Chapter Text
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” — Jeremiah 17:9
Harry liked his office best in the early hours, when the castle hadn’t quite decided to wake.
There were still marks in the walls from spells cast long before he ever taught here—some half-burnished away, others stubborn in their permanence. The windows had the tendency to fog up in the mornings and stay that way until late afternoon, trapping the grey January outside in thick strokes of condensation. Right now, they’d started to bead—a fine wet blur against a sky that was the colour of old pewter and streaked with sleet.
Hogwarts had never been pristine, and that, he thought, was part of the charm.
The hearth murmured softly, the warmth barely reaching the centre of the room, where a ritual table had been dragged into place sometime between midnight and dawn.
He’d prepared it himself.
Not because he had to—Penelope would have done it, and done it perfectly—but because he hadn’t been able to sleep. Hadn’t wanted to. There was something comforting about the precision of it. The way ritual demanded order.
There, a thin silver wardline, glowing faint along the stone floor. There, the tracing rune, freshly etched in red wax, just beginning to set. There, the sigils chalked into place with the kind of careful, silent reverence most people reserved for funerals or anniversaries or war memorials. He supposed this was all three.
At the centre of the ritual, the bowl. Cold, wide, black-glass. Its water shimmered with the faintest opalescent swirl, like a pensieve trying not to be noticed.
It would notice everything soon enough.
When Penelope arrived, it was with the crisp efficiency of someone who still ironed her robes by hand. She knocked once and barely gave him a chance to acknowledge it. Her badge caught the light—Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Magical Forensics Division—and her mouth was already halfway to a frown before she spoke.
“This is a loophole," she said. No greeting, no softening. Just four words, laid out like a charge.
Harry didn’t look up. He’d been expecting the argument.
“It’s a signed loophole.”
She snorted. Elegant, short, unimpressed. “Signatures don’t make a thing less reckless. They just make it legally admissible.”
Penelope offered him the parchment. Neatly rolled, Ministry-sealed, and still damp with official wax. His name was the last one required.
“I hope you understand the precedent it sets,” she said, taking it.
He didn’t answer. Just signed.
She watched him as he did it, then took the scroll and tucked it into her case with the kind of precision that felt like punishment.
Penelope had always looked at him like that: with a sort of cool, relentless pragmatism that refused to bend even under the weight of shared history. She’d supported Hermione’s reform initiatives, stood up for him in chambers more than once—but she still believed rules were the thing that saved people. Harry had never been very good with rules.
She laid the linen out with a wand flick so sharp it cut the air. The fabric landed square against the rune.
It twitched. Not visibly, not to someone who didn’t know what to look for. But Harry felt it. In the bones of the room. In his hands. In the back of his throat.
The linen had been preserved too well—suspiciously well. But Harry had seen stranger things preserved in worse places.
The fabric stiffened as the room responded. The wardline pulsed faintly. The air thickened with heat from the fireplace, but not the comforting kind—a ritual heat. Anchoring. Binding.
Harry stared down at the cloth and told himself this was about Hermione. About the case. About doing it properly, so it wouldn’t fall apart under Ministry scrutiny.
Hermione would have found another way, he knew that. Would have found six, given time. But Draco—Draco had looked at him like he believed this might work. Like he needed it to.
Harry didn’t let himself think about that too long.
This isn’t about him, he lied to himself.
Harry’s fingers curled slightly against the table.
The bowl shimmered, waiting.
The knock that followed was softer. Polite. The kind that asked permission out of formality, not need.
Penelope moved to open the door.
Eilidh Gordon stepped inside with the particular stiffness of someone determined to get everything right. She was young—one year out of the Academy—and wore her DMLE badge like it might disintegrate under scrutiny. The escort post was likely a last-minute assignment, but her shoes were shined and her eyes bright.
She glanced at Harry and flushed.
“Mr Potter,” she said quickly. “It’s an honour.”
He offered a nod. Managed something between a smile and a grimace. It wasn’t her fault he still hated the recognition.
“Thank you, Gordon,” Penelope said. “Send her in.”
Eilidh nodded once, turned smartly on her heel, and fled with all the grace of someone trying not to run.
Narcissa Malfoy followed in her wake.
She was dressed in a long black cloak buttoned high at the neck, silver gloves tucked neatly in one hand. Her expression was unreadable. Regal. Her hair pinned in a style that made no room for softness.
She didn’t look at Harry. Barely nodded at Penelope.
But for the briefest moment, her eyes caught his—not directly, not deliberately, but just enough to register the shape of him. The boy she’d lied for. The man now unearthing what she’d spent decades burying. No acknowledgment passed between them. Just the silence of old debts, unpaid and interest-bearing.
“I’m ready,” she said, her voice dry as frost.
Of course she was. She’d had twenty-seven years to prepare.
Harry didn’t speak. He only gestured to the bowl.
Narcissa stepped into the circle, her movements precise. She did not hesitate.
Three spells. Layered. Illegal in sequence, permissible in isolation. Dangerous regardless.
Magical trauma tracing was never used for the living before.
The Ministry had—barely—permitted its use for objects recovered from the First War—abandoned wands, cursed heirlooms, battlefield remains. Cold cases only. Never for Second War trials. Too messy. Too fresh and prone to volatility.
But there was no law explicitly forbidding civilians from attempting it. Just heavy restrictions on Ministry channels. Which is why Penelope was here. To witness. To record. To ensure Harry didn’t slip over the line he wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near.
What they were about to attempt was delicate even under perfect conditions, threading the needle between the past and the unbearable.
But they had two things in their favour: Narcissa was alive, and the linen had been perfectly sealed in stasis with no potential for tampering.
Harry lifted his wand.
“Ready,” he said quietly. “Please stare into the water and don’t move.”
Narcissa obeyed.
He began the complex series of incantations—a whisper, then a hum, then a steady breath of words stitched in Old Latin.
The bowl pulsed.
A lattice of golden light shimmered between wand and linen, delicate and angular like an insect’s wing. Threads of smoke began to rise—not smoke, not really, but memory made visible. Silver and slow.
The room dimmed.
Penelope cast the containment bubble. The spell clicked into place, clean and cold.
She activated the chrono-scribe. It began to tick.
And Narcissa Malfoy did not move.
For a moment, there was only the soft ticking of the chrono-scribe. The golden lattice held, pulsing faintly where it met the linen, tendrils of silvery thread unfurling like cigarette smoke in still air. The spell didn’t rush—it crept. Not a revelation, but a slow trespass.
Narcissa’s pupils dilated. Her breath caught, parted her lips. She did not blink.
Harry felt it before he saw it. The sharp tug at the base of his sternum, the cold thread of magic stretching between wand and bowl. This was what made it dangerous. The spell wasn’t pulling on the object. It was pulling through him.
His jaw tightened. He adjusted his grip.
Ten minutes in, the room had grown noticeably colder. Not in temperature, but in pressure—like the oxygen had thickened, like sound had retreated to the edges of the world.
His knuckles were white.
Twenty minutes. The tracing rune flared again, casting its flickering light against the heavy stone walls—red, then blue, then gold, then back to red. His skin was damp. Hairline soaked. His knees ached with how still he had to remain.
Penelope said nothing. Didn’t move. But Harry could feel her presence, held taut beside the containment line. Her wand was still up. Her gaze steady. She wouldn’t stop it unless she had to.
