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Chapter Text

POV: Draco Malfoy

The fog in Chelsea did not belong to the Ministry.

Draco Malfoy stepped from the alley, his boots silent against slick cobblestone, and paused just before the edge of the containment barrier. The morning had arrived soft and grey, all sound absorbed by the mist curling thick around the townhouse’s perimeter—enchanted fog, perhaps, but not by their hands. He could taste the difference in the air.

The perimeter wards hummed faintly under his skin as he approached, a sign of good calibration—or Ministry-standard laziness. He flicked his identification against the glyph on the wardstone and stepped through without speaking. The young Auror posted at the barrier stiffened.

“Sir,” the boy started, voice tight with recognition.

Draco didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. His presence was permission enough.

Rosier's townhouse loomed ahead, four stories of faded elegance, its charm dulled by years of inherited decay. Ivy clung stubbornly to the brick. The front door, wide open, yawned into darkness. The house seemed to resist occupancy. Even the mist hovered just short of the threshold, as if unsure it wanted to follow.

He paused just before crossing into the entryway, letting the quiet settle into his chest. Fifth murder. No magical trace. No witness. No pattern that anyone else could see.

And yet.

The moment he stepped through the threshold, something shifted—subtly, but unmistakably. Like the house had taken a breath and recognized him.

Inside, the air was wrong. Not cursed, not hexed—just… altered. As if someone had scraped the magic thin across the walls and left it threadbare. His fingers twitched near the wand at his wrist.

He scanned the corridor—no signs of struggle, no scorch marks or lingering spell shadows. Clean. Too clean. Which, at this point, was its own kind of violence.

The staircase to the right creaked under invisible pressure. Old wood, old secrets. A shattered teacup lay by the hearth, a bloom of dark liquid staining the rug beneath it. The bitter scent rose above the usual death-tinged stillness—sharper than poison, not quite floral. He breathed it in once. Acid and roots. Alchemical. Familiar, but not his familiar.

Draco crouched, gloved fingers skimming just above the rug’s edge. He didn’t touch the stain. He didn’t need to. Whatever had happened here had been permitted —not forced. The wards hadn’t failed. They’d shifted, momentarily and deliberately, to allow someone inside.

He straightened slowly. No glamour remained. No glamour had ever been cast.

Elspeth Rosier had let her killer in.

Outside, the fog curled tighter around the building’s bones.

Draco narrowed his eyes.

Something was wrong.

Not magically. Not mechanically.

Something older . Something missing .

He turned back toward the body.

His jaw tightened.

Five dead. No trace.

The parlor was still dressed in the remnants of a morning unfinished.

A pot of tea, now cold and steeped to bitterness, sat on a silver tray beside two cups—one shattered on the floor, its dark contents bleeding into the edge of an antique rug. The second cup remained untouched, balanced with an old woman’s fastidiousness at the corner of a polished table.

Elspeth Rosier was slumped in her armchair, posture collapsed but not fallen. One arm hung limply over the side, palm down, fingers curled as if she'd meant to reach for something but changed her mind. Her eyes were open. Not wide with fear or pain—but with a kind of puzzled detachment, as if the moment of death had come before she had the chance to name it.

Draco stepped further into the room.

He didn’t call for a field mage or summon the mediwizards who would soon descend on the scene with their cataloging charms and sealing spells. He didn’t need the noise.

He needed the silence.

The hearth had long gone cold. No magical fire flickering low, no ember with memory. Just stone, soot, and the steady scent of something acrid that clung to the room like a second skin. Not rot. Not blood. Bitter. Rooted. Wrong.

He crouched, slowly, beside the shattered cup.

No signs of defensive magic. No wand burns or dueling residue. No curses splintered into the floorboards. He cast a detection charm, wordless and clean. The spell passed through the room like a whisper and came back still.

Nothing.

Too clean.

Draco frowned. Even the most precise dark magic left residue—an emotional heat, the phantom echo of a violent rupture. But this? This felt like someone had wiped the slate not just clean, but deliberately empty . As though the room had been scrubbed of intention.

He studied her face. Rosier had been old—mid-fifties but preserved with the kind of magic that made age pause at the door. Her hair was coiled neatly. Her robes pressed. Her lips tinged ever so slightly darker than they should have been, as if the last breath she drew had soured the blood beneath her skin.

He stepped closer. Breathed in once, shallow.

The air tasted metallic.

No—it was something beneath the metal. Alkaline. Sharp. A layered kind of scent, the kind that didn't belong in a sitting room or on tea leaves. Something added . Something built .

He knelt near the rug, leaned close to the damp patch where the tea had spilled. The odor was stronger there: earthy, bitter, threaded with something chemical. Stabilized. Bound.

Draco sat back on his heels.

This wasn’t poison in the usual sense. This was an agent . Constructed. Released. And whatever it was, it hadn’t been designed to kill through violence.

It had been designed to enter without resistance. To leave no trace. To make it all look like nothing at all.

Which, of course, was the point.

He stood again, slow and thoughtful. His gaze returned to Rosier’s open eyes—eyes that did not scream, did not plead, but stared through him like a woman who had opened a door she thought was safe.

Draco stepped back into the stillness of the room and let it speak to him.

Five victims. No spellfire. No struggle.

Just the eerie quiet of permission. And a teacup no one would ever finish.

The outer protections had held.

That was the first thing he confirmed when he stepped back through the entryway and reapproached the perimeter glyphs etched into the doorframe. The base wards—Ministry-standard containment protocols—were still humming, faint and dutiful. Not degraded. Not disturbed.

To most investigators, that would have been enough. Wards intact meant no forced entry. No external breach.

But Draco knew better.

He raised his wand and traced the boundary lines again, this time slower, skimming along the seams where spell-layer met foundation. The magic responded—obedient, familiar. It opened to him like a well-trained hound.

That was the problem.

He pivoted to the interior wall just left of the entry—where the personal ward signature should have pulsed strongest. This kind of enchantment wasn’t installed by the Ministry. It was custom: older, more intimate. Rosier’s own magic, bound into the wood grain, designed to resist all but those she had chosen.

Draco had seen this configuration before. He recognized the signature glyph—the looping curve of the 'Ouro Reseo', a blood-bound perimeter lock. He had studied it in warding theory at sixteen, then re-learned it after the war when half the homes he entered bore its remnants.

It wasn’t broken.

It was misaligned.

He narrowed his eyes.

The glyph had restructured itself—barely perceptible, just a fractional tilt in the resonance pattern, like a locket clasped out of rhythm. It had reset. Not cracked, not shattered.

Invited. Briefly. And then sealed again, as if nothing had passed through at all.

Draco exhaled slowly. A chill rose at the back of his neck, nothing magical—just instinct.

This wasn’t brute force. This was precision . Someone who knew not how to destroy magic, but how to disarm it from the inside out . A ghost in the wards.

He returned to the parlor, walked the perimeter again, slower this time. No breach in the floo. No trace of Apparition. No shimmer of masking spells or Disillusionment residue.

But the smell—that peculiar, bitter undercurrent—was stronger now. It clung to the hearthstone, soaked into the grain of the floorboard, like something that had never been meant to belong there but refused to leave. It wasn’t rot. It wasn’t potion. Not exactly.

It was a trace left behind not by magic, but in the absence of it.

His fingers twitched.

He turned again to Rosier’s body, still seated like she might rise if the light caught her right. He wondered, briefly, what she had felt in the last moment—whether it had been pain, or simply the recognition that something had been allowed in.

No ward failed.

But something passed through.

And it had known exactly how to ask permission.

He was still standing near the hearth, examining the arc of soot where the stone curved into the baseboard, when the footsteps came.

Measured. Unhurried. No wasted movement.

Draco didn’t turn. He didn’t have to. Only one man walked like the floor belonged to him and yet resented having to touch it.

“Malfoy.”

He looked up. Director Selwyn stood in the doorway, framed in morning fog and Ministry authority, his robes crisp, his expression cut from cold iron. The badge on his shoulder caught the low light and shimmered faintly—Director of Magical Crimes, Office of Internal Affairs. It was a title he wore like a weapon.

Draco straightened, but did not salute.

“Sir.”

Selwyn’s eyes swept the room with the indifference of a man used to murder. He didn’t look at the body. He looked at the absence of evidence—at the cold hearth, the polished floors, the spill that had already dried into memory.

“You’re getting outside support,” he said.

The words landed like a dropped file—flat, expected, unwelcome.

Draco’s mouth tightened. “Respectfully, I’m handling it.”

“Clearly.” Selwyn’s gaze didn’t flinch. “Five bodies. No trail. And no trace of spellwork.”

Draco stepped away from the hearth, spine locked, voice quiet. “This isn’t a case for theorists. We don’t need someone from Mysteries guessing at shadows and trying to reinvent the crime scene from a desk.”

“She won’t be at a desk.”

That was the first hint. Draco caught it. Selwyn didn’t say an Unspeakable. He said she.

Selwyn reached into his robes and withdrew a sealed file, thick with annotations. The parchment looked older than it should, as if it had been pulled from the bottom drawer of something people didn’t open unless they had no other choice.

He handed it over without ceremony.

“Brief her when she arrives. Department of Mysteries flagged a connection to a closed case in their archive. She’s cleared.”

Draco didn’t reach for it immediately. When he did, the wax seal broke beneath his thumb with a soft crack, like a bone snapping in a quiet room.

The name inside was printed in clean, impersonal script.

Granger, Hermione.

His jaw went still.

Selwyn adjusted the cuffs of his sleeve, already preparing to turn away.

“You’ll coordinate starting at nine.”

“That’s in—” Draco checked the wall clock. “Twenty-one minutes.”

“Then I suggest you start cleaning up.”

Selwyn didn’t wait for agreement. He didn’t need to. He was already walking away by the time Draco folded the file shut and slipped it into his coat. The sound of his boots on the tile echoed down the corridor like punctuation.

Draco stared at the door for a long moment after it closed.

Granger.

Of course it was.

He exhaled once through his nose—sharp, silent—and turned back toward the room. His eyes drifted again to the tea stain on the floor, the odd, bitter scent still clinging to the air.

Everything about this case had been quiet. Surgical. Controlled.

And now they were bringing her in.

He didn’t say it aloud, but the words were there, flat and undeniable.

Everything was about to get loud.

The room hadn’t changed, but something in it had shifted.

Draco moved back toward the hearth in measured silence, his boots making no sound on the rug that had once been expensive. Elspeth Rosier’s body remained exactly where he’d left it—folded delicately in death, as if she’d simply failed to finish her sentence. No signs of violence, no scars of magic. Just a stillness that felt like a hand pressed gently over a mouth.

He crouched again, closer this time. The tea stain had spread, bleeding into the weave of the rug in slow, spiraling threads. The color had darkened—too deep for tannin alone. It had settled into the floor like a warning written in past tense.

He narrowed his eyes.

There was something about it. Not the stain itself, but the shape it made. The way it curled, as if drawn by a hand that had once known ritual. Or grief.

It reminded him of something he couldn’t name.

Not a crime scene. Not a pattern.

Something old.

He stayed like that for a moment—still, crouched, silent. Letting the room speak, even if it had already said too much.

A soft tap echoed against the windowpane. Delicate. Precise.

He rose, stepped across the room, and unlatched the glass. The owl waiting outside was standard Ministry issue—identification charm glowing faintly beneath its feathers. It blinked once, held out its leg, and dropped the scroll into his hand without ceremony.

Draco closed the window before the cold could follow him in.

The parchment was embossed with the Department of Mysteries seal—old, raised, and charmed to vanish the moment it was read. No flourish. Just a single line of text in a handwriting that was too elegant to be official: 

Hermione Granger. Department of Mysteries. Arrival: 09:00 sharp.

He stared at it. Not long. Just long enough.

The scroll ignited in his palm with a nonverbal flick of his wand, curling into ash that dissolved before it touched the rug. He didn’t watch it disappear.

Instead, he turned back once more to the room—its quiet corners, its bitter air, the body that hadn’t been surprised by death. Then he stepped out without a word, the echo of the door closing behind him far too soft for how loud the morning had become.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The room did not hum so much as it listened .

Hermione Granger stood in the center of Archive Chamber Three, surrounded by humming glass tanks that glowed faintly in the dim, rune-streaked light. Each contained a sample of what the Department politely referred to as Residual Magical Trauma. To the outside world, that meant sealed evidence of dangerous hexes or battlefield echoes. But in her wing of the Department, it meant something else.

The room was cold. Not by charm—by design. Magic decayed faster in warmth.

She leaned closer to the tank on her left, studying the smear of blue-green aura suspended mid-vial. The residual imprint clung to the inner glass, refusing to settle. It always did that when the source was a child. Their signatures never quite knew where to rest.

The file in her hand—Case 1785-M—was a closed one. A seven-year-old Squib whose parents had requested magical suppression, hoping early intervention might change the outcome. It hadn’t. What remained was this: a flickering echo of magic denied, not by nature, but by policy.

Hermione reached for the sigil wand hovering beside her. She tapped twice against the etched crystal on the rim of the tank. The imprint twitched. She recorded the pulse. Again. No shift.

Still resisting measurement, she thought. That made four in a row.

The magic didn’t vanish when you cut someone from their lineage. It hung in the air like a question no one wanted answered. Most people thought a Squib had no magic at all. That wasn’t true. They had enough to be erased by it.

Hermione made a note in the margin of the report: Residual imprint persists beyond suppression. Emotional resonance possible.

She underlined possible twice.

A door opened at the far end of the chamber—silent, but not unnoticed. Even here, among Unspeakables, silence had texture. Hermione didn’t look up until the footsteps reached her table.

“Granger,” said a voice, crisp and dry.

Head Unspeakable Saanvi Varma appeared in her periphery, draped in formal black, hands folded behind her back like a woman who had never once fidgeted. Her eyes, always sharp, scanned the room before returning to Hermione.

Hermione straightened. “Head Unspeakable.”

Varma held out a slim file—no sigils, no glow, nothing to mark it as urgent except the color of the seal: ashen grey.

Hermione took it. Opened it.

One phrase was highlighted in violet ink: Perception breach. No magical residue.

She blinked. Read it again. Then flipped to the attached summary: Five murders. No known connection. No magical trace. Victims found in magically warded homes, undisturbed. Auror Office requesting review.

Varma’s voice was level. “The Department believes someone is mimicking magical signatures without access to a channel.”

Hermione frowned. “A Squib?”

“Not quite. Possibly something in between.” Varma tapped the file with two fingers. “The Aurors have no theory. Just a growing list of bodies and no spellwork to pin them to.”

Hermione’s mind clicked into gear. “So they want us to provide a framework.”

“No.” Varma smiled, thin and without softness. “They want us to send someone.”

Hermione stilled.

Varma added, “You’ll consult. Observe. Do not interfere.”

“Understood.”

Her tone was neutral. Practiced. She didn’t ask the obvious question until she closed the file and saw the name printed neatly at the bottom of the assignment sheet.

Her hand paused. “Who’s the Auror on record?”

Varma didn’t blink. “Malfoy.”

There was a long moment where Hermione said nothing.

Then: “Of course.”

The lift made no sound as it descended—just a slow hum of enchanted gears behind velvet-lined walls, like the Ministry couldn’t bear to be noisy, even in motion.

Hermione stood in the center, arms crossed over the file Varma had handed her. Her wand hand flexed once, absently, the only betrayal of tension. She didn’t read the name again. She didn’t need to.

Malfoy.

The seal had already vanished. The rest was memory.

The lift shuddered once, then slowed.

She didn’t move.

Instead, her eyes fixed on the mirrored panel across from her—the one that reflected her face a little too clearly, too honestly, the way Department glass always did.

She adjusted her collar. Smoothed the fold of her sleeve. A twitch of control, nothing more.

It’s professional, she told herself. It’s a case file. It’s logistics and field coordination.

But her reflection didn’t blink, and for a moment—just one—something surfaced. A flicker.

It had been raining during the skirmish, though she only remembered that in flashes—mud streaked up her robes, her hair matted to her neck, the way her spells hissed when they hit the ground. It was a cursed grove near Dorset, one of the last wandfire holds before the battle that didn’t get a name.

He had been there.

Not beside her. But not against her.

A curse had arced toward her left, split through the fog like a bone-snap of violet light. She hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t needed to. He was already moving.

She never heard him cast. But the air shifted—something bright and fast and meant to shield. The curse broke inches from her shoulder.

They didn’t speak. Not then. Not after.

A week later, she passed him in the corridor at Shell Cottage. She had paused, half expecting some nod, some shared acknowledgment of breath in borrowed time.

He didn’t stop. Didn’t glance. Just moved past her with the same fluid quiet he’d used in the grove.

Like nothing had happened.

The lift chimed. The doors slid open.

Hermione stepped into the corridor without looking back at the glass. The air outside the Department felt heavier somehow, thicker with the noise of the upper floors. Footsteps. Paperwork. Too many people speaking at once.

She moved briskly through the main level, past rows of enchanted file cases and Ministry-issued pens that recorded signatures whether one wanted them to or not.

She walked as though the weight in her chest wasn’t new. As though it hadn’t stirred at the memory of a single look that never came.

It’s ancient history, she told herself again.

But it wasn’t, not quite.

History didn’t vanish just because you didn’t write it down.

The Auror Office was too loud.

Hermione stepped through the brass-framed doors and was met with the sharp scent of ink and wand smoke, the whirring of enchanted filing scrolls, the clipped rhythm of a dozen voices talking over each other—none of it disciplined, none of it quiet.

She stood for a moment on the threshold, absorbing it all.

There had been a time when this was familiar. When she would have moved through this place with practiced confidence and a dossier full of legislation to fix what didn’t work. But that had been before the Department swallowed her. Before she learned what was written in the archives beneath the ground and what was never meant to rise again.

Now, even the light here felt too quick. Too exposed.

A junior Auror approached—fresh-faced, underfed, and clearly regretting whatever mistake had led to being the one to greet her. He held out a temporary identification badge with both hands, as if it might bite him.

“Unspeakable Granger,” he said, voice cracking slightly. “Welcome back to field operations.”

Hermione took the badge with a nod. “Thank you.”

He flushed. “Director Selwyn said you’re expected in—”

But she was already walking.

The bullpen sprawled before her, all sharp corners and louder confidence. Warded boards floated above desks, cases flickering across them in bursts of image and fact. Paperwork moved of its own accord. Someone was arguing in the far corridor. Someone else was swearing at a file that had vanished mid-sentence.

Hermione moved through it like a ghost, unhurried, untouched. A few people turned to look—half out of recognition, half curiosity—but no one stopped her.

She saw him before he saw her.

Draco Malfoy stood near the center of the room, shoulder to shoulder with Director Selwyn, both of them bent slightly toward a shared board lit with golden script. He was speaking low, gesturing with a pen. His posture was loose, but not careless. The kind of confidence that had been earned, or at least, practiced until it passed for real.

Then he turned.

Their eyes met across the chaos.

His expression didn’t shift—but something in the line of his jaw tightened. Just enough.

Hermione kept walking.

Selwyn looked up.

“Granger,” he said. “Welcome back to the field. Brief with Malfoy. You’ll want to see the Rosier scene.”

Draco didn’t turn. “I filed a complete report,” he said flatly. “She can read.”

Hermione stopped beside them. Her smile was thin, precise.

“And yet here I am.”

Selwyn handed her a copy of the field log. “Full access granted by Mysteries. No jurisdictional walls. Malfoy will get you up to speed.”

He left without waiting for confirmation, coat flaring behind him like punctuation.

Hermione turned to Draco.

He still hadn’t looked at her directly.

There was silence between them. Not charged. Not awkward.

Just old.

The room Selwyn had assigned them was a former storage office hastily converted for collaboration. It still smelled faintly of dust and cooling charm residue, and the windowless walls carried the faint pulse of Ministry monitoring glyphs—active, but low-tier. Standard surveillance. Not that it mattered.

Draco entered first and sat without a word, unrolling the incident scroll with the same efficiency she remembered from war councils. She followed a beat behind, settling into the chair opposite. The table between them was narrow, meant for proximity. She didn’t let it register.

The parchment unspooled between them.

He began reading aloud, voice clipped and dry.

“Rosier, Elspeth. Age fifty-six. Found seated, no sign of hex or trauma. Ward breach—none recorded. Magical residue—none.”

Hermione had already skimmed two-thirds of the report.

She interrupted him.

“This detection pass doesn’t account for chemical residue.”

His eyes flicked to hers, sharp. “There was nothing to detect.”

She leaned forward slightly, tone measured. “Or you didn’t know what to look for.”

A pause, flat and humming. Not silence, not quite. Just the moment between contact and combustion.

His gaze didn’t waver, but he stopped reading.

Hermione tapped the fourth line of the ward signature log. The ink was dry, the glyphs neatly printed, but there—a half-second discrepancy in the reactivation pattern. Small. Imperceptible unless you were trained to watch the way time folded around magical permissions.

She reached into her coat and withdrew a red ink quill. Circled the anomaly.

“Reset lag,” she said quietly. “Milliseconds, but enough to imply something was disarmed manually.”

He didn’t answer.

She sat back. Waited.

His jaw shifted.

“You’re suggesting she let them in.”

“I’m saying the wards didn’t fail.”

He studied her then—not the report, not the glyphs—but her. As if trying to decide whether this was a theory or an accusation. She didn’t blink.

Eventually, he rolled the parchment back into place and rose from his chair.

“I’ll take you to the scene.”

Hermione nodded once, gathered the file, and stood.

They didn’t speak as they left the room, but the distance between them had changed.

Not closer.

Just sharper.

They’d barely cleared the corridor when she asked for the full ward log.

Draco didn’t offer it. Just raised a brow, then summoned it from the archive fileroom with a muttered passcode and a flick of his wand. The document arrived folded and slightly out of order—typical for Auror field work, she thought. Or perhaps deliberate. It was difficult to tell with Malfoy.

They found another quiet room. Smaller. No surveillance glyphs this time, just plain plaster and a single floating lantern that flickered as though it disapproved of the company.

He stood as she sat, arms crossed, expression unreadable as she spread the original log across the table. The Ministry record ink was faint at the edges, but the internal signatures were still legible—ward anchors, activation echoes, magical ID stamps.

Hermione scanned the glyph array quickly, then slower, parsing for sequence.

Three of the four perimeter anchors matched Elspeth Rosier’s standard magical signature. A fourth bore the trace of a Ministry safety override. Expected.

It was the fifth that made her pause.

Not a name. Not a code.

Just a signature string that resolved to nothing.

No registration match. No traceable origin. Not even a failed classification.

She frowned.

“Problem?” Draco asked, his tone level.

She tapped the glyph. “Someone was inside who doesn’t technically exist.”

He leaned closer, glanced at the anchor notation. “You think it’s a ghost?”

Hermione didn’t look up. “No. I think it’s someone who never officially counted.”

Her fingers curled once against the edge of the parchment. Then she added, softer:

“Which is worse.”

The lantern above them buzzed faintly, its glow turning sharp against the white of the page.

She looked up then—really looked at him. No distance. No analyst’s shield.

“Take me to the house.”

He didn’t answer. Not at first.

But he moved toward the door, and she followed.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

They Apparated just beyond the boundary line, the crack of arrival muffled by Ministry warding. The Rosier property stood silent against the morning light, a red-brick monument wrapped in frost and old enchantments.

Hermione exhaled once, sharp and shallow, and adjusted the sleeves of her coat. She felt the wards immediately—static against her skin, like a whisper held too long in the throat. Standard Ministry replacements: efficient, impersonal, indifferent. The kind of protections installed after death, not to prevent it.

She glanced toward the house.

“Why re-seal it with public-grade locks?” she asked, more to herself than to him.

Draco didn’t answer. He stood a few paces ahead, watching the house like it might decide to speak. He hadn’t said much since handing her the case notes. She hadn’t needed him to.

Hermione stepped forward, wand drawn—not raised, just present—and crossed the perimeter.

The air changed.

Inside, the Rosier townhouse had been cleared. The body removed, furniture returned to order, any evidence considered useful now stored in a holding vault. But the magic remained. Not in strength—there were no active spells left here—but in texture.

She closed her eyes for a breath, then opened them again. Slower.

It felt wrong . Still.

Not dangerous. Not active.

Just... unsettled.

She moved to the sitting room. The tea service had been cleaned, but the spill remained faintly dark against the rug. Faint outlines marked where the body had slumped. Someone had been thorough, but not thorough enough to erase the past entirely.

Hermione dropped into a crouch beside the cold hearth, murmuring a charm beneath her breath. A flicker of blue-white shimmered from her wandtip, then rose into the air like smoke.

It hovered over the rug, curling above the threads, forming a hazy bloom just above the floorboards.

Vapor . Not magical residue. Not spellwork. Something subtler.

She tilted her head.

The charm filtered for essence: the haze trembled once, then shifted to a faint green-blue glow at the center.

She frowned.

“Bitterroot base,” she murmured.

Draco’s voice came from behind her. “That wasn’t in the original sweep.”

She didn’t look up. “Because you were looking for spells,” she said. “Not craft.”

He didn’t reply immediately. She heard the faint creak of his step on old wood, then silence again.

Hermione turned her wrist, directing the charm to hover closer to the hearthstone. The haze thinned, revealing a second note layered beneath the first—a chemical stabilizer. Not common. Not Ministry-cleared. Not anything that belonged in tea.

This isn’t magical residue, she thought. It’s potion vapor. Deconstructed. Designed not to leave a trace, but it did anyway. Just barely.

She filed the observation away without writing it down.

Behind her, Draco shifted again.

The silence between them was no longer neutral. It was observational—two methods brushing against each other like blades left too close on a table.

She stood slowly.

“There’s a pattern,” she said, not quite to him.

He didn’t argue.

But he didn’t agree, either.

POV: Draco Malfoy

She catalogued everything.

Draco watched from the edge of the room as Hermione moved through the space like someone assembling a puzzle only she could see. Her wand traced glyphs through the air—tight, deliberate curves meant to capture energy decay, scent trails, signature echoes. She muttered the incantations low and fast, barely audible, as if magic was only real when spoken in the grammar of research.

She paused by the tea stain again, adjusted the angle of her charm, and frowned when the vapor re-formed—slightly off-center from its first bloom. She corrected the rune with a flick of her wrist, not bothering to acknowledge that he was still standing behind her.

Draco turned away.

It wasn’t that her methods were wrong. They weren’t. They were thorough. Documented. Academically sound.

They were just... blind.

A scene didn’t speak in glyphs. Not really. It spoke in absence . In the way a room held breath, or failed to. In what a floorboard didn’t creak when it should have. In what lingered too precisely to be natural.

He crossed back toward the fireplace, crouching near the seam where hearth met stone. His fingers brushed along the edge, slow, not casting— feeling .

The imprint signature was there, faint but intact, etched into the stone with a warder’s hand. Standard placement. Rosier’s magical ID folded into the charm matrix, burnt in during the original bonding.

But it was soft. Too soft. Not broken—but not whole, either.

It felt... cautious.

He narrowed his eyes. “There was hesitation here.”

Behind him, parchment rustled. “You mean hesitation in casting?” Hermione asked, her tone distracted.

Draco shook his head. “In intent.”

He stood, brushing off his hands.

“Someone was let in.”

That made her stop.

She turned toward him, brows raised. “That’s not how warding works.”

“It is,” he said. “If the caster wants it to be.”

She folded her arms. “Intent isn’t measurable.”

Draco didn’t flinch. “Doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

A beat stretched.

She held his gaze for a moment longer than necessary, then turned back to her spellwork with the clipped precision of someone filing disagreement into a drawer she would re-open later.

Draco watched her move. There was a sharpness to her now he hadn’t remembered—measured, yes, but not detached. She was trying to solve the scene.

He was trying to feel it.

The room was too clean. The spill was too precise. The silence didn’t echo the way it should.

She wanted patterns. He wanted contradiction.

Somewhere between the two was the truth.

He looked down at the hearth once more, at the faint ash smear trailing to the rug’s edge, and didn’t say what he was thinking:

That the room still felt like it was waiting for something to return.

POV: Hermione Granger

The tea stain was older now. Not in time, but in tone —its edges oxidized, the color deepened to something closer to rust than steeped leaf. Beneath it, the rug had begun to stiffen.

Hermione crouched again, her wand low and steady, and murmured a chemical separation charm under her breath. The incantation barely stirred the air, but the reaction was immediate: a thin line of red began to pool at the center of the stain, glistening faintly before separating into two distinct rings.

She leaned closer.

The inner ring shimmered just slightly—a stabilizing agent. Rare. Not Ministry-issued. Not domestic.

“Stabilizer,” she said aloud, almost to herself. “Someone built this to last long enough to dissolve cleanly.”

Behind her, Draco’s voice came, dry and unimpressed. “Why would they bother? A simple curse is faster.”

Hermione didn’t look up. “Because if it were a curse, it would’ve left magical prints. Traces. An echo. This didn’t. Which means it’s not a spell.”

She stood, brushing the dust from her knees.

“It’s intentional. Hidden. Controlled.”

Draco tilted his head, folding his arms. “Or you’re seeing what you want to see because it fits your thesis.”

The words landed with surgical precision.

Hermione froze.

The space between them tightened—not with heat, not with tension, but with something sharper. The kind of silence that made you aware of your own breathing.

She turned.

“You think I want this to be potions?”

He didn’t answer.

“I want it to stop,” she said, voice even but unmistakably threaded with steel. “I want the body count to end. I want one of these scenes to make sense without having to rewrite everything we know about forensic magic. But I’m not going to pretend that magic is the only language someone can kill in.”

Draco’s jaw shifted, just slightly.

Hermione exhaled through her nose. Quiet. Measured. But her grip on her wand was firmer now.

She added, more softly, “Just because you were trained to look for rupture doesn’t mean absence can’t speak.”

That—finally—seemed to land.

Draco didn’t reply. But he stepped back, just half a pace. Enough to acknowledge that she wasn’t guessing. She was already too close to something real.

Hermione turned away, refocusing on the residue now darkening against the spell matrix. She didn’t need him to agree. But she needed him to stop pretending she was reaching.

They were both too old—and the dead too many—for performance.

POV: Draco Malfoy

He crouched again, this time lower—closer to the hearth where the wood met stone in uneven seams. The Ministry’s cleanup team had done their job with ruthless efficiency: the ashes swept, the scorch marks vanished, the floor beneath left antiseptically bare.

But not clean.

Not entirely.

Draco ran two fingers lightly across the edge of the floorboard. The grain was slightly warped, not from time or heat—but from pressure. Something had pressed against it. Or into it.

He adjusted his grip on his wand, then brushed aside a thin layer of soot and ash with his palm.

There it was.

A mark.

Shallow. Uneven. Carved hastily into the wood, as if the person who made it had neither time nor permission. A jagged curve, a half-formed loop—unfinished, but deliberate. Not a rune. Not Arithmantic. Not anything officially sanctioned or taught.

But he knew it.

Draco’s stomach drew tight—not with fear, but with recognition. It was a variant. A fractured symbol from a lineage warding codex he hadn’t seen since childhood. One of the older tomes. The kind that was shelved not for disuse, but for disavowal.

Blood marks. Erasure sigils.

Not dark magic, exactly. But not clean.

His pulse clicked once beneath his collar.

He stared at it for a moment longer than necessary.

Behind him, Hermione’s footsteps padded softly across the rug.

“What is it?” she asked.

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t look up.

Instead, he stood in one smooth motion and stepped sideways, angling his body between her and the hearth. The file folder under his arm shifted slightly, just enough to conceal the mark from view.

“Nothing useful,” he said. His voice was even. Bored, almost.

She paused. He could feel her watching him—assessing not just the space, but him.

“Sloppy etching,” he added, with the kind of dismissiveness that invited no further inquiry.

The silence stretched, taut.

But she didn’t press.

Not yet.

She turned away, wand already rising to conjure another analytical charm, her attention shifting back to the pattern of vapor near the hearthstone.

Draco exhaled slowly through his nose.

He didn’t look back at the mark. 

It was already following him.

POV: Hermione Granger

She swept the room one last time, wand low and quiet in her hand.

The spell she cast wasn’t a standard diagnostic—it wouldn’t register magical residue in the traditional sense. It was older, messier, built on the idea that emotion, like energy, left a print. Unsanctioned in most divisions. Still used, quietly, where Unspeakables knew better than to pretend the soul didn’t bleed when no one was watching.

The charm whispered across the floorboards, then pulsed back through her feet—faint, flickering, wrong.

Not dark. Not cursed.

Just heavy .

Hermione paused near the hearth. Beneath her boots, the wood vibrated slightly—barely more than a shiver. As if something had settled there and refused to be scrubbed out. Not a spell. Not a presence. A memory, maybe. Or guilt.

She turned, scanning the space.

Draco stood by the far wall, not quite watching her. His posture was still, too still, the kind of stillness that came from holding something in place—not just his body, but a thought.

His gaze flicked—once—back to the hearthstone. Just a glance. But she caught it.

Then he looked away.

She held her breath.

He knows something about the mark.

Her grip on her wand tightened slightly. The spell completed and fizzled into the air, giving her no new data. Just that same, dull pressure underfoot. A psychic echo without origin. She had half a mind to trace it further. To push. To ask.

But she didn’t.

Not yet.

She filed it away—the flick of his eyes, the way he’d stood between her and the floorboards, the tone he’d used when he said “sloppy etching.”

The lie wasn’t loud, but it lingered.

She turned from the room, stepped past him without comment, and slipped out the front door into the mid-morning air.

The street beyond the threshold was quiet, the mist thinner now, but still present—like the house had exhaled something it hadn’t meant to.

Hermione pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders.

The bitter scent clung to the wool.

Chapter Text

POV: Draco Malfoy

By the time he returned to the office, the corridors had thinned to silence.

Even the parchment had quieted. The enchanted message scrolls that normally drifted from desk to desk now sat idle, stilled by the late hour. The Auror wing, at dusk, was all half-shadow and echo—like the bones of something that had once needed too many voices to function and had finally forgotten why.

Draco closed the door behind him with a click. No wards. No privacy charms. Just the quiet that came when no one expected you to be working anymore.

He dropped the Rosier file onto his desk and stood over it for a long moment, unmoving. The scent from the house still clung faintly to the fibers of his coat—bitter, chemical, wrong. Not strong enough to name, but sharp enough to remember.

He opened the file.

Hermione’s voice surfaced immediately, as if summoned by the scrape of parchment.

What is it?

Nothing useful.

The lie had come easily. That’s what disturbed him most. Not the ease of deception, but the instinct that made it necessary.

He flipped past the core assessment, past the Ministry sweep documentation and the sanitized images of Elspeth Rosier’s corpse in situ. His hand stilled on the floorplan.

The hearth was marked with a red outline. Nothing flagged.

He reached for a clean scroll from the drawer and set it beside the file. With a muttered charm, he hovered his wand just over the diagram and whispered the glyph-copying incantation, low and clipped. The mark—the half-carved sigil beneath the hearth—replicated onto the parchment with slow, shivering ink.

It didn’t belong there. But it didn’t not belong either. The lines weren’t symmetrical. The curve of the arc was incomplete. But the pattern was unmistakable, if you’d grown up in a house that catalogued that kind of silence.

Blood-bound excision. Not in the traditional sense. Not ceremonial. Private. Hasty. The kind of mark carved in places no one was meant to find.

Draco stared at it.

His first instinct was to destroy it. But that would be too obvious. And too late. He folded the parchment once, then twice more, and sealed it with a tap of his wand—not a Ministry seal, but a null-glyph, the kind meant to hide rather than preserve.

He slipped it into the hidden lining of his coat. The pocket there wasn’t on any inventory. He looked around the office then, reflexively. It was empty. Of course it was. But the instinct to check was not.

This case was no longer theoretical.

And whatever it was, it had seen him first.

He didn’t use the front gate. 

The estate sat quiet beneath a moonless sky, its perimeter humming with layered wards—centuries of ancestral paranoia preserved in runes and iron. Draco stepped through the secondary threshold behind the stables, where the enchantments were older and looser, designed for discretion rather than defense. They allowed him in without protest. Of course they did. The house still knew his name.

Wiltshire had gone colder since the war. Or perhaps it simply felt that way when no one was home.

Malfoy Manor loomed ahead, all pale stone and precision, its windows unlit. The path to the west wing was overgrown at the edges, but the gravel still crunched beneath his boots with a familiar cadence. He didn't light his wand. The dark didn’t matter here.

He entered through a side door and bypassed the grand staircase, turning left into the west wing where the air was denser, untouched by domestic staff or seasonal spells. The walls here bore no portraits. Only rows of unbroken silence.

The study door resisted, just slightly, before admitting him.

Inside, the room was exactly as it had been before the war.

Dust veiled the surfaces in fine, grey lace. The shelves were tall and black-lacquered, crowded with volumes bound in dragonhide, iron-spined ledgers, grimoires with no titles. A fireplace loomed on the far wall, empty and cold, its mantle carved with a crest that had once meant something worth defending.

