man. There seemed to be no decision that was the right decision. The bright lights of the evidence room shone down on him, a lucky criminal who knew that eventually all the good things he had were only given so that he would be punished by having them taken away.

Thoros Nott, as much as Yaxley hated him, was good company when you were down. Effortlessly cheerful and smart as a bag of bricks, he would sing every pub song, and would buy you every round while making fun of your misery.

Yaxley was twisting his glass around in the old pub in Glasgow listening to Thoros complain about his son who was marrying (married?) another man. The lack of heir was heavy on his mind and that is how they came to the discussion about Hermione.

“What about your tea bird?”

“Tea bird?” Whisky addled thoughts coalesced into understanding. “Yes, we’re dating.”

“An heir on the way already?”

“Don’t be stupid Thoros, we’ve only met two months ago, and now you want a child from her?”

“Who is she then? What woman has finally tamed the loneliest bloke in Scotland?”

“Tea bird, or Miss Earl Grey.” Yaxley began a bit peeved at the title given to both him and Hermione “Is Hermione Granger. We met at the Ministry, near the fountain out back for smokers, and we’ve been getting along ever since. Surely you’ve seen us together in the papers. We were front page news just over Christmas!”

Thoros looked at him as if he had gone mad. “What’d’ya mean you only met her recently? You met her a long time ago, you madman. She used to be a regular here!”

Yaxley felt like his heart had stopped.

“She was studying under some arithmancer nearby at some university, she would come in late at night and try to drown herself in cheap wine. It was after Malfoy’s kid started hanging out with her, oh god, when was that?” Thoros took a drink here “When that Greengrass girl was cursed.”

“Right after Antonin left the country.”

“Yes, you were probably the only thing keeping this place open, they must have imported cases of whisky for you alone, probably had y’er name written on it in fine script our patron saint of whisky: Yaxley .”

“Back to Hermione!”

“Anyways, there was some man trouble, boy trouble, whatever, and you had taken it upon yourself to cheer her up, you kept buying her drinks, and I think you sang four songs that night alone, I remember countin’ each one hoping it was the last. You were tripping over yourself to make her happy. Usually you’re such a stick in the mud, but with that bird, you immediately went to her each night.”

He searched his memory, trying to will it into existence. That year after Antonin left was a blur up until he had gotten arrested by Potter’s team. With only Lucius and the LeStrange’s left, there was not much to live for, or no will to live for. He was confined to the country due to his ties to the war and his wealth, and his only friend up and fled the country.

“When?”

“A week before you were arrested.” Thoros took another sip of his whisky and then pointed at a booth across from where they were sitting. “You were obsessed with her, but she stopped coming after that night. Thought you scared her off, but she was in the news a lot after that, some trial or law, whatever.”

He threaded his fingers into his own hair. His brain was screaming at him. Hermione knew him this entire time. “The Retaliation Laws.”

Thoros snapped his fingers. “I remember it now, you said something so cheesy, I can’ believe I forgot!”

“What?”

“If she needed you, she could just wish for you, and you’d be there.” Thoros let out a bark of laughter “Li’ y’er a fuckin’ genie eh? No wonder you never got married.”

He stared intently at the whisky stone in his glass. “I said that?”

“Aye.”

She was constantly at that stupid fountain making stupid wishes right in front of him, and by the time he even noticed she existed, she had a pile of knuts in it, waiting for him . How long had he ignored her? How long had it been before he had hit the absolute worst moment of his life to acknowledge the best thing in it?

“So, I guess she didn’t wish for you then.” He laughed and hit him on the back. “Sunk to your level finally, I see.”

Yaxley covered his face with his hands “Shut up Thoros.”

He pushed his glass away, still half full, feeling like it was the alcohol’s fault for making him forget his first time together with Hermione. Every day was getting a little bit worse as his freedom neared.

He had to apologize.

For all his love of Hermione, and for all the time he had spent together with her, he had no idea where she lived, and so under the influence of too much whisky and too much regret for forgetting his first meeting with his little dove, he wrote her a quick note.

My dove,

Where do you live?

In hindsight which came with less whisky, more water, and pacing down his long second floor hallway, entering one bedroom, the next, his study, the lady’s study (his mother’s favorite room), the master bath, and then his study again. He realized how terrifying it would be for Hermione to receive an unsigned letter from someone asking where she lived. He sat down in front of his desk in a plush leather chair, now debating on sending her a follow up note. He leaned back, scratching his stubble, it had to be well after midnight, Thoros didn’t let you leave until last call. He kept telling him there would always be time tomorrow to apologize, and yet for some reason tomorrow as immediately, and  as soon as he could . 

He often would sit in this chair, and not the chair behind the desk, leaving it for the ghost of his overbearing drunk of a father. He could see his dad now, glowering at him for getting in trouble out in the village with Antonin, the Russian immigrant boy that he didn’t want hanging about his nice son . To be the son of an auror and the son of an auror’s son was to be the son of many expectations for what a citizen should look like. Those expectations had driven him here, alone in the empty week between Yule and New Years, sending terrifying notes to witches that were the same age as his friend’s children, falling into the same vices his father had that had driven his mother mad.

He removed his gloves and set them on the desk, scarred hands reminding him of how little he achieved much like his father had. He had told himself when he was a rowdy teenager that he could never become his father, a do-nothing department head that was the janitor of the Minister’s problems. However, he became just that, and his fall from grace was as equal as it was to his father’s.

What would he say about Hermione?

“Master Corban, an owl has come this late.”

He was pulled from his self loathing by one of his elves holding a wet piece of parchment.

To the other rock,

63 York Road, London.

Is everything alright?

Your Dove

He apparated quickly, while drunk, while not quite drunk, to the address she had written. Her parchment in hand, and was greeted with a dark looming building with one light on, five floors up to the right. And this, at one in the morning on December 30th, is how he found out what the Order had truly done to his dove.

He walked up five floors in a cramped wooden stairwell, the walls crowding him on either side and as he ascended each flight his head cleared and by the third floor he realized what a huge mistake he had made by coming here and not waiting until morning. Thoros was right, there was nothing that didn’t look better in daylight. All his decisions this evening were fueled by whisky, desperation, and darkness.

A door opened above him and he looked up to see her peering down at him over a wooden railing, her curly hair hanging down illuminated by the light of the open door to her apartment.

“Corban?”

“I know it’s late.” He said from the third floor landing “However, I must speak with you.”

“Are you in trouble?” She asked “Are you hurt?”

Then she disappeared from view and he could hear bare feet on wood as she descended quickly to meet him and feeling guilty that he had come here at an ungodly hour to apologize for forgetting how they first met years ago when he was a drunkard. He reached her between the third and the fourth floor, she was wearing an oversized white shirt and flannel pajama pants, two steps higher than he was.

Perfection.

“Hermione.”

Hands came to his face as she checked him over, scanning his eyes and then his body for signs of damage but when she stood on a step above him she was slightly taller than him, forcing him to look up at someone he for some reason kept meeting and kept forgetting. His hair was a wild mess from where he had pulled it out at the bar, frustrated with himself for letting her slip away once, and for getting himself into trouble with the Ministry so that soon they would be torn apart twice.

“Is there trouble?”

“I am so sorry.” He apologized and she took a step back fear painted clearly on her features, the loss of her touch pained him.

“Is it the DMLE again? I knew they would try something after the gala.”

He pursed his lips and she clenched her fists at her side, not bothering to look at him, but over his head to the slant of the stairwell overhead.

“I forgot how we met. I forgot about our time in the pub in Glasgow, and I forgot the promise I made to you.” He said quietly. “I didn’t know that you knew me this entire time.”

