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Chapter Text

Blaise

He does not remember when the light became a blade. At first, it waswarmth – the kind that touched the edges of his soul and promisedabsolution. Then, it began to burn, but he remembers the Aurorscalling it cleansing.

They always do, when theymean destruction.

The room where they kept him wasmade of glass and magical wards, old sanctums repurposed intoprisons. The Light's magic lingered in every surface – sharp andsterile in an odd way. It smelled of salt and ashes, with a faintsweetness of sanctified decay. The Aurors, and so many other wizards,spoke over his body as though he were not really here, not really aman. Words like containment, purification, and residual soulmagic. He remembers laughteronce – the soft, pitiful kind. Someone said that it was mercy hewas still breathing.

He would have killed them all if hecould have moved. If he could have opened his mouth. If he could haveopened his eyes.

Instead, he lay still beneath theshimmer of the curse – the Light coiled inside him like a serpentof fire, tightening whenever he tried to breathe. It did not kill; itsimply unmade. Ithollowed him out one nerve at a time, leaving enough mind to knowwhat was being taken. He saw the shape of his own body blur, magicburning through his veins in slow, exquisite ruin.

They said they fought for good.For the "right" side. They said they fought against monsters. Hewanted to tell them: monsters are made, not born.

Time dissolved and days bled intoyears, or maybe hours – he could no longer tell. The air itselfbecame his clock, marked only by the rhythm of footsteps, the clinkof glass, the soft spells of medimages.

Sometimes, he dreamt of the sea.

He would see it behind his eyelids–dark, endless, swallowing the horizon. In those dreams, he wasfree, if only because there was nothing left of him to bind.

One day, however, the atmospherechanged. Someone gasped – a sound of surprise, not fear – andlight flooded the chamber. Real light this time, he could feel it onhis skin, so different from the cursed brilliance of purification.It's something gentler. Like rainlight.

He remembers the taste of it: coldand clean.

He crawled.

Or perhaps he only thought hecrawled – his body was a map of half-healed wounds, his magicthreadbare and flickering. But he found the door, found the worldwaiting on the other side, and fell into it.

In truth, he couldn't move an inch.

But the sea was there anyway, justas he had dreamt.

He lay beneath layers ofenchantment, skin marked with sigils that pulsed faintly with eachdying beat of the curse. Somewhere deep in his chest, magic movedlike blood – sluggish, venomous and stubbornly alive.

Sometimes –often– he wonders if he is already dead.

Sometimes – often– he hoped he was.

Then the sound that had brought thelight came closer – footsteps through water, the hiss of rainagainst glass. It was a different rhythm, slower.

He felt the faint tremor in themagic of the room, the shift in the wards as they recognised someonenew. For a heartbeat, panic flooded his chest – another medimage,another Light-bringer, came to bleed him dry of what darknessremained.

Then, a voice – low anduncertain. Words he couldn't quite follow. His mind drifted in andout, pulled under by pain and exhaustion. He catches a single word asthough through water.

"Zabini?"

It took him a moment to rememberthe sound of his own name. He tried to move, but failed. A tremor –a finger twitching once against the sheets. They were touching himnow, shifting the magic around his body. He wanted to fight, tosnarl, to curse them all into dust, but all that escaped him was aflicker of air, the smallest echo of life.

Still, it was enough.

Magic stirred weakly at the edge ofhis awareness – a spark of instinctive defence, of rage barelytethered to breath. The serpent of Light inside him tightened once,furious, then stilled again. Through the fog, he heard a promisespoken close to his bed, a voice unfamiliar, yet he knew he had heardit before.

"Pack him up. He's coming withme."

For the first time in years, thewards trembled with uncertainty. He did not know this man, but heknew one thing – the cage the Light had put him in was breaking.Something inside him – something dark and enduring – began towake.

Chapter Text

Hermione

The classroom smelled of parchment, candle smoke, and a faint trace of the wards still humming beneath the floorboards. Hermione ran her fingers along the edge of a desk, polished smooth by hands small and large over the past months, and allowed herself a moment to breathe. In the quiet, the weight of the manor pressed softly against her chest – neither oppressive nor comforting, merely present, like the memory of a storm long past.

Once, long before the dust had settled and the Ministry had been forced to acknowledge what they had wrought, Draco, Theo, Harry, and she had reached an agreement with Kingsley Shacklebolt. It was simple in principle, infinitely complicated in execution: they would build a place for children who did not fit into Hogwarts' narrow definitions of magical aptitude – children whose magic shifted, twisted, or whispered in ways older than the founders themselves. They named it the Norxward Institute for Bright Young Minds.