The entire time, Narcissa remained completely comatose. Not unconscious—worse. Her eyes were open, locked on the bowl, but unfocused. Not seeing. Her spine arched slightly, too still to be natural, as if some invisible string held her suspended between recall and ruin. Whatever the spell had found in her, it wasn’t letting go.
Thirty minutes.
Harry’s breathing hitched. Shallow. Too fast. The threads were starting to spin now, the lattice dancing tighter, faster, feeding on the linen like a thing starved. A low pulse radiated outward from the cloth, thick and aching. The bowl vibrated, ever so slightly.
Then it happened.
A flicker.
The rune turned gold and held.
The bowl brightened—not with light, but with density, like it was pulling weight from another world. The threads convulsed.
Harry’s nose began to bleed—fast and hot, a sudden flood that slicked down his jaw and collarbone. It didn’t drip. It poured, with the kind of velocity that made his vision tilt sideways, that told him something in him had split.
Suddenly, Narcissa gasped.
It wasn’t loud, but it cracked the silence. Her spine arched. Her hands curled. For a heartbeat, the golden threads snapped inward, threading needle to mind—and Harry felt the spell click into place.
The trauma was no longer trapped in the linen. It was in her.
Memory moved. Not like a stream, but like a dragline—silk pulled through the eye of a needle.
Harry watched her watching it.
The memory played out in full—cruelly intact, as if it had been waiting for this moment to resurface. He didn’t look away. Couldn’t. Not with the spell still running through him like wire. But it was her face he watched most closely—the minute flickers of recognition, the frozen grief, the moment her mouth parted but no sound came. Whatever she was seeing, it belonged to her. And it was finally looking back.
Then her body seized.
Not all at once—first a tremble in the fingers, then a ripple through her shoulders like lightning passing beneath skin. Her breath caught, shattered, returned jagged. She drew in air between her teeth with a sound too close to a sob, but sharper—surgical, involuntary.
The memory was reinstated.
The spell released like a snapped tether.
Harry hit the floor hard.
His knees cracked against stone, jarring something in his back that hadn’t hurt in years. The bowl’s glow extinguished at once, leaving only a sickly shimmer in the air and the scent of burned metal. His wand slipped from his fingers. The containment bubble dissolved.
Penelope was on him before he could lift his head. He heard her voice first—not loud, but sharp with panic tamped down by practice.
“Don’t move—don’t—bloody hell, Harry—”
Her hands went to his shoulders, anchoring him. His vision swam grey. His ears rang.
Narcissa Malfoy moved like she’d been waiting.
She crossed the circle and sank into a crouch, not beside him, but just in front—her heels not touching the floor, her spine a perfect line. No trembling. No disarray. Only the faintest flush high on her cheekbones and the ghost of magic still clinging to her skin like frost.
“Thank you for helping me remember,” she said.
Not soft, but quiet. A razor sliding back into its sheath.
Her voice didn’t shake. Harry hated her a little for that.
He tried to speak. Failed. His throat was too dry. His face, he realised dimly, was soaked. Blood, sweat, maybe both. His skull throbbed in tandem with his heartbeat, each pulse like a hammer against glass.
Penelope muttered a stabilising charm and swore again, louder this time. “This is why there are regulations. This is exactly why. Idiotic, fucking—”
She dug through her satchel and pulled out a tonic so violently that the vial nearly shattered in her hand. Narcissa didn’t flinch.
“You need to wait outside,” Penelope said to her without looking up.
A pause.
Harry, still half-folded on the stone, managed to tilt his head enough to see Narcissa’s profile.
She stood.
The moment she crossed the wardline, the residual magic fizzled against her boots like static. She didn’t look back. Didn’t say another word.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Penelope pressed the vial to Harry’s lips.
“Drink.”
He did. Slowly. The tonic tasted like crushed mint and copper. It hit his gut like heat.
She sat back on her heels, surveying him with the kind of expression that belonged on St Mungo’s charts. “You’re out of commission for a week,” she said. “At least.”
Harry gave a single nod.
His fingers twitched in his lap, aching from how tightly he’d gripped his wand. The stone beneath him was cold again. Ordinary. There was no trace of the spell left. Just the linen, now limp. The blood. The bowl, empty.
He’d seen it. Felt it.
The truth was out. And now he wished he hadn’t promised Draco he’d help uncover it.
–––
February 2008
The courtroom was colder than it should have been.
Not by temperature—though the torches lining the stone walls gave off more smoke than heat—but by design. Vaulted. Theatrical. Every arch and shadow calibrated to press inward. To remind those seated below just how high the gallery sat. How little they mattered.
Narcissa did not shiver.
Her boots struck the stone in even, gliding measure, muffled only slightly by the velvet runner that led to the central dais. She wore slate grey. Unsmiling, unsparkled. As if mourning required neither black nor sentiment. Her robe was cut close at the waist, high at the throat, the fabric pressed within an inch of its life. Her hair, coiled and pinned in place, held with the rigidity of a spell.
She did not glance at the gallery. Did not seek out Lucius.
Did not seek out her son.
There were too many eyes.
Instead, she moved toward the testimony platform with the slow, imperious grace of a woman raised to believe that everything in the world should rise to meet her.
It didn’t. But the silence did.
Even the torches seemed to quiet.
Let them stare, she thought, chin lifting half an inch.
Chancellor Thorpe, perched like a weathered gargoyle atop the elevated bench, cleared his throat. It sounded like a bag of marbles being upended.
“The court will come to order,” he said, voice cracked and mossy. “This tribunal is now in session: The Ministry of Magic v. Lucius Abraxas Malfoy. The charge: conspiracy to conceal a First War murder by means of magical coercion, aided by legacy enchantments and the use of an Unforgivable Curse.”
A shiver ran through the room—not physical, but magical. A subtle tightening of the wards. The air felt denser. Narcissa inhaled through her nose.
Chancellor Thorpe gestured lazily with one hand. “Prosecution may proceed.”
Catriona Muldoon stood in a sweep of pale blue.
She was not tall, but she had presence in spades—a prosecutorial stillness that suggested she could outwait tectonic plates if need be. Her cropped silver hair glinted under the courtroom’s high-set windows, which let in a winter light too grey to be comforting. Her robes moved like water when she walked.
“Members of the Wizengamot,” she said, voice crisp as cut obsidian. “The facts of this case are not in dispute. A Blood Binding rune tied to the Malfoy line was found beneath the foundations of Malfoy Manor itself—at a time when Lucius Malfoy had already inherited both title and estate. A witness will testify that the accused had both motive and opportunity—that he stood to gain not just silence, but security, by ensuring Caradoc Dearborn never spoke again.”
She let that settle.
“What is in dispute is whether the acts committed in 1981 were born of fear—or of ideology. Whether they were a panicked choice, or a premeditated concealment.”
She paused. Just long enough.
“Mr Malfoy claims he is innocent, but offers little else. But the evidence, we believe, will tell the story for us—one steeped in blood prejudice, ambition, and a deeply buried grave.”
No one moved.
Catriona turned, sharp as a blade drawn mid-duel.
She sat.
Greengrass didn’t rise immediately. His spectacles had fogged slightly at the edges.
Narcissa had never liked him.
Too clever by half, too fond of cleverness for its own sake. The kind of solicitor who knew all the footnotes of every law ever passed and had opinions about the margins. He wore his education smugly, but she could smell the Ogden’s on him from here.