“But you want to leave now that you know.”

“No!”

“You don’t find it strange that I have waited for you? That I’ve wished for you?”

“My dove, if you have wished for me, I am sorry that you have wasted so many wishes for someone like me.”

“If I had to wish a thousand more wishes in that ugly fountain, I would still wish for the same person. You found me when I really was at rock bottom, and you helped me to start swimming upwards.”

“How could I help you when I can’t even help myself?” He said as his eyes traveled to her bare feet peeking out from underneath her baggy flannel pants.

“Well, I would say it was your amazing rendition of Come On, Eileen, but it was not.” She teased. “And it wasn’t that the third or the fourth time you sang it either.”

“Oh, love, I am starting to be happy I don’t remember this meeting now.”

She extended her hand “Tea?”

He took it, skin against skin. “Even this late?”

“Even this late.”

He followed her upwards, squeezing her hand and getting a small squeeze in response. She would look back at him every so often and start humming the chorus of one of his favorite bar songs from when he was a teenager. It was humiliating to think he thought after Thoros said he had sang for her that it was some kind of romantic gesture where he sang Scottish folk songs and played mandolin, but instead it was one song repeatedly.

When they reached her floor, her door was slightly ajar casting a sliver of light thrown from her apartment into the dark hallway and when he stepped inside, he realized he was now standing in her bedroom. War Heroine Hermione Granger, one of the golden trio, arithmancer with the ability to predict the outcome of any major event by 82% and the love of his life lived within 25 square meters of space. His bedroom was easily three times the size of this. She floated a pile of books from the only table in the room, to another pile of books that were stacked in cardboard boxes. This was the true extent of The Order’s greed.

She crossed the space and began to work on heating the water by magic in a kettle, pulling out tins of tea and trying to judge them by the label alone as he took a seat on the only chair other than her bed which was a small twin off to one side.

“Was it that man who was with you all the time that told you finally?” She asked as she finally judged one of the teas out of the two to be better and opened the tin.

“Thoros, and yes. He…why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“It’s not as if you and I are both anonymous people, I am a well known muggleborn, and I remember your comments about how much you hated muggleborns. After your trial, you never came back to the pub, and I thought you figured out the truth about who I was.”

“Fuck, Hermione. I am so sorry.” He wanted to melt into the floor.

She looked over her shoulder at him, impossibly adorable in her oversized clothing as she made tea for the two of them. “I also couldn’t approach you, it isn’t your fault. I knew that if we spoke at work, someone would find out.”

“How long did you know about my elevenses?”

She licked her lips, but did not answer.

“A long time?”

“I saw you once, when I was on my way to a budget meeting, going to the canteen with Agatha from the DMLE.” She let it trail off.

He hadn’t spoken to anyone from the DMLE since he had started and was getting his initial tours around the department during his. His eyes widened as he read the title of the book she was reading, yet another dense book on arithmancy: Discrete Equations for Potions Making. “A long time.”

“I waited.” She explained, not bothering to move the few meters from what he supposed was considered a kitchen “I waited until I couldn’t.”

He felt foolish for not noticing someone tailing him for years. Head of the DMLE, son of an auror, and during his early years he was feared not only for his connections but for the unique way Yaxley ruined lives. As he sat in this small apartment looking at books upon books, all owned by the woman who owned his heart he felt like he had failed her in so many ways and yet he was still here, and yet she seemed to like him. He tugged on a piece of blonde hair that was framing his face, and stared at his shoes.

Expensive dragonhide staring back at him.

“I knew you would be leaving soon, I was at your trial, and I know what the judge sentenced you to, but it took me so long to talk to anyone after I started seeing what happened to people who spoke to me. I didn’t want them to touch you, I didn’t want to ruin you too.”

Hermione was holding onto the two tea mugs, frozen at the counter, unable to look up, a curtain of hair hiding her face from him.

“I am so sorry.” She said quietly “I understand if you find this weird and creepy or you want to leave and never speak to me again. I just…I needed someone like you. Someone who could see me at a bar and know my feelings better than anyone who claimed to know me. Someone who wanted to be around me without knowing what I can do for them.”

The air was tense, and yet she continued. “I am selfish. I wanted you so badly. It seems so stupid now, and so creepy. You gave me something to live for when I felt like the whole world was going to swallow me up, and I repaid this by stalking you.”

He knew he had to make the right decision now. He got up off his dingy little chair and walked the few steps to the kitchen and wrapped his arms around her, kissing the top of her hair. 

“If you are selfish, take all of me. If you want, then I will give. There is nothing that the DMLE can do that I did not write the playbook for, and they can send every auror, executioner, and paper pusher to my door, my dove, and I will still be with you afterwards. You are not stupid, you are patient for a very stupid blind old man who was obsessed with you before he could see who he was obsessed with. My Hermione, if you want someone who knows you, let me learn you until I can gain my mastery in your subject. If you want someone who wants to be around you, then I will be your loyal dog. Forgive me, Hermione, for taking so long to be by your side, and punish me by keeping me here.”

She turned in his arms, pressed between him and the counter, her eyes filled with tears. “Corban.”

In that moment he saw her for what she really was: his.

They kissed, bittersweet salty tears, and after a few moments, her head resting on his chest she spoke again.

“Would you still care for me, if you had known I had done something so terrible?”

He laughed at the idea that stalking him was something so terrible.

“I will love you even if we are at the gates of Azkaban together.” He said rubbing her back soothingly.

“Ridiculous,” She huffed, “I would never get caught.”

“What about you, my dove, would you love me even if I had done something terrible.”

“There is nothing more terrible than your rendition of Come on, Eileen, Corban.”

“Oho, it’s Mr. Front Page.” Rodolphus teased as Corban sat down for dinner at some upscale Italian place that the LeStrange's favored. “We’ve all seen it.”

Lucius, Rabastan, and Rodolphus joined him on New Years Eve, Hermione told him last night that she would come to his place later as she was at an “unavoidable” dinner with The Order. When he protested she said that it was important to be present before The Elections that were happening as two Order members were competing for the Minister’s chair.

“Yes, and a good photo if I do say so.” Yaxley picked up the menu despite knowing what he was going to order. “Not everyone can look so dashing in black and white, I recall your last front page Lucius.”

Lucius’ last article was after he had been released from a two week detention period, and the photo was so bad that Narcissa had paid off the Prophet herself to never bother the two of them again. 

“You wound me, my friend.” Lucius said as the waiter came over “I have seen quite enough of Yaxley in the paper these past few weeks. Can we not move to something interesting?”

“The elections?”

“Can we even still call it elections when there is really no choice? Potter will be King and we will all be buried under the Ministry in six months time, dead or waiting to die.” Rodolphus complained.

“Carbonara, Carbonara, the Gnocchi, and the Pesto. A bottle of champagne on the house for New Years from the Malfoy’s private collection on store.” The waiter said to his regulars and left before anyone had a chance to speak.

“We come here too often.” Rabastan complained as he set the menu down “And I have heard some interesting chatter about the Potter boy. I have told you Rodolphus, it is not a sure thing.”

“Does the sun rise? Potter will be our next little Napoleon.” Rodolphus countered, waving his brother off. “You don’t know politics. You academics are all the same.”

“They said there are problems with his work at the DMLE, it might harm him.” Rabastan mused, pretending to read the menu again “This place never changes."

“He has been working as a personal hit squad for the Minister. The only one who thinks it is problematic are those who he works on, and will speak to people like us.” Yaxley said pulling the white cloth napkin off the table and laying it in his lap. “We are fucked.”