Bright Minds, and perhaps darker hearts than anyone cared to admit.

Here, magic was studied in its entirety. Old Magic, they called it – the kind Merlin and Morgana had wielded, neither Light nor Dark but Ancient, echoing through the ages. Here, children learned charms and curses, blood rituals and druidic rites, the long-forgotten intricacies of runes, and the art of duelling. For those aged eleven to fourteen, every subject was mandatory; only when they reached fifteen did they choose their speciality, and from then on, the Institute separated them not by house or lineage, but by focus, by the way their power decided to manifest.

She glanced toward the window. Rain fell in soft, persistent sheets, blurring the courtyard into watercolour shades of grey and green.  Even the gardens seemed to have learned a new rhythm – the ancient oaks standing taller, the grass curling in gentle spirals that no human hand had planned. The manor itself had changed subtly, as if the building breathed alongside its inhabitants. Magic hummed in the walls, and the corridors seemed to stretch a little further than yesterday. They were all learning, in their own ways, to live within its pulse.

Harry moved through it quietly. He no longer reported to Kingsley, no longer carried the burden of the Ministry on his shoulders. He simply survived, day by day, tending to his own wounds and quietly contending with the knowledge that the Light had never been superior to the Dark – only different, and not always better. He walked these halls like a ghost of the boy he had once been, and yet there was something painfully human about the way he paused at windows or lingered in the library, catching fragments of magic in the air as though it might hold him together.

Draco was everywhere and nowhere at once. Headmaster, organiser, constant presence – yet when he paused, when his gaze drifted far beyond the manor, it always reminded her of what he carried behind the calm exterior: the memory of power, of choices made and unmade, of a war that had asked too much of him. Only those who looked closely could see the faint tremor beneath his careful composure.

Tom, meanwhile, had retreated even further into himself. He still allowed Hermione to study his magic, though now it felt less like research and more like conversation – silent but patient, when he used to refuse any contact. He painted constantly, filling the rooms with impossible shapes and colours that seemed to shift as you walked past. Sometimes she thought the Manor itself had become his canvas, its walls a reflection of the fragments of himself he was trying to understand. He was healing, slowly, and in his way – making peace with a self he barely remembered, a self who had been cruel, brilliant, and untethered all at once.

Theo stayed beside her – not close, not always, but near enough that their movements in the classrooms and labs became rhythmically aligned, unspoken. His presence was steady, though strange –sometimes distant, almost unreachable, and yet other times impossibly intimate. The bond forged on the battlefield remained, strange and stubborn, a tether neither of them could name, and once she did not quite wish to untie.

Hermione moved along the line of desks, arranging books, straightening papers, tracing faint runes embedded in the floorboards. The children had not yet arrived – the younger ones would only begin their studies in a fortnight – but the silence was heavy with expectation. Soon, the Manor would echo with voices again: voices that would challenge, question, and perhaps even terrify the professors with the scope of their potential. Here, they would learn to wield it, not as a weapon or shield, but as an extension of themselves.

She paused, hands folded over a tome of runes. Even amidst the work, the care, the quiet order, she felt the weight of what they had built. It was fragile. Dangerous and alive. And in its pulse, she still sensed the shadow of all they had lost, and the hint of what they could still become.

The first step, as always, was to simply breathe, and then to walk forward. It has been almost three years since the last battle – three years since the wards of Norxward were reforged and the world shifted beneath their feet. Three years since the notion of Light and Dark lost their neat borders, and they began to live in the uncertain space between. In a way, the Norxward Institute was born from that uncertainty – from ashes, really.

The final agreement with the Ministry had taken months of negotiation – arguments in shadowed offices, signed parchments as binding as spells, and the silent presence of Kingsley, who had learned, perhaps better than any of them, that peace required its own kind of rebellion. In the end, he had looked at them – Draco with his calm defiance, Theo with his quiet intellect, Tom half-ghost and half-miracle, and she, Hermione, the traitor and scholar – and said simply: Build something better.

And so they did.

The Institute began with twelve students. Twelve children who had been turned away from Hogwarts for being too volatile, too strange, too much.

There was a girl whose magic melted glass when she cried or screamed. A boy who dreamt in runes and woke with sigils burned into his skin. Twins who could speak to storms.

Draco had found them, one by one. He had written to their families, who no longer trusted the Ministry's promises but dared to hope.