Tobias Greengrass had the look of a man who knew better than to try and defend a Malfoy in public. Yet here he was, in a charcoal robe two inches too short in the sleeves, leafing through parchment like it personally offended him. The ink on his fingers was slightly smudged, and when he rubbed at his temple, he left a faint streak. His wand hand shook when he turned the page—a man in the throes of a throbbing headache fully earned, and too proud to use a sobering charm.
He sighed. Loudly.
“Members of the court,” he began, standing. “My client has waived his right to opening remarks. But let the record show: he disputes the prosecution’s characterisation and the premise that silence is always guilt.”
He sat back down with the energy of someone who knew how this would end, and had already made peace with the paperwork.
Narcissa blinked.
That was… it?
No counters, no strategy, not even a carefully-worded denial for the press to latch onto. Lucius hadn’t looked at her once—not during the prosecution’s speech, not during Greengrass’s limp rebuttal. He just sat with his hands folded and his mouth a perfect, unreadable line.
For a man whose life had been built on performance, it was almost… shocking. For a moment, she worried her ex-husband had been Confunded.
Chancellor Thorpe grunted.
“Ms Malfoy,” he said, eyes blinking slowly. “You may begin your testimony.”
Narcissa stepped into the centre of the platform.
The dais gleamed beneath her boots—unmarked stone, neutral by enchantment, engineered to carry sound in all directions. There were no podiums. No lecterns to hold. Just air. Just light. Just judgement.
She didn’t tremble.
Not when the magical restraints shimmered faintly to life around the perimeter.
Not when Lucius exhaled through his nose without turning his head.
Not even when she caught, out of the corner of her vision, Miss Granger sitting just behind the partition, face unreadable, hands clenched around a notebook.
Narcissa lifted her chin.
Catriona’s voice was the first to break the silence.
“Madam Malfoy,” she began. “You are here today as a witness in the matter of The Ministry vs Lucius Abraxas Malfoy, charged under Level-One Magical Concealment and Obstruction of Justice statutes. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“Do you swear that your testimony reflects your honest recollection, uncoerced and unsupplemented?”
“I do.”
Narcissa felt the eyes on her—the bench above, the gallery below, the man in the first row whose jaw she could draw from memory alone. She did not look at him.
Catriona, like any good prosecutor, dropped the axe. “Was the memory you are about to describe retrieved through magical trauma imprint tracing?”
“Yes.”
Catriona turned, slow and precise, toward the perimeter of the chamber. Her gaze landed on Penelope Clearwater with the weight of formal inquest.
Penelope, standing near the outer edge of the court with the rigid posture of a woman who’d already had enough of this day, gave a single, formal nod. It was the kind of nod that could be recorded in case files, footnoted in procedural scrolls. A bureaucratic signature made flesh.
It confirmed the memory had been retrieved this way. That Narcissa had consented. That the process had held.
Catriona’s mouth tightened.
“I must register formal objection to this method,” she said, gaze cutting towards the bench. “Memory retrieved through imprint tracing is highly volatile, prone to interpretive distortions, and not subject to Occlumency verification. The Ministry has not authorised its use in precedent-setting criminal trials. And, might I add, I believe granting Ms Malfoy’s immunity in this matter is a great miscarriage of justice.”
Greengrass sighed like a man halfway through a hangover and already regretting his next sentence. He stood.
“And yet it was sanctioned by the Department of Magical Law Enforcement itself,” he said, “under emergency investigative procedures, with full authorisation from Lead Investigator Granger.”
A murmur swept through the chamber. Silk and wool shifted overhead as the gallery leaned in—some out of interest, others like hounds scenting blood.
Catriona didn’t blink. “Even so, it cannot be treated as unimpeachable evidence.”
Chancellor Thorpe raised one hand, the gesture slow, bent at the knuckles. “The memory will be heard,” he said. “Weight will be determined by the bench.”
A low shimmer of containment magic flared beneath the dais. The silence that followed was absolute.
Narcissa’s fingers curled around each other. She did not fidget. She did not adjust her sleeve.
Across the aisle, Miss Granger sat ramrod straight behind the inner partition. Chin lifted. Brows drawn.
She looked older. Not in body—she was still too young to carry the weight she did—but in spirit. There was something deliberate in the way she held tension, something honed. Not naïveté burnt away, but conviction tempered. As if her sense of justice had been reforged, again and again, until it could cut clean through bone.
Narcissa saw it in the clenched jaw. In the unflinching stare. In the way her hands stayed perfectly still.
She recognised it, because once—before the mask, before the name—she’d held that same blade. And let it rust.
They had never liked each other. Not then. Not now. Perhaps not ever.
But Narcissa did not underestimate her.
Granger was the reason the trauma trace had been sanctioned. The reason any of this had surfaced at all. The reason Narcissa now stood in open court, facing the reckoning she herself had delayed.
And whether that made the girl a fool or something much more dangerous—Narcissa had yet to decide.
She felt no fear now. That had been burned out of her years ago.
What remained was colder. Sharper. The kind of resolve you didn’t inherit—you bled for.
Narcissa exhaled. Just once.
It didn’t tremble. But it felt like it should have.
She kept her gaze fixed on some indeterminate point just past the Chancellor’s shoulder—high enough to suggest poise, low enough not to challenge.
Her hands had gone cold.
When she finally spoke, her voice was smooth as glass laid over a crack. Cool. Controlled. But brittle at the edges. As if the words themselves were walking a tightrope she dared not fall from.
“It was the beginning of autumn,” she began. “I remember the moonflowers were already flourishing.”
A pause followed—not silence. Never silence in a room like this. The air shifted, fabric rustled, a cough was bitten off halfway. But there was a hush. The kind of stillness that trembles at the edges. Waiting to tear.
“I was under Imperius,” she continued, more evenly now. “I cannot recall how it happened. Only that one day, I found myself in Greenhouse Nine with a spade in my hands. I was digging. Preparing something. The pit was already half-formed.”
Her fingers curled once against the fabric of her robes.
“I remember the pressure. In my head. Not a voice—something underneath my thoughts. Like someone humming a lullaby through a locked door. It said: Stop thinking. You know what to do. So I did. I kept preparing the pit.”
Someone shifted above in the gallery. A faint scratch of quill to parchment.
“Lucius was asleep. I had instructed a house-elf to add Calming Draught to his dinner. Enough to sedate. I needed him unaware.”
Her eyes flicked toward the defence table. Did not linger.
“I took his hand. I made the cut myself. Collected the blood in a glass vial.”
A sharp gasp, somewhere to the left. Someone stilled a quill mid-scratch.
Greengrass made no movement. His lips were pursed in the way of men who knew better than to interrupt a witness threading their own noose.
“He came to the greenhouse at night,” she continued. “Augustus Rookwood. He brought something wrapped in cloth. Long. Human-shaped.”
A long breath, measured.
“I didn’t ask what it was.”
Another flicker of her hands, so slight it might’ve been imagined.
“He dropped it into the pit,” she said. “What I now know was Caradoc Dearborn.”
A name like that didn’t need drama. It brought its own weight. A few heads turned. Someone in the gallery murmured a curse, low and stunned.
Narcissa let it pass.
“I completed the stasis incantations. I… I just knew what to do. The spellwork wasn’t taught. It was—placed. Each motion already inside me. Scripted. I sealed the Blood Binding rune with Lucius’s blood.”
A beat passed. Then another.
“That’s all I remember.”
Shame, if it lived anywhere, lived deep. Not for the act—not even for the cut, the spell, the pit, the hush—but for how long she’d allowed herself to forget. For how easily obedience had followed instruction. For the years she’d worn that silence like silk.