Draco moved to the far shelf without hesitation. The tome he needed was not hidden, only inconvenient. Most of the family had forgotten it existed. He had not.

Obscura Sanguis: Rituals of Lineage and Loss.

The binding resisted his touch at first—an old enchantment meant to deter the curious, not the committed. He pressed his palm to the spine until it unlocked with a soft click, the cover yawning open like a throat. He flipped past the opening diagrams—bloodline seals, hereditary knots, name-binding circles—until the ink began to brown, and the margins grew crowded with notations in crabbed Latin and brittle French. Then he found it.

A single sigil, drawn without ornamentation. Jagged, incomplete. Asymmetrical by design.

His eyes traced the lines.

Excision Mark: Squib Nullification Rite.

The accompanying description was brief. Brutal in its efficiency.

Used to erase non-magical offspring from ancestral records. Ritualistically severs magical recognition of a blood-relative by unbinding lineage threads. Often performed in private. No witnesses required. Legal until 1893. Not banned, just forgotten.

Draco stared at the page.

He did not need to cross-reference. He had seen this before—burned into the baseboard of a bedroom that had been emptied overnight. A shape carved in haste. A curve left unfinished.

His jaw tightened. This was no longer academic. He reached for a parchment slip from the desk and sketched the mark from memory. It matched. Almost exactly.

A chill curled low in his chest. Not fear. Not yet. Validation.

He closed the book with deliberate quiet and slid it back into place. The lock re-engaged with a soft click, and the dust resettled without resistance.

The study was silent again, but the air, changed.

He was eight the last time he stood outside that door.

The corridor had felt longer then. The windows darker, the house larger in the way that all grand things feel endless to children. But the silence—that had already been the same. Dense. Purposeful. Like someone had pressed their finger against the pulse of the room and asked it not to move.

The door to Isidora’s bedroom had been shut. Locked with more than magic.

He remembered standing just close enough to hear the voices inside. His mother’s, low and composed. A man’s, unfamiliar and clipped—Ministry dialect, sharp consonants, words that didn’t belong in bedrooms: registry… revocation… bloodline breach.

He hadn’t understood the words, but he’d understood the tone. Something irreversible was being done.

He’d waited until the door opened.

The room had already been cleared. No toys. No books. The bed stripped of its linens. A single scorch mark remained above the headboard—nothing large, just a dark curve burned into the wood like someone had started drawing and lost the will to finish.

He had stared at it.

Narcissa hadn’t spoken to him. Just rested a hand on his shoulder and guided him back down the hall.

Isidora had not been named again.

Not once.

She had been loud, his cousin. Always just a little too loud for the Manor—her laugh unrefined, her hair forever falling out of plaits. She’d taught him how to draw constellations on the ceiling with a cheap spark quill, trailing smoky lines between glow-charms and pretending they were stars.

She called it our own sky. He hadn’t realized, then, that she needed one.

Draco had asked once—only once—where she’d gone. Narcissa had answered without pause: She wasn’t meant for this world.

That had been the end of it. No funeral. No photograph. No empty chair at holidays. Just a sudden, systemic absence.

Now, standing in the study’s hollow quiet, he pressed a hand to his chest. Not over his heart. Lower. Where the breath always caught before it reached the surface.

The sigil from the Rosier house had been carved just below the hearthstone—where heat should live. Where warmth should be passed down.

He looked at the bookshelf again, at the spine of Obscura Sanguis , already dusted over, as if nothing had stirred it. He didn’t reopen it. There was no need. 

The thing had already been named.

Morning arrived too quickly. Or perhaps it hadn’t arrived at all—just slipped sideways into being, the way time did when you hadn’t slept and had no plans to.

Draco stepped into the Auror Office with the residue of the sigil still pressed behind his eyes.

He moved on instinct—ward check at the door, silent nod to the perimeter file assistant, a glance at the case board to confirm that nothing had shifted. The room was in motion, but none of it touched him.

Hermione was already there.

She stood beside the central desk, bent over a ledger thick with names. Rosier’s known associates, organized by bloodline tier, political affiliation, and—he assumed—whatever secret metric the Department of Mysteries used to measure relevance. She looked up when he entered. Her eyes moved over him—not lingering, not cold. Just noting something.

She didn’t ask.

He said nothing.

There was a kind of truce in that.

He crossed to his desk, slipped the sealed parchment from last night into the second drawer, and pressed the lock glyph with his thumb. It vanished beneath a shimmer of protective ink.

A file snapped shut behind him.

“Malfoy. Granger.” Selwyn’s voice came from the doorway, dry and final.

They both turned.

He held a single slip of parchment in his hand, no folder, no seal. That alone told Draco what kind of report it was.

“New body,” Selwyn said. “Apparent poisoning. You’re both going.”

Draco’s jaw clicked once. “Where?”

“Thornbridge.” Selwyn didn’t look up from the parchment. “A name you’ll recognize.”

The name landed like flint against stone. Draco didn’t flinch. But he felt the edges of something older stirring just beneath the surface.

Selwyn handed the slip to Hermione without ceremony. “Site secured. You’ve got twenty minutes.” Then he turned and disappeared down the corridor.

Hermione read the address once, then looked at Draco. Her expression didn’t shift. But something in her posture did—an almost-imperceptible recalibration, like a blade adjusting to weight.

Draco straightened. There was no room for the sigil now. No room for the girl who’d once taught him to map stars onto the ceiling.

Just another house. Another dead name. Another door someone had opened for the wrong person.

He grabbed his coat.

The rain hadn’t stopped. It came down in a fine, persistent veil that blurred the edges of the Thornbridge estate into something half-erased. Ivy strangled the wrought iron fencing, and the path to the front door had turned to muck, stone swallowed by earth. No visible wards. No alarm charms.

Draco knew better.

The house had the feel of wealth left to rot—too much space, too little care. A familiar kind of decay. He stepped over the threshold and into the study without waiting for the field team to clear the rest of the property. It didn’t matter.

They were already too late.

Rowan Thornbridge was sprawled on the floor, one arm twisted unnaturally beneath him, the other extended toward a tipped decanter that had emptied into the carpet. The liquid was viscous, dark amber, already soaking into the fibers like a wound that wouldn’t clot. His lips were blue. Eyes open. No struggle. Just collapse.

The room smelled of wet oak and burnt sugar, undercut by something metallic and sweet that didn’t belong.

Hermione knelt first. Her wand never left her sleeve. She didn’t need it.

“Bitterroot. Mistletoe oil. Mercury compound,” she said, not quite aloud. “Modified for delayed absorption. Designed to mimic circulatory hex failure.”

Draco didn’t answer. He moved past her, slow, careful.

The carpet had been nudged just off center—displaced in the final moments, or perhaps before that. He crouched and pulled it back.

The sigil was waiting. Not half-formed this time. Not rushed. Carved with intention. Into oak this time, not floorboard. Deeper. Burned along the edges. A symbol with weight now, as though the killer no longer cared about concealment.

Draco stared at it, jaw clenched.

He didn’t need to compare it to the one beneath the Rosier hearth. It wasn’t just the same mark. It was the same hand.

Behind him, Hermione rose. Her voice was softer now, but not gentle.

“You’ve seen it again, haven’t you?”

Draco didn’t answer.

The house was too quiet, except for the rain.

He stayed where he was, the sigil burned into the floor at his feet, the shape of it already branded behind his eyes. There would be another one. He knew that now.

Rain tapping against the leaded glass.
The outline of a body cooling in the center of the room.
Draco Malfoy, unmoving—facing a symbol that once lived in a bedroom no one spoke of, and now would not stay buried.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The Department of Magical Records had no windows.

It was built that way—intentionally. Generations of Ministers had agreed, either out of superstition or practicality, that sunlight had no place in a room where history was meant to be immutable. Too much light invited revision. Here, memory was meant to stay buried.

Hermione stood beneath the green-glass sconces of the Genealogy and Obscured Bloodlines Division, the file request slip still cooling between her fingers. Her name—printed without title, without department—glowed faintly at the top of the parchment, a clearance level that bypassed bureaucracy by virtue of being vaguely threatening.

The archivist on duty, a man with thinning hair and the wary politeness of someone trained to fear overreach, slid the requested scroll across the desk.

“Standard lineage report,” he said. “Subject: Bertram Flint.”

She nodded once. “Thank you.”

She didn’t sit. The reading alcove behind her was empty, its arched ceiling lined with acoustic wards meant to dampen the sound of memory. But she didn’t need comfort. She needed the architecture of the truth.

Unrolling the scroll, she skimmed the standard registry summary: birthdate, apprenticeship certifications, wand lineage, property holdings, burial authorization. No spouse. No heirs. No known dependents.

That last line tugged.

She read it again.

No known dependents.

Hermione tilted the scroll toward the light. At first, the margin appeared blank. But then, just above the date of death, she saw it—an embedded code, faint, almost smudged: ExC-R12 // Sealed by Order of Family Council.

Her pulse didn’t quicken. She’d trained herself past that.

But her hand did tighten around the scroll.

ExC-R12 wasn’t a denial code. It was a discretionary excision marker—reserved for cases where bloodline revision had been approved retroactively, usually through a sealed internal hearing. Rare. Expunged. Invisible to the untrained reader.

She walked back to the clerk’s desk, scroll still open.

“I need the full registry history,” she said. “Unredacted.”

The archivist blinked. “That’s sealed by Council seal. It requires—”

Hermione met his eyes.

He stopped.

She reached into her coat, retrieved her Department sigil, and laid it silently on the desk. It hissed as it touched the wood—recognizing the room, the weight of jurisdiction. The man didn’t speak again. He disappeared into the rear vault.

Minutes passed.

When he returned, the scroll he handed her was older—yellowed at the edges, its ribbon still stamped with melted Ministry wax. It unrolled with a soft crackle, the kind of sound made by records never meant to be opened again.

Hermione read.

There, beneath a line dated forty-one years ago:

Flint, Lysander. Male. Born without detectable magical core.
Status: Unregistered. Revoked at age 7.
Family request for excision: Approved.
Magical lineage terminated.
Placement: Muggle guardianship. File closed.

She stared at the words. Not struck through. Not buried beneath euphemism.

Erased .

It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a form. A file. A process.

Hermione inhaled slowly, the room tightening around her.

This wasn’t theoretical. It was archived.

The Flint residence sat at the edge of Wiltshire, not far from the river but distant enough to pretend the water didn’t exist.

It was the kind of house that looked larger from the inside—thick-walled and narrow-corridored, its ceilings too low for grandeur and too high for comfort. The wards had been stripped upon death certification, leaving the property quiet in that unnatural way places get when magic is absent but memory is not.

Draco was supposed to follow. He hadn’t arrived.

Hermione didn’t wait.

The back study was down a narrow hall paneled in dark elm, the air inside faintly stale with old parchment and something else—duller, acidic. She closed the door behind her, not to seal the room, but to mark the moment of entry. Something in her demanded that each space in this case be acknowledged. They were no longer just scenes. They were thresholds.

The desk was cluttered.

Not the chaos of carelessness, but the precise disarray of ritual—vials uncapped, papers folded at angles too clean for accident. There was potion residue dried along the rim of a cracked glass beaker, its base scorched slightly from overboil. Hermione leaned in.

Ashroot. Tin infusion. A trace of fluxweed char.

The same compound family as Thornbridge.

She moved to the rug.

It was wool, low-pile, and stained in a single dark ellipse. Not blood. Not tea. Something thicker. Hermione drew her wand and whispered a levitation charm. The rug lifted in one slow motion, folding back like a blanket over a wound.

There, carved into the floor beneath—oak again—was the sigil.

She didn’t gasp. She didn’t speak. But her hand tightened at her side.

It was precise, symmetrical this time. No longer hesitant. No longer hiding.

She crouched and performed the tracing spell in silence, her wand tip drawing clean lines through the air above the mark. A second flick summoned a spectral overlay—the glyph she'd copied at Rosier’s, the deeper version from Thornbridge’s. The lines aligned one by one. Perfectly.

She froze them in place.

This wasn’t signature graffiti. Not a calling card. Not a scar left out of ego.

It was a seal.

Not just functional. Ritual.

The implication came all at once, whole and unwelcome.

These weren’t symbolic killings. They were structural. Deliberate excisions. A surgical severing of magical lineage through precision potionwork and bloodline erasure.

She stood slowly, gaze still fixed on the sigil hovering in light above the floor.

This wasn’t about revenge.

It was inheritance as architecture—and someone was razing it to the root.

The Auror Office was quieter in the late afternoon. The edges of its chaos had dulled; voices had dropped to murmurs, the self-shuffling paperwork settling into stillness. A storm thinning, but not yet passed.

Draco sat at his desk.

The report she'd filed two hours earlier was open in front of him. Still unsigned. He hadn’t annotated it. He hadn’t sent it back. He hadn’t pushed it forward either.

Just... left it there.

Hermione stepped into the alcove beside his desk without ceremony.

He didn’t look up.

Her tone was level. Not angry. Just inevitable. “You’ve seen this mark before.”

A beat.

He turned a page without reading it.

She moved closer. “You knew what it meant,” she said, quieter now. “You just didn’t want to say it.”

His shoulders didn’t shift. But something behind his eyes did.

Draco closed the file with deliberate care. Not like a dismissal—like an answer.

“It’s not a curse,” he said. His voice was flat. Barely above a breath. “It’s a silencing.”

Hermione didn’t reply.

The word hung between them, immediate and irreversible. Not dramatic, not loud—but heavy in a way that settled behind the ribs.

A silencing.

Not a killing.

Not a punishment.

An unmaking.

He didn’t look at her. She didn’t press further.

There was knowledge in his tone that had nothing to do with the case. Not theory. Not speculation. Just memory, bound in blood and shame and something else she didn’t yet have the language for.

Hermione exhaled once, through her nose.

She stepped back without speaking, but the space between them wasn’t neutral anymore. It had weight. Shape. History.

They were no longer just colleagues parsing a pattern.

They were carrying different pieces of the same secret—and neither of them could set it down.

The Case Vault was colder than the archives.

Deeper, too. Not in floors, but in the way sound faded once you passed the threshold. The air here didn’t echo. It absorbed. Designed for preservation, not comfort.

Hermione pressed her hand to the sigil plate, waited for it to read her clearance, and stepped inside.

Bertram Flint’s estate file had been classified Moderate Sensitivity, Lineage Contested , which meant it hadn’t been viewed since the sealing order was placed thirty-four years ago. She had to recite the override charm twice before the capsule unlocked with a soft hiss, like the memory itself had exhaled.

Inside: one memory vial. Labeled only with a date.

She didn’t take it to a viewing basin. There was no time. She uncorked it and cast the internal projection spell directly onto her palm, her wand moving in a slow arc to stabilize the frame.

The image flickered into being—blurry, overexposed. A child’s voice, distant.

Then: focus.

A greenhouse. Low ceilings. Rows of potion plants not yet bloomed. A boy, small and wide-eyed, with moss on his knees and a too-big wand tucked behind one ear. His hair was sticking up in every direction, his voice wobbly with laughter.

“ In-fuuu-sion, ” he said, tripping over the syllables like they were steps on a staircase he hadn’t learned yet.

Someone offscreen laughed. A woman, maybe. Or just wind through glass.

The boy reached for a sprig of flameleaf, missed, and fell backwards into the dirt. He didn’t cry. He laughed harder.

Then—

Black.

Hermione stood frozen as the memory cut out—no fade, no closure. Just absence.

She lowered her hand. The magic unraveled back into vapor. The vial pulsed once, then stilled.

At the bottom of the file, etched into the crystal record:
Subject: Flint, Lysander.
Magical Status: Revoked.
Cause: Non-core lineage failure.
Disposition: Reintegration to Muggle guardianship.
File sealed by Family Council Order.
Date closed: 13 July, 1992.

Hermione didn’t move. Didn’t breathe, for a moment. It wasn’t death. Not officially. But it was the end of something.

Not just a life.

A possibility.

She surfaced from the vault in silence.

The lift ride up was slow, its hum more noticeable now, as if the building were reminding her of all the other decisions it had helped bury.

Outside, the afternoon had cooled. She walked without direction until she reached a small café off Ministry Row. Neutral ground. Quiet. No floating menus. No enchanted chairs. Just an aging server behind the counter and a stack of parchment napkins that looked like they’d never been charmed.

She ordered tea. Sat by the window. Her hand trembled slightly when she reached for her quill. In the corner of her notebook, she wrote:

The killer isn’t murdering out of hatred.
He’s rewriting the bloodlines that removed him.

She underlined rewriting. Then closed the notebook. Not because the thought was finished. But because the grief had begun.

The study was small, tucked into the top floor of her building—unwarded, unenchanted, and unremarkable. It had no books that cataloged their own spines, no pens that refilled themselves. Just a desk of battered oak, a cracked ceramic teacup, and a wall of shelves too full to be orderly.

Hermione liked it that way. A room that didn’t listen back.

The fire burned low in the grate, casting long shadows across the floor. Her notes were spread out like a crime scene—maps, lineage scrolls, Ministry extracts, a stack of her own field reports annotated in her handwriting and Draco’s, their voices overlapping in ink. No one else would be able to follow it. She wasn’t sure she could either, not anymore.

She pulled her chair closer to the desk and rolled out a fresh sheet of parchment.

She began to draw.

Not lines. Not lists.

A wheel.

Seven spokes, each one labeled with the surname of a victim. She sketched them lightly at first—Rosier, Thornbridge, Nott, Flint—then added the lesser-known names retrieved from cross-referenced erasure orders. The forgotten ones. The ones whose family councils had voted them out of memory.

At the center of the wheel: the sigil.

She didn’t embellish it. Just copied it as it had been found—blunt, functional, carved with no need for flourish. It looked ordinary, sitting there. Unremarkable.

But the places it had appeared told a different story.

Always near warmth.

Under hearthstones. Beneath carpets. Behind headboards. In the quiet places where people slept and poured tea and taught their children the names they carried.

She lifted her quill and circled each location again—slowly, deliberately. A map not of murder, but of subtraction. The killer hadn’t chosen where people were most vulnerable. He’d chosen where they were most themselves .

Hermione sat back, the wheel glowing faintly in the light of the fire. She stared at it for a long time. Then, without thinking, she flipped back two pages to a note she’d written in a different hand, on a different day. Draco’s voice, still fresh in her mind.

It’s not a curse. It’s a silencing.

She wrote it down again.

This time, beneath it, she added:

What if this isn’t about the people who died—
but the bloodlines that lived?

The fire cracked behind her. The shadows shifted.

Hermione closed the ink bottle and pressed her fingers to the edge of the parchment, holding it in place as if it might try to move without her. She had seen rituals built for power. For control. For resurrection, even. But this was something else. This was a ritual built for erasure and it was nearly complete.

She didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Just sat there, letting the candlelight catch the ink on the page, the shape of the sigil reflecting across her skin like it was something she wore.

Outside, the city exhaled into the dark. Inside, Hermione remained still—quiet, alone, and, for the first time, afraid.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The War Room lived in sublevel three, behind two locked doors and a Ministry approval glyph that didn’t recognize names, only purpose.

Hermione arrived before the others, before the briefing scrolls started their slow shuffle down the rails, before the enchanted map of Britain pulsed to life on the far wall. The overhead sconces were still dimmed, the air cool from overnight stasis spells. She preferred it like this—before the noise, before the second-guessing.

The case board stood in the center of the room: a wide slate wall threaded with brass rails and glyph-sensitive parchment, built for chaos, built for conflict. But this wasn’t a war.

Not yet.

She reached into her satchel and withdrew six file folders. Each labeled. Each recently dead.

Rosier. Thornbridge. Flint. Vexley.

And the two whose names she hadn’t known until yesterday—Ervine Travers, healer, eighty-two. Miriam Montclaire, archivist, sixty-nine. Neither wealthy. Neither political. Neither remembered.

She placed each folder on the board with a slow charm, the parchment adhering to the rail with a soft hiss. A thin red line threaded between them automatically, calibrated to detect magical correlation—house alliance, public records, shared properties, marriages, known affiliations.

The lines did not connect.

Hermione stepped back.

Six names. Six bodies. Six sealed estates.

Yet no visible pattern.

But the gap between silence and truth was always where she did her best work.

She waved her wand once more, summoning a secondary filter from the secure records she’d unlocked two nights earlier: the Ancestral Lineage Removal Orders, filed under Obscured Magical History, Section 42.

The list unfurled across the board like a litany:
Flint, Lysander.
Montclaire, Aldus.
Rosier, Judith.
Thornbridge, unnamed male infant.
Vexley, Evangeline.
Travers, Elric.

Each marked Excised. Each marked Status: Nullified. Each vanished from public record before their tenth birthday.

She conjured a red thread—not Ministry-calibrated, but manual—and looped it from each victim’s name to the erased relative they’d chosen not to remember.

She stood still and let the shape settle.

A ring.

She picked up a piece of chalk from the sideboard and wrote beneath the pattern in steady, slanted hand: No known descendants.

It wasn’t vengeance. It was a ritual.

Behind her, the door opened. She didn’t turn. 

Draco’s footsteps were quieter than they had been yesterday. Not careful—measured. He stopped beside her.

The board said enough.

He studied the web for a moment, arms crossed. Then, without looking at her, he said: “You think the killer’s tracing bloodlines, not vendettas?”

Hermione’s voice was soft. Certain. “I think he’s doing both. But the target isn’t loyalty.”

She paused.

“It’s legacy.”

POV: Draco Malfoy

The Genealogy Office smelled like old ink and policy.

It was a narrow chamber on Level 6, two floors above the War Room, and half as clean. Scrolls floated in and out of the retrieval chutes in slow, deliberate arcs, never hurried, never tangled. The whole system ran on names and blood.

Draco entered without needing to announce himself. Clearance had been granted before he arrived. The clerk barely looked up from his desk.

Hermione was already there.

She stood at the center of the main projection table, surrounded by constellation-like scatterings of magical ancestry charts. Scrolls pulsed in and out of view as she narrowed the filters—lineage collapse, sanctioned removals, inheritance reroutes. It was a visual language she read fluently, as if she could feel the shape of silence in a family tree.

She didn’t turn when he approached. Just handed him a single parchment without preamble.

“Subject: Lysander Flint,” she said. “Status: Erased from Magical Registry. Incident Reference: Sigil 14B.”

Draco took it, though his hand was already tightening before he read.

The sigil was printed in the corner—scanned from floorboard etching, matched by shape and glyph density. A perfect duplicate of the mark found under Rosier’s hearth. The same as the one on Thornbridge’s study floor. The same one he hadn’t shown her in the Rosier file, but that was still sealed in his desk drawer, unfiled.

The same one he had last seen scorched into the wall of a girl’s bedroom that no longer existed.

He didn’t speak.

The air around them flickered with names. Vexley. Rosier. Thornbridge. All connected to Malfoy by blood, by alliance, by old, dusty arrangements sealed with handshakes and family crests. He saw his own surname branching outward on three separate charts. It was everywhere. Quietly, always there.

“They made us forget them,” he said. His voice surprised him. Low. Even. But not impassive.

Hermione finally looked up. “What?”

He kept his eyes on the sigil. “Officially,” he said.

There was nothing else to add. Nothing useful.

And she didn’t ask. Not this time.

Instead, she turned back to the table and summoned another scroll.

The charts reconfigured, but the silence didn’t.

POV: Hermione Granger

The Auror Investigation Space was the only room on Level Two without windows—and the only one Hermione preferred for that reason.

The lighting hummed faintly above her as she paced in front of the central chalkboard, its surface already half-covered with equations, ingredient matrices, and rune-glyph correlations. Her handwriting was meticulous, angling downward in neat diagonals, looping through potion schematics that were not, strictly speaking, legal to diagram outside the Department of Mysteries.

She didn’t care. Behind her, the room remained still. Draco stood just inside the doorway, arms folded, expression unreadable. Hermione tapped the chalk against the board, then circled a string of runes in slow, deliberate arcs. She spoke without turning.

“Every single victim had a cause of death that looks magical—but isn’t.”

She drew a line beneath the word residue , then connected it to a secondary glyph: stabilized combustion.

“No spell signature. No curse imprint. No ritual echo. But the outcome mimics high-level magical effects with alarming accuracy.”

Draco shifted his weight. “You’re saying a Squib,” he said slowly, “someone without a magical core, is mimicking magic through potions?”

She turned to face him. “Not mimicking,” she said. “Repurposing.”

She walked to the workbench and opened a containment charm. A small, silver-capped vial floated up between them, its contents faintly luminous. Vapor trailed upward—subtle, slow-moving, oddly heavy in the air.

She held it out to him.

Draco didn’t hesitate. He drew his wand, murmured a detection spell under his breath.

Nothing.

He frowned. Tried again. The vapor shimmered briefly under the second spell—then fizzled, dissipating into the air like it had never been there.

“No magical reaction,” he said.

“Exactly,” Hermione replied. “Because it’s not magical, but it kills like it is.”

She returned the vial to the stasis ward, watching the liquid still. It shouldn’t have been able to hold its shape outside a potion matrix. Yet it did.

She turned back to the board, picked up the chalk again.

“This isn’t random. It’s built. Engineered. Whoever is doing this understands how magical effects behave—even without a wand.”

Draco said nothing.

Hermione pressed the chalk against the slate hard enough to fracture the edge.

“This is someone who was told magic didn’t belong to them,” she said. “And who learned to build it anyway.”

The chalk cracked. She didn’t stop writing.

Behind her, the silence shifted, changed.

POV: Draco Malfoy

The chalk hadn’t been erased.

It still clung to the board in clean, mathematical lines—arcs and notations that made no attempt to disguise themselves as spells. They weren’t. That was the point. Potions reframed as mechanisms. Killings reframed as logic. Not sorcery, not instinct, but something colder. Learned.

Draco stood in front of the board, hands in his pockets, eyes scanning the symmetry Hermione had drawn.

It was brilliant. It was horrifying.

He’d always understood magic as something inherited. Passed down through hands, blood, expectation. He had learned control through fluency, through instinct, through ritual. But what sat in front of him now—what she had built out of residue and glyph structure and refusal—was something else entirely.

Not magic. Mastery.

Behind him, Hermione stepped closer. Not deliberately. Just near enough for him to sense her presence rather than feel it. Arms crossed, waiting. The silence between them wasn’t sharp anymore. It was weight. Shared, but unbalanced.

Draco stared at the list of names again. Rosier. Thornbridge. Flint. Travers. Lines between them arcing not toward vengeance—but toward design.

He didn’t turn.

“That would mean he’s one of us,” he said, low. Not to her. To the board. To himself. “But not.”

Hermione said nothing.

He exhaled once, slow. “Knows magic. Understands us. Hates us anyway.”

Another pause. This one longer.

“Not hate,” Hermione said at last, quietly. “Not exactly.”

He nodded. Just once.

“Worse than that, then.”

He looked at the sigil again. The same lines burned into Thornbridge’s study. Into Isidora’s wall.

“Grief.”

POV: Omniscient

The red string was starting to look like intention.

It looped from name to name on the case board in quiet defiance of Ministry logic, defying every official channel of motive, every bureaucratic version of cause and effect. The victims had nothing in common, on paper. Different houses. Different politics. Different crimes, if they could even be called that.

Yet—there they were. Bound by omission. A pattern stitched not in what was said, but in what had been made to disappear.

Hermione stood with her hand still raised, the chalk hovering just above the edge of the board. Her handwriting ran clean across the bottom corner, steady even now.

Samuel Hargrove.
Age seventy-nine. Retired Arithmancer. Sealed family record:
One sibling.
Erased.

A weak link. But not outside the bounds.

Draco stood beside her, arms crossed, jaw set. Not arguing. Just watching.

The lines between the names curved inward now, forming something less like a web and more like a wheel. A ritual. Nearly complete.

He stared at the name she’d written and said, without inflection, “We’ll never get there in time.”

Hermione lowered the chalk. Her voice didn’t waver.

“Then we start running.”

They didn’t look at each other for a beat too long. And then they did. No agreement. No trust. But something— unavoidable.

In the corner of the board, one of the name tags pulsed.

A quiet bzzt. Then another.

The room hummed once, softly. The ward system shivered.

Then a message scrawled itself into the air, rune by rune: New Incident Report. Level One. Confirmed Death. Identity Pending.

No one moved. The parchment hadn't even reached the rails yet, but the string had already started pulling itself toward the next mark.

A war board lit with artificial light.
A wheel, nearly finished.
Two people standing in front of it—still not close, but aligned now by necessity.
And a case that has already moved ahead of them.

Chapter Text

Chapter 7: Bitterroot and Bloodlines

POV: Hermione Granger

Wiltshire was colder than she remembered.

Hermione stepped over the threshold of Wendell Nott’s manor just after dawn, the wind still lifting last night’s frost from the hedgerows in brittle, crumbling sheets. The estate rose out of the earth like something reluctantly unearthed—angular, precise, too symmetrical to be kind. No Aurors had arrived yet. She had requested that. Early access. No disruption. No contamination.

The front door stood open on a frictionless hinge.

Inside: silence.

Not the stillness of grief or abandonment, but something engineered. Something preserved.

She stepped into the narrow front hall, wand already in her hand—not drawn, not defensive. Just prepared. The scent struck her first: pine oil, parchment, and a faint trace of metallic citrus—like the aftertaste of a charm undone improperly. She filed it away.

The apothecary room was at the back of the house, tucked behind a library that had been warded for privacy, not protection. The ward signature crumpled at her touch, fragile with age. She murmured the unlocking spell and pushed the door open with her fingertips.

The room was too clean. Scrubbed. Sterilized down to the weave of the rug. Glass gleamed too brightly on the shelves. The brass instruments along the back wall—stirring arms, alembics, distillers—had been polished past function. Not a single potion ingredient remained uncapped.

Wendell Nott was seated in the high-backed chair near the hearth, posture collapsed slightly to the left. His right hand still held the armrest. The left trailed limp at his side, palm up, a cut-glass tumbler shattered near his foot. The liquid—whatever remained—had soaked into the rug in a perfect radius, the kind that suggested no panic. Just gravity.

She didn’t approach the body. Not yet. Hermione lowered herself into a crouch beside the stain, letting her breath steady against the room’s unnatural order. She lifted her wand and cast the trace charm silently, letting it spiral out from the rim of the glass.

The vapor shimmered—pale violet, then green-blue, then flat silver.

Bitterroot.

She frowned. Too much shimmer. Too slow a fade.

She cast a refining charm to isolate the signature. The reaction came back muddied. Bitterroot, yes—but altered. Strengthened. The foundational trace behaved like a base potion, but the residue patterns told her otherwise. This wasn't binding. It was detaching.

She straightened slowly.

“This isn’t grounding,” she murmured aloud. “It’s destabilizing.”

Her eyes flicked to the floorboards beneath Nott’s chair. The stain had begun to seep between the gaps in the grain—unhurried, unconcerned. That was what unsettled her most. The potion hadn’t needed to be quick. It had been sure.

She moved to the shelf of instruments. None of them had been used recently. She could tell by the residue—or lack thereof. The beakers were too clean. The stirring wand too dry. This hadn’t been brewed here. It had been brought in. Administered. Delivered.

Which meant the killer had known exactly what he was doing.

She returned to the glass, to the residue that still hovered faintly above the rim like a memory that refused to evaporate. She cast a secondary analysis—emulsifier trace detection.

And there it was. A Mistletoe oil binding agent—nonstandard, non-registry. Illegal for sale without a medical license.

Hermione didn’t smile. But something in her chest clicked forward.

This wasn’t mimicry.

It was invention.

She straightened just as the front door creaked open somewhere behind her—Aurors, probably. Late. Expected.

She cast one last charm, low and sharp. A light bloom rose from the chair’s base, pulling a final whisper of vapor up from the grain.

Bitterroot.

Twisted. Corrupted. Turned against the very thing it was meant to stabilize.

Her voice was low. Final. “This was designed to bypass magical immunity.”

The room didn’t answer.

But she knew.

The pieces were starting to fit. And what they were building wasn’t magic.

It was a blueprint.

The Ministry Potions Division always smelled faintly of ego.

Hermione stepped into the evidence review wing just before noon, the sample from Nott’s estate stabilized in a floating containment orb at her shoulder. The corridor buzzed with quiet incantations and the hum of enchanted burners, but the review room itself remained unchanged—clinical, smug, underwhelming. White-tiled walls. Temperature charms that never quite held. Two apprentices arguing over reagent decay at the far bench. No one looked up.

The Potions Master on duty did.

Avery.

He sat behind a desk too clean to be used for real work, quill hovering lazily above a scroll that was clearly blank. He didn’t rise when she entered. Just raised one brow, the other disappearing into the sweep of graying hair that had been slicked back with more intention than charm.

“Granger,” he said, as if the name were a puzzle he’d already solved.

Hermione didn’t blink. “I need a breakdown analysis. Unstandardized. Signature trace. Secondary emulsifier mapping.”

She gestured, and the containment orb floated gently toward the evidence bench, lowering itself onto the warded surface with a soft hiss of recognition. The vapor inside curled like smoke in zero gravity—still faintly green at the edges, still heavier than air.

Avery stood slowly. He looked at the orb, then at her. “And this is?”

“Field sample,” she said. “From the Nott scene this morning. Bitterroot base. Mistletoe oil binding. Mercury compound faint but traceable. I’ve isolated the destabilizer, but I need confirmation.”

He lifted a wand and began the preliminary diagnostic charm. The orb responded—soft pulses of light along its core—but Hermione could already see he was moving too fast. His spell was too shallow, calibrated for contamination detection, not structural composition. After ten seconds, he stopped.

“I trained under Bletchley, Granger. If this were real, I’d have seen it by now.” he said, dryly, with the certainty of someone who’d never needed to question himself.

“No match.”

“You didn’t run a split-emulsion test,” she said flatly.

“Didn’t need to. Bitterroot stabilizes, not kills. It’s memory tea, not poison.”

Hermione crossed her arms. “He wasn’t poisoned. He was deconstructed. The Bitterroot was alchemically modified to mimic core destabilization.”

She took one step closer to the bench.

“No,” she said, voice low. “I’m seeing precision. Someone manipulated foundational alchemical signatures with enough control to bypass every Ministry detection charm. That isn’t contamination. It’s mastery.”

He leaned on the bench, hands folded. “Then you’re chasing a ghost.”

Hermione’s eyes didn’t flinch. “Exactly.”

The orb hummed faintly behind her, pulsing once—green, then silver.

She watched him for another second, then turned. No thanks. No final word. She didn’t need permission to be right.

The hallway outside the Division was colder than it should have been. She adjusted the strap of her satchel and moved quickly, ignoring the nods from clerks who didn’t know her, the whispers of recognition she no longer had the patience to address.

Inside her bag, the sample orb glowed once. Unstable. Brilliant.

Someone had built a new way to kill—one the Ministry couldn’t see, because it didn’t want to.

Hermione kept walking.

She had already seen enough.

The vial hit the desk hard enough to make the stasis charm flicker.

Draco didn’t flinch. He barely looked up from the case map in front of him, one hand curled around a quill like he’d never expected to stop writing. The orb of light above the desk cast his face in sharp angles—shadow under cheekbone, under jaw. Still too composed.

“That for me,” he said dryly, “or the tea?”

Hermione didn’t answer. She dropped her satchel to the chair opposite his, yanked out the printout from the Potions Division, and laid it beside the vial like a lawyer stacking evidence. Her fingers were ink-stained. Her sleeves were rumpled. Her braid had come half loose during the walk over and she hadn’t bothered to fix it.

“You were right,” she said.

That got his attention.

He looked up, finally—cool, not smug. Curious, maybe. The dangerous kind of listening.

She pointed to the vial. The liquid inside shimmered faintly, thick as oil and twice as reluctant to move. “This is Bitterroot. That part’s not new. But it’s been altered. The alchemical signature isn’t behaving like a stabilizer. It’s behaving like a destabilizer.”

Draco raised a brow. “Meaning?”

“Meaning it didn’t preserve. It broke down. And it took something with it.” She leaned forward. “That vapor? That residual haze at Nott’s? It’s acting like arcane spill off—but it isn’t. It’s mimicking curse decay. Like someone built a poison to behave like a magical detonation.”

He stared at the vial. Then at her.

“So our killer brews like a cursebreaker,” he said. Not disbelief—just testing the shape of the theory.

Hermione shook her head. “No. Better.”

She paused. Let the word sit.

“Curse Breakers use spells. This is chemistry.”

Silence. Then: “You’re sure.”

“I watched it strip magical residue without a trace. It bypassed the stabilizing wards. Hit the core, not the body. If I hadn’t recalibrated the charm matrix at Nott’s, the entire room would’ve read null. It shouldn’t be possible. But it happened. And it’s happening again.”

Draco stood, slowly. Walked once around the table, eyes on the vial. Close enough that she could feel the tension ripple off him, the weight of a thought forming and not yet named.

He didn’t speak. He just held up his wand and cast a detection spell—something light, something old. It skimmed the surface of the vial and fizzled instantly.

Nothing.

Hermione didn’t smile. “Told you.”

Draco set his wand down.