Now, the Institute counted about forty children of all ages. A modest number, but every year more letters arrived – some hopeful, some desperate – and each new student carried a different kind of brightness.

They taught them everything Hogwarts would not. Charms and Arithmancy, of course, but also Binding Circles, Blood Sigils, Druidic Rituals, and the Ethics of Forbidden Craft. Runes are compulsory for all – the language of ancient magic, as vital to them as breath. Draco oversaw the Duelling Hall, his lesson precise and demanding, his movements almost priest-like in their discipline. Theo taught Theory of New and Ancient Magic and assisted Hermione in her research, where they dissect spells older than the Ministry itself, trying to understand why some branches of magic refused to die.

She, for her part, led Magical History and Ritual Ethics, though she suspected the students preferred the practical workshops where the air hums with each discovery.

There were no Houses at the Institute. The children were first divided by age, then by their chosen field :

The Scholars, who pursue runic study, theory, and ancient languages.

The Weavers, who specialise in ritual craft and potion alchemy.

The Wielders, those who study combat, duelling, and elemental focus.

At first, the group had noticed that the world outside sneered at their attempt. The Daily Prophet called them “The School of Shadows”, and there were petitions demanding the Institute's closure. However, slowly, whispers changed. Parents spoke of children who no longer feared their own strength. The Department of Mysteries began to send quiet requests for research collaborations, as negotiated with the Ministry at the end of the war. And the old line between forbidden and acceptable blurred, just a little more.

Still, Hermione did not fool herself – this was no true victory. It was merely survival made into a curriculum.

Norxward Manor itself had grown around them. The old marble corridors breathed more softly now; the wards hum with patient, living energy. The classrooms were once ballrooms, and studies were now turned into places of learning. In spring, the courtyard bloomed with wild herbs that root themselves without being planted. The children swore they saw the walls shift at night, doors appearing where none were before. Perhaps they were right. Norxward had always been alive, after all.

There was a garden behind the eastern wing where Tom painted – it used to be barren, scorched from battle. Now it was all lavender and glass lilies, glimmering with magic. Sometimes, when the students walk past, their hair lifts in an unseen breeze, and they whisper that the many paintings look back at them.

Harry spent his mornings there, with Tom, often in silence. The medimage still visited weekly, a kind-eyed woman named Coralie, who coaxed words from him with gentle questions. She passed them sometimes and caught fragments – not of war, but of living. Of trying.

Draco, on the other hand, never stopped working. He was in the classroom or his office from dawn to dusk, his robes always marked with chalk from the duelling floor. Yet, sometimes, when he looked toward the lake, she could see something that was not truly weariness – the man never tired – but distance. It reminded her that to rebuild was its own kind of battle – slower, quieter, but no less exhausting. Every spell they teach, every ward they mend, every child they reassure... It was a small defiance against everything that came before. And when the sun sank behind the wards, the classrooms fell into a soft hush. She always lingered a little longer – writing notes, adjusting enchantments, convincing herself she'll stop working soon. The walls whisper with the weight of the day. Somewhere beyond, laughter echoed faintly. In those quiet moments, she almost believed they were healing.  

Chapter Text

Harry

The east garden smelled of paint and lavender. It was still early –the kind of morning where light crept slowly, unsure if it was welcome. The walls of Norxward glimmered faintly, wards pulsing in rhythm with the breeze. Somewhere inside, children were already awake. It was the first day of school, finally.

Harry sat on the stone bench outside Tom's atelier, hands wrapped around a cooling cup of tea. He hadn't drunk a sip. He told himself he came here for the quiet – for the stillness that neither the Ministry nor St Mungo's ever managed to give him – but that was only partly true. Mostly, he came because he still couldn't decide what to think of the man who painted behind the open door. And so, even after three years of living there with this man.

He could hear Tom humming to himself as he worked, sleeves rolled up, dark hair flying all around his handsome face. He painted like he cast – each brushstroke deliberate, powerful, and precise. The canvases around him shimmered faintly, filled with strange landscapes that felt almost familiar: fragments of forests, the curve of a castle wall, the flicker of a serpent's eye. None of them were portraits – he hadn't painted one in months, and the last one was a representation of Malfoy grinning happily.

Harry was absurdly grateful for that.

He still dreamt, sometimes, of the other Tom – the one who laughed while the world burned under his feet. However, this one... this one was no ghost. He looked deeply human to Harry, too human perhaps. There were days when he hated him for that.

"Are you going to sit there all morning?"