But she would not allow her son to live beneath it.
And she would not let the man who gave him his name be sentenced to a crime he didn’t commit.
She lifted her chin.
“That is my account.”
And then, at last, she looked at Lucius.
He probably hadn’t moved the entire time—hadn’t so much as shifted a finger. His face held an unreadable expression carved into marble.
But she saw it anyway—the tightness in the jaw, the way his left thumb pressed just slightly harder against the knuckle. The sign of a man trying not to react, because reacting would mean exposure.
It was almost insulting, the performance.
Catriona Muldoon stood like a closing verdict.
“Madam Malfoy,” she said, voice knife-sharp. “So you admit to physically burying the body?”
“I do.”
“You admit to stealing blood from your husband to implicate the Malfoy line?”
“Yes.”
“And you expect the Wizengamot to believe this was done under the influence of an Imperius Curse so refined that you cannot identify the caster?”
A beat.
Narcissa’s eyes flashed.
“I am not asking the Wizengamot to believe anything,” she said. “I am merely telling you what I remember.”
It landed like a shard of ice.
Greengrass, ever the opportunist, chose that moment to rise. “What she remembers under sworn oath,” he added smoothly, “corroborated by physical artefact, Harry Potter himself, and directly implicating Mr Rookwood. Who is, might I add, already serving a life sentence for other war crimes.”
Narcissa resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She knew precisely how much Tobias Greengrass detested the saviour of wizarding Britain—and how utterly predictable it was, invoking Potter’s name like gospel when it served his argument. Righteousness always came easier when someone else had already paid for it.
Catriona didn’t flinch. “It’s a convenient amnesia,” she said. “And what it does not confirm is who killed Caradoc Dearborn. The accused may have delivered the body to Mr Rookwood before any of this happened.”
The implication settled like smoke over the chamber.
A hush followed—not silence, but the kind of ambient unrest that moved sideways, through side-glances and shifting parchment. One member of the Wizengamot leaned in, murmuring something about reasonable doubt. Another shuffled scrolls with slow, deliberate hands, watching Narcissa as if she might suddenly vanish.
Chancellor Thorpe rapped his wand once against the table. “Order.”
The central cluster of Wizengamot members tilted inward, voices low. Quills scratched. Someone muttered a remark that drew a derisive snort from a colleague.
She did not glance at Lucius again.
She didn’t want to know what expression he wore. Whether it was impassive. Indifferent. Pleased.
She had stood over his sleeping form with a vial in her hand. And now she had confessed it to the world.
But her son—
He was off to the side, just beyond the inner partition, among the observers. Shoulders locked. Jaw clenched. One knee bouncing in a rhythm that betrayed him. He wouldn’t look at either of them. Not his father. Not his mother.
Narcissa stared at that small, ceaseless movement—the ghost of a child’s fidget in a man’s body—and felt something hollow press into her ribs.
He still looked like a boy, sometimes. When he thought no one was watching.
She wondered if he would ever stop paying for her silences.
Her gaze trained straight ahead, every muscle held taut against the weight of what she’d given up. Her carefully pruned image. Her benefit of the doubt.
And for what?
The truth, yes. But truth was never neutral. It came at cost.
Inside her chest, something knotted and did not loosen.
Eventually, Chancellor Thorpe looked up.
“The court will adjourn for the day,” he said. “Further testimony to be scheduled in the morning.”
A final scrawl of quills. A faint shuffle of robes. The torches dimmed, dousing the chamber in a colder hue.
Narcissa did not wait for instructions. Did not wait for Catriona’s nod or Greengrass’s whispered strategy. She turned.
And walked out of the courtroom before anyone could stop her.
Her boots struck the stone with quiet finality.
She did not look back.
Because she knew what she’d done.
And now, so did everyone else.
–––
Interview Room 3A hadn’t changed much.
Still three chairs. Still the single frosted window. The ventilation charm in the far corner continued its low, ambient hum. But someone had replaced the old oak table with a Ministry-standard interrogation slab—rune-etched, radiating a faint chill through her sleeves. The scrying glyph etched in the leg glowed dull red. Recording active. Listening under strict evidentiary protocol.
Hermione sat with her hands clasped loosely on the tabletop, files untouched before her.
She hadn’t looked at them since she walked in.
Across from her, Greengrass was already halfway into a lounge. Legs crossed, head tipped back, he radiated the air of someone rudely interrupted from something more profitable. The tip of his wand tapped rhythmically against his knee—not impatience, exactly. Just inertia wearing a suit.
Beside him sat Lucius, spine straight, shoulders still, the portrait of patient dominance. His hands lay folded before him like he was waiting to chair a board meeting that had gone slightly off-schedule. Not a hair out of place. Not a line on his face he hadn’t sanctioned.
If Narcissa’s shocking testimony had pierced him, there was no sign of it.
So be it.
Hermione took a breath, quiet and clipped.
“We’ll begin with the testimony given in court this morning,” she said. “You didn’t react.”
Lucius tilted his head slightly, like a man asked why he hadn’t applauded the sunrise.
“I listened,” he said.
She nodded once, fingers tightening against her palm. “Did you know what Narcissa was going to say?”
“I did not.”
“Did you suspect?”
He didn’t answer immediately. That would’ve been too obvious. Instead, he let the silence breathe—just long enough to suggest thoughtfulness, but not long enough to signal guilt.
“I knew something had unsettled her,” he said. “I assumed it was you.”
Hermione blinked. “Me?”
“You and your rather… unorthodox techniques.”
He didn’t say imprint tracing, and she didn’t correct him. Let the line stay drawn in implication. It was easier to fight him when he was being evasive. It was harder when he was being clever.
She shifted forward slightly. “So you’re saying she never told you anything. Not about Greenhouse Nine. Not about Rookwood. Not about drugging you with a Calming Draught to steal your blood.”
“Correct.”
“No disturbed earth you happened to notice? No oddly precise gash on your hand?”
Lucius arched an eyebrow. “You’ll find marriage is rarely as theatrical as the outside world imagines.”
Hermione’s jaw clicked once before she masked it. The smugness was deliberate. Designed to needle.
She leaned back.
“Here’s what I think the Wizengamot is starting to believe,” she said, casually—like the observation had just occurred to her. “That you killed Caradoc Dearborn. That you handed the body to your good friend Rookwood. That you needed someone to keep it quiet. And what better way than to use your wife—Imperius her, even—to bury the body in her own private greenhouse.”
Lucius didn’t flinch.
Greengrass did.
“My client has the right to remain silent.”
Hermione didn’t move. She was watching Lucius now—studying him not like a suspect, but like a hypothesis.
She’d read his file a dozen times. She’d interrogated worse men, and more charming ones. She’d held her ground in rooms with Death Eaters, Ministers, and even Harry on a particularly bad day. Lucius Malfoy should not be a complication.
And yet—there was something about the way he breathed stillness. Something about the elegance of his restraint, the exquisite control. Like watching a serpent stretch beneath silk.
The problem wasn’t his defences.
It was that she wanted to know what they were guarding.
She tapped her quill once against the table.
“Mr Malfoy,” she said. “With all due respect to your solicitor, you’ve always had a reputation for precise words. I suggest you use them.”
His gaze lifted to meet hers.
And he smiled. Just faintly.
It was the kind of smile that didn’t reach the eyes but didn’t need to. All sharp edge, no warmth—like a knife so well-honed it could part lace without snagging. A smile with lineage. A smile that had survived war, scandal, and exile, and come out gleaming.