“That’s not a curse,” he said, almost to himself. “That’s engineered.”

“Exactly.”

She crossed her arms, breath controlled now, pulse not. It was easier when she was talking about ingredients. About pattern. About structure. But what sat in that vial wasn’t theory. It was intention. Someone had built a way to kill that operated outside the bounds of wandwork, ritual, traceable magic.

It was alchemy without allegiance. A science designed to feel like sorcery. And no one had noticed until now.

Draco looked at her again, but not like he had before. The skepticism was still there, but it was shifting—replaced by something keener. A kind of recognition.

He tapped the vial once with the back of his knuckle. “You think he’s testing us.”

“No,” Hermione said. “I think he’s proving he doesn’t need to be one of us to take us apart.”

They stared at each other for a beat too long.

Then Draco pulled out the chair opposite hers and sat.

Not quite aligned.

But no longer across the room.

She left his office with the weight of agreement still humming between them—unspoken, unfinished, but no longer in opposition.

POV: Draco Malfoy

They hadn’t spoken in nearly ten minutes.

The chalkboard was full again. Not with diagrams this time, but lists—ingredients, case file correlations, locations mapped in the margins like a slowly tightening snare. Hermione’s handwriting was clean and angled, measured even in exhaustion. The kind of script that didn’t allow for uncertainty.

Draco leaned against the edge of the table, arms crossed, watching her pace.

"Guild alchemy, maybe," she muttered, half to herself. "But Bitterroot isn’t used that way anymore. You’d need someone to teach you how to reverse its base behavior without contaminating the infusion. That’s... old work. Private apprenticeship? Illicit theory? Maybe someone with access to banned texts.”

She paused. Tapped her quill against her palm. “Or institutional labs. Controlled experiments. There was a French compound—pre-war—that experimented with suppressive solutions. Short-lived, but the models—”

“You’re assuming,” Draco said, cutting in softly, “they learned inside the system.”

Hermione turned to face him. A crease had appeared between her brows. “Where else would someone learn advanced magical theory? This kind of refinement takes training—methodology. Equipment.”

Draco didn’t move. Just said, quieter this time, “Where they’d have to teach themselves.” He saw the flicker of understanding—not resistance, not yet. Just the beginning of recalibration.

He continued. “Where books weren’t written for them. Where no one explained the why, only the what. Where theory had to be rebuilt from observation. Where they didn’t get caught. Or forgiven.”

Hermione’s silence sharpened.

He pushed off the table. Took a step closer to the chalkboard, eyes on the list she’d written in column three—stabilizers and their known magical interactions. “You and I,” he said, “we were taught to recognize what works. They were taught to understand why it shouldn’t.”

A beat passed. Then: “You think they’re a Squib,” Hermione said, and her voice had shifted—cool, clinical, but thinner than before. As if naming it made it real.

Draco didn’t answer immediately.

He let the idea sit between them, hovering just above the table, just inside the silence.

“No,” he said finally. “I think they’re someone who’s been told their whole life they’re not magical and decided to prove it wrong.”

The words were quiet. But they landed like a rupture.

Hermione didn’t move. Neither did he. But the space between them had changed.

Not narrowed.

Deepened.

Outside the room, the Ministry pulsed on—too bright, too loud, too sure of itself.

The silence said something else. Dangerous.

POV: Hermione Granger

The projection hovered above her desk, low and flickering—just stable enough to hold. Just unstable enough to betray its truth.

Hermione sat without moving, one hand wrapped loosely around a cup of tea she’d stopped drinking an hour ago, the other curled around the quill she hadn’t meant to pick up again. The office was dark except for the glow of the vapor trails suspended in midair. She had stripped them from the first five sites—slowly, methodically—parsed the energy arcs, the signature warps, the lack of echo.

The absence had a shape now.

She leaned forward and watched the residue coil like smoke above the second Thornbridge scan. It drifted toward the chalkline anchor glyph she’d inserted for calibration—then bypassed it entirely. Not rejection. Refusal. It knew it didn’t belong there.

Hermione clicked her quill once against the edge of her notebook, then lowered it to the parchment without ceremony. No header. No framing.

He’s using potions to simulate magic.
She paused. Watched the vapor turn in on itself, spiraling like a reversed curse.
Then: But not to impersonate it. To replace it.

The words settled. Not heavy. Not dramatic. Just true.

She didn’t underline them. Didn’t encircle them. She knew what they meant. That was enough.

The projection shifted slightly, drawing her attention back to the sigil displayed in the upper right quadrant of the recording—Rosier’s hearth. The edges of the glyph flared faintly under the spell light, not glowing, exactly. Breathing.

Hermione reached for a clean page, flattened it with one palm, and wrote without hesitation: If magic is knowledge, then knowledge is power.

She sat with it. Let the ink dry.

On the desk beside her, a vial of stilled potion vapor—extracted from the Nott crime scene—quivered in its containment charm. It had not reacted to any detection spells. It had not accepted any labels. But it had moved. Purposefully. Patterned like an unfinished incantation with no verbal component at all.

She thought of Nott’s body, slumped but untouched—no scorch marks, no ruptured wards, no signs of magical struggle. Just stillness. Just absence.

The magic hadn’t resisted because it hadn’t recognized a threat.

That was the danger.

A system unto itself. Not an imitation. A correction.

Hermione set her quill down gently. The room was very quiet now. Not the silence of peace. The silence before the structure breaks.

She stood, cast a dimming charm over the projection orb, and pressed two fingers to the rune at the base of the desk lamp. The light blinked out.

The office should have gone dark. But the vapor—just a trace—still glowed faintly in the air behind her. It hovered, unrushed. Untouched. Unclaimed by any magic but its own.

She left the room and closed the door behind her, deliberately.

Chapter Text

POV: Draco Malfoy

The rain in Knockturn Alley didn’t fall so much as drip—from rooftops, from broken signs, from the eaves of buildings that no longer remembered what they were built for. It soaked through illusion faster than cloth, seeping past spells and skin alike. Draco kept his hood up and his wand low, letting the familiar rot of the street press close. It smelled like old potion ash and moulded parchment. Memory. Mistake.

He passed the apothecary without glancing at the boarded-up windows. Passed the wandmaker’s ruin and the place where Borgin’s shop used to stand. There were ghosts here, sure. But none of them were magical.

Thimble was waiting where he always did—three doors down from the collapsed bridge, beneath a sign that used to advertise enchanted bristle brushes and now just listed its own decay. He looked worse than usual. Gaunter. The tremor in his left hand was sharper tonight, twitching like it was trying to leave without him.

“Malfoy,” he said, voice sanded down by smoke and too many years of failed antidotes. “Told you I don’t like meeting in the wet.”

Draco said nothing. Just pulled out the coin pouch and let it land in Thimble’s palm with a weight that could have meant anything. Thimble didn’t bother counting. He never did.

“Came by three weeks back,” he said, already looking past Draco, already regretting the transaction. “Didn’t give a name. Didn’t need to. Knew what he wanted.”

Draco’s voice was flat. “What, exactly?”

“Stabilizers. The kind they stopped approving after the war. Essence converters, high-bonding agents. No cauldron work. Said he wanted everything pre-distilled, compound-pure. Paid in Muggle notes.”

Draco narrowed his eyes. “Why not use Galleons?”

Thimble coughed once, the kind that sounded more like a warning than a reflex. “Said he didn’t want trace spells piggybacking the coins. Wanted clean metal. Dirty hands. Said he didn’t need permission. Just silence.”

“And you gave it.”

Thimble shrugged, rain running down his collar. “I don’t sell morals. I sell ingredients.”

Draco stepped closer. “Where?”

Thimble hesitated. Draco didn’t threaten. The silence between them was old. Paid for.

Finally, Thimble reached into his coat and pulled out a scrap of damp parchment, scribbled with coordinates that didn’t appear on official maps. Draco read them once. Memorized. Then burned it with a flick of his fingers.

“He wasn’t a wizard,” Thimble said then. Not quite a whisper. Not quite a lie. “But he knew things he shouldn’t. Asked about compression infusions. Cross-channeling through blood-bonded seals. Said he was building something that needed to work like magic without ever being it.”

Draco didn’t move.

“And his eyes,” Thimble added, voice lower now. “They didn’t glow. But they looked like they used to.”

Footsteps behind them. Not fast. Not hesitant.

Draco didn’t turn. “You’re late,” he said.

“I’m early,” came Hermione’s voice, calm and sharp as glass. “You just started without me.”

Thimble took a step back. He didn’t look at her. He never did. The Department’s insignia still scared him more than Malfoy ever had.

“You’ve got what you came for,” he muttered. “We’re square.”

Draco nodded once.

Thimble vanished down the alley like a man retreating from his own memory.

Hermione stepped into the space he’d left behind.

Draco glanced at her, then at the address still burning faintly in the air between them.

“This isn’t just potionwork,” he said.

“No,” Hermione agreed, watching the ash settle. “It’s architecture.”

The scent lingered longer than it should have.

Hermione closed the containment capsule with a whisper of spellwork, sealing the vapor trace behind glass, but the bitterness clung to her anyway—just beneath her skin, just behind her teeth.

Bitterroot. Altered.

She should have felt triumph. Discovery always carried a current. But there was no satisfaction here—only the tightening certainty that someone had engineered this deliberately, and no one in authority was going to believe her until it was too late.

Not unless she made them.

She cast one last environmental sweep, noted the absence of wandwork again, and stood. Her knuckles were white where they gripped the evidence case. No one else had arrived yet. She didn’t wait.

The Ministry’s Potions Division was a fifteen-minute Floo from the field site. She took the back corridor, the one reserved for restricted evidence handling. No announcement. No pleasantries.

She didn’t have time for either.

The entrance was behind a false shelf of mold-eaten medical texts—titles bleached blank by time and ash. It didn’t take a cursebreaker to see through the illusion. Just patience. And a willingness to touch what most others wouldn’t.

Draco knelt, brushing his gloved fingers along the floorboard edge until he felt it—the faintest notch carved into the stone lip beneath the shelving. He didn’t light his wand. Just drew his knife. One shallow cut across his palm. Clean. Immediate. He pressed it to the notch.

The lock whispered.

Metal creaked; the wall cracked open by two inches. Hermione stepped forward beside him, silent, watching. She didn’t flinch at the blood. Didn’t ask why he hadn’t used a spell.

They pushed the door open together.

The stairwell descended at a sharp angle, narrow and steep. No torch brackets. No light. Draco conjured a dim floating orb, pale and cold, casting grey across the stone like moonlight filtered through water. It didn’t illuminate much. He didn’t want it to.

The walls closed in around them.

At the bottom: a metal hatch. No magical wards. But it reeked of complexity. Draco traced a finger along the edge—tarnish and old reagents, something like rust and something like formaldehyde. He paused, tilting his head toward Hermione.

She nodded.

They breached it together—his wand at the locking seam, hers at the air duct above, synchronized without instruction. The click that followed wasn’t loud, but it echoed anyway.

The door opened. The lab breathed.

The space was smaller than he’d expected. Lower ceilings. No windows, obviously, but the ventilation system was archaic—coils of copper tubing looped into the walls and fed through what looked like hollow bone. The air was thin. Cold in the wrong way. Not the absence of heat, but the absence of magic.

Draco stepped inside first.

It was a maze. Not of intention, but of need. Metal tables set end to end, some splintered, most scorched. Glass vials still half-full of viscous residue. Alembics fused to their stands from heat. A mortar cracked down its center. A scale, unbalanced.

There were no books. Just scrolls. Rolled and water-warped, many too damaged to read. The ones left open were worse—handwritten in a tight, erratic scrawl that merged Arithmantic notation with something eerily anatomical. Ratio chains beside wandless brew instructions. A formula calculating magical pressure per liter of blood. None of it standard. All of it precise.

Hermione moved beside him, slowly, gaze scanning the walls like they might start speaking. She didn’t comment on the lack of enchantment.

There was nothing to hum here. Nothing to gleam. This wasn’t a laboratory designed for legacy or knowledge.

It was built for function. For survival. For replication.

Draco circled one of the tables, fingers hovering above a cracked siphon hose. He didn’t touch it. Just listened.

The air buzzed—but not magically. A faint pressure. A density. This wasn’t a space for performance. It had never been about that. This was where someone went when they had been told they would never matter. And decided, in response, to make something that did.

Behind him, Hermione whispered, almost to herself: “They didn’t want to copy our world. They wanted to build around it.”

Draco said nothing. The silence between them felt earned, like dust on old metal. Not meant to be cleared. Only understood.

The door behind them closed with a final click.

Neither of them turned.

They were already too deep inside.

POV: Hermione Granger

The cauldron wasn’t hot. That was the first thing she noticed.

No heat runes glowed beneath it. No self-stirring charms spun its contents. Just a faint shimmer rising off the surface of a potion that should have already settled into stasis or spoiled entirely.

Hermione stepped closer. The vapor trembled at her approach, but held its shape.

This was new. Recent.

She cast a containment charm with a flick of her wrist—silent, efficient, drawing a hexagonal seal around the cauldron’s circumference. The wards hummed as they locked into place, stabilizing the vapor before it could dissipate. Not that it was trying. This potion wanted to be seen.

She angled her wand downward, tip hovering inches above the brew. A diagnostic spell fanned out, invisible to the eye but audible to the senses—a low vibrational note in her chest. The surface of the potion shimmered, then began to separate, ingredients rising in spectral strands one by one.

Bitterroot came first. Ground fine, steeped too long. Already denatured. Still functioning.

A moment later: serpent’s breath.

Her brow twitched.

That ingredient didn’t stabilize on its own. It was volatile—reactive under heat, combustible under direct magical influence. But here, it floated above the brew like silk in water, held in place by something else.

Hermione leaned in.

At the base of the reaction—deep, slow-moving, barely clinging to the residue trace—was something she didn’t recognize. Not magical. Not listed in any sanctioned apothecary index.

But she’d seen its molecular weave before.

Muggle chemistry.

A synthetic stabilizer. Probably pharmaceutical. Cross-bonded to the Bitterroot with something sticky and mean. The compound wouldn’t register in magical indexes because it didn’t trigger any core-aligned reactions. It didn’t belong to their world at all.

She stepped back, composure reasserted.

“This isn’t a potion,” she said quietly. “Not in the way we define it.”

Draco’s voice came from across the table. Low. Cautious.

“What is it, then?”

Hermione gestured to the strands still floating in spectral form. “A hybrid paralytic. Built from Bitterroot and serpent’s breath, but reinforced with a synthetic binder I can’t name. Contact-activated. Doesn’t need ingestion. Doesn’t even need intent.”

Draco stepped closer. The light from the containment ward reflected across his cheekbones, sharp and pale.

“That’s why it works on wards,” he said. “Why it’s passing through everything we’re using to detect spell residue.”

Hermione nodded. “There’s no magical fingerprint because it doesn’t use one. It simulates magical function through biological destabilization. Which means—”

“It’s wandless,” Draco finished, gaze fixed on the cauldron. “Which means anyone with hands and knowledge could use it.”

“Not knowledge,” Hermione said, softer now. “Craft. This wasn’t made to poison. It was made to prove control.”

A long silence stretched between them.

The potion glowed faintly in its sealed dome, the surface still rippling. It didn’t fume. It didn’t spark. It just waited.

Draco’s voice, when it came, was almost reverent.

“They don’t want them dead.”

Hermione looked up.

Draco’s eyes didn’t leave the cauldron. “They want them erased.”

The word landed with a clarity that startled her. Not melodramatic or even speculative. Just fact. Named and now real.

She didn’t reply. There was nothing to refute.

They stood side by side, the light of the unspoken spellwork reflecting faintly between them—two investigators, two methods, one weapon more elegant than it had any right to be.

It hadn’t been designed to destroy. 

It had been designed to vanish you.

POV: Draco Malfoy

The drawer didn’t want to open.

Draco muttered a low unlock charm—something designed to bypass most domestic wards—and the cabinet shuddered once, then relented. Dust spiraled out, dry and metallic, like old air breaking free.

He reached in.

The ledgers were stacked carelessly, most of them swollen from humidity, their spines warped and ink faded. Pages curled at the edges, still marked with half-legible notes—measurements that made no alchemical sense, margins filled with erratic scrawl, ingredient lists in languages that didn’t belong in any potion index sanctioned in the last fifty years.

But that wasn’t what caught his attention.

It was the repetition.

A name—just a first at first—looped in the corner of a page. Then again, on the next. And again, scrawled larger. Just there.

Ackerley .

Draco paused, narrowed his eyes.

Ashwin Ackerley .

He’d heard it before. Years ago. A quiet scandal buried under louder ones. A Squib, caught with black-market potions designed to mimic core-bound magic. Charges: illegal brewing, magical impersonation, attempted registry fraud. Not a dark wizard. Not even a dark alchemist. Just a man who wanted to be seen by a system that wouldn’t count him.

He flipped forward.

The name repeated. In different hands, different inks, sometimes in the middle of unrelated notes. As though someone had written it not to document, but to remember. Or perhaps, to make it matter. 

He didn’t call for her immediately. Instead, he stared at the name until it blurred. Not from emotion. From implication.

Then: “Granger.”

She appeared beside him like a thought he hadn’t meant to speak aloud.

Draco tilted the ledger toward her, one finger resting just beneath the signature.

Hermione’s gaze fixed on the name.

He saw the shift before she said anything—saw it in the stillness of her spine, in the way her eyes didn’t widen, didn’t flinch. Just narrowed, the way someone’s did when they’d been holding a truth in their mouth for too long.

She didn’t touch the book. She didn’t speak for several seconds.

Then, finally, in a voice that landed softer than the words deserved: “He was a test subject. Once. For something that never should’ve been approved.”

Her voice didn’t break. But it didn’t finish the sentence either.

Draco watched her.

She didn’t look at him. Not quite. Her focus remained on the ink. On the name. Like if she blinked, it might disappear again.

He filed the detail—the way she said “once,” the weight she put on “shouldn’t.” The fact that her expression didn’t move, but her hands did—folding, then stilling, then folding again.

He could have asked. But he didn’t. Instead, he closed the ledger gently, like it might fracture if he didn’t. He returned it to the drawer and sealed it with a charm that didn’t match the one that had opened it.

Hermione hadn’t moved. He said nothing. But he wouldn’t forget.

Not the name.
Not her reaction.
Not the silence she let settle between them—too quiet to ignore, too intact to break.

Back at the Auror Office, the light became tired.

The enchanted desk lamps flickered with the strained hum of overuse. Filing scrolls dragged themselves half-heartedly from one tray to another. The board on the far wall blinked slow with case updates no one wanted to read. Somewhere down the hall, someone was arguing with a dictation quill. The usual rhythm. But off-beat.

Hermione sat across the room, sleeves rolled, a half-drained tea cup forgotten beside her. She was writing—head down, quill moving in crisp strokes over Ministry parchment. Her handwriting was precise. Unforgiving.

Draco could tell from the distance alone: she wasn’t transcribing facts. She was reframing them.

He didn’t interrupt.

Instead, he sifted through the Ministry's arrest logs—paper copies, older than they should have been, edges browned with spell soot. The file for Ashwin Ackerley had taken fifteen minutes to locate, despite the digital listing in the Registry Index.

That was the first warning.

The second was the seal: Department of Mysteries, Level Seven Restriction. Layered protections in silvery ink, charmed to blur specifics while keeping the general shape of a file intact. Names redacted. Charges summarized. Sentence withheld.

The third was the notation in the margin. Not handwritten. Not bureaucratic.

Test subject.

He didn’t flinch. Just breathed out once, quiet. The folder didn’t give him a story. Just a question with too many silences stitched around it.

He looked up.

Hermione hadn’t moved. Still writing. Still not looking at him.

He turned the file slightly, let it catch the desk light.

Then, without ceremony: “Is this your past?” His voice stayed even. “Or just another secret?”

She didn’t pause. Didn’t startle. She finished the sentence she was writing, placed her quill down with deliberate care, and finally looked up.

“It’s both.”

The words landed without echo. Not because they weren’t heavy—but because they were already known.

Draco nodded once. A slow, measured acknowledgment. He didn’t ask more.

Some things weren’t for interrogation.

They returned to their work. Parallel again. Not aligned. Not yet. But not distant, either.

The silence between them had changed. Not absence.

Tension.
Respect.
Recognition.

Something had cracked open—but it hadn’t broken.

On the far end of the desk, the vial they’d brought back from the Knockturn lab rotated slowly in its containment field, suspended between spells. The stasis charm kept it cold. But the liquid inside refused stillness.

It pulsed—faint, alive .

Not magical.

But something else.

Something worse.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The flagged requisition form wasn’t misfiled. That was the first thing Hermione noticed.

It had been slid neatly between two unsanctioned trial logs—Department of Mysteries internal only, the kind that weren’t catalogued in the public system. No sigils, no glyphs. Just parchment thinned by time and a Ministry seal half-erased by careless heat.

She unfolded it with care.

Greenhouse B12. Experimental Clearance Expired. Status: Dormant. Location: Level Three, Grounds Division. Restricted Perimeter Ward active.

In the margin, one name repeated across three different dates. Not the researchers. Not the regulating committee.

Ackerley, Ashwin.
Test Subject. Status: Unapproved. Observation Discontinued.

Hermione stared at it for a long time.

There were hundreds of trial sites like this—abandoned when budgets shifted, theories failed, or ethics got too loud to ignore. Most were cleared. A few had been buried. But B12 had slipped into the fold—still marked on record, still dormant, still breathing behind a ward someone forgot to deactivate.

She rose from her chair, fingers closing around the edge of the file. Her voice was calm when she activated the comm mirror.

“Malfoy. I found something.”

—

They apparated just outside the greenhouse grounds—what remained of them.

The Ministry used to maintain this space as part of its experimental botany wing, before the accidents. Before the war. Before departments like Hermione’s started quietly requisitioning the forgotten corners of magical infrastructure and using them to test theories no one else would risk.

B12 squatted at the edge of the grounds like a relic. Glass panes, half-obscured by crawling vine growth. A domed roof streaked with dirt and mineral run-off. Wards flickered faintly against the greenhouse seam—not inert.

Hermione stepped toward it, coat pulled tight against the cold. “It matches the project index,” she said. “Last recorded entry was fifteen years ago. No logged exit.”

Draco stood at her side, arms crossed. “You think they lived here.”

“I think it’s where they came back to.” She adjusted the strap of her satchel. “If this is where they learned to manipulate living matter, then it’s the first place they learned control.”

He didn’t scoff. Not quite. But his posture sharpened.

“You think they’ll still be there?”

“No.” Hermione’s voice was even. “But I think something will be.”

A pause. The wind shifted through the overgrowth, carrying a trace that wasn’t floral or green—but sour, alchemical, unsettled.

Draco’s eyes narrowed. “It’s too quiet.”

Hermione glanced sideways. “You’d prefer screaming?”

“I’d prefer less symmetry.” He stepped toward the door. “We go in together.”

Hermione stopped him with a hand at his arm. “No. Not yet.”

His expression flicked toward hers.

“If it’s rigged,” she said, “it’ll want a pattern. Don’t give it one.” She exhaled once, slow. “Five minutes apart. You go first.”

Draco didn’t move. Didn’t argue. But something in him stilled—like an instinct coiling low behind his ribs. After a long breath, he nodded.

She watched him disappear into the vines. Waited.

And when her wand trembled in her hand—barely, just once—she didn’t correct it.

POV: Draco Malfoy

The greenhouse didn’t creak.

That was the first thing Draco registered as he stepped over the warped threshold. No groan of hinges. No protest of old glass expanding against its frame. Just air—wet, still, too thick for comfort. Like something that had once been alive.

Glass arched high overhead, fogged from the inside. The panes were mottled with moss and old ward scarring, streaks of condensation dragging pale trails down their faces like they’d been crying and had finally stopped. Light filtered through in fractured angles. It felt like walking into the inside of a lung.

He didn’t like it.

The floor was uneven—stone tiles cracked in a lattice of roots that had long since abandoned containment. Vines draped from the beams in loose, idle coils, brushing his shoulder as he passed beneath them. Nothing moved. But it didn’t feel dormant.

It felt paused.

He moved carefully, wand drawn low, scanning for trip threads, glyph anchors, anything that might betray a spell laid for panic. But the wards—if they existed—weren’t magical in the way he knew. There was no shimmer. No hum. Only the slight prick of pressure against his temples. Like thought, held too long.

He passed a row of overturned planters, rusted trellises bent into skeletal arcs. The scent of chlorophyll was old, sun-starved. But beneath it—fainter, deeper—something more artificial.

Draco crouched near a pile of broken irrigation tubing, brushed the tip of his wand across the soil.

Dry. But not dead. He didn’t know how he could tell. He just did. He was about to call it—just a ruin, just an echo—when the air changed.

Behind him: the soft crack of apparition. Then, footsteps—measured, familiar.

Hermione.

He turned, already opening his mouth to tell her to wait—but the greenhouse disagreed.

A low sound groaned from the walls. Not a spell. Metal.

Above the door, a glyph flared to life in pale red—a sigil he didn’t recognize, because it didn’t come from any Ministry warding system.

Mechanical. Alchemical. Bound in pressure and pattern, not magic.

Then the door slammed shut behind her.

Hermione froze mid-step. Her eyes snapped to the seal. Then to him.

“Don’t move,” Draco said, low and sharp.

But it was already too late.

The vines moved first, like breath being drawn where breath didn’t belong. A thick root burst from the soil near the center column, arching up with a wet, shivering hiss. It wrapped once—twice—around the base, then split at the tip like fingers seeking purchase.

Hermione didn’t scream. She didn’t back up. But her wand lifted.

Draco took two steps forward and stopped. The vines above him were twitching now—alert. Listening.

The air in the greenhouse rippled once, just enough to raise gooseflesh.

This wasn’t dormant.

It had been waiting.

And now it was awake.

POV: Hermione Granger

The seal on the door had barely finished locking when the air turned.

It wasn’t pressure, not exactly. Not the tightening of magical resistance she’d learned to detect after years of field exposure. This was subtler. Biological. A shift in the density of scent and temperature that made her skin feel too thin for her body. Like something had turned its head inside the walls and was now breathing back.

Hermione raised her wand and cast a containment charm without speaking. The barrier shimmered to life around her and Draco—fine-woven, precise. She could feel it lock at the corners. She was confident in its construction.

For three seconds.

Then came the spores.

They didn’t explode. They unfurled.

From the seams of cracked flowerbeds, from split roots curled like old knuckles, from the base of the central column—thin tendrils of mist rose and began to weave through the air. They shimmered, iridescent and slow, catching the containment barrier as if tasting it.

And then they passed through.

Hermione staggered. Her first thought was that the charm had failed. But no—she could still feel its perimeter, intact, humming along the framework of her wrist. It hadn’t failed. It had been bypassed.

She opened her mouth to cast a counter-agent—and choked. The spores were scent-based. That much became immediately, painfully clear. They weren’t inhaled so much as absorbed. Along the soft inner curve of the throat. Beneath the eyelids. Between breaths.

Mirrorvine, her mind supplied first. And something more acidic. Euphoria Root. Dried, condensed, weaponized.

She blinked, hard. The greenhouse blurred. The floor rippled. Her lungs no longer obeyed their pacing. Her breath came in too quickly, then not at all. The charm in her hand sputtered.

Draco was saying something—low and sharp—but the syllables arrived out of order. Like someone had cut up the sentence and handed it back in pieces.

Her knees hit the stone. She didn’t feel it.

The panic came next—not like fear, not the slow build of logic catching up to danger, but the sharp collapse of reality. Her heart lurched sideways. Her chest locked.

She couldn’t breathe.

Her brain flooded with noise—old memories twisted into threat: a hand over her mouth, a locked door, fire too close to skin. The vines coiled tighter along the columns. She felt them, even without touch—like thoughts she hadn’t given permission to return.

Her wand clattered to the floor, louder than it should have.

Hermione pitched forward onto her hands, trembling now. Her magic sparked against her skin, wild and unfocused, like it couldn’t find its way back to her.

She was trained for this. But the panic didn’t care.

It had roots older than her training. Deeper than her logic. And in that moment, it bloomed.

POV: Draco Malfoy

She was on her knees.

Her wand had fallen from her hand, and her eyes—wide and glassy—weren’t tracking the vines anymore. They were locked on something behind them. Something that wasn’t there.

The mist was everywhere now, curling low along the floor. It pulsed with the faint shimmer of an activated compound—designed to mimic magic, to trigger fear, not through force but through memory. And it was working.

Draco didn’t speak. There was no time. He moved.

The vine at Hermione’s waist was already tightening, inching higher with the blind hunger of a plant that had been taught to find weakness in warmth. It coiled once beneath her ribs, then again.

He dropped to the floor and reached for his boot. The blade slid free with a familiar hiss of steel on leather—small, curved, silver-edged, forged for gutting spellroots, not defense. But it would do.

He didn’t aim. He didn’t calculate. He cut .

The vine gave with a wet snap, the severed end recoiling like a creature that had just learned the meaning of pain. Green sap oozed along the blade’s edge before vanishing into mist.

Hermione gasped—half air, half sound—but didn’t move.

Draco dropped the knife and reached for her, one hand at her spine, the other threading beneath her arm to pull her upright. She was burning hot through her coat, sweat blooming along her collarbone where the spores had taken hold.

She shook against him. With the effort of returning.

He didn’t say anything. Just held her.

The air was still laced with the compound—low enough now to be survivable, but volatile enough to keep working if he let it. So he didn’t.

He turned toward the center column, where the vine system had begun to pulse with slow, deliberate rhythm. Beneath it, a faint shimmer of runes traced a circle into the soil—half-buried, but active. Not cursed. Not even magical in the traditional sense.

Alchemical.

Primitive, by some standards. Ingenious, by others.

Draco moved toward it, dragging Hermione with him until she found her footing. He crouched and brushed the dirt aside with one hand, feeling for the rhythm beneath the glyph. It pulsed once. Twice.

There.

He found the anchor root and yanked.

The circle flickered.

Another.

The second root was deeper, embedded in wax and old potion resin. He sliced through it with the heel of his palm, ignoring the sting. His skin burned, but the glyph dimmed.

A third.

This one required both hands—so he handed Hermione the blade, wordlessly.

She understood.

He pulled. The earth shuddered around the column.

Above them, the main glyph—etched into the greenhouse arch—flared red, then green, then out. The vines recoiled in unison, retreating into the soil like threads pulled through cloth. The mist began to fade.

The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It was aftermath.

Hermione leaned heavily against him, breath still ragged, eyes clearer now but rimmed in something raw.

He looked down at her, eyes unreadable.

“Why didn’t you cast the countercurse?” she whispered.

Draco adjusted his grip on her shoulder.

“Because sometimes the wand makes it worse.”

She didn’t argue.

He didn’t let go.

POV: Hermione Granger

The greenhouse door groaned shut behind them, the final latch catching with a reluctant click. Outside, the air was still damp with fog, but breathable now—cool in the way evenings were before winter made promises it never kept.

Hermione sat first, sliding down the wall until her coat brushed the moss-veined stone and her back settled into something solid. Draco followed without speaking, easing down beside her with a kind of exhaustion that made no attempt at pride.

They didn’t look at each other.

Not at first.

Her lungs still felt too tight. Her skin still prickled with the phantom ache of hallucination—the choking panic, the rooted helplessness. She remembered the vines coiling. The drowning. She didn’t remember his hands. Just the absence of the vine. And the breath that returned like a borrowed thing.

“Thank you,” she said, quietly.

Her voice cracked in the middle, just slightly.

Draco didn’t respond. But he reached into his coat and pulled out a battered flask, unscrewed the top, and handed it to her. She drank—water, warm from his coat—and handed it back.

He drank too. His hands shook, just enough to rattle the cap against the rim before he replaced it. She noticed, but said nothing.

She kept her eyes on the glass panels above them, watching the last of the sunlight filter through cracks and overgrowth, refracted by age and ivy. The glass was dirty. The light didn’t care. It touched them anyway—soft and unassuming, like an apology made by someone who couldn’t speak.

“I saw…” she began, then stopped.

He didn’t prompt her.

She didn’t finish the sentence.

And he didn’t ask.

She didn’t ask about the blade either.

What they’d brought into the greenhouse was theirs to carry. Not to name.

The quiet stretched. And held. And warmed.

Behind them, a vine twitched once beneath the soil. The trap was over.

Hermione tilted her head until her shoulder just barely brushed his.

He didn’t move.

Light caught the edge of his jaw.

She let it linger.

And said nothing more.

Chapter Text

POV: Draco Malfoy

The break room was too warm.

Not by spellwork—just the latent heat of tired magic and burnt coffee left too long on a rewarming charm. The lights flickered once above the sink and then steadied, casting a dim gold over the cramped table where Draco sat with his elbows on his knees and a silver ring pinched lightly between his fingers.

It wasn’t his. It had no enchantments, no history. Just something he’d picked up from the greenhouse floor while the adrenaline still burned through his limbs. Smooth-edged, bent at the band. It had rolled to a stop near Hermione’s boot and neither of them had spoken when he pocketed it. He didn’t know why he’d done it. Only that it was easier than talking.

His hands still ached.

The raw places—wrists, knuckles, the base of each thumb—were tinged with residual sting, the quiet aftermath of being handled by something that thought it owned him. He flexed his fingers once, slow. Still worked. That was something.

The door creaked behind him.

He didn’t turn.

She entered with quiet steps, the kind made by someone not trying to be silent, just used to not being heard. Her coat was slung over one arm, her hair damp at the ends. She looked less rattled than she should have, and more tired than she’d ever admit.

Two mugs steamed in her hands. She set one in front of him without ceremony.

He didn’t thank her right away. Just stared at the cup, then the ring, then back to the edge of the table. After a moment, he muttered, “Thanks.”

She sat across from him, both hands wrapped around her own cup. She didn’t blow on it. Didn’t sip. Just held it.

The silence was softer than it had been in the greenhouse. Not hollow. Not charged. Just... worn. Like something that had been broken open and was learning to settle back into shape.

“You didn’t panic,” she said at last.

Her voice was low. Not quite impressed. Not surprised either.

Draco rolled the ring across his palm again. Let it spin once before catching it.

“Wasn’t the first time a plant tried to strangle me,” he said, tone dry.

Her mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not quite. But something loosened at the corner.

He looked down into the steam rising from his tea. It smelled like chamomile—cheap Ministry sachets, over-steeped and slightly medicinal. Still, the heat curled around his fingers in a way that made the ache ease. A little.

Neither of them moved to fill the space.

There were no debriefs, no scrolls. No scribbled diagrams or runes or names whispered between them.

Just this.

A room that didn’t ask. A table too small. Two cups of tea cooling side by side. 

And a ring, silent in his hand, that still hadn’t explained why he’d kept it. He turned it over once more and finally slid it into the inside pocket of his coat. Not because he needed to keep it. Because for now, he wasn’t ready to let it go. 

By the time the tea had gone cold, she was already reaching for a folder. They walked out together without speaking.

The corridors of the Ministry after hours were quieter than they had any right to be.

The clatter of enchanted filing carts had dulled to a hum somewhere distant, and the walls had settled into that strange in-between stillness—part official, part forgotten. The lighting charms overhead had dimmed to conserve energy, and the long stretch of stone underfoot echoed with each step they didn’t try to muffle.

Hermione walked ahead of him, her coat brushing behind her calves, a stack of case files tucked beneath one arm. She moved with purpose, like she’d already mapped the next six moves on the board and was simply executing them.

Draco followed. Not because he was unsure of where they were going. But because—tonight, at least—she had the thread.

They turned down a narrower passageway leading to the East Archive alcove, where older magical records were kept—sealed registries, lineage vaults, bloodline seals. The kind of things even the Auror Office didn’t touch unless they had to.

She spoke without looking back.

“I want to re-examine the Squib registry seals. The original glyphwork, not the redacted overlays.”

Draco’s steps slowed.

“I already know what they look like,” he said. Quiet. 

Hermione stopped. Just for a breath. She turned slightly, enough for her profile to catch in the low light. Her eyes weren’t surprised. Just searching.

“How?”

Draco looked past her for a moment, down the corridor that still stretched ahead—long and quiet, broken only by the faint pulse of an archival access rune glowing amber at the end.

Then he said, “My cousin.”
A pause.
“Isidora.”

The name left his mouth like something unfamiliar. Not unwelcome. But long disused.

“She was... born different.”

He didn’t elaborate. Not at first.

They resumed walking, slower now, neither of them trying to hurry the space between words.

“She had this laugh,” he said, after a beat. “It took over the room. Too big for the space. Too alive for them.”

A flicker—unbidden—rose to the surface: marble floors, echoing footsteps, the glitter of a toy wand she’d insisted worked if you believed hard enough. Isidora, legs tucked beneath her, teaching him how to whistle with two fingers and nearly falling over with the force of it.

She’d drawn constellations on the ceiling of the west corridor with a charmed spark quill. He hadn’t told anyone he’d liked them.

“She used to draw stars where there weren’t any,” Draco said, voice thinner now. “Made a whole sky over my bed one summer. Said it was ours.”