Tom's voice cut through the quiet – smooth, almost lazy in his pronunciation.

He blinked. "Wasn't sure you noticed me."

"I always do, Potter." Tom didn't turn, but his brush stopped moving. "When you hover like that, it means you want to ask questions, but you don't know where to begin or how to start."

Harry exhales, long and uneven, his breath half a laugh, half a sigh. "Maybe it's because I'm not ready to ask."

"Then you're wasting both our time."

There was no malice in the words. Tom set the brush down, wiped his fingers clean on a rag that looked like it had been used to absorb a dozen different colours, and finally turned to face Harry.

The latter never knew what to expect in those moments. Sometimes Tom looked older, sometimes impossibly young – like the magic that remade him never settled on one age. Today, he looked tired. Not in body, but in the way of someone endlessly running from his own reflection. Harry knew that tiredness too well.

"What are you painting?" he asked, if only to fill the silence.

"A memory," is the answer. "One I'm trying to recall fully, but I can't. These images haunt my dreams lately..."

He frowned and stepped closer. On the canvas, there was a suggestion of movement – waves crashing against cliffs, the faint trace of a figure on the beach. It was beautiful and unsettling at once.

"Is that all you remember?"

Tom's lips twitched, not quite a smile. "Yes. It is all. It seems that my memory, old and new, has a focus on power. Powerful people.Powerful places. Powerful magic. So, sometimes, it's difficult to remember something when it is not linked to power."

Harry didn't answer; he just watched the painting, how light moved beneath the oil, alive like breath trapped in pigment. It felt like standing before a mirror that didn't hate him. Often, he wondered what it meant that he could stand here – that he could look TomRiddle in the eyes and not reach for his wand. Sometimes he thought it was a weakness. Other times, maybe it was proof that he was learning what mercy looked like.

Malfoy passed by once, his cloak trailing silver dust from the duelling hall. He nodded at Harry and kissed Tom quickly, something soft in his grey eyes when they settled on his lover. Every time he was a witness to their love, something odd ached in his chest.

He could still remember a time when Malfoy's name was synonymous with arrogance, cruelty, and war. Now, the man was Headmaster of a school that taught children to wield the magic both sides tried to destroy.

And Harry – who once believed himself the saviour of the Light –sat watching the man who was Darkness reborn paint flowers into the ruins of his own history. The world had turned inside out, and maybe that was what healing looked like.

Tom broke the silence again, once Malfoy was gone. "You keep coming back because you want to understand," he declared, kinder than he usually was. "But I don't believe that understanding me will absolve you."

Harry met his gaze. "Maybe I'm not looking for absolution?"

"Then what? What pushes you to come here day after day in my company when I know you hate me?"

He hesitated. "Maybe I'm trying to believe that people can change. That I can stop hating you."

Tom studied him for a long moment – eyes like ancient ink, dark and impossible to read. Then, softly: "Perhaps you're trying to believe that you can."

The words landed, heavy at the bottom of his stomach. In the painting, the tide hit the cliffs, and outside, the wards hummed in an endless song. Harry looked at the man who was once his nightmare and thought – not for the first time – that maybe darkness was never the enemy. Maybe it was the fear of it that nearly destroyed them all.

By afternoon, the corridors of Norxward were alive again –laughter, clattering footsteps, the sound of small explosions echoing from the duelling hall. The scent of burned parchment lingered in the air, as comforting now as the old Gryffindor common room once was. Harry walked through it all. A group of students passed him, arms full of rune-carved stones that glowed faintly. They greeted him shyly– "Professor Potter" – though he didn't actually teach here. The title has stuck regardless, born of affection and habit. Henodded, managed a smile.

The Institute breathed differently from Hogwarts. There were no portraits in the main corridors, no watching eyes in the walls –only open corridors, sunlight spilling through enchanted glass. The architecture was old, perhaps not older than Hogwarts but ancient all the same.

He found Hermione and Nott in the courtyard, bent over a table covered in maps and star charts. Their head were close, voices low, hands moving in synchrony as if they shared a single mind. Hermionelooked up first, her curls wild from the sea breeze and ink smudged across her wrist.

"Harry! You've been hiding again."

He shrugged. "Just.... thinking."

Nott didn't look up, still making notes with neat, precise strokes."That usually means brooding, in your case."

Hermione glared at him, though her smile softened it. "Ignore him. You look better today."

Harry sat opposite them, eyes drifting across the parchment. It was a map of ley lines – magic currents beneath the land, drawn in shimmering ink that shifted like liquid gold.