“Have you found out more about the audit? Have you asked Miss Earl Grey?” Lucius asked quietly, the audit was a sore spot for all of them.

“All of the cases that were pulled for the audit were related to arrests made by Potter’s Squad.” Yaxley sighed “I checked another case for embezzlement that I dealt with some time ago, and it was intact. If you were arrested by Potter and you were a pardoned Death Eater, your case file is under audit. They are going to find a place to put the money soon.”

“I think they are trying to clean up Potter’s dirty laundry before he gets his throne.” Rodolphus said “The missing money, the auror overrreach, all his secrets from his time in the Dark Operations team. It’s going to be wrapped up nicely and pinned to one of us, all of us, it doesn’t matter.”

“Isn’t the Head of the DMLE appointed by the Minister?” Lucius mused as the champagne was delivered. “Potter’s right hand man might have a new title.”

“Well, what is another Weasley in an undeserved position? It’s practically the operating model of the Ministry at that point.” Rodolphus laughed as he picked the champagne out of the ice bucket

“To us washed up fucks who are about to get pulled under.”

“To every day we have left.” Rabastan said clinking his empty champagne flute against the bottle.

“However many that may be.” Lucius replied

“To us .” Yaxley said firmly “And whatever that means.”

She was waiting at the gates of the manor, and he cursed himself for not getting a portkey for her but it was a last minute thing, and he really wanted to spend the New Years together. She looked so ridiculously pretty in her travel robes, he could see a brown check skirt peeking out from underneath her black cloak. Her hair was catching the wind under starlight as she waited for him to walk down his long gravel drive.

“It’s big.” She said as he opened the iron gate.

“Do you approve?” He said as she stepped inside.

“I do.” She laughed “I approve of this big dark shadow that is somewhere over there.”

“Well,” He smiled. “It’s better at day, and you will have to stay tonight to see it in the sunlight.”

“You are very good at this game.” She said as they approached the house “But perhaps only because I let you win it.”

He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her against him in the shadow of his front door. “Well, you know what they say, my dove, what is mine is yours.”

The elation of Hermione being his, being so obsessed with a nobody like him, being here with him after all that had happened, after all the mistakes he had made and hadn’t made yet filled him with an incomparable giddiness that he might as well be thirteen playing quidditch again. She spared her smiles only for him, she waited only for him. There would never be another that cared for him, there never was a first that had cared for him, as the head of the DMLE, as the heir to the house of Yaxley, as a Death Eater or as a convict. And yet, Hermione knew all of the above and identified with him not as Yaxley, but as Corban, an off-key singer, a friend to take elevenses with, lunch date, dinner date, gala date, and protector. He was not a sum of his titles but a man.

She kissed him before opening the door into the main foyer and stopping short as she surveyed the ancestral home of Yaxley, rich mahogany wood paneling from floor to ceiling, and portraits of landscapes and still-life that were six feet high as they were wide, stone floors and high arched ceilings.

“Oh, Corban. Why the hell are you working at the Ministry for Magic?”

He laughed “Come along, I have been recommended about six different types of champagne and I have bought them all for you to taste.”

He could smell the wood burning in the drawing room, he had agonized over this a few hours earlier, where to take her, and re-arranged every painting so that there was not a portrait in sight. The room was adorned in lush velvet furniture and draperies that he had picked out during his hedonistic phase in his late twenties, where he could find no pleasure in living, so attempted to replace it all with materialistic pleasures. It wouldn’t be until thirty years after that, when Hermione came into his life, that he would find pleasure, not in expensive art, but in inexpensive tea and free conversation.

“I haven’t heard of this.” She said picking up the first bottle of champagne on the sideboard. “Is it good? I only drink when I am with you.”

He swallowed his tongue, that particular bottle of champagne was Lucius’ favorite and cost him a neat 1200 galleons. Lucius told him that the champagne was magic in a bottle, one sip and she was his.

“It is from France,” He managed to say, torn between laughing and wondering why he truly believed he would be able to woo her with material goods that she cared little for. “And I was told it was sweet.”

“I’ll follow your lead then.” She said and walked away from the sideboard full of expensive crystal champagne flutes and beyond his expensive silk furniture and proceeded to sit in front of the fire.

There was a squeak of a house elf, so affronted that Hermione wouldn’t conform and yet he found it endearing. His kitchen elf had a small wooden tray of desserts, six or seven expertly crafted desserts and she floated it up next to the champagne before disappearing. He followed her to the carpet in front of the fire, the glow of the fire made her seem otherworldly, the light caught her hair and turned her into the Madonna.

As he got to his knees before her, a bottle of 1200 galleon champagne in one hand, and flutes that had cost no less than that in the other Hermione held her arms out to him and he forgot them both promptly, leaving them to embrace her, and in the warmth of the firelight he held her, fingers twining in her hair finding purchase as their noses met.

“You have no idea what it has been like to wait.” She said as his eyes closed, he could smell tea on her breath as she whispered, afraid of her own desires.

“I have waited.” He breathed. “And I have won.”

She smiled and kissed him chastely, first, but then he was afraid of her chasteness and he kissed her back, towering over her on his knees, dominating her through posture alone. His fingers left the neck of the bottle of champagne and threaded into her hair, holding her close as their tongues met, the spicy warmth of her kisses, her affection was not reserved here before the fire. Now far away from the eyes of all who knew her she surrendered into his touch, a small keening noise as he inhaled her scent, arousal mixed with that syrupy sweetness of Hermione.

Intrepid fingers began to slide up his torso and she pulled his ponytail free so that his fine blonde hair curtained them, and he inhaled sharply as she leaned back more, pulling him down with her onto the carpet before the fire. The logs crackled as she lay underneath him, and he was afraid to break contact or even look at her, because he knew it had to be another fantasy of his, but when she started to tug at his robes, impatient, he pulled away. 

Hermione was, of course, beautiful, now that she was on his expensive turkish rug in front of his marble fireplace, the glow of the fire, her lips now kissed into a pout, her hair tousled and her eyes watched his hands. “Eager.” He purred as he unbuttoned his shirt.

The comment seemed to have the opposite effect: “Too eager?” She asked, nervous.

“There is no such thing as too eager, my dove, after all, you’re everything that I’ve wished for.”

She let her fingers tug on the fabric of his robes that he was quickly shirking off, desire overriding the shame of his scarred up body from his many duties as an auror, and finally he was topless and it was not said, but she bit her lip, her eyes traveled down his body and then her fingers as she was not ashamed of her lust, after all, there was no one to witness this.

They kissed again and hands, no longer bound in leather began to undress her carefully with their lips locked, first her robes, then her shirt, each button maddening difficult to undo, and when he reached where her skirt met her top he tugged on the fabric and she laughed, breaking the kiss.

“Is it because you want to unwrap me?” She asked.

He looked at her.

“Instead of using magic.”

“Oh no, my Hermione, if we use magic then it is depriving me, because every button I undo, you get a little bit more flustered, a little bit more desperate.” He kissed her again “Let me undo you.”

Her eyes widened at the implication and she licked her lips, splayed out before him as he began to undress her, small touches that made her shiver, or made her close her legs together, tense and release as more and more creamy white skin was exposed by his touch alone, and then finally he pulled off her skirt, leaving her in silk panties, a creamy white v between her legs and a blouse that lay half open.

Could heaven ever be like this?

He opened the blouse to reveal her small rounded stomach, inches of pale skin and the beginnings of the scar that his best friend had delivered upon her. She tensed up as he touched it, and he found it ironic that she could be so self conscious when the hands that touched her were scarred and disfigured. He leaned down, his hair bushing the tops of her thighs as he kissed just below her belly button, and then looked up to see her eyes closed, a smile playing on her lips. His Hermione. His .