He didn’t realize he’d stopped walking until Hermione did too.

She didn’t interrupt.

Didn’t press.

He swallowed. “One day she was just... gone. No talk. No explanation. Room cleared before breakfast. Family said she’d gone to a boarding program. But the wards were erased. Registry file vanished. Even the house elf wouldn’t say her name after that.”

A silence settled between them. Dense. Respectful.

“She tried to whistle like the grown-ups did,” he said, almost absently. “Could never quite get the tone right. But she kept trying. Every hallway.”

Hermione’s gaze hadn’t left him. But she didn’t step closer. That was the right call.

“I never asked what happened,” he added, eyes fixed now on the rune-marked door ahead. “Not really. Not in a way that would’ve mattered.”

A beat.

“She wasn’t the first.”

Hermione nodded. Not because she knew. Because she heard him.

They stood like that for a moment longer. Two people in a corridor built to forget.

And one name that still echoed, no matter how well the Ministry tried to erase it.

The alcove didn’t announce itself. It sat at the end of a narrow offshoot from the Ministry’s archival wing—unlabeled, quiet, and humming faintly with low-security preservation charms. The air smelled like old parchment and locked things.

Draco pressed his palm to the access plate. The wards recognized his name before they registered his intent.

The door opened.

Hermione followed him in without a word.

The room was barely larger than a cupboard. One wall lined with drawer-slots marked by family crests. Another stacked with flat files that bore no names—only Ministry classification seals in shades of ash, umber, and black.

Draco moved with the kind of precision that didn’t require decision. He already knew where it was.

Second drawer from the bottom. Center column.

The metal creaked slightly as he pulled it open. Inside, rows of parchment envelopes stood like tombstones. He reached for one toward the back, tucked behind a few with glossier seals. This one was older. Edges curled. The wax flattened by time.

He held it in his hand for a long moment before speaking.

“Malfoy, House Record—Request for Adjudication,” he read softly.

Stamped in red at the corner: Internal Discretion. Sealed by Family Council Order.

He didn’t break the seal. Didn’t need to. The words were enough.

He stepped back and leaned against the side of the cabinet. The envelope didn’t shake in his fingers. But it should have.

“One day she was at the table,” he said. “And then she wasn’t.”

He didn’t look at Hermione.

“She spilled tea on the floor,” he added, voice distant. “Knocked over a china cup that had been in the family since 1640. Grandmother cursed under her breath. Father didn’t say anything. But he didn’t touch his food after that.”

He blinked. Once.

“I remember because she tried to mop it up with her sleeve. Laughing. Said, ‘Oops. That was a legacy, wasn’t it?’”

He didn’t smile.

The envelope in his hand felt heavier now.

“I asked my mother where she went. She didn’t hesitate. Said: ‘She wasn’t meant for this world.’”

He turned the envelope over in his hand. The seal glinted faintly in the lamplight—gold, not for honor, but for finality.

“Her room was gone within a month. Repainted. Repurposed. I think they moved the wine collection in.”

The silence between them stretched—careful, unbroken.

Draco looked down at the file again. He drew in a breath through his nose, slow and deliberate. Let it settle at the back of his throat before he spoke.

“We buried her before she died,” he said quietly. The quiet that followed didn’t press for more. It simply held.

And that was it. Not a confession. Not an apology. Just fact. Laid bare.

He replaced the envelope. Shut the drawer with a soft click.

When he turned back toward Hermione, he didn’t say anything else.

He didn’t have to.

The wound was never the loss.

It was the instruction not to feel it.

The drawer clicked shut. The echo was soft—muted by the weight of what had been said, and what hadn’t.

Draco stood for a moment longer, one hand still resting on the edge of the cabinet. The air in the alcove had shifted: not colder, not heavier, just… quieter.

Hermione hadn’t moved. She leaned against the opposite wall, arms folded, eyes unreadable in the low light. But she wasn’t withdrawn. Her stillness wasn’t distance—it was attention.

“I’ve read through interviews,” she said, voice low, unhurried. “Field notes. Observational logs from the suppression trials in the late 60s. Post-revocation casework. The Department keeps records—barely—but they’re there.”

Draco turned toward her slightly, but didn’t interrupt.

“Magical trauma in Squibs doesn’t look like ours,” she went on. “It’s quieter. Slower. But it cuts just as deep. Sometimes deeper.”

Her voice didn’t shift with sympathy. Only precision.

“There was a girl—age nine. Erased from her family’s record after an inheritance dispute. She started inventing magical memories. Full ones. Said she’d levitated a book once in her sleep, transfigured her cat into a teaspoon, floated during a nap. All false. She’d describe them in detail. Color, smell, sound.”

Draco’s jaw tightened. Not visibly. Just enough to taste it in his molars.

Hermione glanced down. Not away. Just into memory.

“Another case—boy, ten. He spoke only in spells. Nonsense ones. Made them up daily. Cast nothing, of course. But he wouldn’t respond unless you used them back. The healers said he was unresponsive. But he wasn’t. He just wanted the world to feel like it could answer him again.”

Draco absorbed it silently. The Ministry hadn’t taught him this. His family wouldn’t have wanted to.

“The mind reshapes itself,” Hermione said. “To survive disownment. To become something else.”

A long moment passed. Not uncomfortable. Not stalled. Just present.

Draco stepped back from the cabinet and leaned against the opposite wall beside her, shoulder brushing stone. The light overhead buzzed faintly.

He didn’t look at her when he asked: “Do they remember who they were?”

Hermione exhaled once through her nose. Not a sigh. Just breath.

“Sometimes,” she said. “But only when someone else does too.”

That landed. Deep and low, the way truth did when it wasn’t a revelation but a quiet returning.

Draco closed his eyes for a moment, just once. Not to block her out. But to hold it.

Isidora’s laugh. The way she’d whispered constellations like they were secrets only he deserved to know.

He opened his eyes.

Still in the alcove. Still beside Hermione.

The room hadn’t changed. But he had.

And he wasn’t the only one carrying a silence that wanted, more than anything, to be remembered.

They didn’t speak as they left the records alcove.
There was no need to fill the silence—not now. It didn’t feel brittle the way it once had. It didn’t clatter between them like armor. It walked with them, steady and worn-in, like a cloak shrugged onto both shoulders.

The corridor was quiet—low-lit and half-abandoned this late in the day. The Ministry had a different voice at this hour: no clatter of parchment, no echo of footsteps rushing to keep up with headlines. Just stone and hum and the weight of things not forgotten.

They moved in step without planning to. The rhythm easy. Uncalculated. Hermione’s arms were folded loosely over the folder she hadn’t opened since the alcove. Draco walked with his hands in his pockets, the ache in his fingers from the greenhouse still faintly present, like a reminder of something survived.

He glanced sideways.
Her expression was composed, but not guarded. The difference was subtle—but he noticed it. Not that she was open, exactly. Just… not preparing for impact.

For once, he didn’t look away first.

“Isidora liked you, you know.”

Hermione blinked. She didn’t stop walking. But her head tilted, just slightly, in that way she had when she was caught between challenging and understanding.

“She never met me,” she said.

Draco nodded once. “Exactly.”

He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to.
Some things lived outside of logic. Some recognitions, you just felt.

There was a breath of silence between them—then, unbidden, a faint smirk curled at the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t for her. Not fully. It was for the girl who’d drawn stars on ceilings. For the boy who hadn’t known the shape of what he’d lost. For the fact that, somehow, neither of them had vanished.

Hermione didn’t correct him. Didn’t rationalize it. She just kept walking.

They reached the junction near the main corridor—where the clamor of the office resumed in the distance, growing louder with every step.

Neither of them sped up.

They weren’t allies. Not yet. But they weren’t standing on opposite sides of the board anymore.
Not enemies. Just people.

Raised in systems that taught them to be silent.
Now learning, together, how to name what had been taken.

Two figures walking side by side through the Ministry’s dim corridors—unhurried, unspeaking, and unmistakably in sync. Not defined by what had come before, but by the space that had opened between them. Shared. Unfinished. Real.

His fingers brushed the bent silver ring still resting in his coat pocket. A thing he hadn’t meant to keep. And wasn’t quite ready to return.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The room was too sterile to trust.
Hermione adjusted the containment ring with a flick of her fingers, the wards responding not with a hum, but a low, calibrated pulse that settled against her ribs like a second heartbeat. She preferred it that way—magic you could measure. Magic you could hold to account.

Her temporary workspace in the Research Wing wasn’t meant for field experimentation, but it would do. The walls gleamed with overzealous cleaning charms. The table had been scrubbed too smooth. Every inch of the lab insisted on control.

Hermione imposed her own anyway.

No wand. No staff. Just a copper cauldron nested inside the ward ring, its base set against a carefully measured circle of elemental sand. Sigil stones—unmarked, untriggered—waited at equidistant points. The entire space was calibrated to suppress magical interference.

She needed to be sure. This wasn’t about spellwork. It never had been.

A thin trail of vapor coiled up from the cauldron—pale green, already shifting into the slow opacity of a cooling vapor compound. Hermione watched it for five full breaths, counting each second like a metronome. On the sixth, she moved.

“This isn’t about brewing,” she said, not turning. Her voice was quiet. Flat, but not indifferent. “It’s about emulation—structure without source. A spell’s shape without its soul.”

The Potions Division liaison—young, anxious, and painfully underqualified—shifted behind her, his arms folded more for self-protection than skepticism.

“You’re saying these deaths weren’t magical?” he asked.

“I’m saying they weren’t cast, ” Hermione corrected. She tapped a small vial into the brew—exactly one and a quarter drops. “But the outcome behaves like a spell. That’s different.”

The liquid in the cauldron shifted. It didn’t hiss. It didn’t bubble. It simply thickened—slow, elegant, unnerving. Like a thought taking shape.

She turned to face the liaison, finally. Her gaze was clinical, not confrontational. But there was no softness in it.

“Every reaction we’ve tracked mimics a known magical function,” she said. “Stasis. Paralysis. Hemorrhage. But the residue? It’s chemical. Alchemical. Not arcane. There’s no core signature. No magical instability.”

The liaison blinked. “So… it’s potion-based?”

Hermione exhaled once. Not quite a sigh. “No,” she said. “It’s more than that.”

She stepped back toward the center of the containment ring and gestured once. The vapor over the cauldron began to rise, forming a thin, translucent disk. Runes etched into the surface in real time—no ink, no incantation. Just reaction. Precision. Intention calibrated like pressure on a trigger.

“This killer isn’t casting spells,” she said, voice steady. “He’s building them.”

The liaison didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. The vapor was still forming—a sigil within a sigil, folding and unfurling in layers Hermione hadn’t dared try outside a theoretical lab before now.

Behind her, footsteps paused at the door.

She didn’t have to turn.
The air shifted.

Draco.

He didn’t say anything. Just watched.

The liaison took one look at Malfoy, then at the disk still spinning above the cauldron, and muttered something about retrieving a copy of the Residue Interaction Act from the archives. He was gone before the glyphs resolved fully.

Hermione didn’t move.
She let the magic— not magic —spin out on its own.

After a moment, she said, still not looking back: “I can make it freeze on contact. Like a binding charm. No wand required. Just a catalyst and intent.”

There was a beat of silence from the doorway. Then, quietly: “How long have you known?”

She turned, finally. Draco’s expression was unreadable, but his arms were crossed—and not to guard himself. To listen.

“Since Thornbridge,” she said. “Confirmed it at Flint’s.”

He looked past her to the cauldron. The vapor. The disk still pulsing with glyphs.

“And now?” he asked.

She reached for her field notes, flipped to the last page, and tapped the heading she'd written in uncharacteristically uneven script: Simulation Magic: Spell Theory via Non-Arcane Activation

Underneath, in smaller text: Proof of concept pending lethal reproduction ban.

Hermione met his eyes. “Now,” she said, “I prove the theory wasn’t just possible. It was inevitable.” She didn’t smile. But her fingers curled once against the page—steady, certain.

The containment ring pulsed again.

And Draco stepped fully into the room.

The room smelled like steel and dried citrus—the chemical tang of sterilized air. Hermione rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and snapped on a pair of non-conductive gloves. Behind her, Draco lingered just outside the containment line, the faint hum of the ward ring vibrating beneath his boots.

She didn’t invite him closer.
Not yet.

The workspace was stripped of enchantment: no magical stirring rods, no self-heating crucibles, no reactive powders that responded to wandlight. Just a Muggle-grade coil burner, three flasks, and a scale so precise it corrected for dust in the air. Control. That was the point.

“I’m going to show you what he’s doing,” Hermione said without looking up. “Not what it looks like. What it is. ”

Draco crossed his arms. “You’re brewing without a wand.”

She measured out the first compound. “No, I’m replicating,” she corrected. “And wandless brewing would still imply magical intent. This? This is pure behavior. Chemical mimicry structured to collapse only under specific biological conditions.”

Bitterroot first. Carefully dried. Shaved into translucent curls and left to settle in the base of the flask.

She added a breath of powdered belladonna—measured to the grain, stabilized with a dash of inert iron filings. Then a whisper of Phoenix Ash dust, its glow dim and nonreactive. The dust floated briefly, then fell. Still dormant. Still waiting.

“He didn’t want it to act like a potion,” she said. “He wanted it to behave like a spell.”

Draco said nothing.

Hermione moved to the heating coil and lowered the flask into place, adjusting the flame until it licked the base of the glass without touching it. She kept one eye on the temperature gauge. Another on the chrono-crystal ticking silently beside the beaker. Forty-two seconds. Then the vapor started to rise.

It wasn’t thick. Not yet. But it shimmered—like mist off a freshly cast Disillusionment charm. Hermione stepped back just slightly and reached for the final step: a siphon rig, loaded with a thin thread of stabilizer enzyme. She tilted it into place.

The moment it touched the mist, the vapor sparked—not with light, but form. Solidified in midair for half a heartbeat. Then dropped, as if gravity had only just remembered to catch it. A slow-moving, viscous tear of black fluid coiled into the base of the cauldron. It pooled and pulsed, oil-slicked and waiting.

Hermione lifted the vial slowly.

The liquid thickened along the inner curve of the glass—almost alive. She tilted it once. The fluid rolled, heavy and slow, clinging to the surface. Then she unscrewed the cap and dipped the tip of a sterile cloth into the substance. When she pressed it against her wrist, her fingers went numb within a breath.

“Non-lethal,” she said, holding the cloth up for him to see. “But enough to paralyze small muscle groups. Localized. Targeted. On contact. No ingestion. No incantation.”

Draco stepped forward, mouth parted slightly—not in disbelief, but in the quiet astonishment of a man watching the edges of a truth he didn’t want to admit fold in on themselves.

“That’s not supposed to be possible,” he said.

Hermione wiped her wrist clean with a neutralizer patch and didn’t blink.

“Neither is he.”

She set the vial in a containment cradle. The fluid shimmered, faintly gold at the edges, like something trying to decide what it wanted to become next.

Draco didn’t speak again.

The room wasn’t a lab anymore.
It was a battlefield.
And Hermione Granger had just drawn first blood—with knowledge, not magic.

The vapor had dissipated. The vial sat sealed inside the containment cradle, pulsing faintly like it still remembered movement. Hermione wiped down the workbench in precise circles, the rhythm steadying. The copper coil clicked as it cooled behind her, releasing the ghost of bitterroot and ash into the air.

She didn’t speak.

Not because there was nothing to say—but because she didn’t trust herself to say it first.

Across the room, Draco remained still. He hadn't asked any more questions. Hadn’t touched the chalked schematics on the back wall. Just watched the demonstration unfold like it had told him something about her he hadn’t expected.

She rinsed the glass stirrer in the sterilization basin, the spell reacting with a faint hiss. Set it down on the drying rack. Reached for the enzyme flask next.

Footsteps, soft. Measured.

Then his voice, low. “You should’ve been a cursebreaker.”

Hermione’s hand paused mid-reach.

He stopped just behind her, near the edge of the table, his presence folding into the air like a shadow finally willing to speak. “You think like a saboteur.”

She turned slightly, brows lifted. “That wasn’t a compliment, was it?”

A flicker passed over his expression—an almost-smile. Dry, but not unkind. “It was.”

She studied him—really studied him—for the first time that day. He looked different in this light, she realized. Not softer. Just… less armored. The weight in his posture hadn’t shifted, but the edge had dulled. And his gaze—sharp, still, always sharp—held something quieter now. Not approval. Not quite admiration.

Acknowledgement.

It should’ve made her bristle. Instead, it anchored something. “I didn’t build this to be impressive,” she said, voice quiet.

“I know.”

Another silence.

He lingered at the edge of her work table, fingers curled loosely around the lip of the bench, like he wasn’t sure whether to hold it or let go. There was something in the way he stood—just outside the containment ring, just close enough to reach for something unspoken—that made the room feel smaller.

She turned toward him fully.

And that was when the alarms went off.

A low-pitched siren vibrated through the walls, not loud but immediate—designed for field response teams and Departmental cross-notification. The containment cradle locked with a sharp click. Overhead, the emergency glyphs flared to life in warning-red rune light.

Hermione stepped back instinctively. Draco had already turned toward the door.

“Emergency corridor,” he said.

“Which wing?”

A voice—disembodied, mechanical—answered from the ceiling: “Auror Evidence Division. Explosion detected. Triage level: critical.”

Hermione’s heart seized.

She didn’t hesitate. She grabbed her coat, wand already in hand.

Draco didn’t speak again.

The stillness between them shattered.

And they ran.

Red light strobed along the walls of the corridor, a pulse timed to panic. Glyphs flared overhead—emergency runes rotating into view, spinning too fast for anyone to read but clear in their intent. Lockdown initiated. Hazard containment breach. Auror Evidence Division.

Hermione ran.

Her boots slammed against the stone floor, coat whipping at her knees. Ahead of her, the corridor split—one hall already sealed by rising stone wards, the other open, flooded with sound.

To her left: a junior Auror scrambled to clear a rack of scrolls as they caught fire.

To her right: Draco, already ahead, wand drawn, moving with the kind of control that only came from muscle memory, not calm.

They reached the reinforced door at the same time. Smoke curled from beneath it—grey-black, wrong. Not cursed, not magical.

Just wrong.

The glyph array above the handle flickered once, then sparked, dead.

Hermione didn't wait. She slammed her hand against the override rune and whispered the command. The lock hissed in protest—then yielded.

The door creaked open into chaos.

The Evidence Wing was unrecognizable.

Shelves had buckled inward, their containment charms snapped like bones under pressure. Vials were shattered across the floor, glittering in shards of stasis glass. Residue from confiscated potions hissed where they’d leaked into pooling ink. The air shimmered, not with magic—but with chemical instability. Whatever had gone off hadn’t exploded outward.

It had corrupted. And in the center of it all, frozen in place—arms slightly raised, wand half-drawn—was Auror Timmons. One of the senior field agents. He was pale, unmoving. Not petrified. Not stunned.

Paralyzed.

Hermione stepped forward, casting a shield over the body before kneeling beside him. The containment field buzzed softly. The edges of his coat were singed, but his skin showed no burns, no bruising. Only the stiff arc of a body caught in something it couldn't counter.

Draco crouched beside her, silent.

She didn’t look at him. Just lifted her wand again and cast the detection sequence she’d only hours before embedded into the chalkboard of her lab.

A soft spiral of vapor shimmered above Timmons’ chest. Pale grey-blue, tinged with a faint chemical luminescence.

The glyph she’d drawn in the lab responded. The vapour pulsed once. Perfect match.

Hermione’s stomach turned. The signature was hers. Or close enough to be.

Not magical. Not spellcast. Just built —from Bitterroot and a dozen other ingredients meant to simulate a magical trigger. The paralytic was precise. Timed. Calibrated to disable the nervous system and trip every single magical sensor in the room while remaining utterly non-magical itself.

A poison designed to mimic a curse.

No. Not mimic.

Overwrite.

Draco spoke quietly beside her.

“They’re showing off.”

Hermione’s breath caught.

“They knew you’d figure it out.”

She didn’t answer.

The message had already been delivered—in stilled breath, in twitchless hands, in the perfect stillness of a man who’d spent his career enforcing magical order and now couldn’t even move.

This wasn’t just retaliation.

It was instruction.

This was war by alchemy now.

And she’d helped write the language.

The Emergency Response Wing was too quiet.

They had cleared the smoke. Stabilized the wards. Neutralized the remaining vapor. Every containment rune on the door now pulsed a steady, muted gold. But inside the room, the air still felt flammable.

Hermione stood beyond the glass.

He hadn’t moved—frozen mid-draw, caught at the edge of collapse.

Not dead. Not damaged. Paused.

The message had already burned through.

“They’re not targeting bloodlines anymore,” she said softly. “They’re targeting a response.”

Behind her, Draco leaned against the wall, arms folded, jaw clenched. He hadn’t spoken since the evidence team arrived. Hadn’t interrupted when she ran the vapor readings again. Hadn’t argued when she declared the attack potion-mimetic rather than spell-adjacent.

His silence was agreement now.

“They want us chasing them,” he said at last. “Which means the next step is already happening.”

Hermione turned.

Her bag sat open on the table, half its contents still strewn across the surface—scrolls, quills, Ministry extract slips. She reached inside and withdrew her field journal. The parchment was already stained with ash and ink, the ritual wheel diagram smudged along the outer edge from overuse.

She flipped to the latest page. Six names. Six sigils. A seventh line drawn but still unlabeled. She uncapped her pen, then paused.

Every death so far had struck at bloodline silence. At ancestral betrayal. But this one—this new escalation—it wasn’t about the past.

It was about the present. About them.

She drew a small glyph into the center of the ritual circle. A modified alchemical symbol. Not for death. Not for silence.

For mirroring.

Blueprint theft through precision. Power asserted through stolen logic. Confrontation by design.

She closed the notebook, palm resting over the cover like a seal.

“We’re not investigating a killer anymore,” she said.

Her voice was steady. Final.

“We’re tracing a blueprint.”

Draco didn’t argue. He didn’t move.

On the far end of the table, the potion vial from the lab sat in containment—its stasis field flickering around it like breath. The liquid inside wasn’t glowing exactly, but it pulsed. Slow. Rhythmic. As if it were waiting. As if it knew what it was meant to become next.

Hermione stood motionless beside the glass, eyes fixed on the vial—its glow reflected faintly in her irises. Draco stood behind her, shadowed, watching the same thing. A silent chemical beat. A beginning disguised as aftermath.

Chapter Text

POV: Draco Malfoy

The smoke was thicker than it should’ve been.

Not from spellfire—Draco could tell the difference. This was chemical, acrid, threaded with something too sweet and too sharp. Potion-based. Improvised. Effective.

The Evidence Wing was fractured along its spine, the central corridor warped by the blast. Shards of tempered glass crunched beneath his boots. Floating shelves hung at strange angles, their charms stuttering, light flaring erratically in broken loops. Somewhere behind him, a ward buckled with a high-pitched crack, then went dead.

Draco moved without thought. Without question. He didn’t call out. Sound could trigger proximity charms. Sound could mean collapse.

He flicked a shielding spell toward the nearest unstable structure and stepped through the breach in the wall, cloak catching on the edge of a scorched file cabinet. The air beyond was worse. Hot. Dense. Laced with the residue of containment spells that had failed mid-cast.

Not spellwork, he thought. Simulated arcana. Triggered by intent, not incantation.

He could still smell it—Bitterroot at the base, but altered. Something that burned too long for a flash effect. Something designed to hang in the lungs.

The room was sideways—both literally and not. Cabinets overturned. Sealing glyphs fizzing out mid-symbol. A containment charm still sparked in the corner, trying and failing to rebind itself to a shattered vial. The remnants of a broken anti-tampering rune glowed like a wound in the floor.

Draco stepped over it.

Then he saw movement. Near the far wall, pinned beneath a buckled shelving unit—the sharp edge of a navy Auror robe, the corner of a shoulder insignia just visible.

He didn’t hesitate. With a grunt and a muttered levitation spell, he raised the edge of the structure—not high, not far, just enough to drag the body free. The weight in his arms was solid. Breathing, but limp.

Fleming. One of the new trainees. Too quick with his wand, too loud in the breakroom. Had once asked Draco if a disarming charm counted as assault if you aimed for someone’s ego. He didn’t look like that now. There was blood across his temple. A nasty cut, maybe. Nothing fatal. His chest still rose and fell beneath the soot.

“You’re fine,” Draco muttered, breath short. “Stay fine.”

He didn’t hear the crack until it was too late. One of the fractured ceiling anchors gave way with a screech and a thud, sending a cascade of dust and vapor down from above. Draco shoved the trainee to the side and stepped back—but not fast enough.

He inhaled.

The mistake hit instantly.

The air wasn’t just thick—it was laced. Something hybrid, unfinished. A compound built to destabilize magical equilibrium. Potion-based, wandless, and alive in the lungs.

His vision warped. Edges bent. Sound dropped into a low, humming pitch that thrummed through the floor. He stumbled, tried to brace himself against the wall, but it wasn’t there anymore. Or maybe his hand missed. He wasn’t sure.

The room tilted.

Everything slowed.

The last thing he saw before the dark took him was the flicker of a failed stasis charm sparking out across the floor.

Not cast.

Triggered.

Then nothing.

Just black.

The ceiling above him was made of pressed tin and runes—standard Ministry enchantments meant to hum softly during stabilization, like lullabies for spell-shattered Aurors. Draco didn’t like it. The tone was wrong. Too saccharine. Like reassurance performed for someone else’s benefit.

His throat was dry. His magic—still present, but flickering at the edges—throbbed in slow, uneven pulses beneath his skin. It felt like someone had poured sand into his veins and asked it to behave like light.

The cot beneath him creaked when he shifted.

He wasn’t alone.

She didn’t announce herself. She didn’t need to. He knew it was Hermione by the weight of silence alone—too intentional to be anyone else. She was seated beside the bed, robes soot-streaked, her hair pulled back hastily, the frayed end of a spell tag still stuck to her sleeve.

Her hands were clasped around a glass of water.

She didn’t look at him until he did.

Their eyes met. Just once.

Then she reached forward and placed the glass into his hand—without flourish, without commentary. Her fingers didn’t brush his. It still felt like contact.

Draco took a sip. The water was cold. Too clean.

The ache behind his eyes hadn’t faded. His left arm was wrapped in a sterile charm, humming with low-level healing runes. His lungs pulled against something thick.

He cleared his throat.

“Potion fume induction,” he said. The words were gravel. “That’s how he paralyzed them.”

Hermione nodded once. “He wanted you to breathe it in.”

Not a guess. Not a deduction. Just fact.

He didn’t ask how she knew. She wouldn’t answer if it were only theory.

Draco looked past her, toward the far wall. A shelf of potions flickered with soft diagnostic lights. No movement. No sound, except the ward purring faintly at the edge of his vision.

He should’ve seen it. He should’ve known.

His jaw tightened.

“This wasn’t a warning,” he said after a moment. “It was a message.”

Hermione didn’t reply. She reached into her robe and pulled out a file—thin, already smudged with soot. She set it on the table beside him without speaking. A name glowed faintly through the char on the cover.

Draco didn’t reach for it. Not yet. Instead, he looked back at her.

“You came here fast.”

“I was already close,” she said, quiet.

He didn’t believe her. Not really. But he didn’t question it either.

The silence between them wasn’t easy—but it wasn’t empty. It was full of too many almosts: almost lost, almost late, almost saying something they weren’t ready to name.

Draco leaned back into the cot, closed his eyes for just a moment.

The faint ache in his chest was still there. But he could breathe. Barely. 

And she was still sitting beside him. 

Not leaving.

The containment lab still smelled like fire. Not the kind that burned flesh or structure, but the kind that lingered in memory—chemical, precise, the residue of something that had not just detonated, but declared itself.

Draco stepped into the lab without announcing himself. He didn’t need to. Hermione was already inside, standing near the central analysis table, wand raised, her expression carved from the same stillness she’d worn at the greenhouse. Except this time, it was colder.

The lighting overhead had been lowered to accommodate sensitive detection spells. The room pulsed faintly, the air thrumming with suppressed resonance. An array of magically shielded samples floated behind containment glass, flickering with internal diagnostics.

But Hermione wasn’t looking at any of them.

She stood over a single object on the table—a warped metal panel, scorched along one edge, its surface blackened with soot and something glossier, chemical, too deliberate to be residue. Not Ministry metal. Thicker. Reinforced. Likely from one of the containment chambers in the Evidence Wing.

She didn’t speak when he entered.

Just shifted slightly, to make space beside her.

Draco stepped up and stared down at the panel.

The mark wasn’t visible—not yet. But he could feel it. Something about the edges of the metal, the way the heat had warped but not consumed it. It had been protected for a reason.

Hermione lifted her wand and murmured something low—an Unspeakable dialect, angular and guttural, too old for Hogwarts and too precise for field use.

The metal responded. Not with heat or sound—but with light.

Lines began to emerge—first faint, like steam on glass, then sharper, ink-thin and exact. The surface shimmered once, and then the sigil revealed itself: not etched. Not burned. Written. Layered in potion-reactive ink that had survived the explosion through a protective brew he didn’t recognize.

At first, it looked like a name.

Draco leaned in.

The characters shifted, reconfigured themselves as the detection charm completed its sequence.

One word.

Curled across the panel in calligraphic, acid-black script.

Unworthy .

It wasn’t just a message.

It was a weapon.

Draco didn’t move. Didn’t blink. He stared at the word like it might change if he looked long enough. But it didn’t. It held steady, suspended in magic and ink and something older—something personal.

Hermione said nothing.

He could feel her watching him. Just… witnessing. That made it worse. The word sat between them now. Not a taunt. Not a warning. A designation.

Draco’s jaw tensed, but his voice stayed level. “It’s not Ministry script.”

“No,” Hermione said. “It’s adapted alchemical shorthand. Written like a naming charm. Directed.”

His gaze flicked toward her.

She didn’t elaborate. Not like she needed to.

Draco stared at the panel again. His reflection caught in the metal, warped slightly by the curvature of the burn. For a moment, he looked like someone else.

Someone who might deserve the message.

He stepped back.

“Log it,” he said, voice flat.

Hermione didn’t move.

He looked at her again, not quite meeting her eyes. “It’s meant for me. But it’s not about me.”

That, finally, made her blink. Just once.

He turned without waiting for her response. Behind him, the word lingered, still glowing against the blackened steel—sharp as a spell, and twice as silent.

The sigil hadn’t disappeared.

Even after the spell faded, even after the potion ink cooled beneath the surface of the metal, Draco could still see it— Unworthy —burned into the air behind his eyes. It lingered in the way a sound might echo in a ruined church, not loud but permanent. The sort of silence that didn't soften with time.

He stood in the low-lit hush of the containment room, hands at his sides, unmoving. The walls flickered faintly with residual containment spells, the metal slab between him and Hermione still warm with a magic that wasn’t magic at all.

The word didn’t fade. It never had.

He inhaled, slow, measured—then again, faster. Not panic. But close to it.

He didn’t look at her. Not yet.

Instead, he asked the question that had been pacing the length of his ribcage since he stepped into the room.

"How long do you think he’s been watching?"

Hermione didn’t answer. Not directly. She stepped closer, the silence shifting with her weight. When she spoke, her voice was quieter than the room, but it cut through the fog behind his eyes.

“It’s not just watching,” she said. “He’s been waiting.”

“Each one of them was meant to be found.”

Draco’s gaze locked on the metal panel again. His reflection was distorted now—half-lit, fractured along the curve of the surface. As if he were looking at someone half-remembered.

His throat felt tight. Not sore. Tethered.

“They know me,” he said, almost too quietly.

Hermione didn’t flinch. “They want you to know them.”

The sentence hung there—undecorated. Unforgiving.

Draco closed his eyes.

It would have been easier if it were just about the mark. The deaths. The sigil that followed them like a curse with no caster. But it wasn’t. It had never been. Not really.

This wasn’t a pattern. It was a reply.

He opened his eyes again, met hers for the first time since the ink burned clear. “Why me?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Because you come from a house that silenced people like them.” Her words weren’t cruel. Just precise. “And you didn’t stop it.”

The sentence didn’t wound. It confirmed. Draco’s shoulders didn’t shift. But his hands curled slowly into fists at his sides. It wasn’t anger, or even shame. Just the quiet knowing of what had always been true.

There was a long pause. The kind that marked the distance between what someone knows and what they’re finally willing to say aloud.

Then: “Neither did anyone else.”

Hermione didn’t correct him. She just let it land. And in the thick silence that followed, something between them stopped holding its breath.

Draco didn’t move. He stared down at the panel, at the word that had rewritten the quiet between them, and let it settle into him—not as guilt, but as inheritance. This wasn’t about blame. It was about what came after.

The corridor was almost empty. A few Ministry night lights floated at half-mast overhead, casting slow-moving ellipses of light that swayed with the building’s internal breath. The kind of hour when the institution slept with one eye open—records whispering quietly behind closed doors, parchment still warm from its last message.

Draco walked beside her. The ache in his chest had dulled. Not gone. Just narrowed into something he could walk with. The aftershock of inhaling engineered magic still crackled beneath his skin, but it had settled for now, coiled like something patient. Something waiting. He didn’t need to speak. Not at first. 

Hermione stayed beside him—silent, but alert. She didn’t hover. She didn’t touch. She matched his pace. That was enough.

They passed the portrait of Vesta Proulx near the east stairwell. She didn’t stir from her painted chair. Even the paintings knew better than to speak right now.

The elevator stood at the end of the corridor, gleaming faintly. The silence carried weight—what remained unsaid, and what no longer needed to be.

“They’re not finished,” Draco said. His voice didn’t waver. It didn’t rise, either. Just settled between them, like the first true thing they’d said all day.

Hermione didn’t ask who. Or why. Or if he was sure. She just nodded. “They’ve just started rewriting the story,” she said. “Only this time, the ink burns back.”

The doors chimed softly. Opened. Draco stepped inside. As did she. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the lift’s humming space. Not touching. Just aligned. The doors closed.

Behind them, far down the corridor, the containment room still flickered under its layered security spells. And on the far wall, just above the edge of the blast-scarred panel, one word still glowed in slow-burning ink: Unworthy.

It hadn’t vanished.

Neither had they.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The air was too still for a place that had just killed someone.

Hermione stepped into the Department of Magical Law Enforcement’s secure evidence corridor, boots landing quiet on stone still damp from cleansing spells. The residual heat in the floor told her the containment field had only been lifted minutes ago. Too fast. Too soon. The Aurors were trying to outrun what they didn’t want to see.

They hadn’t succeeded.

The corridor was sealed behind her with a hiss—standard for internal containment sites, but the charm lagged by half a beat. Her stomach tightened. That meant the system had stalled. Strained under chemical interference. She adjusted her robes and stepped forward.

Auror Frederick Galloway’s body was propped against the far wall, arms slack, chin tilted up like he’d died mid-interrogation. His eyes were still open. No scorch marks or broken skin. Just an expression she recognized from autopsy scrolls—cellular collapse. Asphyxiation from the inside out.

One of the field Aurors—tall, tense, too green to hide it—approached from the right, clipboard in hand.

“We’ve ruled out hexfire,” he said. “No signature residue. No breach. He was alone in the corridor—standard route, midday. Wards show no evidence of being disrupted.”

Hermione didn’t look at him. “What about environmental magic?”

The Auror hesitated. “None detected.”

She turned to him. “That’s not an answer.”

He swallowed. “Nothing from sanctioned spell matrices. No known wand traces.”

Sanctioned. Known. That was the problem.

Hermione crossed the corridor in three strides, passing two hovering containment runes and a half-fused sensor node still sparking at the corners. Her own wards flared as she passed—Unspeakable override. 

“Everyone out,” she said. Silence. Then movement. Shoes scraping against tile. Shuffling robes. Someone muttered something about ‘field escalation’—someone else hissed ‘fuck this’ under their breath. 

She didn’t care. The room cleared around her. No one questioned it. She didn’t wait to be asked. The door sealed behind the last one. Only then did she kneel beside Galloway.

He looked smaller now. The infamous investigator who had led post-war raids on unregistered magical settlements, who had once leveled a family estate to find a single cursed ring. Gone. No trauma. No fight. Only stillness.

She murmured the imprint spell beneath her breath, directing it into the air just above his chest. The glyph spun wide, then narrowed into a tight, trembling ring.

A shimmer rose—barely visible, curling slow.

Hermione inhaled once. Shallow.

Mordant Mist. Not exact. A derivative.

Her fingers twitched at her side.

The composition was old. Illegally so. A compound banned six decades ago for its corrosive effects on magical cores—capable of eroding a witch’s arcane channels without breaking skin. Her Department had two known samples on record. Both sealed under triple wards. Both inaccessible without three department heads present.

This version was cleaner.

She adjusted the spell parameters, isolating scent compounds and magical interference markers. The glyph fluttered, then resolved.

He hadn’t been cursed. He’d been hollowed. 