And damn it, it landed.
Something low and unwelcome flickered in her gut. Not fear, but attraction—brutal and chemical. She shifted slightly in her seat, legs crossing tighter beneath the table, as if that could contain it. She felt her spine straighten, as if her body remembered to brace before her mind caught up.
Lucius turned slightly, elegant as always, and said, “Tobias. Leave us.”
Greengrass did not so much as glance up from the loose stack of parchment he’d been rearranging into disorder. “Absolutely not.”
“I insist.”
That earned a pause.
Greengrass set the parchment down, slow and deliberate. “Are you going on record, Mr Malfoy, stating you wish to speak to the Lead Investigator alone—without your legal counsel present?”
Lucius inclined his head, just barely. “Yes.”
Greengrass’s nostrils flared. “That’s irregular.”
“So is burying a body on your own property,” Lucius said mildly. “And yet here we are.”
A beat. Not a challenge—there was no need for one. Just the slow gravity of a man used to getting what he wanted. Lucius didn’t raise his voice, didn’t blink. He simply watched Greengrass with the calm patience of someone waiting for a bureaucrat to realise they were already irrelevant.
Greengrass sighed, long-suffering. “Merlin help you,” he muttered, and swept from the room with the reluctant indignation of a man who knew he’d already lost the argument and would have to explain it on an invoice.
The door hissed shut behind him.
Silence expanded—not the vacuum of absence, but the hum of something active. The containment charms glimmered faintly around the edge of the table, anchoring the conversation to the Ministry’s evidentiary net. Outside the observation window, someone shifted just out of view. A scrying glyph pulsed in the corner like a second heartbeat.
Now it was just the two of them.
Hermione should have felt more in control.
She did not.
Lucius studied her—not lazily, but deliberately, like one might regard a potion they’d never seen before. Then he leaned forward, the movement slow, deliberate, hands folding once again atop the rune-carved slab.
“You intrigue me,” he said.
The words slid across the table like smoke. Dry, smoky, seductive.
Hermione blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You’re not trying to trap me.” His voice was low, almost conversational. “You’re trying to understand me. There’s a difference.”
“I’m trying to uncover the truth,” she said, sharper than she meant.
Lucius’s head tilted a fraction. “Which you believe I’m hiding.”
“Because you refuse to give it.”
That earned her a quiet chuckle—low and rich and maddening. “I used to think you were some uppity Mudblood. Now I just think of you as uppity.”
The word hit the air like a curse—so casual, it almost missed her. Almost.
Hermione went still. Her breath caught somewhere between fury and disbelief. Her fingers curled slightly atop the folder of parchment she hadn’t touched since walking in.
“Well,” she said, voice brittle and bright, “isn’t that progress. Too embarrassed to say that in front of your solicitor?”
“It is progress,” Lucius said, maddeningly calm. “You’re simply too proud to see it from my point of view.”
He reclined slightly, a man easing into confession—not apologetic, but unhurried. “I was raised to fear your kind. To hate you. Muggles hunted us for our magic, once. And then, slowly, the magic diluted. Mudbloods came. You came. And everything we were taught to hold sacred—our customs, our inheritance, our blood—was diluted in turn.”
He looked at her then, fully. “And yet, despite everything, here I sit. Trusting a Muggleborn war heroine to find the truth. More than I trust my own solicitor, who thinks I’m guilty.”
His voice was velvet and steel. His eyes steady. There was no flattery in it. No manipulation. Only that infuriating, calculated calm that always made her want to throw something hard.
She wanted to rage.
She wanted to slap him.
She wanted to know what that voice would sound like with his mouth closer.
Hermione hated herself a little in that moment. Hated the heat that bloomed, sudden and traitorous, low in her stomach. Hated the part of her that noticed the sculpted edge of his jaw, the perfect angle of his collarbone beneath the robe, the dusting of silver at his temples. Hated the part of her that wondered what it would feel like to kiss a man who never lost control.
She crossed her legs again. Tighter this time.
“You think this is charming?” she asked, and her voice didn’t shake, though she expected it to. “Playing the reformed aristocrat? The reluctant bigot reborn?”
Lucius smiled—languid, merciless.
“I think you want me to be a monster,” he said. “Because that would make this easier.”
She felt it before she understood it: a tightening in her chest, a bloom of pressure beneath the breastbone like a muscle flexed too long.
Not outrage. Not quite.
The words were poison—but the delivery was not. No performance. No false humility. Just… clarity. As if he’d held that thought for some time and only now found the shape of it.
Hermione forced a breath through her nose and reminded herself she was here to corner him. Not to understand him. Not to admire his diction or the slow, precise way he spoke, like language was a duel he always meant to win.
She regrouped.
“So if we bring in Augustus Rookwood,” she said, voice steady, “and question him under testimony to corroborate your ex-wife’s account… you’re telling me you’ll be able to stand by your innocence?”
He didn’t blink.
“I have nothing to hide.”
It was almost convincing.
Almost.
But Hermione Granger was not easily lied to, and certainly not by men who fancied themselves myth.
She saw it—the flash beneath the surface. The smallest ripple at the corner of his mouth, a momentary stillness behind the eyes. Not panic. Not guilt. Something subtler.
Unease. Or anticipation.
Or both.
She leaned back, fingers steepled. The tension between them stretched like filament—taut, delicate, ready to snap. Or to sing.
Her mind told her she was gathering information. Cross-referencing facts. Applying pressure.
Her body disagreed. Her pulse was high, her throat dry. And the worst part—what she would never admit, not even under Veritaserum—was that he made her feel more awake than anyone had in months.
Even now. Especially now. A murder charge hanging between them like a chandelier made of bone, and still—
Still.
He looked at her like he saw something worth watching.
And damn her, but she’d accepted tea when she was meant to be serving protection notices.
She should end this.
She should call Greengrass back in, deliver some perfunctory warning about obstruction, and exit with her dignity intact.
Instead, she said, “Rookwood hated you, didn’t he?”
Lucius’s brow arched.
“He resented the old families,” she continued. “That became very apparent during his trial. Said they were too cautious. Too afraid to seize real power. The ones who didn’t go full fanatic were just cowards playing both sides.”
A pause. No one spoke.
Hermione leaned in.
“Do you think he framed you? Could he have Imperiused your wife after killing Dearborn himself?”
For the first time all afternoon, Lucius looked uncertain. Just for a breath. But she saw it. And something deep in her gut twisted—sharp, sweet, victorious.
“You’ll have to ask him,” he replied flatly.
The silence that followed wasn’t empty—it thrummed. With withheld truths, with legacy too bloodied to untangle, with the weight of something she still hadn’t figured out. Hermione didn’t speak. She just watched him, eyes narrowed, pulse loud in her ears. The scrying glyphpulsed once, like a heartbeat. And beneath the rune-etched table, her hands curled into fists.
–––
The pacing wasn’t theatrical anymore. It wasn’t the controlled, serpentine kind Draco had once mastered in front of journalists and disciplinary panels—the kind designed to project calm detachment while buying time to think.
No, this was something else. This was frantic. Breathless. The tread-worn stretch of rug in Harry’s office had already given up a few stray threads beneath his boots, and still Draco moved like he didn’t remember starting. Or didn’t know how to stop.
His cloak hung half-buttoned, askew across one shoulder like he’d forgotten he was wearing it. His hair—still rain-damp from the walk up to the castle—clung to his temple in flattened streaks. There was a single, stupid drop of ink on his cuff from Merlin-knew-where. His wand was still strapped beneath his left sleeve, tight against his forearm, long past when it should have been removed.
He hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t noticed any of it.
“She lied to me,” he said, sharply, mid-step. The words came too loud for the room. He didn’t care. “All those years, she let me think—she let me believe she was different. That she only did what she had to do. That it was him—always him—making the decisions. And she just survived it.”
He turned, took another half-lap across the stone. The fire crackled softly behind him.
Harry hadn’t moved.
He sat in that ridiculous leather armchair near the hearth, legs long, hands folded loosely in his lap. Watching. Not intruding. Just there—like a lighthouse that had long since stopped blinking, but still hadn’t toppled into the sea.
Draco swallowed.
“She’s not who I thought she was,” he said, and this time it cracked on the edges. “I used to dream about testifying against him, you know. My father. Telling the world what he was. What he’d done. I used to think it would feel like justice. Like some great catharsis.”
He gave a laugh that didn’t sound like laughter. “And now—he might rot in prison for a murder I’m not even sure he committed. And I don’t—I don’t know how I feel about that. I don’t know if I want him to be innocent.”
He stopped pacing.
The silence between them thickened—not cruel, but taut. A silence that held space. One of Harry’s gifts, apparently.
Draco let out a sharp exhale and slumped onto the edge of the desk behind him, palms pressed flat against its cold surface like he needed grounding.
“I thought she was the victim,” he said, quieter now. “The one who stayed alive just long enough to keep me alive. But she—she cut him, Harry. She drugged him and cut his hand. And buried a fucking body like she was potting orchids.”
“She was Imperiused,” Harry said gently. “By Voldemort, or someone close to him. For all you know, she did it to protect you.”
Draco’s eyes snapped shut.
It made it worse somehow, hearing him say it—hearing Harry reach for a kindness Draco couldn’t seem to offer his own mother. That familiar tilt of the world again, the way everything Harry did refused to align with the cartoonish villain he’d once occupied in Draco’s head.
“She said nothing,” Draco bit out. “All those years, and she let me believe she was clean.”
“She couldn’t remember,” Harry said softly.
Draco pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw stars.
“No,” he said. “No, she didn’t. That’s what’s so fucked. She didn’t forget, not really. She buried it. She let it stay buried. Like that would make it less real.”
There was a pause. The sound of the fire. The faint tap-tap-tap of sleet against the window panes.
“I feel like I’m going mad.”
He meant it. He wasn’t being dramatic. He wasn’t reaching for pity. He was a grown man unravelling thread by thread, held together only by anger and shame and a rapidly collapsing story he’d used to survive.
And he hated—gods, hated—that he’d come here. That his feet had carried him to this office in this castle without permission, without purpose. Without pride. Because there was no one else. No one else who’d seen him at his worst and hadn’t tried to fix it or pity it or weaponise it.
Just Harry.
Who sat still in the armchair and watched him come apart like he’d known it would happen eventually.
Draco stared at the floor. His breath hitched once in his chest.
He was cold. But there was heat in the room.
And under all the rage, all the grief, all the bile in his throat—something else pressed forward. Something treacherous. The same something that had said yes when Harry invited him to tea the previous night, just because Harry knew the first day of trial was looming and he didn’t want Draco to be alone. That had notched into place like puzzlework every time their eyes met across a courtroom, or a table, or a battlefield of someone else’s making.
He didn’t know what to call it. He just knew it was real.
And getting harder to ignore.
Harry rose without a word. A quiet shift of weight, a slow push from the armchair, and then: movement. He crossed the room like this wasn’t unfamiliar territory.
Draco didn’t look up at first. His palms were still braced against the desk, his throat raw with the remains of too many truths, and something dull throbbed at the base of his skull—shame, or adrenaline, or grief on a time delay.
Then Harry was in front of him.
A pause. No question asked. No permission sought.
Just a hand.
Warm. Solid. Resting on his shoulder with the kind of deliberate softness that made Draco flinch, because it wasn’t a grip or a threat or even a gesture of pity—it was an anchor.
He let out a slow, shaky breath.
The weight of it—a single palm, steady as stone—shouldn’t have meant anything. But it did. It meant he wasn’t alone in this awful, echoing grey-space of not-knowing. Of not-trusting. Of not-hating enough to make the confusion simpler.
“I hated him,” Draco said, voice raw. “I really did.”
His throat tightened, but he forced the words out.
“For everything. For the war. For what he turned me into. For how he looked at me that night—when I couldn’t do it. When I couldn’t kill Dumbledore.”
The memories tasted bitter. Like ash.
“But I don’t want him to rot,” he finished. “Not like this. Not if it wasn’t him.”
The fire popped behind them. Outside, the sleet lashed harder against the windows. Inside, Harry didn’t move. His hand remained—unchanged, unflinching.
Draco hadn’t realised how cold he was until the heat started to return.
“You need to get Greengrass to subpoena Rookwood,” Harry said quietly.
Draco blinked. “What?”
“Eyewitness testimony from a convicted Death Eater won’t be easy to admit into evidence—especially not if it exonerates another Death Eater. But it’s the only thing that can further validate your mother’s memory.”
Draco nodded slowly, mind catching up to the present, even as his body stayed half a step behind. “He’s in Azkaban,” he said. “Greengrass says it’ll take weeks—”
“Tell him to start now,” Harry said. “Tonight.”
Something in the room shifted then. Not the air, exactly, but the charge within it.
Draco looked at him—really looked at him. Not the professor or the former Auror or the saviour or the boy who’d once nearly killed him inside a lavatory. Just him. Quiet and flinty and stupidly noble. The same man who now—somehow—stood beside him without demanding penance.
And for the first time in weeks, the panic began to loosen.
“You performed the imprint tracing,” Draco said, low. “Even though you knew it would make you sick.”
Harry exhaled through his nose. His gaze flicked to the window. “It was the right call.”
“No,” Draco said, sharper now. Firmer. “It was more than that. I asked something impossible of you, and you did it anyway.”
His own voice surprised him. Too close to something like gratitude. Too bare.
But Harry didn’t flinch.
He just looked at him.
And Draco felt it again—that terrible, unspeakable thing, blooming sharp and hot beneath his ribs. The weight of everything unspoken pressing against his lungs. The way Harry's body heat had travelled through cotton and cloak to rest directly against his skin. The sound of the storm. The scent of ink and parchment and fireplace ash. The unbearable stillness.
It built behind his teeth like a storm. Like lightning behind glass.
And somewhere beneath the guilt, beneath the grief, beneath the years of rot and ruin—
He wanted.
Gods, he wanted.
Not just the body—though that too, always that—but the stillness. The part of himself that stopped unravelling in Harry’s presence. The part that didn’t have to pretend to be fine. The part that could breathe.
Harry’s hand hadn’t moved. Still on his shoulder, solid and warm, like an oath. Draco could feel the press of each finger through the wool of his cloak. Could feel the weight of his own pulse, crashing dumbly in his throat.
And then Harry said, so quiet it barely qualified as sound:
“Of course I did.”
That was all.
Of course I did.
Not “because I had to” or “because it was right” or “because we needed it for the case.” Just of course. Like it was self-evident. Like it was inevitable.
Draco didn’t think.
Didn’t plan. Didn’t calculate. Didn’t scheme.
He moved.
Surged forward with the reckless finality of someone falling off a ledge—not reaching for safety, but for contact. For confirmation that this ache had somewhere to go.