"Expanding the wards?" he asked.

"Eventually," Hermione said. "But right now we're just charting how the old magic moves. It's... fascinating, really. The Institute sits on one of the oldest crossings in Britain. Druidic, probably pre-Merlin."

"Draco thinks the wards respond to intent," Nott added, his tone thoughtful. "Not just to spellwork. They seem to mirror the people inside. When the students are calm, the magic hums. When they're angry or excited, it stirs."

He allowed the words to sink in. Magic that reflected emotion. Maybe that was why Norxward felt alive, or maybe it was why he felt less like a stranger here than anywhere else.

He glanced toward the manor windows. From one of them – high above, behind glass streaked with light – he saw the faint silhouette of Tom Riddle standing at his easel again. Painting. Hermione followed his gaze, quiet for a beat.

"You still visit him, then?"

Harry nodded. "I don't know why I keep going back."

"Yes, you do," Nott said, at last looking up. His voice was calm, but his eyes were sharp as ever. "You're trying to find what makes him different. Or what makes you the same?"

Hermione reached out, resting her ink-stained fingers lightly overHarry's hand. "Healing isn't linear, you know. It's all right to need to look at the thing that hurt you – especially when it's no longer what it was."

He breathed out, slowly. The bell rang somewhere inside the manor –a clear, melodic sound that called the younger students to dinner. Nott rolled up the map, and Hermione gathered her notes. The breeze caught a strand of her hair; it danced like a flame.

"Come eat," she said gently. "You can think about Tom and redemption after pudding."

Harry laughed – a small, genuine sound that felt strange in his own throat. He rose, following them back inside.

The hall glowed with soft candlelight, and students gathered at long wooden tables. Malfoy stood at the far end, speaking with one of the older pupils, his expression patient and proud. For a moment, Harry watched him – the former enemy, now a teacher guiding a nervous child through an incantation.

  Something shifted in him, a quiet uncoiling. He didn't know if he would ever forgive the past – or himself – but as the laughter of young witches and wizards filled the room, he thought that maybe forgiveness wasn't the point. Maybe the point was this: the living, breathing proof that light and dark were never enemies at all –just two sides of the same spell, finally spoken together.  

Theo

Dinner at Norxward was never quiet. Not in the irritating, Gryffindor-first-sense he remembered from Hogwarts, but in the way of a place alive – a place learning to breathe again after being suffocated for far too many years.

The hall glowed with warm candlelight, children chattering over steaming bowls of stew, the clatter of silverware echoing beneath the vaulted ceiling. The first evening of term always hummed with a particular kind of magic – anticipation, nerves, hope.

Theo watched it all from his place at the staff table, fingers curled loosely around a glass of water. It still felt strange sometimes – the idea that he was staff at all, that people looked to him for guidance. Stranger still was the realisation that he liked it.

Teaching.

Of all things.

No one at Hogwarts would have predicted that. Not the professors, not Draco, not even Theo himself. He was the quiet one, the observer, the strategist moving in the background. He had assumed he'd remain there forever – a ghost in a world rebuilt without him. But then Hermione had shoved a stack of rune manuscripts into his hands one night, eyes bright and curls wild, saying, "Read this and tell me if you see what I see."

He saw it, and more than that. And she seemed relieved that he did.

Now, as he observed the students at the long tables, he felt something warm settle beneath his ribs – something he hadn't expected from life, and certainly not for himself: purpose.

Theo taught three main subjects: Advanced Runes, Theoretical Ritual Frameworks, and, because Draco insisted he was the only one "patient enough to handle the precocious ones", the first-year general class in Theory of New and Ancient Magic and Its Ethics. He found the last class ironic. Him, teaching ethics. But the children didn't know the darker parts of his past – his father's hands on his shoulders, the weight of expectation, the shadow of pureblood doctrine stitched into him as tightly as his own skin. Maybe that was for the best. If he could help these children unlearn the lies he had swallowed whole, then perhaps something good could come out of the wreckage he carried inside.

He watched two first-years attempt to pry a levitating quill out of the chandelier. Their laughter rang across the hall.

He couldn't help it – he smiled.

"Your face is soft again," Hermione murmured as she slid into the seat beside him, nudging his shoulder with hers. "That means you're thinking."

"It means I'm eating," he replied, spearing a piece of bread. "A rare moment of peace."