No defense spells had triggered. No wards had responded. The Mist had passed through his aura like it belonged there—and in sixty seconds or less, it had burned through every protective weave in his body.

Her mouth was dry.

This wasn’t symbolic. Not a punishment for legacy. Not a reckoning. It was tactical.

He’d been chosen because he was strong. Known. Because no one thought someone like him could be taken out silently. But he had been.

Hermione leaned back on her heels, gaze sweeping the corridor. The runes above the door were still flickering—cycling through calibration, trying to read a pattern that didn’t exist. She stood. Cast one more spell—an Unspeakable tracer, old and deep. It passed through the corridor in a soft wave, then stopped. One flare. One match.

Her own work. The Mist variant was using a base compound she’d written in theory six years ago and never published.

Her stomach flipped.

He was using her.

She didn’t flinch. She turned toward the door, wand lifted to cancel the seal, her voice cold. “We need to talk to the Department Head,” she said, to no one in particular. “Now.”

The hallway beyond was crowded. She didn’t wait for them to move. Behind her, Galloway didn’t bleed. He didn’t burn. He’d just stopped. And the killer had proven he could do the same to anyone.

Even here. Even now.

Especially now.

The room felt colder than it should have. Not because of the wards—it was one of the most tightly secured chambers in the Ministry—but because the truth always made the air thinner when it finally arrived.

Hermione stood at the center table of the Magical Intelligence Command Room, fingers dancing across the charmed parchment spread out in layers before her. The map was evolving by the second—hovering glyphs shifting in and out of alignment, data threads pulsing along lines of encoded logic, spell-enhanced ink trailing her touch with spectral precision.

Behind her, the senior analyst team murmured around the perimeter, whispering over threat forecasts and predictive models. They didn’t know what she was really mapping. They thought this was another post-blast signature study. An incident classification. Another autopsy in graphs.

They were wrong.

Hermione didn’t speak. She fed the latest data from Galloway’s scene into the system and watched as it slotted into place—far too neatly. The sigil signature she’d extracted from his lungs still shimmered faintly across the top left of the projection—chemical, not arcane. Clean. Cruel. Controlled.

She flicked her wand once, and the names appeared: 

Travers. Montclaire. Nott. Flint. Thornbridge. Rosier. Galloway.

She frowned. Something wasn’t lining up. Until she cross-referenced profession. Not bloodlines. Not anymore.

She tapped the command slate and dragged Galloway’s full employment record into view. Years in Magical Enforcement. Specialized in containment. Led raids on illegal potion labs, Squib enclaves, and back-channel magic handlers. Reputation: aggressive. Efficient. Discretionary force approved.

Hermione’s mouth tightened.

A second window bloomed beside it. Auror Elena Travers . Former tracker. Specialized in unauthorized magical diagnostics. Known for post-war surveillance of families with lineage anomalies.

Another. Miriam Montclaire. Gringotts Curse Division, cleared for high-sensitivity squibline artifacts post-1999. Sealed files. Experimental work.

A fourth. Thompson Wells. Unlisted death. Unsanctioned rune decipherer. Used during the Warrant Era to trace wandless magical indicators—specifically in non-core-borns.

Each of them was tied to enforcement. Each of them had participated in suppression. The system wasn’t just being watched anymore.

It was being dismantled.

Her pulse beat once—hard—against her ribs. She pulled up the remaining list. Cleared agents with similar histories. Magical personnel who had served in post-war containment, especially those tied to Squib surveillance or forced lineage testing.

The scroll compiled, unrolling with grim finality. A dozen names.

Eight had already been killed.

Three were missing.

One was still active.

Malfoy, Draco.

The name printed itself in standard Ministry type. Neutral. Untouched.

Hermione stared at it.

Her hand tightened around the edge of the scroll, the parchment bending under her grip. She didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. Because this time, it wasn’t just an academic realization. This time, she wasn’t reading history.

She was watching it narrow.

The killer had shifted targets—from legacy to lineage to enforcement.

To memory.

To Draco.

The quiet between her ribs turned sharp. She looked away from the scroll only when her breath caught, shallow and fast, as if the room had dropped pressure. But it hadn’t. It was her. She closed her eyes.

One second. Two.

Then she turned to the nearest field comm mirror.

“Track Malfoy,” she said, voice low. Even. Absolute. “Where is he right now?”

The analyst at the mirror startled, blinking. “He left the secure zone ten minutes ago. No Apparition logged.”

Hermione’s voice dropped. “Then find him.” She didn’t wait for an answer.

The killer wasn’t circling bloodlines anymore.

They were silencing the system that buried theirs.

And Draco Malfoy had just stepped directly into its path.

The bullpen buzzed with noise Hermione didn’t hear.

She moved through it like a fault line—sharp, silent, inevitable—ignoring the rustle of parchment and the clatter of Ministry-issue boots on stone. Her coat flared behind her. Wand tucked into the seam. Field folder unread.

Draco was where he always was during tension he didn’t want to name—at the back of the room, one hand on the case board, spine set like he could press truth from geometry. He didn’t look up until she was nearly at his shoulder.

“Now,” she said, already turning.

She didn’t wait for confirmation.

Draco followed.

The corridor they stepped into was narrow—too narrow for Ministry formality. No enchantments. No surveillance runes. Just cold stone, faint torchlight, and air that hummed with what couldn’t be said in public.

Hermione turned on him the second the door sealed behind them.

“You’re next,” she said. No buildup, no softening. “It’s not theoretical anymore. It’s not a pattern to decode. It’s a kill list. And you’re the last name on it that hasn’t died yet.”

Draco didn’t flinch. He looked at her with the same sharp-edged calm he wore in every debrief, every confrontation. But she saw it—that tension behind his jaw. The way his thumb tapped once against the seam of his coat. Small, deliberate tells.

“And what exactly,” he said, tone clipped, “do you think pulling me from the case would accomplish?”

She stepped closer, too fast. “It might keep you alive.”

“If I vanish, they’ll pivot. They’re watching us—more closely than we thought. They’ll know we’ve gone reactive.”

“I don’t care if they pivot,” Hermione snapped. “I care if they kill you.”

Draco’s expression tightened. “You’re letting this get personal.”

Her breath caught. She laughed, once. Sharp. Unamused. “This was personal,” she said. “The moment they marked you. The moment they spelled that word into metal and left it for you to find.”

Unworthy .

She didn’t say it aloud. She didn’t need to.

“They’re not interested in the game changing,” she went on, quieter now, voice low but no less furious. “They don't want it to move. They want to end it. And you. They’re building to you.”

Draco’s silence said more than any rebuttal. He didn’t deny it.

She stared at him—his hands still, his eyes unreadable, the same man who’d cut through alchemical vines to get to her without a single spell. Who now stood there like he could outlogic his own death.

“I’m not asking you as a colleague,” she said. And her voice cracked—just once. Just enough to betray what she hadn’t meant to show.

“I’m telling you,” she said, the next words trembling at the edge of her breath, “I can’t lose you like this.”

He looked at her then. Really looked. And something fractured behind his eyes—just for a second. A flash of something raw. Human. Afraid.

But when he spoke, his voice was iron again. “Then don’t watch.”

Hermione didn’t answer. Couldn’t. She turned, sharp and fast, boots hitting stone harder than necessary. She didn’t let herself look back—not even once. Because if she did, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to leave at all.

The corridor swallowed her. And the silence that followed wasn’t absence. It was fear, coiled too tightly to name.

The corridor outside the Auror archives was too still. Not magically so—just thick with the hush of places meant to house records no one wanted to remember. There was no foot traffic here during field hours. Just quiet, filing glyphs sleeping beneath the walls, and the faint hum of preservation charms clinging to the vault doors like breath held too long.

Hermione paced. Back and forth across five flagstones, her boots hitting the same uneven tile with each turn. Her fingers were ink-smeared from gripping the edge of her notebook too tightly. Her coat hung open, half-askew, like she’d forgotten how to wear it properly after walking away from him.

She pulled the notebook from her satchel. Her hand trembled as she opened it. She flipped past sketches of sigils, mapped glyph arrays, field notes from Thornbridge and the greenhouse. Past residue readings and casefile cross-references. Past her neat analysis of potion behavior and the equations that had once made her feel like knowledge meant safety.

She found the page marked Predictive Pattern Models – Revised . The last name written there was Galloway. She stared at it. Then, without preamble, she wrote: We were never the target. We were just next.

Her fingers hesitated. Not because she didn’t know what came next. But because writing it down made it true. She pressed the nib harder, let the ink bleed into the paper like it might carry the weight for her.

Draco Malfoy. Final proof. Final silencing.

The words didn’t blur.

Her vision did.

Hermione closed her eyes, just for a moment, and saw the greenhouse again—his hands cutting the vine before it could crush her ribs. The containment lab—the flicker of recognition in his face when the sigil spelled his name in poison. The corridor—his voice sharp, flat, final.

Then don’t watch.

But she was. She had been watching from the beginning. And now she couldn’t stop.

Her breath caught.

She snapped the notebook shut, not with anger, but desperation. Like closing it might slow what was coming. Like paper and logic could still save him.

She leaned against the wall, letting the cold stone press into her spine like a reminder that this was real. That this wasn’t war, exactly.

It was ritual.

It was grief, forming in advance.

Not for what had happened.

But for what she couldn’t stop.

For the first time since the file landed on her desk, Hermione Granger no longer felt like she was chasing a killer. She felt like she was already mourning.

The courtyard outside the Ministry caught the last of the evening sun like a secret it wasn’t sure it should keep.

Hermione stood just beyond the edge of the outer portico, half-shadowed by the wide sweep of a column, one hand curled around the strap of her satchel like it might anchor her to the hour. The air had begun to cool, but the stone still radiated the day’s heat—stored and slowly releasing, like memory refusing to fade.

Across the square, Draco stood in conversation with another Auror—tall, dark-robed, someone she didn’t recognize. The other man gestured toward a field report, said something she couldn’t hear. Draco responded with a shake of his head and a faint, dry laugh. Brief. Tired. But real.

It caught her off guard. There was something careless in it—an echo of something boyish, unguarded, almost… human. The kind of laugh that used to come before dinner, or after long patrol hours. The kind of laugh you didn’t give to a world you didn’t trust.

Hermione didn’t move. She didn’t call out. Didn’t step forward. She just watched.

The lamplights along the upper balcony began to flicker into life, casting long, honeyed beams down the Ministry facade. The gilding on the elevator doors shimmered faintly beneath the archway. Draco stepped away from the conversation without ceremony, coat catching briefly in the breeze. His hand rose once to adjust the collar.

Then he was inside the lift. The doors slid closed. And he was gone.

She waited a moment longer, until the Auror he’d been speaking with turned away, until the last slant of sunlight dipped below the rooftops and painted the plaza in the early hush of dusk.

Only then did she exhale. Not relief. Resignation.

The shadows along the pavement stretched longer now, gathering in quiet corners where Ministry light didn’t reach. The stone steps behind her creaked faintly as the last few workers left for the evening—boots scuffing, voices low, nothing urgent yet.

But it was coming.

She could feel it.

Hermione stood alone in the square, the weight of unsaid things pressing against her like a second spine. She didn’t open her notebook. Didn’t reach for her wand. She only stared at the place where he had been.

And braced.

Not for revelation.

For loss.

The word Unworthy surfaced again—unbidden, unshakable—curling in her chest like smoke that knew its way home. Not as accusation.

As omen.

The square had quieted. Spell light from the balcony glowed faintly overhead.

Hermione didn’t follow. Didn’t speak.

The system had identified its final variable.

Not a message. A correction.The same one carved in metal. The same one meant for him.

Draco Malfoy wouldn’t be next.

He would be last.

Chapter Text

POV: Draco Malfoy

The ping was old magic. Not in composition—but in intent. Soft. Measured. A heartbeat through ruined stone.

Draco stood in the middle of the Auror Records Office, one hand braced against the edge of the file table, eyes fixed on the projection hovering just above the rune-etched brass plate. The coordinates pulsed in slow intervals—too faint to trip the Ministry’s standard alarm grid, but calibrated close enough to arcane detritus that someone had flagged it for manual review. Lucky. Or not.

The source: Knockturn Alley. Sector 9. Former apothecary site. Registry tag marked as decommissioned, all licenses revoked during the post-war purges. Property hexed shut since 2008 after the original owners—a half-blood couple with two unregistered children—were cited for illegal brewing practices and quietly erased from the census.

The location had stayed sealed. No trace activity for over a decade.

Until last night.

Surveillance glyphs from the surrounding shops—most of them rusted or uncalibrated—had picked up a single pulse. Not a spell. Not even an incantation. Just a flux. Like something exhaled beneath the door and decided it remembered how.

Draco closed the file.

Behind him, Hermione’s voice cut clean through the quiet: “He’s inviting us.”

He turned. She was standing by the wall-length rune map, arms folded tight across her chest, her gaze tracking every flicker of motion on the chart like she could will the next piece of evidence into revealing itself.

“This is bait,” she said. “He’s narrowing the field. You know what that means.”

Draco reached for his coat. “It means we’re finally close enough for him to want to watch us bleed.”

She stepped into his path. Not forcefully. Just... deliberately. “You shouldn’t go.”

His wand slid into his sleeve with a practiced motion. “Then we’re out of time.”

“Draco.”

He paused. That tone—sharp at the edge, but soft in the middle. It wasn’t authority. It wasn’t even warning.

It was care. Strangled.

He didn’t answer.

She stepped aside.

The alley outside the perimeter checkpoint wasn’t any quieter than usual. Just colder. Knockturn always ran a few degrees beneath the rest of London, like the street itself remembered what had happened here and decided warmth was a luxury it no longer afforded.

He stood just beyond the shimmer line, watching the way the wards trembled faintly where the pulse had landed. It had already started to fade, but he could still feel it—low against the soles of his boots, like pressure building beneath old earth.

Hermione’s footsteps crunched behind him. “You know they want it to be you.”

“I know.”

She didn’t speak again.

He stared at the boarded windows of the apothecary. The wood was warped. The leaded glass curled in on itself, vines etched through its grime. But there was something in the stillness that wasn’t inert. The absence of sound here wasn’t decay. It was waiting.

Draco’s jaw clenched once. “Let’s see what they wants us to bite on.”

And with a whisper of charmwork and a press of his palm to the side ward seam, he stepped through.

Into the trap.

The building sagged like it remembered being useful once.

The front of the apothecary bore the weight of two decades’ neglect—shuttered glass streaked with ash and age, wood panels swollen at the seams with rain and regret. Wards crackled faintly along the doorframe, the kind that weren’t cast so much as left behind: residue layered over itself until it became something else. Not active. But watching.

Draco scanned the exterior, noting the symmetry of decay. Left window fractured inward, not out. Rooftop tiles curled like bark. Alchemical runoff crusted the base of the front step—faintly blue, corrosive, old. Not accidental.

Not unoccupied.

Hermione didn’t speak when she joined him. She didn’t need to. Her wand was already moving—precise, restrained, the spellwork barely more than a murmur in the air. Protective layers fanned outward from her fingertips: nullification veils, containment seals, a subtle dispersion field for redirected magical shock. All done in silence. All rehearsed.

She finished the perimeter sweep in under two minutes.

When she straightened, he was already at the door.

His hand curled once around the iron handle—cool under his fingers, cold with the kind of resistance that didn’t come from spells, but from design. Wards didn’t hum here. They waited.

He heard her step closer before he felt it. Then—

Her hand closed around his wrist.

He didn’t turn.

“We go in together,” she said, low but firm.

Draco didn’t answer right away. He looked down at her hand instead—small, sure, the grip strong but not hard. There were traces of ash at the knuckle. Her pulse beat once against his skin before she realized it.

“Granger—” he began.

“No.” He smiled. Soft. Tired.

“Don’t make this noble. You’re not disposable.”

“I know.”

She didn’t release him.

Draco glanced back at the door. At the faint shimmer of glyphs scarring the threshold. Whoever had activated this place had done so with intention. With history. He didn’t expect to find anything intact inside.

“I just need three minutes,” he said. “That’s all.”

“You don’t know what’s waiting.” Her voice faltered in belief, misplaced and clinging.

“Neither do you.”

He turned toward her fully now. “If this is what I think it is,” he said, voice low, “they won’t run from both of us. But they’ll run from you.”

She blinked. Once. Then let go. Not consent. Not trust. But something like belief.

Draco nodded once. Not farewell. Not a promise. Mere acknowledgment.

He stepped forward. And the door—this time—opened without a sound. The door closed behind him with no sound at all.

Draco stood still.

He wasn’t afraid. He knew how to move through danger. But the stillness here watched him back.

The air paid attention

The shop’s interior was narrow and tall, the ceiling lost in shadow even as dusk slanted through the boarded windows. Shelves lined the walls, buckling with age, their contents gutted—bottles shattered, vials emptied, beakers tipped at angles like snapped spines. What glass remained intact gleamed faintly in the half-light, catching his movement like eyes that didn’t blink.

He didn’t call out. Didn’t cast illumination. The ambient glow leaking through the cracks in the front facade was enough. More than enough.

The dust told him everything.

Heavy, undisturbed, but for the single set of footprints tracked in a staggered line from the far wall. Not a struggle. A path. Someone had come here, not in haste, but with intent. Not to escape. To wait.

Or worse—to set the stage.

His boots crunched once as he moved forward.

Near the back of the space, on the warped floorboards where the shelving had collapsed entirely, something small sat half in shadow.

A child’s toy cauldron.

Plastic. Charred.

The rim had melted inward from heat, its cheerful smile warped into something brittle and hollow. One handle was fused to the floor. Beside it, the faint outline of scorch marks flared outward—like a detonation, small-scale. Personal.

A child had been here. Or someone who had once been one. The grin melted into the plastic wasn’t just warped—it was preserved. As if someone had wanted him to see what joy looked like, once heat had taken the shape from it.

Draco’s breath tightened. Not from fear. From something sharp and sudden—like memory catching fire.

He crouched.

The blackened edge of the cauldron still bore traces of resin. Not potionwork. Wax. Ritualistic. A grounding seal, maybe. Or a mockery of one.

His wand twitched in his hand.

This wasn’t potioncraft. It wasn’t even science.

It was memory , crystallized in performance. A message for anyone who could read it.

He stood slowly.

And then he saw it.

On the far wall—above a collapsed bench, framed in peeling paint and broken shelving—a sigil had been carved directly into the plaster.

Crude, but deliberate. Blood. Set and dried and bound in potion-based ink so faint it nearly disappeared unless the light hit it just right.

Draco stepped closer.

The shape pulsed once as he approached.

Not like magic.

Like breath.

A slow expansion. A contraction. As if the wall itself were alive.

He didn’t touch it.

He knew what it was—what it meant.

An invocation.

The room had no wards. No traps in the traditional sense. But it was primed . He could feel it in his teeth, in the backs of his eyes. The way the magic here—if it could be called that—didn’t hum so much as press against the skin, testing the limits of recognition.

He stepped back once.

Just once.

And behind him, the air shifted.

A whisper—not sound, but movement. The kind a predator makes just before it decides you’ve seen too much.

Draco’s grip on his wand tightened.

He didn’t run.

He turned—slow, measured—and said nothing.

The silence, in answer, said everything.

This wasn’t just a space someone had lived in.

It was a space they’d left behind like a message in a locked room.

A ritual, waiting for the right witness.

And Draco had just become the final participant.

He didn’t mean to step forward.

Not consciously, anyway.

But there was something about the way the sigil pulsed—slow, then sharp, like a breath caught in the throat—that drew him closer. Wand raised, angle tight to his wrist, Draco approached it the way one might approach a sleeping creature you weren’t sure was dead. Deliberately.

The air around it had stilled. Not inert. Expectant.

He flicked his wand once, muttering a low-level reveal spell designed for forensic overlays— aperio lamina . It should have shown structural layers. The history of the carving. The intention in its strokes.

Nothing.

The sigil stayed quiet.

Resistant.

He adjusted the angle of his grip, pivoted his stance.

Tried again.

A second charm— lux subtilis , meant to extract any residual magical binding from blood-based inscriptions. The sort used in death rites. Family protections. Memory seals.

The sigil responded this time.

Flaring.

Heat lanced outward—a bloom of pressure that shoved against the inside of his ribs. Something older. Engineered . His wand stuttered in his grip, the charm breaking in a fizz of static. The sigil flared so bright it whitewashed the wall—then burned to nothing, leaving behind a ghost-ring of ash like breath on cold glass.

And then—

Click.

A sound not meant for spellwork. 

Mechanical .

He turned.

The door behind him—open when he’d come in, unlocked, unguarded—shuddered once.

Then slammed shut.

The sound of it hitting the frame echoed through the room like a gunshot. A sealing glyph flashed red across the wood—spiraled once, bled into the grain—and vanished.

No flash. No explosion. Just closure .

He was locked in.

He crossed the room in three strides.

“Granger—”

Her footsteps were already there. He could hear them—measured, quick, not yet alarmed.

He slammed a palm against the door.

“Don’t—!”

But the words didn’t reach her.

Because the floor lit up.

Beneath him .

He glanced down.

A second glyph had revealed itself, carved into the floorboards in a pattern designed to lie dormant under movement. It didn’t glow. It sighed . Like something relieved to have been seen. Like something saying finally .

It activated the moment his weight settled fully over it.

And the light went black.

Extracted .

As if every photon in the room had been pulled into a sealed bottle and stoppered shut.

He didn’t scream.

There was no time.

The last thing he felt was the hum of the glyph crawling up his legs like blood called home.

And then—

Nothing.

Exactly what it had been designed to create.

The dark wasn’t total. That was what made it worse.

If it had been absolute—pitch, void, death—he could have adapted. Adjusted. Counted breath. Measured stillness. Found the edges of panic and reshaped it into purpose.

But this—
This silence remembered.

It pressed in—not loud, not even cold. Just wrong . The kind of wrong that came not from spellwork or toxin, but from design. Something crafted precisely to unmake. Not violently. Elegantly .

Draco reached for his wand.

It was still there—warm against his palm, familiar as pulse. But the magic inside it throbbed like something bruised. Muted. He held it upright, whispered the charm under his breath:

“ Lumos. ”

A spark flared—brief, trembling, silver-white.

Then—

Flicker.

Then nothing.

Withdrawn .

Like the space had inhaled it and decided it didn’t belong.

He tightened his grip, grounding through the wand’s handle, through the leather wrap worn smooth by years of muscle memory. His breath stayed steady. Shallow. He didn’t call out. He’d learned better.

He turned in place. Slowly.

Let his eyes adjust to the absence of light.

Shapes began to resolve—not visually, but spatially. He could feel the outline of the wall four paces behind. The sag of the collapsed shelf near his left shoulder. The cauldron’s bent silhouette, still warm from illusionary residue.

And then—

A sound.

Breath .

Deliberate.

His head snapped toward it.

There—across the room, burned into the opposite wall—something shimmered.

A sigil. Not the same one from before. This one was reversed .

Not drawn.

Etched —as if the wall itself had swallowed it once and now, at last, was offering it back.

Lines curled in on themselves, still glowing faintly red, not with heat but with the memory of fire. It pulsed once. Slow. Like a heart.

Draco didn’t approach. He understood. This place hadn’t been built to hold him. Not even to hurt him. 

It was built to unwrite him. 

To extract his shape from the record. To let his name soften at the edges and fall away from memory like something no longer grammatically necessary.

He stood in the center of the room, magic dimming inside him like a wick that had never been lit properly to begin with. And from the other side of the door, faint and distant—Hermione’s footsteps.

Quick. Frantic. Then retreating. Then gone.

A single pulse of red from the sigil cast a shadow across Draco’s face.

Not long. Not warm. Just final.

The sound it made wasn’t a spell or breath.

It was silence .

And it closed like a seal.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The door was still humming when she hit it.

A pulse of red—faint, already fading—rippled across the perimeter glyph like the echo of something finished. Hermione’s shoulder struck the threshold hard enough to rattle her teeth. She didn’t feel it. Not yet. Her wand was already out, carving spell after spell into the air like breath: Finite . Alohomora . Verdunire . Deconstructum .

Nothing.

The seal didn’t acknowledge her at all.

“No—” she muttered, not to the door, not to herself. To the space between. The one that still remembered his voice. “ No. ”

Another spell. Then another. Glyphs skated across the barrier and evaporated like steam. The apothecary remained sealed, the perimeter smooth and indifferent. Not hostile.

Just done.

Behind her, the Apparition crack came too loud. Aurors. She didn’t turn.

Footsteps approached. Someone said her name—twice, then again. She didn’t hear them. Not really. Her wand carved deeper. Runes for emergency override. For access grants. For blood-bond bypass.

Still nothing.

She stepped back and slammed her palm against the wall.

“Open.”

It didn’t.

When she finally turned, the perimeter was lined in Ministry robes—green, gold, grey. Auror Division. Emergency Protocol. Magical Containment. One of them was already preparing a logbook, another sketching glyph traces into a floating diagnostic scroll.

“Granger,” a supervisor said, voice too smooth. “Step back. We need to begin documentation—”

“No.”

She didn’t raise her voice. Didn’t have to.

The spells on her wand crackled, unspent.

“Ma’am—”

“You’re late.”

That shut him up.

The diagnostic scroll shimmered once. A message blinked to life along the bottom: Last triggered ward event: ninety-three seconds ago. Internal magic signature: unregistered.

Ninety-three seconds.

She’d been ninety-three seconds too far behind.

Hermione exhaled once—sharp, ragged—and turned back to the door. The Ministry techs were running diagnostics now, overlaying spatial scans and sigil breakdowns. She ignored them.

When the seal finally gave, it didn’t crack.

It dissolved .

No magic. No resistance. Just absence.

The door swung open to reveal nothing .

No body. No blast marks. No magical debris. Just dust. Shelves. And stillness so complete it vibrated inside her skull.

Hermione crossed the threshold without waiting for clearance.

She swept the room once—then again, slower. Her wand glowed at full strength. She cast every detection charm she knew, layering them atop one another, weaving them together with the kind of desperate, surgical precision she hadn’t allowed herself in years.

No residue.

No heat signature.

No trace.

Draco was gone.

Not displaced. 

Not hidden.

Gone.

She reached the back wall—where the sigil had once pulsed—and pressed both palms flat to the plaster. It was cold now. Dry. She scraped her nails along it anyway, searching for a ridge, a groove, a burn. Anything.

Nothing.

Her throat ached.

Behind her, someone coughed. She didn’t turn.

“He’s not here,” someone else said quietly. “We’ve swept the cellar. There’s no second floor. No hidden stair.”

“I want it rechecked.”

“We did. There’s nothing to—”

“ Again. ”

She turned slowly, eyes glass-bright, voice tight and unreadable.

The Auror nodded. Backed off.

No one stopped her when she resumed the search herself.

Every cabinet. Every corner. She pulled open drawers with shaking hands, overturned crates with too much force. She scraped at the floorboards. She knelt beside a half-melted child’s cauldron and tried not to remember the last time she saw him laugh .

Her fingers curled around the rim, bloodied from splinters.

Still nothing.

She stayed there, crouched in the ruin, as the Ministry moved around her—cataloguing, documenting, failing. And for the first time since the war, Hermione Granger felt something break that couldn’t be mended by theory.

She hadn’t even said goodbye.

Not really.

The silence wasn’t passive.

It was personal.

And she wasn’t sure if it was grief—

Or if it was rage .

The briefing room reeked of ink and bureaucratic closure.

Hermione pushed through the doors without waiting for permission, the back of her coat still streaked with grime from the apothecary floor. The room was full—Aurors, analysts, two Department liaisons she didn’t know, and Director Selwyn at the head of the table, sleeves rolled, voice clipped. The scent of fresh parchment lingered over half-dried sigils on the board. The kind that signaled a case almost closed.

She didn’t sit.

“Status update on the Knockturn investigation,” Selwyn said without looking up. “We’ve swept the premises. No surviving wards. No traceable magical event signature. No active combat markers. The perimeter logs read a final pulse at 19:06—single entry, no exit.”

A pause.

“And no body.”

That hung. Just long enough to sound definitive.

Selwyn turned a page in the folder beside him. “Until confirmed otherwise, the official designation is presumed deceased.”

Hermione’s voice cracked the silence like a curse.

“You mean until it’s convenient to forget him.”

Heads turned. Slowly. Selwyn’s didn’t.

“Hermione,” he said, and somehow made her name sound like a caution. “There’s no sign of continued presence. No magical echo. The space is sterile.”

“Because they sterilized it,” she snapped. “Because that’s what it was designed to do. To remove him without evidence.”

A junior analyst two seats down shifted uncomfortably. Someone else reached for their stylus, pretending to check notes.

Selwyn sighed, finally meeting her eyes. “We’ll mark him as presumed dead until evidence says otherwise. That’s not personal. It’s protocol.”

Hermione took a step forward. “And the recovery team?”

“No.”

The answer was immediate, carved from indifference.

“Not for one man,” Selwyn continued. “Not without confirmation. Not without political cost. And especially not when the press already thinks the case is closed.”

“He’s not a footnote,” she said, barely more than breath.

Selwyn didn’t flinch. “He’s a Malfoy.”

It wasn’t a compliment.

At the far end of the table, one of the advisors—older, forgettable in the way Ministry careerists always were—let out a quiet chuckle.

“Malfoy always did know how to disappear,” he said.

Hermione didn’t look at him.

The room held its breath for one long second.

Then Hermione turned with finality.

She reached the door, paused, fingers hovering just above the handle. She didn’t slam it. But every muscle in her body wanted to. Instead, she left it swinging quietly in her wake—open enough to let the chill of her departure follow her out.

Behind her, the room returned to its scribbles. Its signatures. Its forgetting.

Draco Malfoy had disappeared and the Ministry was already practicing how not to say his name.

The perimeter wards were still humming when Hermione slipped beneath them. A low-frequency ripple of standard Ministry security—barely more than a deterrent now, designed to look thorough from a distance. They’d sealed the door. Catalogued the air. Closed the file.

But they hadn’t looked. Not the way she would.

Her invisibility charm shimmered faintly as she crossed into the shell of the ruined apothecary, casting only the faintest displacement in the shadow of the doorway. The air had cooled since the explosion, but it still carried the wrong scent—burned wood, vaporized stone, something that tasted faintly of copper and citrus. The aftermath of a trap meant to erase itself.

She moved through the wreckage slowly.

Shelves had collapsed like falling ribs, bottles smashed in half-crescents of glass and powdered bone. Most of the floor had already been cleared by the sweep teams—documented, sealed, dismissed. But the back room hadn’t been processed thoroughly. Too unstable, they’d said. The damage pattern was inconsistent.

Hermione didn’t trust inconsistent.

She passed the edge of a scorched worktable and crouched by what had once been a side rack of mortars and alembics, now nothing but slag and soot. Her wand whispered a soft detection charm, dim as straight beneath water.

Nothing.

Then—
A glint.

Barely visible beneath a layer of blackened ash and fractured glass, near the base of what had once been a floor drain. Not magic. Not strong enough to trip the residual warding. But real.

She reached down carefully, brushing away debris with gloved fingertips until her hand closed around it.

A potion vial.

Cracked, but intact at the base. Its glass was scorched on one side, but the seal—old-fashioned, wax-and-thread—was half preserved. The contents had burned away. Mostly.

But not all.

Inside, nestled in the concave bottom, a shimmer remained. Faint. Silver-blue. Flickering like breath.

Hermione froze. She knew that shimmer. Not just alchemical residue. Not typical decay. This was trace essence.

Emotional. Raw, unstable, illegal in every sanctioned lab on the continent.

She held it up, letting the weak light from her wand catch the swirl inside. The color shifted once—silver, then blue, then silver again. It didn’t behave like light. It behaved like memory. Like presence.

And suddenly, she knew.

This wasn’t evidence.

It was him .

Not blood. Not hair. Not bone.

But something older. Deeper.

A fragment of will embedded into something designed to survive erasure.

Her throat tightened. She slipped the vial into a reinforced case from her satchel, layered three preservation charms over the top, and pressed the seal closed with the flat of her palm. Her fingers were shaking now. Just slightly. But not from fear.

From certainty.

She stood, the ruins still silent around her. The sigil was gone. The trap disarmed. But this—this vial—was proof.

Draco hadn’t vanished. He’d left something behind. Not a message. A tether.

Hermione turned, moving back through the ruins, her steps measured now, her cloak brushing ash into silent spirals behind her.

The Ministry could write him off.

But she couldn’t.

She wouldn’t.

Outside, the night had deepened—but in her hand, the vial still glowed—soft, persistent.

Enough to say: I’m still here.

The walls of the ritual room did not echo. That was by design. Carved into bedrock beneath the Department’s deepest vaults, the chamber had been built for spells the Ministry no longer acknowledged. Its air was still, thick with old magic and older silence—polished stone veined with mirrored slivers, each one blank and black unless called upon. There were no doors that led here by accident. No keys that weren’t blooded.

Hermione keyed the seal with her wand and her name. Just her name, whispered into the hinge of the lock like a promise she didn’t intend to keep.

The door closed behind her with a sound like breath pulled through stone.

She didn’t wait.

She crossed to the center of the chamber and placed the vial—cracked, sealed, still flickering—into the basin etched into the floor. It was made of moonstone, etched with runes that pulsed only under direct intent. Echo spells required more than precision. Willingness was enough. Consent, permission—were irrelevant.

She set the containment stabilizer. Then she knelt. Her wand rested against her thigh, untouched. This kind of spell was not cast through incantation. It was drawn.

She opened the vial. The shimmer curled upward, slow at first—silver-blue vapor rising in a coil. Not mist. Denser. Alive with residue. The basin caught it, recognized it, and began to pulse in response. One breath. Then another.

Hermione placed her palm to the runic edge of the basin and closed her eyes.

“Adgesto,” she whispered. “Verum. Interior.”

The words weren’t loud. They didn’t need to be. The magic answered anyway.

It hit like pressure—like a wave slamming into her sternum from the inside out. Her spine arched. Her breath caught.

The vapor surged.

Around her.

And then—

The room disappeared.

She was not in the chamber.

She was not in her body.

She was inside him .

Just enough to feel —

The air burning wrong.
The magic not catching.
The sudden spike of fear—unpanicked, but sharp. Trained. Deadly.
A flare of heat in the lungs. The sensation of being locked in place, preemptively.
A flicker of thought—disbelief giving way to calculation.

A hitch in his breath—low, contained, the same way it always caught when he was about to lie to a teacher, or challenge her in class. A pause. Then steadiness.
The spell was rigged. Not to detonate. To erase.

And then, rising beneath it all:

Her name.

Clear.
Unquestioned.
Just— Hermione.

It landed like a pulse.

And then the blackness came.

Fast. Silent. Not pain. Not even fear anymore. Just the clean absence of control.

Her hand flew back from the basin.

She gasped—once, ragged, chest heaving like she’d surfaced from something deeper than water. Her knees hit the floor hard. Her head was swimming, too full. Her skin was ice.

The vial in the basin was dim now.

Spent.

The imprint had held. Just long enough.

A contact.

She stayed kneeling for a long time.

Long enough for her breath to slow.

Long enough to know what she’d done.

This spell was banned. Unstable. Designed for mindwalkers and trauma specialists, not field agents—not Unspeakables with something to lose.

It didn’t matter anymore.

He was alive.

She’d felt it. 

Presence.

And more than that: intention.

He hadn’t shouted, begged, or even pleaded.

He’d sent her name like a warning. Like a direction. Like a tether.

Hermione rose slowly, her knees trembling beneath her. Her fingers were bloodless where they gripped the rim of the basin.

She looked down at the flickering trace still clinging to the inside of the stone.

“You’re not gone,” she said aloud.

Her voice didn’t shake.

Not anymore.

She turned away from the basin. The room said nothing. The mirrors on the walls stayed black.

But in the very center, where the shimmer had spiraled, something remained in the air.

A shape. A breath.

And the faint echo of her name—still suspended, still waiting.

Just a promise.

The door sealed behind her with a sound like stone exhaling.

Hermione stood for a long moment in the narrow corridor, spine pressed to the cold wall, breath catching in the hollow of her throat. The vial trembled in her hand—not violently, not visibly. Enough for her knuckles to ache.

The lights overhead hummed, low and steady, like they hadn’t noticed what she’d done.

Her knees still wanted to give out. Her chest still shook with the ghost of his fear—his breath in her lungs, his panic, precise and unflinching, humming in her blood like an aftershock. She’d absorbed it. All of it. And it had not broken her.

Not quite.

She pushed off the wall. Each step toward the main corridor was deliberate. Not fast. Not slow. Just grounded in the simple fact of forward. She rounded the final bend toward the atrium stairs when she saw her.

Head Unspeakable Varma stood in the archway—unspeaking, unreadable, hands clasped behind her back like she had been waiting not for Hermione, but for the moment itself. Her gaze dropped once to the empty vial, still glinting silver-blue in Hermione’s grip. Then she said, voice like the edge of something sharp: “That ritual is banned for a reason.”

Hermione didn’t stop walking. She didn’t hesitate. Only when they passed within a breath of each other did she reply, soft but clear: “So is abandoning your own.”