As he continued to undress her, he learned her small tells, when she would tense up, unsure of his next touch, and relax as he soothed her, warm calloused hands undid her bra and tossed it aside until finally she lay in a puddle of their clothes, he wore his trousers, painfully small now, wild hair, and silk panties, a private odalisque for his eyes only.

He kissed her collarbones first, enjoying the way she sighed under his touch, opening for him now, her legs falling open, her body arching up to meet his lips as he traced his way down her body by his lips alone. She sighed or made these delightful mewing noises as he got close and then retreated from her most pleasurable parts. This tease only left her wanting, it gave him a sense of power he forgot he could have. To be desired and to cause desire, fingers held onto her hips and before he reached the small of her waist, she bucked up against him.

“Corban, I am burning.” She whined as he grabbed her hips, his fingers hooked into the silk of her panties, unwilling to unwrap her yet.

“It is good we are near the fireplace.” He hummed against her skin and kissed her belly button before finally making his way to where skin and silk met.

He could smell her desire, a musky sweetness that only made him realize how painfully aroused he was. He wasn’t sure he would last long, and yet he wanted her to know unknown pleasures. He pulled the silk down only a centimeter and kissed where it once was, each part of her mons revealed to him, neatly trimmed as he kissed it until he came to the apex of her thighs, a dewy stickiness under his lips and his tongue darted out to taste it, dipping into her sex and finally he tasted the girl he had dreamt of, for these long months.

She tasted like honey, a tangy sweetness that so perfectly fit his ideal. He pulled the panties down and spread her before him, the fire interrupting her breath, erratic as he licked her exposed slit, collecting the taste of her and feasting on the desire that he had made simply from undressing her. She made these glorious whines and sighs, her thighs on either side of him tensing and relaxing until she was praying via his name alone.

“I want more.” She begged as he drew his tongue across her sex, her hips following along as she desperately arched against him.

“More?”

“Please…please you.” She said, her hands in these delicate fists, twisting into his discarded robes.

He inhaled sharply, excited by her incoherence, at the way she whined when his heat left hers and he knelt between her legs, and his hands went to his pants, and slowly, so agonizingly slow as she squirmed on his floor he freed himself from his wool trousers, letting them pool around his knees and then he took his cock out last, red and throbbing.

Her eyes went to it, and then met his, and his perfect little dove smiled like a cat. “Yes, please.”

“Always so polite,” leaning down over her until their noses met, then their lips, her juices still coating his tongue, his cock pushing through her folds and poised at her entrance. “Let’s see if I can change that.”

Fingers came into his hair and pulled him into another deep kiss as her hips bucked up to meet him and slowly he slid into her hot sex, wet and wanting for him, centimeter by centimeter they met, and centimeter by centimeter he entered heaven, and heaven, centimeter by centimeter, lost her patience and began to beg.

“More.”

He fucked her slowly, withdrawing completely before pushing back in, enjoying the small mewls of pleasure she made, her fingers sought purchase as he seated himself entirely inside of her, their hips meeting as she sighed in contentment beneath him, completely full, completely one.

“More?” He breathed in her ear.

“More.”

If he wasn’t slow, he would finish embarrassingly early, and he continued his pace, enjoying the way that her body matched his, her small frame bent and bowed in order to pull more pleasure from him, and he gave to her, kissing her slowly in between strokes, the warmth of the fire, the warmth of her desire, the warmth of her honeyed gaze as she breathed his name.

He began to pull from her more and more, he would grind his hips into hers and listen to her long shuddering moans which did nothing to keep him from coming too early. It felt impossible that she was here for him, and yet she would beg him in her honeyed sweet voice.

“More, Corban, please. I need you.”

Fingers came under her chin as he picked up the pace, their eyes meeting, her body jolting as their hips snapped together, a puff of breath leaving her as she was filled with him. “Take it.” He whispered “Be a good girl, take it all from me.”

To watch her desire unfold in her eyes, her thoughts so close to the surface he thought he could scoop from it unconsciously, to feel her desire for him so blatant in her minds eye as a natural legillmens. This was his, this was all his finally, and it was so pure he was not sure what he had done to deserve something.

Her eyes closed as she arched her body, tensing and shuddering around his cock. His whole body teetering on the brink of eternity. “Don’t stop, I-”

“Yes, that’s it, take it Hermione, let me give you everything.”
Her breathing was short and shallow.

“Please.” She begged her eyes now meeting his. “Please fuck me.”

Politeness gone, replaced with this rawness that was his.

“Watch me.” He growled, he knew that if he fucked her he would not last long “Watch me as you come, Hermione. I want to see you break for me.”

“Corban.” She breathed, brown eyes meeting his, almost completely dark, the firelight dancing in her eyes as she shuddered, a whimper as she clenched around him, a jolt of pleasure, fire starting from his brain to his toes as she came undone beneath him and pulled her with him. He snapped his hips and shot his seed so deep inside of her it would never leak out, a permanent marking of her choice.

She was his now, there was no denying it. He would do everything to keep her. He peppered her sweaty face with kisses, her lips turned up into a sated smile and when he tried to pull away from her she held him there, his cock softening inside of her.

“Not yet.” She said quietly.

The fire popped, and he moved the 1200 galleon champagne as he lay back down ontop of her, brushing her hair away from her pretty face, glistening with sweat.

It was strange to be with someone who loved him so completely, but then again, now that she was with him, there was no way he could love her by halves. She was his absolute.

She kissed him and nuzzled him. “I love you.”

“And I love you, my dove.”

Chapter Text

She laid in his bed, rich silks encased the two of them, their noses so close they were almost touching but not quite. Yaxley was afraid to let her out of his reach, lest this dream disappear forever. He kept thanking every god both old and new that despite being a fuck up that they delivered him safely to her.

“Corban,” She said quietly, and he opened his eyes to meet hers.

“Hermione.”

“If I had done something reprehensible, would you still be with me?”

“Do you need my help with it?”

“No, but-”

“If you’ve done something terrible, let me know, so I can clean it up for you.” He kissed her. “I have plenty of experience in this area.”

“What if it was against the law? Or maybe…against the law...”

“My dove, I care little if you broke a thousand laws, as I do not love laws, I love you. If you need assurances, I will bind myself to you in some ancient magic so that you never ask me again.”

Her fingers moved up to his chest, twisting around the ends of his hair. She exhaled shakily. “I know you don’t remember how we met the first time, but I don’t think you remember the second time either.”

“My ego cannot handle how many times I have met you and forgotten my Hermione.” He groaned, pulling the sheet over the two of them to try and hide from judgment. “Is it only two times? Have I met you in every life and forgotten you?”

“Perhaps.” She laughed “This time was not your fault.”

“Then let me remember you now, for a little while.” He said holding her face in his hands and memorizing it. “So that when I forget again, my mind will remember exactly where every freckle is without knowing your name.”

“You’re so dramatic.” She laughed, but did not move away from his touch and he kissed her nose “I am ready to hear about how I met you again.”

“This one was quite ugly.”

“I live quite an ugly life. That’s how I deserved such a pretty girl in my bed.”

“Corban!”

“Alright love, tell me about the second time we have met.”

“Well, Ron was late for dinner, it was a few days after we had met the first time, maybe a week, but I was going to call it off with him that night, and he probably knew.” She sighed and rolled her eyes, even as he cradled her face in his hands, unwilling to stop touching her. “However, I was tired of pretending like there was an us , after you, I knew that there was no chance of him again. Ron was, of course, the one who told me my life was ruined after the failed Retaliation Laws, and that my best hope of living any life would be to marry him and stay out of the public eye .”