She rolled her eyes, and he caught the familiar spark of affection in it. They had been working all afternoon on ley lines, their minds weaving together as naturally as threads on the same loom. Sometimes he wondered how they made sense together – him with his shadows and blunt logic, her with her fire and precision. But then she'd glance at him like this, ink smudged on her cheek, and he'd remember: neither of them had ever really belonged anywhere until Norxward.

Not that he'd say it aloud. He wasn't Draco.

Hermione warmed her hands around a teacup. "What do you think of Harry? Does he seem steadier to you?"

He hummed, thoughtfully. "He's talking to Tom again."

Her eyes softened. "Do you think it helps?"

He considered. "I think he wants it to. Which might be enough."

She fell quiet, reflecting, and Theo resisted the urge to reach for her hand. Instead, his gaze drifted to the far end of the hall, where now Draco stood with a group of older students, demonstrating wand posture with the absolute seriousness of someone guarding the crown jewels. His hair glowed like white-gold in the candlelight as his grey eyes glinted.

Headmaster Malfoy... Even now, even after three years, the title felt like a joke delivered by an overly ambitious comedian. But Draco had grown into the role with startling grace. Structure suited him; responsibility steadied him. And the students adored him – even the ones who were clearly terrified of disappointing him.

Theo wasn't sure Draco saw what he'd become. He often seemed too busy running everywhere at once. Then, there was Tom. He was absent from dinner again – unsurprising. Tom spent most evenings painting surrounded by enchanted silence, or leaning over Hermione and Theo's research notes with an unnerving amount of interest in things that belonged to an era he barely remembered.

Tom Riddle was oddly quiet now. Not harmless – never harmless –but contained and thoughtful. Sometimes Theo caught him staring out windows as if searching for a memory just out of reach. Sometimes his magic pulsed in the walls like a heartbeat responding to some ancient call. And sometimes, when Harry visited him, the entire manor seemed to hold its breath.

"Are you brooding?" Hermione cut his thoughts, her voice low enough that only he could hear.

He tore a piece of bread. "I don't brood."

"You do. Very elegantly, in fact."

He snorted, very ungracefully so. "Says the woman who colour-coded an entire tower last week."

"That was practical organisation!"

He hummed, unconvinced.

Their shoulders brushed again – lightly, unintentionally, except nothing ever felt entirely unintentional with her these days. Working beside Hermione Granger had been like waking up after years underwater. She challenged him, matched him, frustrated him, and understood him in ways he hadn't expected anyone to.

And the battlefield they'd shared in the final war had carved something between them that neither of them dared name. Not yet.

Theo's gaze softened as he watched her sip her tea, curls haloed in candle-glow. He loved teaching. He loved learning. He loved building something new after a life of inheriting ruins. Maybe, just maybe, he was learning how to love people, too. Even when it scared him.Especially Hermione.

When dessert arrived and laughter swelled through the hall, Theo leaned back in his chair and let his eyes sweep across the room one more time.

Norxward was strange and unpredictable. It was everything he never had. 

He allowed himself to believe he belonged here, as someone shaping the world instead of fleeing from it. Healing, he came to realise after the war, didn't always arrive like lightning. Sometimes it arrived like this: a warm hall, a full table, a future unfolding quietly in candlelight.

  He allowed himself to breathe.  

Chapter Text

Draco

Night settled slowly over Norxward, draping the old manor in a shawl of silver dusk. The students had retreated to their towers, the corridors had fallen quiet, and the last of the evening's enchantments hummed through the walls.

Draco sat alone in the small sitting room he shared with Tom,firewhisky catching the candlelight as he rolled the glass between his fingers. The hearth glowed low – mostly embers now, breathing soft crackles into the stillness. Even after three years, he had not quite grown used to evenings like this. Peace had always felt like a rumour, something other people earned. Something he wasn't meant to hold.

Yet here he was—headmaster, professor, builder of something new.

He took a slow sip, letting the burn settle in his chest.

At first, the Norxward Institute for Bright Young Minds had sounded pretentious even to him, then dangerously ambitious. But the moment Kingsley had approved the charter, Hermione had burst into tears, Theo had smiled in that quiet way he reserved for real victories, Tom had kissed him with passion, and Potter had gripped Draco's shoulder like it meant everything.

Suddenly, the impossible felt inevitable.