The words didn’t rise. They didn’t waver. They landed like a seal pressed to parchment—permanent, undeniable.

Varma said nothing. But her stillness cracked, just slightly.

Hermione tucked the vial into her cloak. Her hands were steady now. She didn’t look back. She didn’t ask for clearance. She didn’t ask for backup. She didn’t ask if this counted as treason, or insubordination, or some quiet form of grief. She knew what this would cost—her title, her standing, maybe more. But she’d stopped measuring safety in Ministry terms.

She had spent too long being careful with what she felt.

No more.

She paused once beneath the Ministry archway, where the shadows lengthened into something thin and jagged and waiting. Her breath clouded briefly in the corridor’s dim. And then, aloud—for no one but herself, but for the first time ever, truly said—“He’s alive. I felt him.”

The echo folded into the stone, into the dark, into the weight of a system already preparing to forget.

She didn’t care.

She had been ninety-three seconds too late. She wouldn’t be again.

Hermione stepped forward.

Not as an Unspeakable.

Not as an Auror.

As someone who would find him.

No matter what.

The shadows took her in and did not let her go.

Chapter Text

POV: Draco Malfoy

The ceiling was wrong.

Too bright, too flat, too clean. Not the soft, ever-shifting glow of magical lighting, not the flicker of sconces or the pale flicker of rune-cast ambience. This was clinical —fluorescent light recessed behind glass, humming faintly, steady as breath you didn’t know you were holding.

Draco blinked once, slow. The air scraped his throat on the way in. Dry. Recycled. Scrubbed raw. He was lying flat—stone beneath him, smooth and cold, polished so precisely it reflected nothing back. He tried to lift his arm.

Nothing moved.

Not bound or restrained—simply held. Fixed. Pinned to the slab by something that vibrated faintly against his skin. A pulse, timed and impersonal. 

His fingers tingled from lack of circulation—or suppression. His wand was gone. He didn’t need to reach for it to know. He closed his eyes again for a beat. Just gathering.

The taste in his mouth was metallic—copper, ash, something distilled . It sat thick at the back of his tongue, like the aftertaste of a stabilizer gone wrong.

He opened his eyes.

The room was rectangular, windowless, and white—not the white of purity, but of absence. The kind of white that had no softness to it. Bleached stone, polished metal. Every surface sealed and sterilized.

He turned his head. Slowly.

To the left: a wall of cabinets, glass-fronted and empty. To the right: nothing. Just more white. The hum came from beneath—under the floor or inside the walls, a mechanical thrum that wasn’t magical. It vibrated through the slab, into the bone.

His core flickered.

He felt it like a phantom limb—magic still there , somewhere, but unreachable. As though submerged. As though someone had sunk it into liquid and left it suspended.

He inhaled through his nose. Slow. Testing.

Still there.

Still him .

But caged.

His wrists itched.

He shifted his fingers—just enough to confirm movement was possible in theory, not in practice. The restraint didn’t hurt. That was the worst part. No threat of fire, or bruising force, not even crackling pressure of containment wards. Just pressure. Constant. Silent. Absolute.

He was being held, not harmed.

Not yet.

A monitor beeped once to his left. Not loudly. Just a tone of acknowledgment. Of awareness.

The air held no magic. But he was not alone.

He didn’t call out. He didn’t test the bindings again. He knew how to wait. Waiting had always been a kind of power, if you could do it right. His heartbeat slowed deliberately. His mind—fragmented at first—began to piece itself back together.

A room like this was built for observation.

Which meant it had a purpose.

Which meant someone, somewhere, had made a decision about him .

He let that settle in his chest like a coin dropped into water.

Then, with the last shiver of breath still caught in his throat, he whispered—dry, cracked, but deliberate—“Where am I?”

There was no answer. Only the low hum of alchemical circuitry and the echo of a room designed not to contain him. But to define him.

The door didn’t open so much as it unstitched—silent, seamless, like part of the wall had decided it was done pretending.

Draco didn’t lift his head.

There was no sound at first—then, footsteps: quiet, deliberate, untouched by tension or showmanship.

When the person came into view, they were precisely as Draco had expected—and somehow worse. A man. Early forties, maybe. Trim. Neat. A face like a bureaucrat or a professor—structured, clean-shaven, made sharp by stillness. Neither attractive nor forgettable. The kind of face built for long meetings and quiet revolutions.

No wand. No magical signature humming beneath the skin. Yet the room changed anyway.

The man stopped three feet from the table and folded his hands behind his back. He didn’t introduce himself. Didn’t smile.

He just said: “Heir.”

The word landed like chalk on a blackboard. Dry. Measured. Intentional.

Draco let the silence breathe for a beat. Then: “You know my name.”

The man’s gaze didn’t flicker. “I know what your name means .”

He said it the way scholars spoke in thesis chambers. The way priests said Amen . As if the name itself were a spell that someone else had cast a long time ago, and he’d simply learned to dissect its weight.

The man stepped forward—not toward Draco, but toward the far side of the room, where a monitor flickered in quiet compliance. He didn’t touch it. Just stood before it, hands now loosely clasped, like a lecturer waiting for a classroom to realize it was already behind.

“I don’t hate magic,” he said, voice mild. Unapologetic. “That would be sentiment. And I’m not sentimental.”

Draco didn’t answer.

“I hate,” the man continued, “that it gets to mean something. That you’re born with a wand in your hand and a world at your feet, and I had to steal knowledge just to make a spark .”

He looked at Draco—slow, deliberate—not through the lens of rivalry or want, but something steadier. 

Clarity .

“You inherited a throne,” he said. “I had to carve a table out of ruin and call it mine.”

Draco met his gaze, finally. Unflinching. “So this is it, then? You trap me in a white room and deliver your manifesto like a bedtime story?”

“No,” the man said simply. “This isn’t the story.”

He took a step closer.

“You’re the punctuation.”

Draco’s breath held. The air had begun to feel less like air and more like a thesis . Like theory wrapped in human skin, pacing across the floor of his silence.

“You were born into control,” the man said. “Into the presumption that power doesn’t have to explain itself. I wasn’t. So I learned. I watched. I dismantled the rituals you didn’t even know were rituals. The blood, the wards, the language.”

He paused.

“Do you know how long it takes to master a system you’re not allowed to speak inside?”

Draco didn’t answer.

The man smiled—too precisely to be kind.

“Long enough to stop wanting permission.”

A silence stretched between them.

Then: “Why me?” Draco asked. The question was not weakness. It was precision. Tactical.

The man tilted his head. “Because you are the shape of the lie,” he said. “And I want to know what happens when I unmake it.”

Then he turned and walked toward the door again—calm, unrushed.

Not a captor.

A surgeon. Or a scholar. Or a ghost.

The door re-stitched behind him without a sound.

And Draco, alone again in the white hum of absence, finally understood: This was not punishment.

It was proof.

The lights dimmed. Not flickered. Dimmed—methodically, deliberately—until the glare of sterile fluorescence softened into something lower, more intimate. A glow like moonlight through clay, green-edged and uneven, pulsing faintly from the seam of the ceiling. Not charmwork. Not spellcasting.

Something older. Cruder. Built by hand.

Draco blinked against the adjustment. His bindings didn’t loosen. The table beneath him didn’t warm. But the air changed.

Then: the door again—seamless, soundless—and the man reappeared.

Same neutral clothing. Same flat expression. But something in his gait had altered. Not his speed. His intention . As if the first visit had been preface, and this—this was the thesis.

He stood near the edge of the table, hands loose at his sides. “How does it feel,” he asked conversationally, “to be in a room that doesn’t believe in you?”

Draco didn’t answer.

The man nodded, as though that were the answer he wanted. He circled slowly, gaze flicking over Draco’s body like a physician taking inventory—restraint, restraint, vitals, resistance.

“I never set foot in Hogwarts,” he said. “Not properly. Toured it once as a boy. The staircase moved when I wasn’t ready, and they laughed. Not cruelly. Just easily. The way people do when they don’t expect the world to bite back.”

He paused beside the table.

“So I built my own curriculum.”

He gestured toward the ceiling—toward the thin, glowing line that pulsed across the plaster in irregular seams. “That light? Phosphorescent mineral infusion. Took three years to get the ratio stable. No wand. No sigils. Just dirt. Fire. Patience.”

Draco’s jaw twitched. He didn’t look away.

The man smiled slightly—appreciation, not mockery.

“Magic,” he said, “is just repetition. Sequence. Ratios. You know that, of course. You’re a wardworker. You’ve read the theory. What they didn’t tell you was that once you see the pattern—once you really understand it—you realize you don’t need a core.”

He leaned in, voice low. “You need time .”

Draco stayed still. But the burn behind his ribs spread.

The man turned and began to pace again—slow, as if letting the doctrine rise of its own accord.

“I started with scraps—misprinted textbooks, broken stasis charms, black-market cauldrons, a few Muggle manuals that called the body a machine. Did you know they describe the body as a system ? Not a vessel. Not a channel. A machine .”

He stopped near the corner wall, gestured to a barely visible circle of chalk. “That sigil doesn’t respond to spellwork. It reacts to carbon heat. You breathe on it the wrong way, it records your frequency.”

Draco felt the breath catch in his throat—not fear. Understanding.

“I brewed elixirs that trigger reactions—runes, curses, worse. Everything your world outlawed, I reverse-engineered,” the man went on. “You built your war with legacy and wandwork. I built mine with discarded names and a Bunsen burner.”

He turned again, slow. Walked back to the table.

“People like you,” he said, “were told that power is inherited. That blood is destiny. And maybe, for a while, it was. But I’ve written new laws. Proofed them.”

He tapped the edge of the table. “You wouldn’t last two weeks without charmwork. I built this room with mud, glass, and revolt .”

The silence pressed down.

Draco’s mouth was dry. His magic—still sluggish beneath the bindings—flickered like a match underwater. He looked at the ceiling. At the walls. At the faint glint of sigils etched not in runic script, but in functional logic—crude, brutal, exact.

This wasn’t ideology.

This was a reconstruction .

And that’s what terrified him.

Because the man wasn’t wrong.

He wasn’t mad.

He had built something real.

Draco turned his head, slowly, until their eyes met again. And for the first time, he didn’t see vengeance there.

He saw a future.

One that didn’t need wandwork.

One that had already decided he didn’t belong.

The vial was small—smaller than it should have been. Thumb-length. Glass so thin it caught the low alchemical light and threw it sideways, bending the room into angles that didn’t belong. Inside, the liquid was dense, dark. Silvery-black. Weight. Suspended. Waiting.

The air recoiled, and Draco felt it before anything else.

No scent hit his nose. No sound met his ears.

But something had changed. Instantly.

The man held the vial between two fingers and looked at it like something sacred. Reverent. Not cruel.

“This,” he said softly, “took me seventeen years.”

He stepped closer.

Draco tensed. The restraints were still in place—a binding of conductivity and suppression. He could feel his core—still burning. But like fire through frost. Slow. Disconnected. Too distant to wield.

The man reached out.

Draco jerked back—only an inch, only a breath—but it was enough.

The man stilled.

And then he said, gently: “You erased someone once, didn’t you?”

Draco froze.

The air around them held still. Even the hum beneath the stone seemed to hesitate.

“A cousin,” the man continued. “A girl. She smiled too loud. Laughed wrong. Didn’t cast.”

His voice was calm. Not accusatory. Just accurate.

Draco didn’t answer.

The man didn’t wait for one. He tilted Draco’s head back with a touch that was almost clinical. The vial’s rim met his lips—cool, thin, inevitable. Draco clamped his mouth shut.

The man didn’t force. Didn’t press.

He just said, so softly that the words didn’t echo, “Now you’ll feel what it’s like to almost be nothing.”

That landed.

The bindings held.

But inside—something splintered.

And that was enough. Draco let go.

And the man poured the potion in.

It bypassed the tongue completely—no flavor, no warmth, nothing to hold onto. But the moment it hit his throat, something inside his chest clenched. Not pain. Worse.

Removal.

It spread like frost through marrow. Slow, inevitable. His breath staggered once—then again. His hands twitched against the restraints. His shoulders locked.

Then—
his magic flickered.

Faded.

Like light through smoked glass. Still there. But unreachable.

The edges of the world sharpened. The room grew too loud. His heartbeat stuttered, irregular now, trying to orient itself in a body no longer tethered to power. His skin tingled. His teeth ached. His lungs pulled harder for something they didn’t know how to name.

And his core—his core—

He couldn’t feel it.

Not truly.

Only the outline.

The absence.

The man leaned down until his mouth was near Draco’s ear. Not intimate. Not cruel. Present.

“Now,” he said, “you’ll remember. What it’s like to be just almost. To almost reach. To almost hold. To almost matter.”

He pulled back.

Draco couldn’t follow him with his eyes. Even that had become too far.

The potion wasn’t the sweet release of death. It wasn’t writhing pain.

It was disassembly.

It was silence, restructured.

It was what the girl who laughed too loudly must have felt, once.

And now it lived inside him.

The door closed without a sound. No latch. No lock. Just absence—the finality of a space no longer waiting for witness.

The footsteps withdrew—steady, unhurried, indifferent. Draco sank against the restraints, hollow in their absence.

The vial's residue still clung to the inside of his throat—thick and metallic, like memory filtered through ash. His body, slick with sweat, felt distant from itself. His heartbeat stuttered, then corrected. Then stuttered again.

He tried, again, to summon it.

Magic.

The word no longer felt right in his mouth.

The gesture—the reach—was still there. Reflexive. A twitch in the chest. A pulse along the ribs. But nothing answered. The room did not push back. It did not welcome, either. It simply watched. Blank. Unmoved. Not void, but denial made manifest.

He swallowed hard.

Nothing moved.

Not in the air. Not in his blood. Not in him.

His limbs hung heavy against the operating surface, useless beneath the weighted stillness. He flexed a finger. Once. Slowly. Like testing a limb that belonged to someone else.

His tongue moved against the roof of his mouth. Dry. Foreign. He tried to shape a word. Any word.

No sound emerged.

Even language, it seemed, had begun to abandon him.

He turned his head slightly. The ceiling loomed above—flat, colorless, lit from within by an alchemical filament that flickered with unnatural calm. He stared at it until the glow swam behind his eyes. Until it blurred.

And then—

The sigil burned across the backs of his eyelids.

The one on the apothecary wall.

The one that triggered the trap.

The one that meant not absence —but removal.

He blinked.

And behind the sigil—so sudden it stole breath—her face.

Not real. Not memory. But his mind, desperate to tether itself, gave her form.

Hermione. No expression, no mask—only that hush she carried when her mind was moving faster than her mouth. The air around her seemed to slow. Her gaze, steady and watchful, made the room feel like a problem waiting to be solved.

He saw her the instant before the door sealed. Heard her footsteps—too late.

He remembered the word that rose in his throat then. The one he didn’t have time to say.

Her name.

It was the only thing he could still feel clearly now. Not the magic. Not the pain. Not even himself.

Just the word unspoken.

Hermione.

The lights dimmed further. The silence tightened. It had shape now. Texture. It wasn’t the quiet of solitude.

It was erasure.

Not performed.

Perfected.

Draco lay still. Muscles locked not by force, but by distance. Core flickering like a star buried in water.

His eyes remained open.

He stared upward into a room that had no memory of him.

And for the first time in his life, he understood what it meant—

—not to be forgotten—

—but to be unseen.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The wand hovered a few inches above her open palm, trembling like a needle caught between poles. Tethered.

A flickering line of light arced between the wood and her skin—volatile, frayed, too fragile to name. It wasn’t a tracking spell, exactly, but the echo of one. The last living thread of his emotional imprint, preserved in potion residue and stitched together with an incantation not written in any Ministry-approved grimoire. Emotion-echo spells were banned during the War—too volatile, too intimate, impossible to falsify or fully sever.

Hermione didn’t speak.

Even breath felt too loud here.

The forest clung to fog—damp, metallic, heavy with the memory of industrial run-off. Branches loomed low, gnarled and black-veined, like they’d once been trees but had long since opted out of the performance. It was a silence cultivated by neglect, not design.

And ahead of her, half-swallowed by the tree line: the facility.

A square of concrete and rust. Windowless. Unnamed. A decommissioned Muggle research site the Ministry had written off after the Statute Renewal Accords. Uncursed. Unwarded. Buried. A place no witch or wizard would stumble into—because there was nothing magical to find.

Except she was here. Because her wand still trembled. Because the tether still burned. And because the ache in her chest had sharpened into direction.

Hermione stepped forward, boots crunching over gravel that had long forgotten it was meant to lead anywhere. The building’s facade peeled in strips of old lead paint, revealing scarred concrete beneath. A chain-link fence hung limp from its hinges. The air smelled of iron and rain and the bitter tail-end of oxidized solvents.

She scanned the perimeter with a whisper of a spell—not a detection charm, but a chemical filter.

There it was.

Faint, but familiar: the signature of Bitterroot hybridized with Mistletoe oil, distorted by heat. The same trace left in the greenhouse. In the evidence wing. On his skin.

This was no spellcraft. This was design.

She pressed a hand to the door with the ache of absence .

Magic wasn’t repelled here.

It was refused.

Hermione stood still for one full breath, the wind catching in her cloak, the tether between her wand and skin pulsing once like a heartbeat half-remembered.

Then, barely audible—her voice hoarse with fury and dread: “This is where he brought you.”

The tether sparked again.

And she stepped inside.

The door wasn’t locked in the way Ministry doors were locked.

No runic seal, no enchanted threshold, no alarm glyph waiting to scream into the night. Just a triple-reinforced Muggle deadbolt, a rusted keypad with half its buttons worn blank, and something more ancient layered beneath it all—a faint alchemical inhibitor etched into the hinges. Silent. Intentional. Designed to suppress hostile magical fields on contact—not block entry, but bleed power from anything reckless.

She didn’t cast.

Hermione slipped a tension bar into the slot and worked the pins free with a conjured pick, the rhythm steady, the resistance almost eager. The inhibitor flared once beneath her palm—recognizing her magical field, testing for aggression. She didn’t give it any.

There was no fanfare when it gave. The lock turned, soft as breath, as if even resistance had grown tired.

She opened the door like a surgeon cracking the ribs of a patient too far gone to save. The air inside the corridor was stale. Not rotten. Just abandoned. Long-unbreathed. The fluorescent bulbs overhead sputtered to life in staggered pulses—sickly white, buzzing in dissonance with each other and electricity failing its original purpose.

She stepped inside and didn’t bother to shut the door.

The hallway extended in both directions—linear, brutal, institutional. A spinal column of a building that had once pretended to be scientific. Now it was just a carcass.

Hermione moved left without wand light and footsteps that barely breathed.

The tether in her hand—the last residue of the Echo Imprint—shivered faintly every time she turned a corner. Not like a signal, but like a ghost of memory still clinging to the path.

The first door she passed was marked BIO-SIGNAL MONITORING STATION. Inside: a console rusted with time, a circle of bracing straps mounted to a metal chair, dry potion stains crusted along the armrests like something had tried to scream from the skin and failed.

The next: CHEMICO-ARCANE FUSION STUDY LAB. Cauldrons rigged to Muggle ventilators. IV drips feeding into steel canisters. One glove still on the floor, latex fingers curled inward, stained orange-red like old rust or blood or both.

She moved on.

The space held its stillness.

But the hum was constant.

Faint. Internal. Not electrical.

Alchemical systems running in absence. Spells never used, but accounted for. This wasn’t a lab designed to protect. It was built to resist retaliation. To force invention in isolation.

She stepped past a wall smeared with graphite diagrams. Ratios. Ritual overlays. A child’s handwriting layered over them in parts. Not notes. Not threats. Instructions.

Her jaw tightened.

Hermione pressed her palm to the wall.

It was still warm.

No magic, no heat signature.

Just presence.

Draco was here.

Or had been.

And whoever built this place had designed it not just to hold a body.

But to test what happened when you removed the world from around it.

She kept walking.

And didn’t blink.

The surveillance chamber was colder than the hall.

It wasn’t cold from air or absence. This was something else. The kind of chill that bloomed only in places where observation had long outlived compassion.

Hermione stepped inside, wand steady, shoulders not.

The room was small—six paces across, eight deep. Monitors lined one wall, dead now, cracked and dust-veiled. Wires dangled from the ceiling like veins cut mid-surgery. A bank of rune-inlaid consoles blinked dimly behind a half-smashed sigil matrix, pulsing faintly with a sick, pale glow.

But it wasn’t any of that that stopped her breath.

It was the table.

Unassuming. Metal. Slightly scorched at one corner. Sitting atop it: two fractured pieces of wood, snapped clean through, the inner core exposed like something vital and tender and never meant to be seen.

Draco’s wand.

The grain was unmistakable—smooth ash, pale with silver threading at the base. She’d seen it tilt through spell-light. Had felt it skim past her in the Room of Requirement years ago. Had handed it back to him once, fingers brushing for half a second too long.

It lay now in pieces.

Broken. Careful.

Left.

Hermione didn’t move for a moment. Not one. Her breath had stopped mid-inhale. Her lungs refused orders. Her heart had gone silent in the wrong way—like it was waiting to be told how to beat again.

She stepped forward. Her boots made no sound. Her body remembered silence the way grief did—ritualistically.

She reached out, fingers shaking, and cast a preservation charm over the wand pieces, whispering the incantation low and precise.

But her magic cracked.

It surged—not from the spell, but from her. A flare, wild and raw, lashing the table edge like it couldn’t bear containment. Sparks burst along the containment field—too hot, too fast—before the charm sealed. The ward shimmered, unstable.

She stared at it. Then her jaw clenched. The pressure behind her eyes blurred the room. The ache of everything that wouldn’t collapse unless she let it.

Hermione took one step back, lifted her wand, and pointed it at the nearest wall.

No incantation.

Just a thought sharpened to a knife.

The blast hex hit with a low, thunderous thud. The wall cracked inward, stone splintering like bone. Dust bloomed. Nothing moved.

She stood in the silence that followed.

It wasn’t enough.

It would never be enough.

She stepped toward the wall, still breathing hard, eyes burning, voice low and shaking with something that had stopped being rage and started becoming promise.

“You broke him,” she whispered.

To the room.

To the walls.

To the system.

“You broke him.”

She pressed her wand to her palm. The magic stilled. Coiled.

“I’ll break you.”

Her fury stilled into her spine, her breath, the line of her wand.
Every step forward was a vow she’d already made.

The monitors sparked once—then went dark for good.

The final door groaned. Hermione pushed it open slowly, her palm pressed flat against the runic seam where old magic had once lived but now only memory lingered. The hinges gave way without resistance. Almost welcoming.

The room beyond was quiet. The kind of quiet that followed ritual. Or rupture.

It was too clean, at first glance—too orderly to be honest. Stainless metal, glass cylinders still half-filled with potion residue, tubes threaded like veins through the walls. A central slab of stone slicked to surgical polish, surrounded by diagnostic glyphs that had burned out under strain. A dozen biometric sensors still blinked in disoriented syncopation.

But she wasn’t looking at any of it.

Her eyes had already found him.

Draco.

He was strapped to an upright chair at the far end of the room—arms bound at the forearms and biceps with runes she didn’t recognize, head tilted back slightly, as if someone had adjusted him by hand. Not unconscious. But drained. Reduced.

His skin was pale. Not bloodless—but too still. Veins traced his throat and hands like rivers waiting for thaw.His shirt—standard interrogation-issue white, impersonal and threadbare—was soaked through with sweat, clinging to his ribs. His chest rose and fell in a rhythm that was shallow but stubborn. His mouth was parted. Lips cracked, faintly blue.

But it wasn’t the color that undid her.

It was the feel .

Hermione staggered forward, knees already buckling, hand half-raised as if reaching could undo what had been done. She felt for his magic first—not with a spell, but with her own. Opened herself. Let her core stretch toward his. And there it was:

Flickering.

Dimmed.

But there .

Buried under something heavy and wrong.

“Draco—” she breathed. “Oh, God—”

She reached him. Dropped to her knees. One hand cupped the side of his face, thumb at his temple, fingers trembling against the stubble that had grown along his jawline in the days— days —since he vanished.

He didn’t move.

His skin was hot.

Her other hand brushed the edge of a restraint glyph, and it bit her—just enough to spark. Her magic recoiled. She ignored it.

“Don’t you dare fucking leave me,” she said, sharper this time, closer.

Her forehead bowed to his. Breath caught. The weight of the moment pulling her spine into something near collapse. Her wand dropped to the floor with a sound that echoed like an apology.

For a terrifying second, there was nothing.

Just the hum of machinery that was never meant for healing. Just her heart trying to decide if it should break now or wait.

Then—

A flutter.

His lashes twitched.

His jaw trembled.

And his lips formed a word. Not loud. Not strong. But real.

“Granger?”

She choked on the exhale. Like her body had been holding itself hostage in the shape of composure and had just remembered how to fall apart.

“I’m here,” she whispered, pressing her palm against his jaw again. “I’m right here.”

His eyes blinked open, unfocused and filmed with exhaustion. They didn’t find her—not right away. But they tried.

“Thought—” he rasped. “You—wouldn’t—”

She pressed her forehead to his again. “Don’t,” she said, voice shaking. “Don’t waste what you have left trying to say something stupid.”

A breathless sound escaped him—something like a laugh, broken in half.

She let her fingers curl at the back of his neck. Her hand was wet. She didn’t know if it was his sweat or her tears.

“Stay with me,” she said.

Not a plea.

An order.

And this time, he didn’t resist it.

He was still breathing.

Barely. But he was.

Hermione leaned in closer, fingers pressed to the side of his throat—not his pulse point, not quite. Just the place where his heartbeat echoed the longest. The rhythm was thin, staggered, but there . Her thumb traced the line of his jaw once, grounding herself in the fact of his skin, his heat, the stubble that shouldn’t be there if he’d only been missing for days.

She closed her eyes, just long enough to steady her own.

“You’re still here,” she whispered, voice low and firm, like naming it would make it stay. “I’m here. We’re not done.”

Her wand was already back in her hand, steady now, though her breath still wasn’t. She cast a diagnostic scan—low-spectrum, full-body. Illegal in this context. Unauthorized in any jurisdiction. She didn’t care.

The magic shimmered through the air, wrapping itself around his form like a net of truth. It flickered, stuttered at the core—but revealed enough.

Magic: compromised. Suppressed at the junction between nerve and core-channel. Not gone. But shut in .

Muscle fatigue: extreme. Neural strain: bordering on collapse.

Mind: present.

She didn’t exhale until the last thread of light faded.

Still him. Still whole , beneath the systems trying to erase him.

Her hands moved fast now—checking reflexes, cleaning the sweat from his temple, pressing a stabilizing charm into the base of his spine where one of the restraint glyphs had flared red. Her spell took. It wasn’t strong, but it held.

Her eyes flicked across the table near the wall—glass vials, metal tools, potion residue still cooling on curved ceramic. One vial pulsed faintly. Clear fluid, almost viscous. Unlabeled.

She picked it up.

Held it to the light.

The color was wrong—slightly tinged, slightly too still. Stabilizer compound. But corrupted. Modified in the same way as the paralytic at the greenhouse. Stabilizers were meant to preserve magical coherence in the body; twisted like this, they dulled core-channel conductivity instead.

Her jaw tightened.

She didn’t risk it.

Instead, she drew from her coat a satchel of field-mixed reagents, snapped open a warming seal, and assembled her own blend: base tonic, marrow-root suspension, core stimulant—just enough to support vital systems without igniting unstable threads.

She fed it to him drop by drop, one hand cradling the back of his head. He swallowed, barely.

“Stay with me,” she whispered.

The room held its breath. Not over. Paused.

She lifted herself from the floor, breath still tight, her wand in hand, eyes scanning every wall, every sigil, every mark etched into metal or skin or stone.

This wasn’t a room built to kill.

It was a room built to keep .

Her voice was low. Flat. Terrifyingly calm.

“He doesn’t get to keep you,” she said. “Not even your silence.”

She stepped back to Draco and pulled the cloak from her shoulders. It was standard-issue Ministry black—worn thin along the hem, charm-insulated, lined in stasis runes. She wrapped it around his frame as gently as she could. He didn’t shiver. He didn’t resist.

She tucked it in tighter anyway.

One last breath.

Then her wand lifted.

It flared gold at the tip.

Bright. Sharp. Anchored.

A beacon.

She wasn’t summoning help.

She was claiming him back.

And the building would feel it.

Hermione stood in the center of the chamber, one hand on Draco’s shoulder, her wand casting steady light that danced across every surface of the room—not to burn it down. But to lead them both out.

They were not done.

Not yet.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The air was breaking apart with pressure, with shrieking vents and the staccato shatter of mechanical alarms that didn’t know how to whisper. Red light strobed across the containment chamber in rhythmic pulses, too fast to track. Somewhere in the bowels of the facility, the chemical wards had registered interference.

Too late.

Hermione stood over Draco’s body, her own blood already slick down her forearm, eyes wide but unblinking. Her wand trembled at the tips of her fingers—from proximity to the one thing she couldn’t lose.

“Mobilicorpus,” she whispered.

His body lifted—not gracelessly, but not cleanly either. Like the air didn’t want to give him back. Like it remembered his breath and wasn’t done with it. She conjured a stabilizing sling, wrapped him in it like a second skin, and cast a pressure shield around his skull, sealing the edges with the back of her wrist.

The transport tether pulsed once.

Alive. Still alive.

She pivoted toward the corridor, the sling floating beside her like a thread she refused to sever. The exit was fifty meters down, through a hall lined with dead glyphs and sleeping traps.

Not dead.

Dormant.

She reached the threshold, and the glyphs blinked on. Violet at first, then red. Not spells—schematics. Embedded in steel, in reinforced mortar, in the veins of the facility’s floor.

Each step was an invitation to lose him again.

Hermione moved anyway.

The first trap was proximity-based. She could feel it in her skin—heat building behind her molars like a curse unsaid. She cast a glyph-dampening field ahead, slow and wide, and dragged it forward inch by inch until the threshold flickered and gave.

The sling buzzed beside her. Draco groaned once, low, breathless.

“Stay with me,” she muttered, not looking at him. “Just… stay.”

The second ward was vocal—triggered by soundwaves in the upper register. She cast a silence dome, layered thick and tight, just as a cabinet near the wall exploded outward in a bloom of glass and white vapor.

The force shoved her sideways.

Pain lanced up her arm.

Something sliced deep—glass or metal, she didn’t know. Blood soaked through her sleeve and dripped onto the floor in sharp, rhythmic taps. She didn’t stop. She pressed her palm to the wound, hissed through her teeth, and kept disarming.

Three glyphs in, her magic buckled.

Four glyphs in, it righted.

Draco exhaled again—barely. A flicker of breath. A twitch in the sling.

Hermione dropped to one knee and cleared the last ward manually—tracing her wand through the kill-sequence she’d memorized from restricted scrolls never meant for public record. Her voice was hoarse now. Her hair was soaked at the temples. Her skin burned from within. She didn’t care.

She didn’t stop.

Couldn’t.

The door in front of them groaned with a release. A breath unheld.

She stood.

Her voice low. Unrelenting.

“You don’t get to take him,” she told the room. “Not like this.”

And then she walked forward—dragging his body, her blood, and everything they weren’t supposed to have—through fire, through ruin, through the logic that said it was already over.

And into light.

POV: Draco Malfoy

Consciousness arrived like breath in frost—thin, halting, half-formed.

Draco drifted in the space between nerve and will, where the body lagged behind the mind and magic was a rumor told through bone. Everything felt fractured, misaligned. As if someone had taken the shape of him and shaken it loose.

He couldn’t open his eyes fully. But light filtered through—pale, red-edged, moving. He couldn’t breathe easily. But something in the air insisted he try.

There was a voice.

It came in waves—cut by pain, shaped by fury.

Hermione.

He didn’t hear the words. Not precisely. But the cadence lodged beneath his ribs. Urgent. Unyielding. Frayed at the edges. It hit like spellwork—not through ears, but through the pulse of memory.

He felt her hand brush his jaw—featherlight but electric. Her magic threaded across his skin in low, stabilizing hums. Not spells. Just contact. She wasn’t weaving incantations. She was holding him together.

And it was working.

He exhaled, ragged. Tried to say her name.

“H-her—”

The syllable caught, cracked against his throat like a miscast ward. He couldn’t force the rest. His tongue felt clumsy. His lips wrong. But the meaning pulsed beneath the failure.

Hermione.

She was here.

He didn’t know how.

Didn’t care.

Somewhere nearby—just behind the veil of glass and heat and blood—something shifted.

Draco’s eyes, barely open, caught the outline of movement.

A figure.

Still. Straight-backed. Watching.

Behind a sealed inner wall, the Squib stood in shadow—neither fleeing nor intervening. Just observing. Composed in the way only someone who had long ago surrendered to their own conviction could be.

Draco blinked. The shape sharpened.

The man’s mouth moved once. No sound.

But Draco read it.

Four words, etched in calm.

She’s the spell you’ll always fail to cast.

His lungs forgot what to do.

Revelation—horribly quiet.

He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. The weight of the sentence fell into him like a curse written in truth.

Hermione was burning to save him—rewriting every line of protocol, breaking every seal the world had told her was sacred. She wasn’t using power.

She had become it.

And somehow, that made her more vulnerable than anything he’d ever known.

Draco tried again to move, to lift a hand, to anchor himself in the heat of her presence. But all he could do was feel her magic fold around him like breath. And know—with aching, unbearable clarity—that he might not survive the cost.

Not if she paid it alone.

POV: Hermione Granger

The final door was older than the rest—iron, half-rusted, veined with alchemical burn scars that glowed faintly under strain. It pulsed once as Hermione approached, mirroring her own heartbeat. Fast. Unsteady.

A six-layer ward glimmered just beneath the surface—mirror glyphs, sigil recursion, pressure-calibrated runes that spiraled inward like a trap designed by someone who didn’t believe in mercy.

Hermione didn’t have the time to break it properly.

And she didn’t have the strength to be careful.

Her hand trembled as she pulled Draco closer, steadying his weight with one arm and casting with the other. The corridor behind them wheezed and groaned with retaliating pressure—seals collapsing, heat building.

She whispered the spell. Her own design. A dismantling protocol from her early Unspeakable days—unfield-tested, theoretical, meant for structure collapse, not human escape. She had called it salvage-through-shear .

Now it would have to be a key.

The spell hit like a blunt edge—unrefined, but forceful.

The ward screamed. The sigils fractured inward, looping on themselves, collapsing like a lung punctured from the inside. Light burst from the edges. A soundless explosion cracked outward, and then—

The door tore open.

With terrifying violence.

The blast threw her backwards. Her spine hit the wall. Her head struck stone.

She didn’t stop moving. Draco was limp in her arms, blood trailing from his mouth, his wrist bruised beneath the restraint marks. She dragged him forward on instinct, cloak clutched in her fist like a lifeline.

The air outside the rupture was cold. Bitter with wind. Free.

She collapsed just past the threshold and pulled him into her lap. His head lolled against her chest. His lips were too pale.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no—”

She pressed her palm to his sternum, cast the stabilizing charm again. Her magic flared too hot, searing across her ribs. She didn’t care.

“Stay with me,” she said, voice breaking. “Do you hear me, Malfoy?”

She brushed the hair from his forehead, forehead to his, anchoring them both.

“You are not—” Her throat seized. “You are not allowed to die. Not before I tell you what it cost me to lose you—even for a second.”

Her voice cracked on the last word.

He didn’t move.

Her fingers gripped his shoulder, white-knuckled.

And then—

A cough. Shallow. Cracked like paper.

His fingers curled around her wrist—weak, unsteady, but deliberate.

Hermione choked back a sob. Her forehead stayed against his.

For the first time since she stepped into that godforsaken place, she allowed herself to believe they might both make it out.

Not untouched.

But alive.

POV: Draco Malfoy

The stone beneath him wasn’t cold.

It should’ve been. But his nerves weren’t registering heat anymore. Or maybe the cold had settled so deep it had simply become him. He couldn’t tell. His body was a noise—distant, fractured, as though someone had dropped him into the world and forgotten to attach the strings.

There was wind. He thought.

A rattle. Metal? No—breath. Her breath.

It was the only rhythm in the world that made sense.

Her voice was the next thing. Quiet, not shaking, but shaped like something that had just remembered how to hold. She was speaking—soft syllables pressed against his skin like balm and salt together. Repeating.

Just... stay .

He didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to break whatever spell she’d managed to hold between them. But his fingers betrayed him—twitched once, then again. Numb. Then alive.

He reached.

His hand found skin.

Her wrist.

And he gripped.

Not hard. Not enough to anchor her. But enough to know he was still tethered.

She stilled.

The mantra stopped. Only for a breath. Then her hand closed over his, and he felt her there. Solid. Real. Scarred.

“Granger,” he said, though it wasn’t really a word. Just breath shaped around memory.

Her face appeared above him like dawn through soot. Blood smeared along her temple. Hair matted. Her eyes—wild, burning, glazed, and so unbearably here —locked onto his.