His mouth collided with Harry’s in a breathless, graceless kiss.
It wasn’t gentle. It was raw and shuddering and hungry, all teeth and tension and the kind of kiss that made Draco’s hands claw blindly into fabric—Harry’s jumper, soft and well-worn, bunched in his fists before he could stop himself.
Harry didn’t pull away.
He met him.
Met him like he’d been waiting for it—like instinct, not hesitation. His hand slid from Draco’s shoulder to the back of his neck, fingers threading into dishevelled blond hair. Draco groaned low into the kiss, knees nearly buckling as the warmth of it swallowed him whole.
Their mouths worked in tandem—urgent, searching. Harry tasted like coffee and something grounding, something bitter and solid that Draco hadn’t realised he’d needed. His tongue swept across Draco’s lower lip, and Draco opened to him with a gasp he didn’t have time to regret.
Hands, now. Everywhere.
Draco’s left one gripped Harry’s collar like an anchor; the right found Harry’s hip and dug in, holding, pulling, needing. The press of them was unbearable. Harry was firm beneath his robes, all broad chest and unrelenting heat, and when Draco shifted against him, he felt it—
The hard line straining behind Harry’s trousers. The sharp exhale Harry gave when Draco’s thigh brushed against it. The way Harry’s hand tightened reflexively at the base of his skull.
It was too much.
Too much and not enough and so fucking late.
Draco made a noise in the back of his throat—frustrated, breathless. Harry’s other hand was now at his waist, hot through the shirt, searing even. Their kiss deepened, messier now, uncoordinated and so honest it hurt. There was no choreography, no control—just heat and want and the frantic, exquisite madness of it.
Draco ground forward without thinking—rutted against Harry’s hip like something starving, gasping as their bodies aligned. He felt the press of Harry’s cock through his trousers—hard, urgent—and grabbed for it, blindly, almost viciously, just to feel. To prove this was happening. That it wasn’t one more fantasy collapsed under grief.
Harry groaned into his mouth—low and guttural—and pulled him closer, fingers fisting the back of Draco’s cloak like he might never let go.
And Draco—stupid, wild, desperate—let himself believe it for a second. Let himself want.
And then—
It broke.
Draco wrenched back like he’d been burned, stumbling half a step away. His breath caught. His chest heaved. Every inch of him felt scraped raw.
“Shit,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t have. I—I thought—fuck, I’m sorry, I thought—”
His voice crumbled under the weight of it. His heart pounded like something desperate in a cage.
He couldn’t meet Harry’s eyes.
Couldn’t risk seeing the fallout, the disgust, the rejection—couldn’t bear it, not after this. Not after the way it had felt.
But Harry said nothing for a beat.
And then:
“Please don’t be sorry.”
Draco froze.
His eyes lifted slowly, reluctant. Disbelieving.
Harry’s lips were parted, still flushed from the kiss. His pupils were blown wide. He looked—wanting. He looked wrecked.
And he meant it.
Don’t be sorry.
It wasn’t an invitation, not quite. But it wasn’t regret either. It was something steadier. Truer.
And for the first time in weeks, the panic stopped spinning. The dread dulled. The question mark that had been him—his guilt, his grief, his broken trust in his parents, in himself—quieted for just long enough to let something else through.
Desire. Yes. But something older than that, something simpler.
The relief of not being alone in it.
He didn’t know what came next.
But for the first time, he wasn’t performing.
He just was.
–––
The courtroom was colder today.
Not merely in temperature—though the entire Ministry had gone glacial overnight, courtesy of the snowstorm curling round its enchanted dome like a shroud—but colder in spirit. The torches burned low and sullen. No flickering, no crackle—just a steady, exhausted hiss. Even the magic in the air seemed slower, more reluctant to perform. The wards hung heavy and damp, like old curtains in a shuttered house.
Residue.
Memory had mass, and yesterday’s testimony had left it behind in thick layers—coating the stone, pooling in the joints between flagstones, clogging the hinges of the chamber doors. The truth had been exhumed. The corpse of it still stank.
Lucius stood when told, sat when told. Dove-grey robes today. Not penitential white or mourning black—that would’ve reeked of theatre—but neutral, quiet. A palette of contrition. He wished he’d been allowed his cane—just to rest it across his knees, to fold his hands over the serpent’s head. Not to fidget. Not even to grip. Just to anchor.
He had mastered the art of stillness long ago.
Greengrass fussed beside him with a sheaf of parchment like a swan with ruffled feathers—elegant, irritable, and entirely performative. Further down the aisle, Catriona Muldoon bent to whisper with a tall aide in high-collared midnight blue. The man’s face was angular and forgettable, but his eyes weren’t. Cold as quartz. He didn’t blink often.
Chancellor Thorpe sat above them all, old and gnarled as an olive root. He hadn’t spoken since calling the room to order, which in itself was more damning than any tirade. He simply watched. Digested. A slow judiciary serpent, patient in his hunger.
Lucius allowed his eyes to flick upward—just once.
Draco.
Rigid in the observer’s gallery, dressed in near-black. Tie knotted tight, jaw clenched tighter. His lips were parted as if he were halfway to saying something. A word, perhaps. A name. It hung there, suspended, never spoken. Potter was sitting next to him.
Lucius didn’t look away. He didn’t allow himself to look away—because if he did, he might imagine Narcissa sitting nearby, one row back. Hands clasped in her lap. Still as a prayer.
She wasn’t there. He didn’t search the gallery to confirm it.
A low creak from the doors.
The Aurors stepped through first, boots clicking in solemn pairs. Between them, Elphias Doge.
Lucius watched as the old man made his slow way to the dais. Not because he found the man particularly compelling—he didn’t—but because the moment demanded it. Doge was a living relic. One of the last ties to Dumbledore. Ancient, stooped, almost translucent under the courtroom’s harsh magical light. He looked like he’d been poured into his best robes and left out in the rain. But his presence was deliberate.
Doge had, apparently, insisted on testifying in person. Despite the records. Despite the memories collected. Despite the Ministry’s legal counsel advising against it.
That made him dangerous.
What did he know?
Doge reached the dais with maddening slowness, his cane thudding once against the base as he steadied himself. The torches flared, then calmed—almost as if the courtroom itself were reacting. A hush settled. Not reverent. Not curious. Just… expectant.
Lucius’s spine didn’t move, but his shoulders coiled half a millimetre tighter.
Because the old bastard was going to say something that mattered. That much was obvious. The question was how much of it would be true.
Lucius didn’t breathe.
Not because he was afraid. But because some truths—uttered plainly—had the power to unravel every lie you’d built your life upon.
And Elphias Doge, for all his sanctimony and stubborn breath, had always been dangerously fond of the truth.
The courtroom did not still so much as settle. As if bracing.
Doge stood at the centre of the dais with the slow, deliberate care of someone who had already buried most of his friends and hadn’t forgiven the world for making him do it. His tartan robes were clean and sharply pressed, but his shoes—one dragonhide, one cracked suede—told a truer story. The walking stick he leaned on was walnut, polished to a worn shine, the bronze cap at its base clinking faintly against the stone.
He looked impossibly old today. Not wizened—spent.
His voice, when he gave his name, was low but clear. Slightly hoarse, as if disuse had layered over reverence.
Catriona Muldoon, unflinching as ever, stepped forward.
“Mr Doge, you provided formal testimony to Lead Investigator Granger concerning the disappearance of Caradoc Dearborn. You are here to give sworn confirmation of that statement. Do you swear that your words are truthful and complete?”