He didn't know when it happened, or how, but the Institute had become the axis of his life. The students relied on him; the staff–his friends – trusted him; the manor itself seemed to respond to him. It was heavy, indeed – crushing on the worst days – but it was also right. It fit him. He liked teaching more than he'd expected. The older years especially – the duelling classes where precision mattered more than power, where control mattered more than bravado. The ones who came to him wracked with fear of their own magic, or fear of becoming something dark... he understood those fears deeply, for he had lived them. And every day, he watched his students walk a little straighter, every year growing braver. They were building a world he had once believed lost.

A soft rustle drew his attention. Tom's painting robe – dark blue, flecked with dried silver – lay draped over the chaise. Paint-stained rags were stacked neatly next to an open sketchbook on the table. Tom had left them like breadcrumbs, tracing his path through the evening.

He smiled faintly, feeling the adoration he had for the man warming him inside out.

His lover had fought him, at first, about the painting room.

"I don't need a space," he said, clipped and defensive, wrists tight behind his back.

"You do, dear," Draco had insisted. " You need a place that is yours."

He hadn't expected, then, the way Tom's expression had softened –not quite relief, not quite fear, but something fragile, something that reminded him of the deep love they shared. He had chosen the western studio, with its wall of windows and quiet light. Draco, for his part, had carved out part of the gardens for him, a private stretch of roses and old oaks where Tom could breathe without being scrutinised.

They were gifts, but not for redemption. His lover didn't need redemption to be deserving. They were simply gifts for his man, trying– truly trying – to build himself from dust.

Draco took another sip from his drink, letting warmth flood him.

Tom struggled, of course. They all did. Some days he woke with memories he didn't want; other days, without memories he wished he still had. He rarely said it aloud, but Draco knew when the shadows pressed too close. The magic in the manor flickered, the airtightened, and Tom's hands shook slightly when he reached for a brush.

Draco never named it, never pushed, and never demanded confession. He simply sat beside him, painted when asked, and offered silence when needed. Tom, in return, was steady in a way Draco hadn't known he craved – a presence at his back, a soft murmur in the morning, a hand drifting to his waist when he thought Draco wasn't paying attention.

Draco Malfoy, heir of the Malfoy great family, Pure Blood for many centuries and ex-Death Eater, had never expected to be loved, let alone gently.

He lifted his glass in a quiet toast to no one.

"Three years," he murmured to the empty room. "Not bad, considering."

He let himself breathe, eyes drifting to the window where moonlight silvered the garden he had given to his lover. The roses glowed faintly, enchanted with a warm luminescence, Tom insisted was purely practical even though he suspected it soothed him.

Tomorrow would bring new tasks, new students, and new problems. It always did... but he liked it, in a way, and was ready.

By morning, as predicted, the peace had evaporated. Draco's office was flooded with parchment – reports, letters from prospective families, rune pattern requests from Theo, and a frankly insulting pile of essays from the second-years who had apparently conspired to see how many ways one could misuse the word "ancient".

He was halfway through drafting a revised safety plan for the advanced duelling hall when the door swung open without warning.

He was about to yell that whoever was entering must knock, when Hermione stormed inside, and behind her –

Ronald Weasley, in Auror uniform, red-faced, breathless, looking simultaneously excited, panicked, and deeply out of place in Norxward's calm corridors.

They both spoke at once.

"Draco –"

"Malfoy, you're not –"

They stopped, looked at each other, then at Draco. After a moment, Weasley stepped forward, swallowed hard, and blurted:

"You need to come see this. Now."

Draco blinked once. Breathed in, then out, slowly. Then set down his quill.

The walk from his office to the main hall felt disproportionately long. Perhaps because Weasely and Hermione refused to explain anything until they got there, or perhaps because Tom was no longer beside him, and the absence of that quiet hum of shared awareness left a hollowness in his ribcage.

He followed them – Weasley striding ahead with the urgency of a Ministry operative fresh off adrenaline, Hermione keeping pace with a kind of escalating dread that did nothing for Draco's nerves.

The doors of the main hall stood open, and it was silent inside. His stomach dropped.

The long wooden tables had been pushed back against the walls, leaving the centre cleared – an unusual sight. Lanterns floated overhead, dimmed to a soft amber, and the air smelled faintly of antiseptic cataclasm and smoke.

On one of the table lay a body.

Not just any body, but one he knew.

It was Blaise. His friend. His old best friend. Lying on the table, unconscious.

He was stretched atop one of the wide wooden tables, the dark wood stark beneath the unnatural stillness of his body. His skin –normally a deep, warm brown with a natural glow that always made him look composed, collected and aristocratic – had dulled to an ashy, grey-brown pallor. It leached the life out of his features, turning familiar contours strange.