The moment cracked her.

Just for a second.

A tremble in her mouth. A flicker behind her eyes. Then she straightened, cleared her throat, and said: “You came back.”

He blinked slowly, each motion thick, like swimming through lead.

He nodded—barely. “I followed your voice.”

She let out something between a laugh and a sob, pressed his hand tighter between both of hers. Then pressed it to her chest.

“You’re not dying,” she whispered.

He wanted to argue. Not because he thought he was, but because the certainty in her voice made him believe it—and that was somehow more terrifying.

The sky above them was still dark.

But she was lit like a promise.

And for now, that was enough to keep him here.

Breathing.

Still.

POV: Hermione Granger

The rooftop garden at St. Mungo’s was still slick with the night’s mist, vines curling up enchanted rails, the skyline bleeding pale into gold. It was quiet here. Just her and him and the space between.

Hermione guided Draco to the edge, one arm braced around his ribs, her other hand steady beneath his elbow. His breathing was ragged but regular, a raw kind of rhythm that belonged more to instinct than stability. Triage had done what it could—restoratives, stabilizers, something muttered by a healer she couldn’t remember—but none of it mattered until she’d seen him move under his own weight.

He didn’t protest when she led him up here. That alone terrified her more than anything else.

The rooftop stones were still damp with the night’s chill. She helped him to sit, then lowered herself beside him, letting his shoulder drop against hers. The weight of him wasn’t heavy. It was anchoring.

He didn’t speak. Not at first.

The sky had begun to shift—dark to grey, then grey to something gentler. Just the breath-before of a day that hadn’t decided what it would become.

Hermione exhaled. One hand drifted toward his chest, palm spread, just over his heart. The beat there was faint. Tired. But unmistakably his.

“You were almost a ghost,” she murmured.

Draco made a sound—rough, too low to be a laugh. “You almost let me be.”

She didn’t flinch. Just pressed her hand flat, firm. Felt the warmth of skin under the wreckage. Felt the pulse fight for its place. 

“No,” she said. “Never.” The word settled between them like spellwork that didn’t need to be cast. A vow spoken too late, and somehow still in time.

Draco’s head tilted, just enough for her to feel the whisper of his breath against her collar.

They stayed like that, the two of them wrapped in exhaustion and blood-streaked silence. Her cloak around his shoulders. Her wand across her thigh. In her other hand—cupped loosely like something sacred—the broken halves of his.

Still here.

The first arc of sunlight crested over the far buildings, catching in the shattered wand’s splinters. Light refracted off splintered wood. Glowed against his pale cheek.

And still, she didn’t move.

She didn’t have to.

The world was beginning again.

And for the first time in too long, they were both still part of it.

Alive.
Together.
Facing east.

Chapter Text

POV: Draco Malfoy 

The ceiling wasn’t white. 

It was a soft shade of ash, pale and porous, laced with faint cracks that spread like memory across plaster. The light above it pulsed low—steady, spell-bound, faintly blue. Healing light. The kind calibrated not to startle the body as it came back to itself. The kind meant for long stays.

Draco blinked once. Then again.

Each breath dragged through his chest like it had been borrowed from somewhere else. His ribs ached—not in sharp stabs, but in deep, exhausted bruises. He shifted, just slightly, and the linens rasped against his skin like a question.

He didn’t answer.

The air smelled of eucalyptus balm and sterile potion vapor, faint traces of aconite and fluxweed clinging to the edge of the enchantments. It was familiar. Disorientingly so. Not that room. Not the white that had hummed without mercy.

This was a different white. This one didn’t want anything from him.

He exhaled—shallow, then deeper. Magic stirred in his chest, sluggish and uneven, like it wasn’t entirely sure if it belonged to him anymore. It sparked low, coiled somewhere near his spine, refusing shape. Still fractured. Still present.

He turned his head.

The movement cost him more than it should have. A sharp pulse lit up behind his eyes, and his vision blurred before it cleared again.

She was there.

Hermione.

Asleep in the chair beside him, folded into a posture that had lost the argument with exhaustion long ago. Her coat was half-slipped from one shoulder. Her braid was a mess. She’d slumped sideways, hand still resting on his forearm—fingers curled slightly, as if even unconscious, she wasn’t ready to let go.

Draco didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He just stared at her—at the crease in her sleeve, at the ink smudge on the side of her thumb, at the faint tension still clinging to her jaw, like she’d been arguing with silence and hadn’t quite won.

A wave of something swelled in his chest—too warm, too heavy. He didn’t name it. Couldn’t.

The last time he’d seen her, she’d been on fire.

And now she was here.

He closed his eyes.

Just to let the moment settle around him.

To feel, without resistance, what it meant to still be here.
To still be held .

And to not be alone.

He knew the moment she woke. Just a shift in the way the air held her—like the warded room exhaled all at once. Hermione jerked upright in the chair, breath catching, hand slipping from his forearm as if she hadn’t meant to fall asleep there at all.

Her eyes found him instantly. 

He didn’t move. Just watched her.

She blinked once, disoriented. Brushed a strand of hair out of her face with the kind of gesture that was too practiced not to be reflex. Her coat rustled softly as she straightened, spine snapping back into something professional, as if the past twelve hours—her rage, her blood, her hands on his face—could be filed away with enough posture.

He let her have it.

For exactly four seconds.

Then, voice low, no preamble: “Did you break protocol to find me?”

The question hung. Just the space between breath and answer.

She didn’t flinch.

“Yes.”

Draco blinked. Once.

She didn’t look away. “And I’d do worse,” she added, quieter now—neither threat nor admission. Simply what was.

It hit harder than he expected. The ease of it. Unmasked. Unguarded. Just offered. Like it didn’t cost her anything to say it anymore.

Draco swallowed. The burn in his throat hadn’t faded. His magic still lagged behind his body like a storm slow to roll in. But something else—something older—settled in his chest like gravity remembered.

He didn’t smile. Didn’t soften. But the edge dropped from his voice.

“Good to know.”

They sat in the silence that followed. Just there .

The ward hummed overhead.

Somewhere in the hall, a cart squeaked past—potion flasks clinking softly like distant glass windchimes.

Inside the room: her breath. His heartbeat. And something between them neither of them had dared name until now.

Only honesty.

And it held.

The kettle was too light.

It scraped awkwardly against the counter when he lifted it, and for a second—just one—his fingers forgot how to hold things. His wand wavered in his left hand, charm sputtering, not from imprecision but the lack of trust . Magic didn’t answer him the way it used to. It came in jolts now—uncertain, uneven, like something testing the shape of a scar from the inside.

Still. He didn’t stop.

He filled the kettle by hand instead. Set it on the heating rune. Watched the coil flicker blue, then red. His reflection shimmered in the copper curve—too pale, too thin, eyes still ringed in the remnants of something he didn’t want to name.

He exhaled through his nose. His hand still trembled.

From behind him: nothing. But he could feel her in the doorway—the shift of her weight, the folded arms, the silence so exact it became a kind of pressure. She didn’t say a word. But he could feel her watching.

The kettle whistled once, like breath pulled too tight.

Draco reached for the handle, and the charm on his wand sparked again—too fast this time. The spout hissed, steam arcing over his fingers. He just turned the wrist slightly wrong and poured. Half a splash missed the rim. The other half made it into the cup. He set the pot down too hard. The ring of it echoed.

Her gaze hadn’t moved.

Draco reached for the sugar next—two pinches, not spooned. He then stirred, quiet and clumsy, his hand still marked with the imprint of a restraint sigil he hadn’t let the healers erase.

Milk. Barely any.

He carried the cup to the table and set it down in front of her.

It was a little off-center. A little too full.

She looked at it.

Then at him.

And without breaking the silence, picked it up. Sipped once.

“You remembered how I take it.”

Draco shrugged. The motion was uneven. “Course I did.” He didn’t look at her. The heat in his palm still burned. 

But her hands didn’t shake when she lifted the cup again. And for the first time in days—since the seal, since the trap, since the room that tried to erase him—his magic didn’t flicker.

It settled .

Just enough to say: You’re here. I remember.

The light held on, faint and stubborn, as if the room hadn’t realized the day was already over.

Draco lay upright, back braced against too many pillows. He hadn’t asked for them. They’d just appeared, like everything else in this place. Clean blankets. Calibrated potions. Everything in this place came with a smile and an expiration date: the blankets, the potions, the pleasantries. Just long enough to get him standing.

The room was quiet now. The diagnostics no longer clattered. No healer with the tight-lipped smile of someone who had read too much of his file and still didn’t quite know what to do with his name. Only him. And the hum beneath his skin.

His magic hadn’t come back all the way yet.

It moved strangely now. As if it was a song he knew but couldn’t hum—familiar notes dulled at the edges, tempo off just enough to unsettle. Every time he reached for it, it stalled. Present, just slow. Fogged. Like it was still deciding whether it wanted to recognize him again.

He stared at the ceiling, breathing against the weight of it. And heard it again.

She’s the spell you’ll always fail to cast.

The voice hadn’t followed him out of the room. But the sentence had. Lodged between his ribs. Coiled just behind the place where incantations used to live without effort.

He didn’t believe in prophecy. But he believed in accuracy. And the man had been right about everything else.

Across the room, Hermione gathered her coat. She hadn’t said she was leaving. But he could tell. The way she moved, slower now, careful not to make noise. Like she thought sound might undo the rest of him. She tucked her wand into her bag. Fourth night sleeping upright in a chair—one ankle hooked behind the other like she didn’t dare let her body soften.

He hadn’t asked her to stay, but he didn’t want her to go.

She reached for the door.

“Granger.”

It came out quieter than he meant. Not strained—just unguarded.

She paused. Turned. One hand still on the frame. Eyes steady, unreadable in that way she had when she was trying not to push.

He reached out just enough to let his fingers brush hers where they curled around the handle.

Her hand stilled.

He didn’t close his fingers. 

But she didn’t pull away.

The hum of the room stayed even. His magic didn’t shift. His pulse didn’t climb. But something in him—the part that had been locked in that chair, in that room, in that sentence—eased.

She wasn’t a spell he failed to cast. She was the one who came back for him when the room forgot his name.

And right now—her fingers still near his, her breath still steady—he remembered his.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The Restricted Lineage Room smelled like parchment and old decisions.

Hermione stood in the aisle between two record towers, sleeves pushed to her elbows, her wand gliding above the spread of ancestral charts like a conductor calling dissonance into shape. Ink flickered beneath her spell light—spidery genealogical threads branching out in tangled succession, shifting into view with each whispered Lumos Linea and Vinculum Revela .

The air was thick with the scent of activated vellum—dry, chalk-sharp, touched faintly by the protective bitterness of ashroot ink. Beneath her boots, the floor was rune-scored and quiet. This room didn’t echo. It wasn’t meant to.

She traced a name with her wandtip. Rosier . The chart bloomed outward, blooming in the air like a half-dissolved spell. Two dozen branches. Nine marriages. Three disputed inheritances. And one faint mark, just beyond the reach of the official registry: Judith Rosier – Excised 1946 . No date of death. Just a silence where a record should’ve been.

She whispered, “Next.”

The scroll shifted. Flint . The ink cracked as it moved, ancient sigils protesting the intrusion. A lineage with deep Ministry ties—records cross-referenced with estate claims, magical aptitude seals, even blood purity charters dating back to the Restoration Accords. But there it was again— Lysander Flint . Removed at age seven. “Non-core lineage failure.” Disposition: guardianship transfer. Placement: unknown.

She flicked her wand again. Nott. Thornbridge. Each name flared, then rotated, spinning into place in the suspended projection above her table. Bloodlines drawn in looping glyphs, a constellation of legacy threaded through centuries of curated silence.

But it wasn’t the families that made her breath catch.

It was the pattern.

Hermione took a step back, eyes narrowing.

Each chart rotated, aligning not in straight lines, but curves. Interlocking spirals, faintly irregular—never quite symmetrical, but unmistakably intentional. The excised branches didn’t fracture randomly. They turned, like teeth in a gear, like a ritual script sketched across time.

She reached for the binding ribbon at her belt and unrolled a transparency slate across the center of the air. Her wand hovered just above her sternum as she cast a layering charm. One by one, the records overlapped—Rosier, Nott, Flint, Thornbridge. Each “cut” in the line—a child revoked, a branch sealed, a name disappeared—glowed faintly red.

Then yellow.

Then white.

They pulsed.

In rhythm.

Hermione’s breath shallowed. She wasn’t mapping bloodlines anymore. She was tracing a circle.

A ritual. Reversed.

Most blood-protection rituals wove legacy into permanence. The way a parent might bind their magic to an heir. The way a mother might embed her name into the marrow of her child’s spellcasting. Legacy spells were additive. Preservative.

This one severed. It wasn’t building protection. It was performing erasure. And it was doing it in sequence.

Hermione steadied her hand against the desk, her fingers brushing the edge of the last chart— Thornbridge, 1883. A name missing. A wand unregistered. A glyph excised.

One more spiral, incomplete.

The final mark hadn’t been made yet. But it would be.

Soon.

She whispered, “You’re carving silence into blood.”

And her wand, still suspended in air, shivered like it had heard a curse that wasn’t done casting.

The Bloodline Theory Lab was one of the oldest rooms in the Department—and one of the quietest.

It did not hum. It calculated.

Hermione stood at the center console, wand tucked behind her ear, hands braced on the rim of the algorithm basin. The air was cool, still. Beneath her boots, the floor shifted faintly as the spell lattice beneath it processed her query—reading intention, cross-referencing ancient magical theory, ritual lexicons, and generational blood algorithms most witches never learned existed.

A single rune stone hovered in front of her—pale and hexagonal, pulsing with soft amber light. Two more joined it. Then five. Then thirteen.

Each one spun, slow and deliberate, trailing threads of encoded ink through the air. A map of logic, drawn in language older than numbers.

Hermione didn’t breathe.

She whispered the final command: Simulcare Vinctum.

The stones locked into orbit.

A glyph shimmered to life in the air above the basin—elegant, spare, brutal. A ritual circle built not from summoning lines or sacrifice matrices, but from absence. Negative space made functional. Theory made threat.

She tapped the first anchor point with her wand tip.

Rosier. Excised Squib. Killed.

The glyph pulsed once—red.

She tapped again.

Flint. Excised. Killed.

Another pulse.

Nott. Thornbridge. Travers. Montclaire.

With each addition, the circle tightened—less a ring now than a trap. The lines didn’t radiate outward. They collapsed inward. A spiral of eradication.

Hermione murmured, “He’s not killing to avenge them.”

She tapped the final known point— Galloway . Not a bloodline elder. An enforcer. A severance guardian.

The stone glowed. The glyph recalculated. And then it happened.

The center of the circle inverted—flipping like a glyph drawn backward in blood. The anchor points folded into one another, and in their place bloomed a mark that had no name in current magical taxonomy.

A null sigil.

Not silence.

Void.

She reached for the alchemical overlay panel, activated the predictive glyph tier, and overlaid the modified ritual onto a legacy inheritance matrix. The stones began to pulse faster now—calculating, spinning, simulating the theoretical outcome of seven excised bloodlines sealed through ritual death.

A chime rang out. Soft. Final.

One more “cut.” One more excised anchor executed with intention.

And the spell would lock.

Not on the victims.

On their families.

On their descendants.

On the possibility of magic ever returning through their lines.

Hermione whispered, “He’s not erasing people. He’s erasing possibility.”

She reached out, pressed her palm to the glyph interface, and overlaid the model forward—tracking how the magic would move through unsealed blood. She watched as three entire family branches darkened in the theoretical tree. 

Extinguished.

Generation by generation.

The stones slowed. The air thinned.

The circle remained.

It glowed faintly red—then white.

And then—

Stillness.

Complete.

Hermione didn’t step back. She didn’t speak.

Because this wasn’t vengeance.

This was an alchemy of extinction.

And someone was about to finish it.

The Foster Registry didn’t feel like a Ministry office.

It felt like forgetting.

The air was warm in the wrong way—too many sealing charms holding too many secrets. The walls buzzed with quiet containment spells, designed to comfort, not to question. Files hovered lazily in midair, parchment softly revolving in gentle circles, looping the names of wards placed into magical care as if bureaucracy could count as guardianship.

Hermione stepped into the registry's restricted annex with the echo of the null sigil still burning behind her eyes.

She moved straight to the back—past the adoption glossaries and the Guardian Spell Affidavit scrolls—to the untouched archive: the one labeled Excised-Related Lineage Inquiries – Conditional Access Only.

Her clearance unlocked it without protest.

The cabinet unlatched with a click.

A single, flickering search stone hovered into view—old, Ministry-standard, worn to dullness from decades of disuse. She spoke directly into it.

“Surviving descendants. Squib-excised lines. Maternal. Post-Flint Inheritance. Filter: open guardianship files. No bonded magical protections.”

The stone pulsed—once, twice—then began to spin.

Names blurred across its surface. Most faded before they formed. Others glowed briefly, then vanished. Inheritance blocks. Severed cores. Deaths. Closed loops.

Until one held.

The searchstone steadied.

One name.

Tobias Whitcombe.
Age: 5
Status: magical guardian foster (unbonded)
Bloodline: Half-blood (maternal grandmother: Cecilia Flint – Squib, excised)
Placement: Fielding family, rural Devon
Location ward: inactive
Protective charm: none registered
Magical tracking: never assigned

Hermione didn’t move.

The boy’s file blinked once, requesting access confirmation.

She pressed her hand to the glyph without hesitation.

The folder unrolled in front of her—paper-dry, charmed ink pale at the edges. Medical report. Early magical indicators. Placement letter. A scrawled note from the foster mother saying he liked to trace stars in the condensation on the window. No wards. No sigil protections. No heritage watchmark.

He’d slipped through.

She felt her breath tighten. Not with fear. With knowing.

This was it.

The shape of the ritual pattern, the spiral of legacy cut clean at the root—it had pointed to an ending. And this boy was it. Not because he was dangerous or because he mattered to anyone else.

But because he had been forgotten.

And now he was needed.

A final stitch in the spell. A fifth-year boy who had drawn constellations in the cold and hadn’t yet learned to be afraid of his name.

Hermione swallowed hard.

Then—without flourish, without waiting—she cast a location ping.

The charm flared blue.

Active. Rural Devon. Alive. Unshielded.

Her wand sparked against her wrist from the force of the return. She didn’t stop to record it. She didn’t rerun the sequence. Because this wasn’t data anymore.

It was a child.

She closed the file with a flick of her wrist, summoned her satchel, and turned toward the exit. Her voice was quiet, spoken to no one but the stone still glowing behind her: “No one takes him.”

And then she vanished.

Not as an Unspeakable.

Not as a Ministry agent.

As the last thing between a boy and a spell designed to erase him.

The projection glyphs spun above the central strategy table like a constellation unraveling.

Six ancestral maps— Rosier, Thornbridge, Flint, Nott, Travers, Montclaire —hovered in midair, each threaded through with glowing red fractures, like veins bleeding out beneath old parchment. Where the lineage once pulsed with legacy, now the lines flickered. Faded. Silenced.

Hermione didn’t blink as she expanded the overlays.

They formed a spiral.

A ritual circle, rendered through birth, erasure, and death.

She turned toward the table. Selwyn sat flanked by two senior Aurors, arms crossed in the practiced posture of a man unimpressed by urgency. The others—tacticians, medi wizards, two unspeakable liaisons she didn’t recognize—watched her with cautious interest. Like she was a theory that had yet to prove itself useful.

She didn’t flinch.

“Each victim,” she said, “was tied to a bloodline that, at some point in the last century, erased a Squib descendant. Not cast out—erased. Through legal revocation. Lineage erasure. Arcane nullification.”

A murmur flickered along the edge of the room.

She let it pass.

“The ritual that’s being performed isn’t new. It’s just inverted. A perversion of the ancestral preservation circles once used to safeguard magical inheritance. The geometry’s the same. The magic is not.”

She flicked her wand. A new glyph unfolded above the table—a wide circle, segmented, six runes filled, the seventh still flickering.

“If he succeeds in closing this circle—if the seventh anchor falls—we’re no longer looking at a pattern of vengeance.”

She paused. Let it land.

“We’re looking at a curse. One that targets potential. One that permanently suppresses magical inheritance in the connected lines.”

Selwyn leaned back. “You’re saying a Squib’s brewing blood magic?”

Hermione didn’t blink.

“I’m saying,” she said, voice sharp and surgical, “that he’s doing it better than anyone who ever trained at Hogwarts.”

That silenced the table.

She stepped forward, wand lifted again but for instruction. She pointed toward the final quadrant of the glyph. The one still pulsing blue.

“Tobias Whitcombe. Age five. Unprotected. Descended from Cecilia Flint. Erased forty years ago. No ward sigils. No bloodline surveillance. No core monitoring. He fits the final anchor model with mathematical precision.”

“Where is he now?” asked a woman in charcoal-gray robes.

“With a foster family in Devon.” Hermione’s voice was flat. “And he doesn’t know who he is.”

Selwyn exhaled through his nose. “And your estimate? How long before this theoretical ritual closes itself?”

She didn’t look away from him. “Forty-eight hours. Maximum.”

Another ripple of silence.

Selwyn finally stood. “Assemble a field team. We’ll do an emergency perimeter sweep. Discreet.”

Hermione nodded—once.

But her stomach twisted.

Discreet. Sweep. Assemble.

Words that bought them nothing but time they no longer had.

The Aurors were moving—grabbing scrolls, snapping field bags shut, shouting coordination orders over the table’s growing hum—but Hermione stayed still.

Because the ritual had already begun.

And the Ministry was still writing memos.

The light had faded an hour ago, but Hermione hadn’t lit the lamp.

The Ministry wing outside her office hummed with its usual twilight quiet—clerks finishing reports, floo flames dimming low, the occasional echo of boots across tile. But inside her room, only silence lived. The kind that settled when a decision was already made.

She sat with Tobias Whitcombe’s file open on her desk, a photo paperclipped to the corner. The boy stared up at her through a lens charmed thirty-six hours earlier. His hair curled in soft, unbothered wisps around his ears. One front tooth missing. His arms wrapped around a plush dragon, a toy wand in his right hand—cheap wood, no core. Harmless.

The wand didn’t spark.

But he smiled anyway.

Hermione’s fingers hovered just above the photograph. Not touching—close enough to feel the warmth still radiating from the charm’s residual ink. She let her hand lower, slow, until her thumb rested against the edge of the frame.

She remembered the way Draco’s voice had broken when he tried to say her name. Remembered the sound of breath being siphoned from someone who still had magic but couldn’t feel it. Remembered the slow, deliberate silence of a spell meant not to kill—but to unmake.

And this child—

This five-year-old boy with nothing but a borrowed name and a wardless roof—was the final glyph in a ritual that had already begun to hum beneath their world.

She reached for her wand. Tapped once against the rune-etched basin on her desk, muttering a spell she hadn’t used since her first year in the Department—a personal trace weave. No oversight or record.

A soft circle of light flared across the basin—pale gold, tinged faintly blue.

Still alive. Still unmarked. For now.

She exhaled. Sharp. Measured. Then leaned forward, dragging the small hearth mirror toward her with one hand while her other anchored the basin’s light. Her wand struck the flame rune with surgical precision.

The floo mirror flared to life. Green. Flickering. Private. She keyed the connection herself—no glyph queue, no Auror routing. Just a direct channel into the Devon floo tower near the boy’s foster home.

The flame crackled.

Then—when the circuit opened, soft and waiting—she said only one phrase: “I’m coming.”

No title. No badge. No authorization string.

Just fact.

She closed the mirror gently, pressed a sealing charm into the surface. Then turned back to the desk. Her eyes landed on Tobias’s file again—open now to the genealogy chart, incomplete but damning. The break where his grandmother had once been. The scar in the shape of omission.

Hermione reached for the quill. She didn’t write anything. She just lifted the file—carefully, like a vow—and laid her hand over it. The rune circle beneath the basin pulsed once, bright and unwavering, casting its light across her desk, her face, the edges of a world she was no longer asking permission to protect.

The room filled with gold.

And Hermione Granger stood still in the middle of it—unshaken, unblinking.

Ready.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The war room smelled like antiseptic and overwork.

Hermione stood at the center of the charmed projection array, its flickering glyphs rotating in uneven spirals around her. One hand sliced through the air, layering protective runes over a perimeter schematic. The other clenched a Ministry-grade stylus like a weapon. Her sleeves were pushed to her elbows, her braid already half-unraveled. She hadn't noticed.

A constellation of Aurors ringed the room—ten of them, most standing. The youngest shifted their weight too often; the oldest didn’t shift at all. The quiet between her words was not hesitation but calculation. Every second mattered.

“We reinforce all seven access points,” Hermione said, tone clipped. “Full-spectrum alert charms keyed to biological and magical signatures. No entry—magical, non-magical, inferred, disguised, or otherwise—without direct identification. Anyone without double-verification is hexed before they cross the first threshold.”

A murmured affirmation passed through the room. She didn’t acknowledge it.

Her wand moved again, faster this time, tracing a secondary arc through the projection. The glyphs pulsed. Patrol rotations, twelve-minute cycles. Mirror-checks every fourth round. The safehouse would not just be secure—it would breathe security, exhale it like a shield.

“I want this child covered from every angle,” she said. Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. “He is not a symbol. He is not a weapon. He is not a mistake. He is five. And we protect him.”

Someone cleared their throat—soft, deferential. An Auror from the Sussex division. “What about internal threat clearance, ma’am? We’ve had rumors about glyph-breach specialists working from inside—”

“We’ll address it,” she said, already pivoting toward the eastern corridor overlay. “I’ve routed an internal sweep through Discreet Tactics. No one enters the boy’s radius without secondary clearance and a confirmed magical integrity scan. No one.” Her gaze swept the room, sharp enough to cut. “If you so much as think about second-guessing that protocol, leave now.”

No one moved.

She breathed, finally, and turned back to the board. The wards shimmered. A perfect ring.

Only then did she register him—leaning in the corner of the room like shadow stitched into wall. Draco. Unmoving. Unbothered. Out of calculation.

He hadn’t spoken once.

The Aurors began filing out, slow and stiff, as though the air had thickened. The room emptied until only the two of them remained.

The silence was brittle.

He pushed off the wall with the same quiet, deliberate ease she remembered from that first interrogation room. All calm angles and repressed recklessness. He approached the projection, glanced once at the runes, then said, evenly: “He won’t go through the front door.”

Hermione didn’t turn. She anchored the stylus into the desk with more force than necessary.

“He won’t get through at all.”

A beat.

The projection light flickered. The last glyph trembled before it settled.

She didn’t say what she wanted to say.

She didn’t say: I need to believe this.
She didn’t say: I can’t lose another name.
She didn’t say: You shouldn’t have been on that table.
She didn’t say: I’m not ready for what comes after this.

She said nothing.

The room exhaled. Her grip on control did not.

POV: Draco Malfoy

The war room emptied like it had been told to forget itself.

Draco waited until the last rustle of robes receded down the corridor, until the charmed door stilled with a muted hiss and the projection glyphs settled back into their soft, methodical rotation—each pulse of light a beat in the chest of a system pretending it hadn’t just failed. Again.

Hermione stood in the center of it all—motionless, outlined in the projection’s glow like an echo that refused to fade. Her shoulders were rigid, jaw tight, eyes locked on the floating wards as if the shape of safety could be willed into permanence through force of will alone.

He crossed the room without sound. Toward the table.

The projection basin was still active—suspended lineages orbiting in soft arcs above the surface, bloodline glyphs blinking in sequence like a curse drawing breath. He reached out, not for the primary overlay, but the deep registry—embedded four tiers down, woven with old Ministry records and legacy magic even the Unspeakables had started to treat like metaphor.

His fingers tapped the basin’s edge.

A new glyph rose. Gold. Malfoy-Flint-Rosier. Not in a line. In a spiral.

He didn’t speak until it settled.

“You’re looking at it backward.”

Her head turned—slow, careful, like the angle of her gaze might crack if she moved too quickly. She didn’t answer.

He tapped again. Zoomed in. The spiral tightened—threading through three generations, then four. Then further. Past Isidora. Past the last sealed heir.

“You think Tobias is the target,” he said. “He isn’t. He’s the closure point. A tether. But to finish a ritual like this—one bound by erasure, not inheritance—you don’t sever the tip.”

He paused.

“You cut the root.”

Hermione’s brow furrowed. Just slightly. She didn’t ask what he meant. She already knew.

Draco flicked his wand across the glyph. A subsection bloomed: Excised Lines – Malfoy. The entry glowed in soft violet: Magdalena Isidora Malfoy. Revoked, unregistered, 1831. Filed under 'Unsuitable Inheritor.'

He looked up. Her face hadn’t moved. But the air around her had stiffened.

“I fit,” he said quietly. “I’m the last living descendant of a cut branch. Fully public. Fully visible. The only one who hasn’t vanished.”

Hermione’s lips parted—but not to speak. 

He took a step closer to the basin, his voice low, even. Measured in that way his father’s used to be, except this time, there was no mask.

“The circle doesn’t want a child,” he said. “It wants the final name. Not to end the blood. To finalize the forgetting.”

Hermione’s silence broke.

“So you want to offer yourself up?” Her voice sliced through the room like a diagnostic spell. “ Again? ”

He blinked. The projection light caught in the hollow of his throat.

“No.”

But his response landed wrong. Too late. Too soft.

Hermione’s arms folded. Precisely. The way she folded reports she intended to rewrite.

Her voice didn’t rise. It chilled. “You think you can strategize yourself into irrelevance and call it sacrifice,” she said. “You think legacy makes you disposable.”

He held her gaze now. “Legacy makes me relevant.”

“And what does that make me?” she asked.

The question wasn’t fair. Or maybe it was too fair.

He didn’t answer, because the truth was simple. Terrible. Inevitably hers.

She wasn’t the circle’s target. She was the reason he couldn’t let it complete.

Outside, the war room’s wards reset. The projection dimmed. The air between them held its breath.

And Draco finally said, softer than he meant: “It ends with me.”

Hermione stepped forward. Slowly. Deliberately.

“No, it doesn’t.”

And this time, neither of them looked away.

POV: Hermione Granger

The door sealed behind them with a hiss too smooth to be satisfying.
The war room’s projection light bled under the seam for half a breath, then vanished entirely.
Silence followed. Not quiet. Silence. The kind she’d trained to carry like armor. The kind that used to mean clarity.

Hermione stepped into the corridor first.
The Ministry’s lower halls were always cold after midnight—stone slick with chill, air too still, too obedient. The sconces here burned low, firelight thin and amber. Old light. Honest light. The kind that revealed more than it softened.

Draco walked behind her, steps measured, not cautious—just annoyingly composed. The glyphs were still glowing behind her eyes. The circle. The missing name. Tobias. And him.
Always him.
Still trying to outmaneuver survival. Still believing his own absence might fix what someone else broke.

She stopped.
Right in the center of the corridor.

He did too. Just behind her. Close enough to feel the heat of him. Not close enough to lean.

She turned.

“You can’t do this,” she said.

Her voice was low but loud enough to echo off the stone. It cracked in places she didn’t recognize.

“You can’t make yourself a martyr every time the math fits.”

He blinked. Just once. That infuriating stillness again. Like the world could burn and he’d just calculate the radius.

“This isn’t about martyrdom,” he said. “It’s about leverage. He needs the ritual to finish. I give him that. We control the end.”

Hermione laughed.
Bitter. Dry.

“You almost died for a theory last time.”

He said nothing.

Her hand moved before she thought it through—flat-palmed, sharp. She shoved him. Hard. Right against the collarbone.
He staggered half a step back. His eyes widened.

“Don’t you dare make that decision for me again.”

Her voice caught.
Because it was true.

Draco was staring now. His face bare in the flicker of the wall-light. Tired. Still pale from recovery. But listening. Too carefully.

“You can’t offer yourself up again,” she said.
Each word was slower than the last. Her breath stuck between them.
“Not for this.”
A pause.
Then—lower.
“Not for me.”

The silence that followed wasn’t tactical. It wasn’t designed. It just was.

She hated it.

She looked away, pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes like it might stop the heat behind them from spilling. She breathed too hard. Her heart too loud.
It had taken everything in her to hold steady through the war room, through the glyphs, through the theory. Through watching him on that slab.

But this—
This was the one thing her logic didn’t know how to solve.

He stepped forward.
Slow. Measured.

His voice when it came was gentler than she expected.

“You’re not the reason I’d do it.”
A pause.
“But you’re the reason I might not.”

She didn’t move.

She couldn’t.

The corridor flickered again—light trembling along the stone like something remembering how to stay lit.

Hermione let her hand fall. She didn’t look at him. But her voice steadied—barely.

“Then let me be the reason.”

And this time, he didn’t walk away.
This time, neither of them did.

POV: Draco Malfoy

The Ministry balcony held its breath in the hour before dusk.

Draco stood with his forearms braced against the balustrade, the stone cool beneath the bones of his wrists. Below them, the city pulsed—soft golds and bruised violets pooling between chimney stacks and cathedral spires, evening settling into the creases of London like ink on a worn page. Far off, a flock of birds lifted, scattered by some invisible shift. He watched them go, their silhouettes cutting through the light like a warning.

Behind him, the door creaked open. He didn’t turn. He felt her before she stepped into view.

Hermione didn’t speak. She moved to the railing at his side with the kind of silence that wasn’t absence—it was restraint. The tension still radiated from her in slow waves, tight and quiet. Her hands gripped the edge of the railing like it might anchor her to the part of the world that still made sense.

They stood like that for a long time.

The child’s name hung between them, unspoken. Still too soft to call a mission. Still too loud to ignore.

The light caught in the corner of her face—turning her profile sharp, then tender. He didn’t look directly at her. Not yet. It was enough to feel the gravity of her beside him, the warmth of someone who’d crossed lines to bring him back from where he hadn’t known he’d gone.

He exhaled, slow. The wind tasted like iron and dusk.

His voice, when it came, was low. Steady.

“This isn’t about you, Hermione. It never was.”

Her posture stiffened—shoulders braced like a hit was coming.

“But,” he continued, “I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t for you.”

She turned then, not sharply. Just enough to face him. Her mouth parted like a question had formed before she could stop it.

“What does that even mean?”

He kept his eyes on the skyline. Let the rooftops blur into one dark edge. Let the quiet settle.

“It means I used to think survival was the best I could hope for.” He flexed his fingers once against the railing, as if to test the weight of the words. “Get through. Stay clean. Keep quiet. Don’t make things worse. That was enough.”

His mouth twitched—something between memory and regret.

“But then you pulled me back,” he said. “From that room. From whatever I was becoming inside of it.”

She didn’t speak. Didn’t move. But he could feel the space between them shift. A slight recalibration of breath.

“I want more now,” he said. “I don’t want to be a name crossed off in someone else’s ledger. I don’t want to be a seal on a door you have to open alone.”

He turned, finally. 

Met her eyes.

“I don’t want you to carry this by yourself.”

The air went still.

Her face didn’t soften. But the set of her jaw cracked—barely. A line of tension eased at her temple. She studied him, like she always did. Like the truth might be hidden in his pulse, his posture, the grain of his voice. Like she hadn’t already known what he meant, but wanted to hear him say it anyway.

“I’m not here to die for anyone,” he said. “Not even for you.”

She blinked.

“But I’ll stand in front of this with you. Every inch of it.”

And that was the truth.

A steady thing, named and placed and no longer avoidable.

The wind kicked up around them, pulling at the hem of her coat, the edge of his collar. Somewhere below, a street lamp flickered to life. The city was beginning to remember itself again.

She didn’t reply, but her hand brushed the back of his—just once. 

Light. Precise. Enough.

And neither of them moved away.

POV: Omniscient

The city beneath them exhaled into dusk.

Lights bloomed across rooftops in slow succession, like memory finding its rhythm again. The Thames, long-shadowed and silvered in the hour’s last light, cut its silent path through the spine of London. Smoke coiled from distant chimneys. The world, for all its fractures, kept turning.

On the Ministry balcony, two figures stood at the railing.

They did not speak for a long time.

Hermione leaned forward, her hands folded over the stone. Her shoulders had eased—not into peace, but into stillness. The kind that came not from victory, but from decision.

Beside her, Draco watched the sky. Not the city, not the child’s coordinates mapping themselves out in hidden wards, not the runes he could feel flaring into place along the horizon like scars burned into starlight.

The sky.

The place where things left and didn’t come back.

The wind threaded between them. A cool, tentative thing.

Hermione said, quietly, voice calm, “If you go in, I go with you.”

She didn’t look at him.

Draco didn’t answer right away. His hands flexed against the railing, the faintest shimmer of pressure still limning his skin where the last ritual had tried to claim him. His magic was returning, uneven and uncertain. Like him.

“That wasn’t the plan,” he said.

Hermione turned slightly—just enough for him to see her mouth, the set of it, the curve that had long since stopped asking permission.

“Plans change,” she said. “People do, too.”

And there it was.

No terms. No conditions. No strategy.

Just her.

A hand on the table. A life not offered, but aligned.