“I do,” he said. And it landed—quiet and mortal.
Lucius inhaled once, shallowly. Held it. Released.
Chancellor Thorpe did not nod so much as incline, eyes hooded behind the veil of his spectacles. “Proceed.”
For the briefest second, Lucius let his gaze drift—not to Draco, not to Hermione, but to the edge of the courtroom where the shadows were thickest.
A place the torches didn’t quite reach.
A place memory had no business hiding.
And then Doge began to speak.
“Caradoc was undercover in 1980,” Doge began, his voice soft but resonant. “Recruiting Death Eaters. Or trying to.”
The courtroom did not move.
“It was a doomed strategy, even then. Most of us thought so. You-Know-Who’s grip was already too strong. His followers were zealots or cowards by that point—no middle ground left.”
A dry rasp of parchment from the left gallery. Muldoon shifted her weight but did not interrupt.
“But we needed fractures. People with doubts. Cracks in the marble.” Doge’s mouth twitched at the edge, a grim smile without humour. “Caradoc believed in cracks.”
Lucius felt his fingers twitch—just once—against the polished edge of the table. Not enough to betray nerves. Enough to know they were there. He could guess what accusation was coming next. Not the exact words, but the shape of them.
“His most promising lead was Lucius Malfoy.”
There it was.
The silence that followed was not expectant—it was braced. As if the room itself inhaled and forgot how to breathe out.
“He told me he believed Lucius might be… disillusioned. Young, too polished for the role he was playing. More interested in power than blood.” Doge paused. “Someone who might be turned—not to the Order’s cause, necessarily, but away from You-Know-Who’s.”
Lucius exhaled. Not audibly. Not visibly. But the motion lived in his chest, slow and deliberate. He remembered 1980. He remembered the frost-rimmed evenings at Malfoy Manor, the endless meetings in shadowed drawing rooms. The feel of his father’s disappointment layered under every compliment. The mask he’d worn at every gathering—tailored, affable, impenetrable.
He remembered Caradoc, too.
“Caradoc dropped the angle eventually,” Doge went on. “Said he’d tried philosophical feints. Shared doctrine. Danced close to treason. But there was no invitation returned. He called Lucius a dangerous waste. And he moved on.”
There was something odd about hearing his name repeated like that. Not in accusation. Not in defence. Just… observation. A stranger’s recollection of a man Lucius had once been. Might still be. Depending on the story.
“By 1981,” Doge continued, “Caradoc had a new source. Someone else on the inside. A Death Eater who claimed not to be one. Said they weren’t ready to join the Order, but they would pass on information through him. It was how we found Avery.”
A hum of movement at that—small, rustling. Collective memory turning pages.
“Caradoc didn’t name the source. Said it was too dangerous. That this person was only a whisper away from execution if discovered. He believed they were trying to do right—slowly. Carefully. But he was afraid. Said he was being watched.”
Lucius did not move. Did not glance. But he could feel the courtroom shifting around him—like gravity had picked a new centre and was still deciding how cruel to be about it.
“And then,” Doge said simply, “he vanished.”
The silence was longer this time.
“I truly believed Caradoc hadn’t made contact with Lucius in months. But with where his body was found—buried in Wiltshire—I have to wonder…”
A shift rippled through the room, subtle but unmistakable. The kind that didn’t need words to land. A breeze—no, a draft—moved through the courtroom, stirring the lower torches. For a moment, it felt as if the temperature dropped further.
Someone near the gallery coughed. Another leaned forward, too slowly.
And still, Doge’s voice cut through the stillness, not cruel, not accusatory—but resigned.
“I grieved him,” Doge said. “We fought together. He was the best of us. Brave, brilliant, infuriating. He would’ve made a terrible Auror—too idealistic. But he believed there was something left in people worth saving.”
His gaze flicked, just briefly, toward Lucius.
“Even in Malfoys.”
Lucius didn’t blink. He merely kept his eyes level, unreadable.
It wasn’t pain he felt. Not quite. It was the slippery echo of a name he hadn’t spoken in nearly three decades. A name buried beneath ten layers of persona. A name that once made him want to become something better—before it reminded him why he never could.
He had danced so close to the fire.
And maybe, he thought now, the real legacy wasn’t what it had burned—but what it had failed to cauterise.
“Caradoc told me once,” Doge continued, voice thinner now, stretched by memory, “half in drink, half in defiance—that he believed there was more to Lucius than cruelty.”
Another shift in the room. Not sharp. Not scandalised. Attentive.
“That he saw intelligence. Charisma. A mind sharpened by fear. That maybe, if the world was different, they might have—”
A pause.
Lucius didn’t look up.
“They might have worked together. That they could’ve changed things.”
Doge swallowed. The courtroom’s stillness pressed in.
“I long suspected,” he said at last, “that there was something… else.”
The silence changed shape.
“That Caradoc was in love with Lucius.”
It landed like a dropped vial—no crash, just a fragile, suspended shatter.
There were no gasps, not really. Just the sound of people remembering how to breathe again.
Greengrass’s quill skidded sideways, ink blotting his notes. Muldoon fumbled mid-pass of her case file, dropping it squarely into her aide’s lap. Chancellor Thorpe, uncharacteristically rattled, leaned to murmur something to the woman at his right—his voice too low, too quick.
Hermione did not move.
But Lucius felt her gaze like a wire pulled taut between them—silent, sharp, almost intimate. Not curiosity. Not sympathy. Something worse.
She was thinking about it.
What Doge had said. What it meant. What it looked like. She was parsing the implications, the narrative, the broken symmetry of men who’d died for him—and those who hadn’t.
And Lucius—
Lucius did not want her in the room.
Not now. Not like this. Not with that look in her eyes: measured, magnetic, unforgiving. That precise little tilt of the chin. That fucking intelligence.
Because beneath it all, he could feel it coil: that same undercurrent from the breakfast room, the interview chambers. He was not sure what it meant. He only knew that it vibrated too close to the surface. And that she had no right to witness him here, in this memory-stitched ruin of a self he barely recognised.
Doge didn’t retreat.
“I don’t know what Lucius knew,” he said gently. “I don’t know if it was mutual, or unspoken. Caradoc never said. But I know obsession when I see it. I know hope when it dies. And I know what kind of grief takes root when that love isn’t out in the open.”
Lucius held still. Painfully so.
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t scoff or smirk or smooth the line of his robe. He let it stand. The accusation. The eulogy.
Because this, too, was performance. He believed in control. In dignity. In distance. Everything about these proceedings—the imprint tracing, the insinuations, the gentle unraveling of his past—was an affront to that control. But he refused to fall apart.
“Is that all, Mr Doge?” Chancellor Thorpe asked, voice like a closing ledger.
“It is.”
“The bench will take it under advisement.”
The torches guttered once—too much air or not enough—and the room seemed to breathe flame. The sudden heat, sickly and stale, pooled beneath Lucius’s collar. His cuffs. His skin.
He lowered his gaze. Slowly. The table’s edge had begun to splinter. A vein of old damage, lacquered over, still visible beneath the polish.
There was a long pause. Greengrass leaned in, lips barely moving.
“What the bloody hell was that about?”
Lucius stared at a knot in the floorboards. Warped from some past charm misfire. He let his eyes trace the ruin of it. Felt the ache of something ancient and unfinished pulsing behind his sternum.
And then, very softly, he said, “Old fool.”