“You didn’t.”

“You told me not to.”

He closed his eyes in frustration, he must have been obscenely charming that night to her for her to abandon her boyfriend for him immediately after. Yaxley had never thought himself as charming to anyone, but Hermione clearly thought so.

“You had gotten arrested.” She said, “Ron was late to dinner because he was hauling your body across the office from some windowless room to another, you were bleeding and-” she closed her eyes “I saw the signs of cruciatus. I have suffered that curse enough to know it.”

Perfect. After charming her enough to fall in love with him in a pub in Glasgow, the next time they saw each other, he was at the lowest point in his life, tortured by children half his age for a crime he did not commit, bleeding and twitching half conscious with only a third of his mind.

“I had never seen someone in such bad shape, not even during the war, not even myself after I had been tortured by Bellatrix! To know that my friends were doing this to you in the Ministry of Magic!”

She was crying and trying not to, biting her lip, his fingertips wet with tears. “Come now, my dove, it is many years gone, and I am fine now.”

He kissed her cheeks gently, the wetness on his lips salty. His chest was tight that anyone would cry over his suffering. He wished that he could have somehow protected her from the ugliness of the DMLE, the ugliness of a wheel that he participated on once upon a time. It felt bitter in his memories now.

“You had saved my life.” She explained “After the retaliation laws I thought my life was over. Ron told me my life was over. Then we met again, and I decided to save yours.”

Corban stopped peppering her face with kisses and pulled back away from her.

“How?”

She sniffed and looked at him, searching his eyes. The air grew thick around them underneath his silk sheets, hot from her breath, her checks wet and red. “Promise me,” She breathed “Promise me that you will not leave because of what I have done. If you leave, I shall wish I was dead, or will be dead if they find out what I have done.”

He licked his lips, but the choice was easy, he had to keep choosing her. Each time he choose her his life got a little better. “I, Corban Yaxley, sole heir of the House of Yaxley, do promise my life and loyalty to Hermione Granger.”

There was the white glow of binding magic. Her eyes widened.

“I, Hermione Granger, do promise the same.”

“Okay, my dove, I am bound to you, out with it.”

The mischievous smile spread on her lips. “I will give you two options, Corban.”

“Out with it!”

“I will tell you now, or I will tell you in one week’s time and you can guess it.”

“And what do I get if I guess it?”

“Me.”

“I already have you.”

“Well,” Hermione said “What about having me again?”

“Ah, well, I am quite fond of you.”

“Well?”

“Ok, ok, I want to win you all over again. Let me play auror one last time, my dove, but what will happen if I lose.”

“I get you.” She smiled.

“Hmm, suddenly the stakes are lower.”

At the dawn of the New Year, he woke up in a life that was so perfect it could not be his own. Hermione was sleeping beside him, the clingy thing she was, she held his hand in his sleep, making sure they were face to face, nose to nose, on the same pillow even. She smelled like sex and vanilla, a mixture of her and them . She was all curves and softness, and she was all his.

It took him three tries to meet her, to truly meet and see her for his, and it had to be destiny because nothing else would give him so many chances to muck it up, and yet she burrowed closer to him when he moved, she followed him when he was drowning, she fell with him right through the Ministry to the bottom, so that she could pull him back up.

“Happy New Year.” She murmured and shifted, naked under his sheets, not turning away, but turning towards him, her nose buried in his neck, just under the swell of his Adam’s Apple.

“Happy New Year, my dove.”

Hermione as it turned out was going to have a very busy New Year’s Day. She explained to him that she was going to send her resignation to the Ministry and was moving out of her flat so that “those who have trouble with it” would not be able to find her. However, before she left she left a neatly bound packet of parchments with lines and lines of arithmancy proofs. She left a note in the top corner in her neat handwriting. “ Good Luck Detective - Hermione.”

She said she was moving to a place in Glasgow to be closer to her “patron.” He told her that he wasn’t giving her enough money to be considered a patron, but after she had left, he tried to devise twenty ways to give her enough gifts that he could make sure she would never need to seek out another patron. It was in the middle of this scheming that the LeStrange brothers came over unannounced with more champagne and good tidings.

Rodolphus was cell mates with Antonin, and so while Rodolphus and Yaxley were not close in school, after the prison break from Azkaban during the war, they had grown rather close via Antonin. Now that Bellatrix was gone (and good riddance) the two brothers were inseparable, Rabastan because he loved his brother, Rodolphus because he felt guilty for what his brother had gone through whether it be war, or wives.

“Where is she?” Rodolphus stopped short in the study where Yaxley was pouring over catalogs from various shops that Narcissa had recommended “And what are you doing?”

“Avoiding that.” He pointed to the packet of equations that Hermione had left. “And trying to find pretty baubles to buy her so that she will find me attractive.”

“What about the champagne we bought from the restaurant?” Rodolphus said, setting the bottle down on Yaxley’s desk “Was it not enough to drop over two thousand galleons on that girl last night?”

Yaxley flipped through another page of posing witches in various dresses and skirts before looking up “No.”

“Did you tell her how much that champagne cost?”

“No.”

“Then how will she appreciate it?” Rodolphus now eyed the champagne he brought over as a gift, and more than likely an excuse to meet Hermione. It was another fine vintage, Blanc De Blancs in cursive across the front. “Pearls before swine, neither you, nor her, appreciate the work we have done in getting you a wife.”

Yaxley turned the catalog, tapping on a dress that was made of fairy silk and had the night sky woven into it. “What do you think of this one?”

Rodolphus leaned over as Rabastan picked up the packet, his eyes looking over the model and then to the price. “I think you’ve gone mad.”

“This is the deterimancy experiment?” Rabastan asked, changing the subject as he pushed the twine tying the parchments together out of the way.

“It is a riddle.”

“This is a riddle? I apologize, but I believe she will be better suited to be my wife than yours. An ex-auror doing probabilistic equations?” Rabastan unwound it and placed the note from Hermione on the oak desk where Yaxley was currently flipping through a jewelry catalog.

“I am hoping if I buy her enough gifts, it will buy me enough time to learn arithmancy.”

“Or I can just solve it.”

The three men were quiet, waiting for someone to say no.

“Or you can just solve it.” Yaxley agreed as Rabastan walked out of the study, flipping through the papers, heading down the hallway towards where Yaxley knew the library to be.

“We came for another reason, besides champagne, and trying to get a peek at Miss Earl Grey.” Rodolphus said and withdrew a neat little envelope from his robes “I believe you will be in sunny Italy for awhile, my friend Master Alessandro has accepted her proposal and her apprenticeship starts in thirty days.”

He looked down at the envelope, neat script printed across the front “ Miss Hermione Granger ” A worry started to worm it’s way into his head. If she had a master in Italy, would she even want him to come with her? He thought of nights and days, communicating with her only through owl post, which would take days internationally. If he got arrested for the audit, things would be even worse. She wanted nothing more than to become a true arithmancer, and he had made it come true for her, but he felt like he was one step away from wrecking even this with his past.

“Are you not pleased?” Rodolphus asked, now flipping through a dress catalog on his own.

“I am.”

“You’re not.”

“What if she wants to go to Italy alone?”

“Well, then you go to Italy too, and you run into her over and over until she realizes that you’re the one for her.”

Yaxley’s eyes moved up from the paper to Rodolphus. “It’s funny you should mention this-”

Rodolphus interrupted him by showing him a gaudy black silken dress with dragons moving all over it. “This one?”