He didn’t reply. Not aloud.

But something in him settled, deep and low, the way soil accepts a seed: not with certainty, but with space.

They stayed like that—two silhouettes carved against a darkening sky, close but not touching, framed by the flicker of protective glyphs igniting across the far horizon. The wards flared into life like constellations rearranged. Tobias Whitcombe was safe. For now.

Below them, the Ministry’s lights guttered and pulsed. The clock tower chimed the hour—once, slow and precise, echoing off stone and into shadow.

Hermione’s hair lifted in the wind. Draco turned slightly toward her, but didn’t close the space between.

They didn’t need to.

The choice had already been made. Not in gesture. Not in speech. In staying. In standing side by side at the edge of a war they hadn’t asked for—one step toward each other, nothing more.

The moment held.

And in the hush that followed, the runes overhead hummed.

Still lit.

Still holding.

Chapter Text

POV: Draco Malfoy

The door sealed behind him with the sound of a decision locking into place.

The chamber had no windows, no clocks. No time to be marked, no sky to observe. Just stone and steel and the quiet hum of reinforced containment wards. The air here smelled of old magic and long compromises—burned parchment, iron filings, powdered bone. It reminded Draco of the war in ways he didn’t allow himself to name.

Selwyn stood at the far end of the room, spine straight, robes pressed to unnatural perfection. He didn’t turn as Draco entered. The senior tactical strategist was already seated at the long table, her fingers laced over an open scroll, her expression carved from something colder than policy.

Draco stepped forward with the quiet discipline of someone who had rehearsed the price. He stopped two paces from the table. “You’ve seen the revised ritual schematic.”

Selwyn’s eyes flicked toward him. The strategist did not move.

“We’ve seen it,” she said.

“And?”

“You’re suggesting we complete it,” Selwyn said. “Intentionally.”

Draco nodded. “One step from the center. One breath before the glyph locks. We let him think he’s won.”

The strategist arched one brow. “And what exactly do you propose we use as the final tether?”

He didn’t answer.

He simply reached into his coat and slid the parchment across the table—annotated, marked with a spiral of bloodline connections traced backward from Tobias Whitcombe to Isidora Malfoy and beyond. The lines curved in on themselves with quiet finality.

The strategist’s gaze dropped to the center glyph. Her silence lengthened.

“You’re the root,” she said.

Draco nodded once. “I close the circle.”

Selwyn exhaled, sharp and slow. He reached for the chair beside the table but didn’t sit. “You realize what this means.”

“Yes.”

“You disappear from the map. From the protections. From her.”

His voice didn’t carry weight until the last word. Then it landed like stone dropped into a wound.

Draco didn’t look away.

“She wouldn’t agree,” Selwyn added.

“She doesn’t get a vote,” Draco said.

The strategist slid the parchment forward. “This is a kill-point plan. You understand that. You give him what he needs, and we gamble on containment catching him the moment he drops his guard.”

“If it fails,” she added, voice colder now, “it won’t end. It’ll trigger cascade activation across every connected glyph. It won’t just fail—it’ll spread.”

“We don’t gamble,” Draco said. “You place the containment spell directly into the ritual structure. Use the glyph as a trigger. His own spell becomes the trap.”

Selwyn studied him. There was something in his gaze that wasn’t approval—but wasn’t dismissal either. Just the resignation of a man who had made this choice before. In other rooms. With other names.

He turned to the strategist. She gave the barest nod.

Selwyn reached into his robe. Produced the operation parchment. He unrolled it with bureaucratic finality.

The room smelled more like ash than before.

Draco stepped forward, took the quill, and signed. His name burned into the paper in red ink. The line shimmered, sealed, and vanished.

The containment glyph embedded in the lower corner flared. 

Operation 47-B: Decoy Protocol.
Approved.

His hand shook as he set the quill down. Not from fear nor regret. From knowing. From the weight of one truth that hadn’t left him since the glyph burned beneath his skin.

“She’ll hate me,” he muttered, voice low, not quite to them.

Selwyn’s eyes stayed on the parchment.

“That’s better than losing you.”

Draco didn’t reply. He turned toward the door. The corridor beyond would be empty now. Hermione would still be upstairs, triple-checking field sigils. Mapping runes. Making herself the line between the world and its own mistakes.

He’d stepped outside it. For her. And without her. The door closed behind him. Quietly. With Irrevocability.

The corridor outside the Floo terminal was stripped of ceremony. Simply stone walls washed in the pale green glow of containment magic, their seams threaded with silence and sweat. The kind of silence meant to be unnoticed. Functional. Clean.

Draco moved quickly.

His boots made no sound against the polished flagstone. His robes—neutral, field-issue, reinforced with tactile sigils stitched beneath the lining—hung loose around his shoulders, designed to look forgettable. He was all restraint. Every piece of him layered and efficient, stripped of anything that could betray intent.

At his wrist, his wand glinted beneath the fold of his sleeve—braced with a containment band, pressure-calibrated to activate on movement, not speech. He hadn’t cast with it yet. He didn’t know how steady it would be.

His magic throbbed low beneath his skin. Unsteady. But present.

The glyphs on his forearms shimmered faintly—ward-reactive ink pressed into skin, built to echo the exact moment a ritual trigger flared. They glowed against the bone, soft and sharp, like bruises that had learned to read.

The final ward loomed ahead.

A pale, translucent curtain of green-blue magic, woven so tight it hummed at the edge of hearing. It wasn’t designed to keep things in. It was designed to mark what left. A tether. His signature would pass through the barrier and embed into the Ministry’s tracking net—one last recorded line.

Draco paused just before the edge.

He lifted his hand. Palmed the last rune-seal. A flicker passed over his skin as the tether initialized. A soft click sounded from the wall. The kind of sound bureaucrats never noticed, but soldiers always did.

His breath hitched—brief, silent. He could almost hear her voice in the space beside him, the shape of what she would say if she were here. But she wasn’t. He hadn’t let her be. Every instinct screamed that he should be doing this with her. Every part of him twisted against the choice.

But he’d already made it.

He stepped forward.

And then—

“Don’t you dare walk through that ward.”

The words landed like a curse. 

Commanding.

He froze.

Her voice came from behind him, steady but tight, each syllable clipped like it had been cut from something breaking.

He turned.

Hermione stood at the mouth of the corridor, framed by the green glow. Her hair was a mess, her robes half-buttoned, her wand gripped low at her side like she’d sprinted through three floors and hadn’t bothered to pretend otherwise.

The look on her face wasn’t anger.

It was betrayal.

And that was worse.

Draco didn’t speak.

The tether behind him glowed brighter, sensing the spell signature in flux.

Hermione’s eyes dropped to the glyphs on his skin—his wrists, the base of his neck, the ward-seal at his temple.

“You went to Selwyn,” she said. 

Still, he didn’t speak. He didn’t move.

“Without me,” she added, and this time, the words caught. Just barely. “You signed it.”

He swallowed. His throat scraped dry.

“I had to,” he said quietly.

She shook her head once. Disbelief carved into the motion.

“No,” she said. “You wanted to.”

He didn’t argue. He couldn’t. Because she wasn’t wrong. Not entirely.

“I couldn’t ask you to agree to this,” he said.

“I already did,” she snapped. “That night on the balcony. When I said I’d go with you.”

He stepped toward her. One pace. Careful.

“This isn’t about trust,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” she shot back. “It always is.”

The tether behind him pulsed again, a soft blue warning in the corner of his vision. The system wanted resolution. Identification. A destination to send the last trace.

But all Draco saw was her.

Her shoulders drawn tight, as if holding herself together with sheer fury. Her chest rising too fast. Her eyes bright with something she hadn’t let herself feel until now.

She looked hurt.

He had expected anger. Resistance. Even silence. He hadn’t expected the truth to look like this. And still—he had no plan to change it.

“You did this behind my back.”

Her voice was steady. But barely.

He stopped moving.

“I had to,” he said. “You would’ve tried to stop me.”

“Because I should’ve.”

She wasn’t yelling. That would’ve been easier. She was white-hot fury held inside glass—every breath a fracture, every word one heartbeat from breaking.

They stood inches apart.

Too close for distance.
Too far for comfort.

Draco swallowed. His mouth tasted like the tether’s residue—metallic, unfinished.

“You said knowledge is power,” he said. “Well. Let him test mine.”

Her eyes flickered. That was all. A single crack in the mask.

Then she stepped closer. Not to touch. To cut the space down until there was nothing left between them but the truth they’d both been avoiding.

“You don’t get to make yourself the offering.”

Her voice was quiet. But it shook. The way the earth shakes before a structure falls.

He stared at her. Long enough to see the pulse in her throat. Long enough to realize his own hands had curled into fists.

“Then stop me,” he said.

There was a beat of silence.

The kind that doesn’t end.
The kind that waits.

He could feel it in the air—thick with magic and memory and everything they’d carried in the dark. The war. The bloodlines. The glyphs etched into skin like prophecy.

But what hung between them now wasn’t ritual.

It was choice.

And neither of them knew how to make it.

Her breath hitched. Just once.

But she didn’t move.

And neither did he.

The silence fell with a kind of finality he’d felt only once before—in the white room, strapped to stone, when even his breath had seemed borrowed.

But this wasn’t that.
This was worse.
Because here, he was free to move and still didn’t know how.

Hermione stood in front of him, eyes locked on his with the steadiness of someone who had trained her whole life not to flinch. But her hands betrayed her. Clenched tight at her sides, trembling with every word she hadn’t let herself say.

And then she did.

“If this is the last time I see you,” she said, “I’ll never forgive you.”

The words just fell—

Blunt.

Undeniable.
Like fact sharpened into consequence.

She looked down. Not away—never that. Just enough to let the weight of it settle.

Then, quieter: “Or myself.”

Draco felt the impact.
Not sharp. Deep.
Somewhere in the hollowed-out part of his chest that had learned to live without names like mercy, like home.

He could have said something to deflect it.
Something distant. Something precise.
She would expect that. Might even welcome it.

He didn’t.

Instead, slowly, without strategy or shield, he reached out.

His fingers found hers—cold and rigid—and brushed lightly across her knuckles. A touch so careful it wasn’t contact, mere suggestion of it.

And in the space where cruelty could’ve fit, where fear would have been easier, he let the truth live.

“Then you’d better come get me.”

His voice didn’t shake, but it didn’t hide either.

It was a dare.
A plea.
A promise.

The hallway didn’t move. Neither did she. But the world between them shifted—barely, quietly. Like something impossible had tilted. For the first time since the seal flared red and the tether snapped, Draco Malfoy allowed himself to hope.

Not for survival.

For her.

The ward glowed faintly ahead—still open, still waiting.

Draco moved toward it in silence, the echo of her words stretched thin behind him like a tether not yet severed. His feet found their rhythm automatically—measured, deliberate, the kind of cadence that said: I’m already gone. But every step felt heavier than it should have from knowing.

The air in the corridor had shifted. Tighter now. More present. As if the Ministry itself was holding its breath.

He stopped just short of the sigil line.

Reached for the glyph etched at his wrist—the one keyed to his magical signature, encoded for single-use passage. He traced the activation sequence with a flick of his wand, the gesture familiar and irreversible. The sigil bloomed gold beneath his palm.

The wall in front of him shimmered. A boundary. The magic hummed low, waiting to take him where no one could follow without cost.

Behind him, the silence held.

Hermione hadn’t spoken again.

He could feel her. Still rooted at the edge of the corridor. Still holding the pieces of the moment between her fingers like glass—cutting, gleaming, too fragile to name. He didn’t turn.

He raised his hand to the rune.

The tether lock engaged.

A soft pulse flared across the room. The tracking glyph lit the space like a heartbeat made visible, marking his departure in the system that had nearly forgotten him once already. He took one step into the threshold. 

Then, only then, did he glance back.

She was still standing where he’d left her.

Still unmoving.

But her hand had curled around her wand—tight, white-knuckled, not drawn, but ready. Her face was unreadable. But her breath had shortened. He could see it, small and quick, like the body remembering how to prepare for something it hadn’t chosen.

Their eyes met for the space of a single beat.

Everything he might have said was there—in the way he looked at her, and didn’t look away.

Then the ward took him.

The glow consumed his shape in a blink of light, gold folding in on itself like silence closing a door. The sigil dimmed behind him. The corridor returned to stillness.

And Hermione?

She didn’t move. 

But then—slowly, precisely—she turned.

And started walking.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

The moment the ward registered a breach, Hermione was already running.

The lift hadn’t even stopped fully when she shoved the grate open with both hands, boots striking the marble with enough force to leave scuffs—she didn’t care. Down the hall, past the Atrium, past three startled security charms that flared at her magic and had the sense not to argue. Her robes flared like a second warning.

The door to the Monitoring Chamber groaned open under her spell before her palm touched the latch.

Three technicians turned sharply. None of them had time to speak.

“Pull the private overlay on signature alpha-seven-three-Malfoy ,” Hermione snapped. “He’s crossed the outer ward.”

The nearest technician—a fresh transfer from Vector’s team, face pale and far too young—stammered. “We—we didn’t log a departure.”

“You wouldn’t have,” she said. “It’s locked to an Unspeakable seal.”

Her wand was already out. She flicked it toward the central glyph array with ruthless precision. The projection dome flared to life, tracing lines of magical telemetry across the Ministry grid—faint gold at first, then blue, then suddenly—

Red.

It pulsed hard. Fast. Erratic.

There. Top right quadrant. Westward trajectory.

Hermione’s breath hitched. She forced it still.

The sigil she’d drawn—stitched into his shoulder with a whisper of starlight ink, masked beneath healing salve the night he came back broken and silent—was glowing like it had been set alight.

Red. Not for death. For deviation.

She whispered, “No.”

The projection flickered. Coordinates sharpened: Warehouse perimeter, north of Bristol.

Hermione’s eyes narrowed.

Too clean. Too stable.

She leaned forward, wand lifting to freeze the data frame mid-shift. “That’s not a field site. There’s no secondary glyph pattern. No surveillance deviation. No containment bleed.”

One of the technicians opened his mouth. She didn’t let him speak.

“It’s a decoy.”

The tether stuttered once on the map—glitched, reset. The trajectory jolted off-course like a string caught in wind.

Her stomach dropped. She knew the signature. The shape of that pull.

“Displacement sigil,” she said, voice sharpening to the shape of panic she refused to show. “He was redirected mid-jump.”

The boy at the console turned white. “We—we can try to isolate the rebound—”

“No.”

Hermione spun on her heel.

The glyph overlay was still pulsing red behind her. But she was already gone—darting to the back of the chamber, where the personal transit runes lay coiled like coiled wires, anchored to sealed destination vectors. Most weren’t calibrated for single-person deployment. None were sanctioned for chase pursuit.

She didn’t care. She slapped her hand against the override rune. The pattern flared beneath her palm. Her own signature surged into the stone—so fast, so fierce, the wall cracked.

“You’re not leaving me behind again,” she whispered.

The light consumed her in a blink. The chamber fell silent—except for the flickering red sigil still flaring over the empty grid.

Malfoy: in motion.
Hermione: after him.

Neither of them were where they were meant to be. But both exactly where they had to go.

She hit the ground hard.

Her landing cracked through the rusted air like a fracture in steel, and she landed mid-spin, wand raised, already casting the containment buffer before her boots met the floor. The warehouse roared around her—empty and echoing, the vast ribcage of a forgotten Muggle structure long surrendered to mold and rust.

But the air—

The air burned.

Hermione staggered forward, one forearm lifted against the smoke that clung low and chemical, thick with potion residue and too many stabilizers. The stink of it curled in her throat: fluxweed rot, scorched mistletoe, and something sharper—unfinished.

She didn't need analysis to name the work.
She could taste it.

Draco had been here.

“Scindo Revela,” she whispered.

The spell bloomed wide, a dome of pale blue arcing out from her wand in clean, spiraling pulses. As it spread, the space shimmered—caught, paused, then unraveled.

Illusion matrix.

The air warped.

A flicker. Then another.

And there he was.

Draco.

Tied to a chair in the center of the room, head slumped, breath shallow. The image stuttered once, looped, then began again. A visual echo. Convincing—until it wasn’t.

Her jaw clenched. She moved forward.

The flicker stuttered again—too clean. Too even. There was no core bleed in the bindings. No sigil shadow.

It wasn’t him. It never had been.

She pressed two fingers to the floor, just outside the illusion ring. The steel beneath was scorched in a perfect circle—burned through with glyphs that had already faded. Transportation glyphs. Two-layered. Timed.

The air still held warmth.

At the center of the floor, beneath the image of Draco’s looping form, sat a single glass flask.

Empty.

She stepped toward it slowly. Crouched. Touched the lip. Still warm. Fresh.

Hermione inhaled through her teeth. “He was here.”

But only briefly. A holding space. A false frame. A ritual echo designed not to trap—but to stall. To distract. She stood too quickly. For a single beat, gravity forgot its place.

“No,” she said, to no one. To the warehouse. To the tether still flaring behind her ribs.

She dropped to her knees again, braced her hand flat against the scorched floor, and whispered the only thing she had left: “Find him.”

The desperation locator was never meant to be cast in public field sites. It pulled too much from the caster, required intention braided with memory. But she didn’t hesitate.

The sigil at her wrist flared red—violently, immediately.

Not forward.

Down.

Far down.

Her breath caught.

He was underground.

She rose slowly, her hands smeared with ash. Her wand shook from unadulterated retribution. They’d moved him while she was in the sky. And she was behind. She turned once, took in the ruin, the smoke, the mimicry of failure—then vanished in a twist of flame-bright light.

Chasing him again.

If he was the offering—then she would be the interruption.

She split through the coordinates on instinct alone.

The apparation nearly tore her sideways—one of the stabilizing glyphs collapsed mid-jump, slashing her into a field of interference so dense she felt the skin peel from the inside of her wards. It was a miracle she didn’t splinch. Her left boot hit the floor with a sickening crunch, her shoulder slammed into a wall of stone that pulsed like a heartbeat, and the rest of her followed, breathless, shaking, burning.

She was through.

And it was already too late.

The chamber reeked of cold fire and sterilized ruin—metal and magic braided into something wholly wrong. Bioluminescent potion tubes coiled along the ceiling like veins, dripping in slow intervals into shallow stone basins lined with sigils that pulsed an eerie, off-rhythm glow.

It wasn’t a room.
It was a conversion engine.
And in the center of it, bound to a surgical rig bolted to the floor, was Draco.

Hermione froze mid-step. Her wand lowered before she realized it.

He was strapped upright—limbs held firm by steel-and-lead bindings etched with old blood runes, the kind built not just to restrain magic, but to smother it. His shirt had been sliced open at the collar and hung loose, clinging to his sweat-damp skin. A lattice of glowing lines wound across his chest in delicate, lethal symmetry—sigils drawn in alchemical formulae she recognized from outlawed healing texts and reversed ritual theory.

A conversion array—no longer theory, no longer observation.

This one was built to activate.

Her eyes dropped to his arm—pinned straight at the elbow, IV embedded into the bend, the line snaking upward from a ceramic infusion bowl that shimmered with thick, iridescent potion. It was already inside him. The conversion compound. Stabilized. Absorbing.

“Oh, God—”

His wand—still holstered at his hip—jerked once.

Sparked.

Flickered out.

She took a breath. It didn’t reach her lungs.

Draco’s head sagged forward, chin dropping against his chest. But his eyes fluttered—once, twice—barely open, flickering like a dying star behind a fogged pane of glass. His mouth was parted. His lips cracked. He was breathing, only just.

Her feet moved.

She didn’t remember deciding to cross the room. Only that the world blurred sideways as she reached for him—one hand on the rig, the other catching his shoulder. The heat of his skin was wrong. 

Absent.

The glow of the sigils deepened in hue—amber to red, red to violet. One line pulsed down his sternum, slow and deliberate, like a final command sent into a closing system.

She pressed both palms flat against wards as if pressure alone could push it back.

“Draco.” Her voice fractured in her throat. “Draco—look at me.”

He didn’t.

But something in him shifted—some fragment of self flinched toward the sound of her.

The conversion formula lit again, brighter now. Near his ribs, one glyph cracked, bleeding light.

“Please,” she whispered, “you stay with me.”

The infusion bowl trembled. Another drop fell into the line.

She reached for her wand, cast the first severing charm she could remember— Exsurgat vena —targeting the potion line at his arm. The spell fizzled on impact, deflected by a shield matrix embedded in the alchemical warding.

It had been built to complete something with him.

Her magic couldn’t breach it. She looked up—his face now slack at the edges, his magic pulled so thin it was more echo than presence. His jaw twitched. One hand jerked against the restraints.

“I found you,” she yells. “I’m here now.”

And still, the sigils pulsed, like a countdown.

She landed hard, knees nearly buckling under the weight of the spell she'd overcasted to tear through the coordinates. Smoke met her first. Bitter. Chemical. Still clinging to the seams of the air like it hadn’t yet learned he was gone.

Hermione lifted her head, already casting a shield against the residue choking the edge of her lungs. Her eyes watered, not from grief—yet—but from the cloying sting of ashroot and stabilizer decay. She stepped forward.

The warehouse loomed around her like a stage long since struck—props left behind, but no players in sight. Beams twisted with sigils burned halfway through. The spellshock shimmer of a recently-used site.

But not active. Not alive. Not Draco.

She scanned left, her wand cutting through smoke like a scalpel. Her heartbeat stayed steady only because she ordered it to.

“Come on,” she muttered. “Come on, don’t let me be—”

A flicker sparked in the air ahead.

Her stomach dropped.

She stepped into the illusion without slowing.

And there he was.

But not him. Not anymore.

It happened in the space between spells. Between breaths.

The sigils lit up all at once—flaring from the steel beams, from the floor beneath Draco’s feet, from the air itself—with purpose. A containment wall surged into place—transparent but humming, thick with warded resistance, so dense she could feel the structure of it pressing against her magic like fingers to the throat.

She slammed into it with full momentum.

The collision stole her breath. Her shoulder cracked against the invisible barrier, her wand rebounded from the shield with a hiss of displaced energy. Sparks sprayed from the contact point. She stumbled back, eyes wild, lungs refusing to cooperate.

“No,” she rasped. “No—no— no .”

And then he stepped forward.

From the shadows behind the rig, the Squib emerged—not cloaked, not masked. No wand in hand. No defensive posture. Just a man who had rewritten magic with nothing but time, resentment, and theory. Calm. Measured. A scholar of annihilation.

He looked at Draco, whose head had slumped forward in the rig, chest still glowing with pulsing sigils now dimming to violet. Sinking. As if being drawn inward .

Then he looked at her.

And spoke as if stating fact in a lecture hall.

“Now you’ll know what it’s like to watch power dissolve.”

The words landed like inevitability.

She stopped.
Her breath caught—sharp, ragged.
Not from fear.
Understanding, fast and brutal.

Her knees buckled.
Just for a second.
The part of her that had held through fire, through silence, through every impossible policy collapse—
—cracked.

“No,” she whispered.
Like a prayer that already knew it was too late.

And then she screamed his name.

“Draco!”

The air pulsed around her.

Her wand snapped upward, and the magic that ripped through her was not sanctioned, not elegant, not safe.

It was grief .
It was devotion .
It was her .

“ Frangere Totem! ”

The breaking spell detonated from her wand tip with a scream of stone and air. The entire chamber shuddered . Pipes above burst in arcs of steam. The containment wall trembled, sigils sparking like dying stars. The Squib staggered—not much, but enough. A crack split across the rig’s foundation.

She threw herself forward again, this time not with strategy, but with fire.

The ward held.

She cast again.

Harder.

Wilder.

Her voice tore down the center. Her hands burned. The barrier blistered the skin from her palms, but she didn’t stop. Couldn’t. She pressed into it with every ounce of magic she still owned—more than she should have had, more than the room could contain.

And it broke .

She collapsed through the threshold in a wash of smoke and boiling light. Fell to her knees beside him, choking on air that wasn’t air, eyes already searching—

His chest moved.

Barely.

She touched his face—slick with sweat, too pale, the sigils still glowing weakly across his skin like a dying constellation. His pulse under her fingers was erratic. Fast. Slowing. Flickering.

His magic—

It was there.

But fractured. Thin. A thread, not a presence. She felt it with her own, brushed against it like a second language barely spoken. Not gone. Not yet.

“Draco,” she whispered, her voice wrecked, her hands raw and bloodied. “Stay. Stay. ”

He didn’t speak.

Just breathed—shallow, but real.

It didn’t soothe her.

Or absolve anything.

But it stoked the rage she held close.

She lifted her head slowly. The Squib stood where she’d left him—unflinching. Unarmed. Not smug. Just sure .

For the first time since it all began, Hermione Granger didn’t want to protect the world. 

She wanted to burn it down.

The chamber trembled with aftermath. Smoke clung to the floor in slow spirals. The potion tubes above hissed quietly, broken lines leaking their final drops into shattered bowls, sigils blinking in half-finished loops. The rig moaned under its own weight, one binding strap hanging uselessly, singed at the buckle.

Hermione knelt in the ruin of it all, her body curled around his like a shield.

Draco’s breathing was shallow, ragged, as if each inhale scraped against glass, but it was his. Still his.

She pressed one hand against his chest, her palm just above the jagged constellation of fading glyphs. The lines still glowed, dim and twitching, but their pattern had fractured. Their center had failed to lock. She could feel it—like a spell arrested mid-incantation, its meaning undone before it could scar.

Her magic surged—focused.

She slid her wand into the space between two ribs and whispered, “ Contineo fluxum. ”

A golden arc expanded outward, a containment field curving over his body like a dome of breath. It halted the potion’s spread—froze the alchemical current in its half-pulsed descent. The lines of the conversion matrix guttered once. Then stilled.

Draco flinched beneath her.

His lashes twitched. A breath hitched.

And then, his eyes opened.

They were unfocused at first, blown wide and glassy, ringed with exhaustion that had settled into the bone. He stared upward, as though his mind had forgotten what it meant to belong inside his body.

Until they found her.

He blinked again, slower this time. Recognition crawled in behind the pain. His mouth parted, a breath forming a shape—her name, or maybe a question.

She shook her head.

“Save it,” she whispered, her hand sliding up to his cheek. “I’m here.”

He didn’t try again. He just exhaled. A tremor ran through him. Then stillness.

She tucked his head into her lap, cradled him there with the gentleness of someone who had run out of ways to scream. Her fingers moved through his hair—slow, anchoring, steady. She could still feel the flicker of his magic beneath her skin. Weak, but present.

He was here.
He was still here.

Across the chamber, the Squib watched.

He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t spoken. The light from the shattered sigils flickered across his face—carving him in halflight. And for the first time, he looked uncertain .

Still standing. But his certainty had cracked.

Hermione turned to him, not rising, not shifting her grip on Draco for even a breath. Her eyes locked on his, sharp and bare and incandescent with something beyond anger.

“No,” she said.

One word. A warning. A vow.

“He’s not your symbol.”

She adjusted her grip on Draco’s shoulders, pulled him closer against her.

“He’s mine. ”

The words landed. Final. Irrevocable.

The Squib said nothing. But something shifted, barely. That practiced composure faltered, the edges of certainty bending like a structure just beginning to lean.

The ritual had taken something. She could feel it.
Draco’s magic was altered, his pulse staggered. A piece of him dimmed.

But not all.

Not enough.

And she would not let it be more.

The containment field shimmered above them, golden and trembling, her own body the last barrier between him and the unfinished spell still bleeding into the walls.

The chamber walls wept with residue, magic bleeding like ink across stone, dripping in uneven lines, runes unspooling, the geometry of violence unraveling at last.

Hermione stayed where she was, Draco’s head in her lap, his breath warm at her wrist.

Waiting for reckoning.

Chapter Text

POV: Hermione Granger

Draco was slipping.

His pulse was erratic beneath her fingers. The spell lattice etched across his skin pulsed in broken tempo, alchemical glyphs twitching toward completion. The potion line at his arm pulsed a final time, glowing violet now, the color of closing.

Hermione moved.

Fast. Precise. Terrified.

She reached into her satchel with shaking fingers, pulled the ritual scalpel she’d sworn she’d never use outside of theory. The steel gleamed too cleanly in the chaos. She drew it across her palm without flinching. The cut was shallow, but deliberate—controlled pain. Her blood welled quickly, bright and sure.

She pressed her hand to the floor.

The stone hissed.

Sigils bloomed beneath her fingers in red—not drawn, but demanded. They flared to life, wrapping her arm in light, feeding on her will-like breath. The ground buckled as the spell breaking rite took shape.

She hadn’t cast this before.
No one had.

“ Verum Fractum, ” she whispered, voice hoarse.
Break what lies beneath.

The glyphs exploded outward—veins of spellfire lashing through the chamber. They raced toward the rig, toward Draco’s body still braced in pain, still upright, barely breathing.

The potion lines reared like snakes. They lifted from the floor, writhing, alive now in panic. The magic in them knew it was being undone.

Draco arched against the restraints, a choked sound breaking from his throat. His wand sparked again—once—then died.

“ Fractum radix. ”

Her voice cracked.

The air snapped.

Runes on the walls began to shatter—one by one, their containment matrices screaming as they broke. The pressure in the room thickened to suffocation. The temperature dropped. The smell of ozone bled into her throat.

Her wand sang in her hand, too loud, too sharp, magic whipping from its core in wild, feral arcs. It wasn’t sympathy. It wasn’t cooperation. It was violence.

She didn’t care.

“He’s not yours to unmake,” she said, louder now—her voice a blade, her blood still spilling into the sigil. “You don’t get to decide how this ends.”

Her magic struck the potion rig like a thrown star.

The conversion line burst, glass shattering, liquid cascading down Draco’s arm in a hiss of smoke. The sigils across his chest spasmed. One flared white. Another cracked. The rest sputtered like dying stars.

He gasped, loud and sharp, his body seizing once before collapsing limp in the restraints.

She caught him before his head hit the stone.

The conversion engine stuttered.

Once.

Then again.

Its core sigils blinked wildly, out of sync, as if unsure whether to finish the spell or erase it.

A low hum deepened into a groan, metal grinding against magic, the structure buckling beneath Hermione’s last glyph.

Cracks spidered through the base of the rig.

Potion tubes burst. A rune cracked open and bled light.

The circle flared once—too bright—

—and died.

The conversion engine collapsed inward, sputtering sparks, its heart silenced.

The ritual was broken.

Hermione sank to the ground, cradling him, her blood still dripping, the smell of ruin clinging to her skin.

But Draco was breathing.

And that was enough.

POV: Draco Malfoy

The world was breathless.

Not still— emptied .
As if something had exhaled and forgotten to return.

Draco hovered inside that breath, drifting in a chamber that no longer had edges, no longer obeyed shape. Sound was a memory, and light had unspooled into colorless static. He felt the floor beneath him only through pressure—metal straps across wrists, ribs, ankles—points of contact rather than weight. His body was suspended in ruin.

And his magic—

His magic was leaving.

Piece by piece.

It slipped through him like smoke through cracked glass, whispering along the channels of his core, retreating from the spine, the throat, the wrist. He could feel its absence like a phantom limb. The hollow ache where power used to hum. The wrongness of stillness in the bones.

Something flashed behind his eyes.

The Squib’s face.
Unbothered. Knowing.
He wasn’t gloating. That would have been easier.
He was certain .

Another flash.
His father—
That same look. Different meaning.
Control as inheritance. A sneer carved into bone.
“Power without control is chaos.”

Then—
A girl laughing.

Soft. Wild.
Dark hair breaking from a braid, fingers pointing at a constellation only she could name.

Isidora?
Hermione?
The memory couldn’t decide. He didn’t know if it mattered.

His wand shifted at his hip, still holstered. Useless now.
He tried to lift his fingers. Couldn’t.

The wand slipped free.

Fell.

He heard it. That, he heard.

The crack .
The unmistakable shatter.

It echoed like a spell that had never been cast.

And then—

Her.

Through the haze, through the ruptured edges of his vision, she broke through. Gravity .

Hermione.

Her magic bled into the room like a second rupture—hot, wild, angry . Glyphs burst. Metal groaned. The walls screamed. She moved like she was remaking the space with her will alone.

Her hand slammed into the runes. Her voice cracked open spells she should never have known. Blood streamed down her arm. Her wand hummed at a frequency that made the chamber shudder.

She was tearing the room apart.

For him .

She’s going to destroy herself for me.

The thought didn’t rise like realization. It emerged like a fact—distant, sharp, helpless.

His mouth opened. He meant to stop her. To say her name. To warn her. But all that escaped was breath.

Still—her name lived behind his eyes, over and over, louder than the crumbling of stone, louder than the ache in his bones.

Hermione. Hermione. Hermione.

He felt her hands on his chest. Heard her say stay.
Felt her hold the spell together with her body.

Felt himself fading.

Her name tethered him.
A thread pulled taut.
Fraying—
But unbroken.

POV: Hermione Granger

The matrix was breaking.

It cracked like frost beneath skin, quiet and devastating. The sigils along the rig pulsed in erratic stutters, each flicker a skipped heartbeat in the ritual’s anatomy. The conversion array, once so precise in its awful elegance, now faltered like a dying engine. Glyphs unraveled mid-loop. The alchemical hum stuttered into silence.

But the potion—
The potion was still moving .

Hermione’s eyes locked on the glowing line feeding into Draco’s arm, its light dimmer now, but steady. A single thread of ruin still alive, still threaded through his core like a whispered command not yet rescinded.

She had seconds.

She gripped her wand with both hands, blood smearing down the handle. Her magic was thinned, fraying at the edges, pulsing like an overdrawn muscle—but she called it anyway. Forced it into coherence.

Memory and intention snapped together in her mind:
The counter-glyph she’d studied only in fragments.
The untested theory woven through half-erased war documents.
A spell not for breaking, but stripping .
Undoing .

Her voice was hoarse, raw from shouting, but it rose now, steady, “Rescindere radix.”

Light screamed from her wand.

A thread of violet, so dark it bordered on black, lashed through the air, spiraling toward Draco’s chest like a blade built of consequence. The spell caught where the conversion line met his core, locked there, and pulled .

The glyphs writhed. The potion convulsed.

Draco jerked, his body lifting off the rig by sheer force of contact, his back arched, eyes fluttering open just long enough to see her .

Then the spell tore the thread from his chest.

The backlash struck her like a curse.

Magic slammed into her sternum, caving in breath, spine, bone. She flew backward—cracking against the far wall with a sickening, echoing thud . The stone split. Her body dropped limp to the ground.

Silence followed.

True silence.

Only the ache of something undone.

Hermione blinked, the room tilting sideways. She couldn’t feel her wand. Could barely feel her hands. But she saw him, still in the rig. His head bowed. His chest moving.

Breathing.

She rolled onto her side. Crawled.

Every joint screamed. Her limbs trembled. Her magic flickered like a dying flame, but she moved . Across broken stone and shattered sigils, across the wreckage they’d both been nearly buried in.

When she reached him, she let her forehead press to the side of his knee. Just once.

Then, hands fumbling and clumsy,she reached for the restraints.

The first buckle gave.

Then the second.

Blood smeared her palms. Her shoulder screamed with each movement. But she worked. Unfastening him piece by piece. Until, finally, he slumped forward—heavy and unconscious—but free.

She caught him. Barely.

His body curled against hers as she slid to the ground, his weight braced across her chest, her hand still pressed to the faint, dim thrum of magic beneath his ribs.

Her fingers tangled in the fabric at his chest.
She couldn’t breathe.
Not because of the smoke.
Because she had gotten to him—
And it still hadn’t been enough.

She pressed her mouth to his shoulder, her voice breaking open.
“I should’ve been faster.”

It wasn’t guilt.
It was grief disguised as proximity.

It was there.

Faint.
Fractured.
But there .

She closed her eyes.

Collapsed into the ruin of it all.

And held on.

POV: Draco Malfoy

The first thing he tasted was blood.
Iron. Smoke. Ash. Memory.

It filled the back of his throat like a name half-swallowed, thick and metallic, too familiar to flinch from. He turned his head—barely. The motion scraped against something warm. Soft. Someone.

Hermione.

Her fingers were on his chest. Just over his heart, spread wide like she had once tried to keep something in. Or pull something back. Her palm was slick—dried blood, not all his. He could feel the tremble beneath her skin, not from fear, but exhaustion.

He blinked once. The chamber swam.

The ceiling above him was cracked open, glyphs smudged and sputtering, their language lost in the wreckage. The scent of burnt potion hung in the air like grief—cloying, chemical, absolute.

His magic stirred. Barely. A flicker, dull and distant, like breath held too long. His core was there—but not whole. Fractured. Rewired. Still his. But smaller. He tried to move. Couldn’t. Didn’t need to.

Her breath was near his temple, too steady to be calm.

“Granger,” he murmured.

It barely made sound. More shape than speech.

Her hand moved, just a fraction. Pressed harder. Answer enough.

“You didn’t let me burn,” he whispered.

The words slipped out unformed. Not accusation. Not gratitude. Just truth, soft and ruined, rising from the wreckage of what he used to be.