“God no.”

Rabastan was not seen for the rest of the day.

Hermione missed dinner, and Yaxley sat at the table alone with a catalog with bookmarks for about fourteen different robes, some gaudy tiaras that Rodolphus insisted that women wore. Yaxley and Rodolphus argued over this tiara point for thirty minutes straight since he had never seen Hermione wear something like this but apparently Bellatrix did and maybe they should floo call Narcissa on the matter.

He decided to check in on her, grabbing the envelope and leaving the catalogs next to his untouched plate in the oversized hall. The elves had set two seats next to the far end of the oversized oaken table, a family heirloom and trademark of the Yaxley’s. He apparated to her residence only to see he was not the only person there.

Yaxley froze across the street, erring towards a tree, watching Harry Potter pace back and forth in front of Hermione’s home, he could see that he had a stack of parchments rolled up in his hand, crinkling under his fist. It was dark and cold, Potter paced from one lamp to the next, clearly furious. His eyes moved from Potter up to the floor where he knew she was.

Did she know that he was there? Is that why she did not come outside?

The light went out on the fifth floor and Potter still hadn’t noticed the other auror across the street. Yaxley withdrew Rabastan’s wand from his sleeve. Hermione was balancing a box of books on her hip as someone kept talking to her as she was going out the door, she was laughing and waving goodbye in the narrow shaft of light from the building and whoever see was talking to pointed to the figure on the street.

Potter straightened up and offered a polite wave as Hermione braced herself, shrinking in on herself as she was apt to do, trying to protect herself from what was coming. However, things were different this year, not eighteen hours into it.

“Potter!” He barked and the other man whipped around, his wand drawn, those cool auror reflexes he used to awe over before he became one. “Do we call this little display stalking? Or threatening ?”

Hermione out of the corner of his eye was now walking the short distance from the door to the street, her wand in her hand. There was no one on this quiet London street who had not known the horrors of war.

“I don’t know Yaxley, we’ll see if you can fully form a sentence to talk to your barrister about it later.” Potter spat. “Perhaps this time we’ll make it stick.”

Hermione stopped at the threat, not six feet away from the two men. Her voice was cautious, soothing a wild animal. “Harry, you are so close to Minister, you shouldn’t be making a scene on the street. I’ll owl you.”

“Oh no you don’t. I know all about what you’ve done, Hermione. I’ve told our mutual friends and we want to talk to you. Now .”

“She’s busy.”

“Stay out of it, Death Eater.”

“I am leaving London.” She insisted and shifted the box from one hip to another “I have left the Ministry, you won’t find any more trouble with me, Harry. Just let it go.”

“You aren’t getting away from us.” He threatened, each word more vile than the last, the jail warden that had caged his dove for more years than even he wanted to think about. Potter’s wand was trained on Hermione, but Yaxley was faster. He whipped out Rabastan's wand and in one smooth movement, had the upper hand.

Sometimes experience is better than age. 

“Try it Potter.”

Potter, the hero of the first war, was only shying away from the wand not due to fear, but because Yaxley had jammed it so far into his jaw it was a natural reaction to flinch from pain. “Curse me, and you’ll disappear forever.”

“I’d rather disappear than her. That’s the plan, isn’t it? You can only take one of us out, the landlady and probably all of these good little witches and wizards are looking out their window right now. They want to see what is going to happen to the good little war heroes that defeated the Dark Lord. I am comfortable with being the villain, but are you?”

Yaxley dug the wand deeper into his neck, seeing Potter’s eyes move to the building, it was enough for him to go off of. So Harry Potter was still at the behest of public opinion. He would make a fine Minister of Magic.

“Do it Potter, curse Hermione Granger on this street and kiss your wish to be next Minister of Magic goodbye. Let her go, and the Prophet can print a DMLE ticker about a report of an assault tomorrow in the Prophet. Harm her, and I’ll be on the front page for murder.”

“Fuck off Yaxley.”

“You fuck off Harry.” Hermione said, finally finding her anger “Once you couldn’t use me for strategy, you used me as Ron’s bed warmer. When I wouldn’t let Ron use me anymore, you discarded me under the guise of a state secret. It’s over Harry, the secret is out. The real way you won the war is about to be published in every academic journal on this island and the continent and I’m leaving. I’m not going to be a tool for a war that is long ended. I am not some dormant weapon for The Order. I have left your gang of thugs, who are much worse than any Death Eater by the looks of St. Mungos, and I hope you never contact me again. ”

Potter finally took a step back from Yaxley and turned to the two of them. Yaxley moved to get closer to Hermione and Harry pointed his wand at the two of them. “I know what you’ve done Hermione, we all know! You thought you were so bloody clever. I’ll make sure that you never leave this island, consider Britain your Azkaban, you interfering little bitch.”

A dog started barking and the savior of the wizarding world disapparated with a crack, leaving the two of them alone. She exhaled shakily and looked down at the box that contained all her worldly possessions.

“I would rather like it if I could stay with you tonight.” She said.

“Dinner is waiting.” He replied and handed her the envelope that he came to deliver.

She took it, puzzling over her name on the front in neat script.

New year, new future.

On the second of January, he ate breakfast with Hermione, and it was the first time that he had the luxury of seeing her not at work, but as herself. She wore oversized clothing and read a small book off to the side of her plate as she ate fresh baked biscuits completely coated in raspberry jam. The elves were all bunched up at the door from the kitchen watching her eat, illuminated by the large bay windows off to one side of the room, winter sunlight casting soft shafts of light across the entire room, six hundred years of pureblood history made perfect by the addition of his Hermione.

“Corban,” She said not looking up. “Are your elves afraid of me?”

“I think they are afraid of most people, considering only three or four different people ever have visited in the past twenty or so years.”

He sat down next to her and she closed her book before pouring him tea. This domesticity was so intangibly sweet, like an ache he didn’t realize he had until it was gone. She tugged an envelope from underneath her book.

“This is your doing?”

“Well, I had some assistance from some men you’d rather not meet.”

“You know that he is the Master of Arithmancy in Europe?”

He did not, and kept quiet, instead cutting open his own scone. He had thought Rabastan was full of it, an always apprentice, but apparently he had made some good connections over the years.

“He has not taken an apprentice for nearly fifteen years.” She insisted as he began to butter his breakfast “And I didn’t even apply, no letters of recommendation, nothing.”

“Well, you gave me the proposal and we gave the proposal to him, and he accepted. That’s what you wanted, right?”

Her eyes fell to the plate “But it is in Italy.”

“I have been looking at houses in Puglia, and found some estates.” He said, pausing to judge her reaction “For you.”

“For us?”

Relief coursed through him. So, she had the same worries as he did.

“Also for us.” He said biting into his scone as she picked up the envelope.

“Then I will accept, and you will have to show me what you have found. I don’t have much money so I will accept help from my patron for a little while longer.”

“Being your patron makes me feel so old .” He said through a mouthful of biscuit “Can I not be something else?”

“Lover?”

“Acceptable.”

“I will meet the friend that gave me this.” She said waving it at him “I don’t like being in debt to people.”

“I also don’t like that they have been coming over trying to catch you in my house for three days now.” Yaxley grumbled “No doubt they will be here sometime around dinner.”

Rabastan and Rodolphus came again with more champagne, the same champagne that they brought and took home yesterday, citing that it was only for Miss Earl Grey and not for Yaxley. Hermione had spent a majority of her time in the house exploring the vast corridors and once he had shown her the library, she had refused to leave, and so Yaxley too, spent the majority of his day in his ill used library until the LeStrange's showed up.

Rodolphus approached her first, tentative, setting the champagne down in front of him as a barrier when he entered the library where she was reading. The two LeStrange brothers both were dressed in finer robes than Yaxley normally saw them in.

“You are the ones who got me the apprenticeship.”

“Yaxley-” Rodolphus’ voice broke, his hand still on the neck of the green glass bottle “Yaxley showed us your work, and it seemed a bit of a crime that you weren’t a master.”

“Hermione Granger.” She offered her hand to him.

He took it. “Rodolphus LeStrange.”

Her eyes darkened. “Your wife tried to kill me.”

“Me too.” Rodolphus replied simply.

“Me too.” Rabastan said quietly “It’s ah… I’m Rabastan LeStrange.”

“Me too.” Yaxley added and offered his hand to her “Corban Yaxley.”

She smacked it away with a smile, the tension released immediately, and Rodolphus let go of her hand.

“Are you staying for dinner? Corban has the largest table I have ever seen outside of Hogwarts.”

Rodolphus let go of the bottle and looked behind him towards where he knew the dining room was. “I believe I must ask the lady of the manor if she has seating for two more.”

“Yes, I think so, I mean, there’s room for two hundred more at that table.”

Yaxley's cheeks tinged pink at the fact that she not only did not balk at the title, but embraced it with ease.

“You exaggerate!” Yaxley said as she sat back down.

“We brought champagne, and I wanted to ask,” Rabastan pulled out a tattered copy of her "riddle" of equations that she had gifted Yaxley. “When you integrated this variable in, are you saying that you integrated the set, or a subset of that set, it is unclear.”

Hermione got up and looked down at the equations in his hand. “You are the one that got me the mastery.”

“Yes, I am old friends with Master Alessandro. The brilliance in your set theory cannot be denied, Miss Granger.”

“Hermione, please.”

“Come on Yaxley,” Rodolphus said as the two of them began to talk what seemed to be another language “Let’s leave them to it.”

“Hermione?” He asked but she waved him off as Rabastan asked his next question, the two of them, heads together, flipping through pages and pages of arithmancy.

The two men left the library, Rodolphus clearly rattled by Hermione’s presence exhaled as soon as they were far enough from the library. “I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“The scars, the scars from Bellatrix, everyone knows those scars. They’re famous and they’re from my ex-wife.” Rodolphus hissed.

He had seen Hermione’s scars in intimate detail a few times, and he knew the paper often would pull up a photo of her, fresh from the war, her sleeve torn to reveal the horrible word carved in stark red on her skin MUDBLOOD.

Hermione however had never brought up Yaxley’s history against him, it seemed almost passe to her that they were on opposite sides of the war. When he exposed the Dark Mark to her the first time, during the late October weeks where it was sometimes too hot in her favorite restaurant her eyes glanced to it briefly, and when he had tried to tug his sleeve down to spare her discomfort she stilled his hand.

He repeated her words to Rodolphus: “We all bear the scars of our mistakes.”

Rodolphus rubbed his arm where the faded dark mark lay beneath his sleeve “Who would have thought that nearly thirty years after I made the mistake of following a classmate I would end up here? In your drafty old manor wondering when the Ministry is going to nab us all and kill us outright while some slip of a girl my wife held down and tortured in my other friend’s house is entertaining my brother.”

“We had a shit lot at life, but I am trying to make things better, and things getting better seemed to start with her, each time it starts with her.” Yaxley said as they entered his study. “So I have to keep choosing her, and then maybe I can make up for forty years of being an absolute mistake with forty years of devotion.”

Rodolphus picked up the bottle of whisky and twisted the cap open. “So what are we thinking for the wedding? Como? Milan?”

“We can’t even agree on what clothes to buy her and you’re planning the wedding?”

“You haven’t told Antonin yet have you?”

“No.”

In truth he and Antonin had been conversing for months about Hermione, but he could never bring himself to admit who he was so in love with. Miss Earl Grey was written about in at least forty to fifty letters to Russia, everything from her bad days at work to her tastes in food. There was this fear that settled into him each time he got close to writing her name to parchment that it was a choice he was making, between his best friend and the best thing that he had in this god forsaken rock in the Atlantic.

“Well, you will tell him before the wedding.”

“I will.” Yaxley promised, not sure if he could keep it.

He heard Hermione laughing in the hall and the lone tones of Rabastan’s voice as they walked. Rabastan’s gaudy dragonhide boots clicking off the wood on the second floor. “-your logic but if you can give me a bit more to go on.”

“If you are truly an arithmancer, you will know the results before the first research trial has completed. You paid for it after all, you should be able to finish Corban’s homework for him.”

Rodolphus stiffened at her presence, while his brother had a tentative smile on his lips, quill in his hand, following Hermione around the study even as she sat next to Rodolphus who looked like he would rather be cursed than be with her. A reaction that lessened with exposure, because each day he visited Yaxley Manor over the first week of the year, he relaxed a little bit more.

It was on the seventh day that the elder LeStrange laughed at a story Hermione was telling Yaxley over lunch that she looked over at him, the husband of a woman who almost killed her.

“Ridiculous right?”

"Ridiculous!" Rodolphus agreed with a smile, and then with that, the awkwardness turned into ease.

Ridiculous, how could anyone be uncomfortable around his Hermione? He flipped over another real estate listing in Tuscany, and his life too, turned another page.

It was on a rainy day, three days before the election of the new Minister of Magic that he received a quick note from Rodolphus asking that Yaxley come alone to take tea with Lucius, which was unusual in itself as Lucius never liked to go out of Malfoy Manor for anything less than dinner at his favorite restaurants. He left Hermione in the library for the afternoon and went to visit, election news everywhere on his walk up to the small cafe.

There was something distasteful to him about the frenzy around a fixed election. He saw the campaign flyers as he walked around town, despite being really no choice in candidate he was surrounded by the current Minister and Potter waving and smiling.

He ducked into the cafe where everyone was already gathered around a table, coffee and pastries already waiting, Lucius’ golden hair was unmistakable. Rabastan looked like he had seen better days and was drinking his coffee faster than they could refill it and Rodolphus was tapping a half empty sugar packet on the table, waiting for Yaxley to be seated.

“Well?”

“Well, I solved it.” Rabastan said, looking like he had sacrificed about a week’s sleep to Hermione’s riddle.

“And?”

Rabastan turned the papers around so that the equations were facing Yaxley instead of him, he took a quill and pointed at a variable DH that was riddled everywhere. “This is Potter’s performance at the DMLE, you can see it here, here, and-” he flipped a few pages “Here.”

“So she was tracking Potter?”

“This equation is for the election in three days, to determine the outcome.”

So, this was Hermione’s first experiment for her Mastery. She had done it without funding.

“This variable directly affects the outcome of the election.”

There was a silence over the table, before Lucius spoke up: “You said you had found all of our cases were audited, all of Potter ’ s cases were audited.”

Yaxley licked his lips, not liking where this was headed  “Yes, resulting in mistrials.”

Rodolphus emptied the rest of his sugar into his coffee “For a financial audit.”

Fuck.

“Hermione.”

Lucius relaxed with a sigh next to him “It wasn’t The Order at all, it was her!”

“Why? Not just your case, but all of our cases.” Rodolphus continued “Why wouldn’t she want her best friend to win the Ministry seat?”

“So we can relax?”  Lucius insisted “She’s not trying to get rid of you, at least, right?”

He wiped his face with his hands, realizing now that the entire time he had underestimated his little accountant when all the evidence he had collected until now had placed her right in the middle. She would have the ability to do an audit, and she had been at his trial. She knew every case that Potter and Weasley had done because they were her friends. She had asked him several times over their courtship of one week if he would hate her if she broke the law, and he had said no, thinking that it was some minor thing.

Potter knew that was the more frightening thing. He had said as much when he confronted her just two days prior. What did that mean for her safety?

“Yaxley!” Rodolphus said kicking him under the table.

“Is she trying to get rid of us?” Lucius asked again.

“No, no!” Yaxley said sitting upright, incredulous “She’s been trying to sabotage Potter.”

“But why?” Rodolphus interjected, tapping on the paper “This was years worth of effort.

“Fuck if I know.”

“Ministry Auror.” Lucius said with a snort “Our best and brightest.”

“You said her life went to rock bottom after the Retaliation Laws right? This equation dates back to that time.” Rabastan flipped through to the first page “Just a few weeks after that.”

“When Yaxley was arrested.” Rodolphus said, his eyes moving from his brother to Yaxley “ You were the first change she made.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“So, revenge then?” Lucius said, taking a sip of his cappuccino “Not bad for a mudblood.”

“Lucius!” Rodolphus exclaimed “In public?”

“It’s a compliment!”

“And you’re a prick.” Yaxley countered.

Lucius rolled his eyes at the childish insult. “Well, whatever the reason, it’s not us she wants, for once.”

“Oh, I think she wants one of us.” Rodolphus replied suggestively.

“It’s quite brilliant actually.” Rabastan said as he flipped through the solution “Every single case, everything Potter has done for seven years has made his life worse because Miss Earl Grey intercepted all of it. Every fake raid, every false arrest, gone into a bureaucratic process that no one can look into.”

“I always thought the DMLE was the most powerful branch of the Ministry.” Lucius said “Now I see I have been mistaken.”

“Oh, even the DMLE knows that it is the auditors that have the power.” Yaxley said, finally picking up his coffee hoping that it would calm his anxiety. Not fear of Hermione, but fear for her, as she was one and they were many. If the Order knew what she had done, then she was right, they would come for her.

Rodolphus nodded. “The curse of being seen.” 

Hermione lay next to him in bed, half asleep on his arm, she liked to be close to him, touching if at all possible when they slept. Starved for affection for so long she drank from his companionship eagerly. She was a fan of constant small touches, small bids for his attention, and he gave in to all of them. Loving her was a full time commitment, and he worked overtime with pleasure.

However as they lay in his large master bedroom, the shadows closing in on them as night grew longer, his heart was heavy with the secret that he had solved the riddle and knew. He had to tell her, the election was tomorrow.

“I solved it.”

Her eyes fluttered open sleepily “Rabastan solved it.”

“We all know what you did now.”

She opened her eyes fully “We all? You promised you would not tell."

“And I did not! My dove, it was only the four of us: Lucius, Rabastan, Rodolphus. We had thought that we were going to be arrested by the audit team. I thought I was going to be torn from you and thrown into Azkaban.”

“Well,” She said, stretching to wake up a bit. “I do have one of you in custody.”

“Why prevent Potter from being Minister?”

“We do not know if it worked yet .”

The question that weighed on his mind finally came to light, the tightness in his chest unbearable “Was getting my case just a factor in your equation?”

She shook her head, her curls bouncing around her face “Your case was the case that made me realize I had to do something. I watched my friends turn into monsters. I watched my friends get devoured by them in that windowless room, when they dragged your body out of one room into a cell like a sack of potatoes, it changed something for me. You were…You meant so much to me, and-” She paused, a gasp for breath as she tried to hold tears away, hiding her face. “You were reduced to nothing there. I know what that is like. I fought to have that stop. What they did to you and to Daphne-”

“What of Daphne?”

“They knew I was going to publish it. The arithmancy that gave the Order the ability to win the war. It was six years of my life, it was and still is my pride, and they tried to prevent me from being able to publish anything. People would find out that Harry Potter did not win the war, but arithmancy did and it would ruin him. He told me he would never be Minister if I published, if people knew the truth.”

She pulled the blanket up to her nose, hiding away from him. “They tried to kill me, and it didn’t matter if it was just me, and I tried at first to do things the right way, complaints and passing laws. However, I felt so defeated by the whole machine.”

“Until me.”

“Until you.” She let out a shuddering sigh “Until I saw you, I realized that it wasn’t a matter of my life, but it was a matter of yours. I had to make it so Harry would never become Minister, or else something far worse than Lord Voldemort would be in power. People hated the Dark Lord, but no one hates Harry Potter. Power unchecked. Power unchecked that harmed you behind closed doors. It couldn’t happen. Not as long as I am here.”

“One witch can truly decide the future of the Ministry of Magic?”

“Only once, I think,” She said, swiping the tears out of her eyes, “I am tired of fighting these wars.”

He kissed her, enveloping her in his arms, hiding her away. A kingmaker, an arithmancer, but most importantly, his.

Rabastan and Hermione were constantly chattering about some theorem of Master Alessandro’s that was more interesting than anything else Yaxley could possibly entertain her with. Their favorite Italian restaurant was packed to the brim with patrons, Lucius had gotten them a semi-private booth and the Wizarding Wireless was in the middle of describing the vote counting process for the election.

Yaxley and Rodolphus were currently both picking out houses in Italy, going through each listing and pointing out pros and cons while Lucius gave his two cents on the investment purposes of each building. Red wine, half eaten breads, empty plates of pasta, four to six different desserts, shot glasses emptied of limoncello, and Hermione had ignored the champagne as she squabbled with the younger LeStrange. “Hermione? What about Rome?”

She looked up, confused “What about Rome?”

“Quiet!” A little Italian man yelled from near the radio and the announcer’s voice got louder “Quiet! The results are in!”

“And we have quite an upset ladies and gentlemen, despite many pollsters thinking that Potter would be in, the votes say it all: Kingsley Shacklebolt gets another term as the Minister of Magic. Many exit polls believe that Harry Potter’s poor case performance at the DMLE to be proof that he is a War Hero, but he’s not cut out for the Ministry of Magic.”

The second announcer laughed “There are truly no heroes in the Ministry, Lee, that’s why we have to force them to go to work there in the first place.

The men were silent for a few moments as there were cheers and chatter around the restaurant. “Miss Granger,” Lucius said, quietly, seriously. “I am willing to give you a salary of two hundred thousand galleons a year if you start tomorrow.”

She shot him a skeptical look. “I am busy.”

“If you can just tell me whether to invest in this company.” He pulled The Prophet nearby, flicking quickly to the business section.

“She’s busy!” Rabastan insisted, putting his hand down on the paper to stop him and a champagne cork popped somewhere in the restaurant.

Rodolphus popped open their own champagne. “I believe a toast is in order to Miss Earl Grey, an accountant who has changed the course of Britain’s history.”

“Who?” She asked as her champagne glass was filled.

“To you, my love!” Yaxley said as he raised his glass.

“To Corban, who if he hadn’t sang so terribly in that pub five years ago, I would not have been here today.”

“To both of you, whose wedding I will have much fun planning.” Rodolphus said.

“And to me,” Lucius said raising his glass “Who is about to make a lot of money from his investments thanks to Yaxley and Miss Granger.”

“Mrs. Yaxley!” Rodolphus interjected as the glasses clinked.

“To Mrs. Yaxley!” Rabastan said, raising his glass to Hermione.

“Not yet!”

“But soon?” Lucius said after he finished his sip of champagne.

“Of course.” She laughed. “To Mr and Mrs Yaxley.”