Black curls, usually trimmed close and immaculate, were mussed and damp as though he'd been sweating or rained on. A faint sheen clung to his temples, and his long lashes lay unmoving against his cheeks, making the hollows beneath his eyes appear darker, bruised.

He wore finely cut clothes – tailored and expensive, no doubt –but they were torn at the sleeve, dirt ground into the seams, the fabrics at the collar singed like he'd been too close to something volatile. His fingers, normally adorned with elegant rings, were bare and slack against the wood. He was utterly motionless except for the faint rise and fall of his chest – so shallow Draco only caught it because he forced himself to look for it.

For a moment, the world shrank to a pinprick.

Blaise.

He hadn't allowed himself to think of him – truly think of him –in years. War fractured friendships, but he had been certain Blaise was dead. Either lost on the battlefield of Hogwarts or killed the day he shattered Azkaban.

He never had proof, but the silence, this silence deep enough to bury grief in. He had mourned his friend. He had made peace with the idea that some ghosts did not return.

Yet here he was – his old friend, the one who always walked with effortless grace and perfect control – lying broken, unconscious, pale as the dead on Norxward's dining table.

Alive.

But barely.

Draco drew in a breath, but it tasted of iron.

"Where," he started, voice too thin, "did you find him?"

Weasley stepped forward, rubbing a hand over the back of his necklike he expected Draco to hex him any moment.

"I got sent on a mission," he said. "Ministry recovery.Northern coast. He was left in a warded hospital, in a coma... they didn't know what to do with him."

Draco's gaze sharpened, turning ot face the redhead. "Is it a curse?"

"Light magic", Weasley nodded. "Not the normal sort, though. It seems it's a Purification spell. Cleansing containment sigils. The kind Aurors started using during the war, but they're supposed to be strictly forbidden now. He was caught in one, I think. Probably for some time now."

Draco felt his stomach lurch.

This sort of magic – the kind developed during and after the war –was meant to restrain dark-affiliated wizards and witches without killing them. However, the theory was deeply flawed. He knew that ashe knew that Hermione, Theo and several others had written research papers arguing that this kind of "Light magic" was as destructive as the Dark sort.

He looked again at his friend's face – gaunt, too sharp, too still... – and felt a cold fury spark.

"Why bring him here?" he asked, though the answer already curled at the edge of his thoughts.

Weasley exhaled sharply. "Because I know Zabini is probably dying. He can't have long left, and because 'Mione and Nott know more about magic's effects on the body than anyone in the Ministry. Because Norxward can handle things the Ministry refuses to recognise still..."

Hermione sat her bag down, her gaze sweeping over Blaise with clinical precision.

"I suppose we can start searching for a cure... create a trial with Theo..."

Draco turned his attention to his friend again – a faint pulse of magic throbbed under the surface of the skin. It was weak, venomous and struggling. Hermione noticed it too; she leaned closer, brows drawing together.

"There's Light residue," she muttered. "Layers of it. Old, but still active."

Weasley pointed at the curve of Blaise's throat. "There's this scar too. The medimage said Light magic bit him hard, but I don't think they treated him well either..."

Draco examined it – unlike the jagged thing that marred his face, this one was a thin, elegant silver line, as if carved by a spell too precise to be accidental. It gleamed faintly under the hall's enchanted lanterns.

He exhaled slowly, forcing himself to keep his voice steady. "We need Theo. And Tom... Now."

Hermione nodded sharply. "Already sent a Patronus."

Weasley shifted on his feet. "He twitched, you know. When I went to get him. Just once... it was as if he knew I was there."

Draco closed his eyes for a moment. He imagined Blaise alone in that cursed warded room, the Light magic unmaking him piece by piece, leaving him hollow and helpless, unable to scream. He imagined the serpent of Light winding tighter every time Blaise fought it. He felt something inside him go very, very still.

"Blaise cannot die like this," he whispered, more to himself than to the room.

Hermione touched his arm – brief, grounding, but Weasley looked away, jaw tight.

He opened his eyes. "Theo and Tom will help us stabilise him," he declared. "The Institute will not let him die."

He turned to his friend, watching for a moment longer how still and pale he was. He watched the faint pulse of magic beneath his skin flickering – a spark of something dark, stubborn, and impossibly alive. He reached out and placed a steadying hand near his wrist, not touching him but close enough to feel the cold emanating from him.

"Stay with us," he murmured. "You're not done yet."

  He heard the doors open behind them, quickly followed by footsteps. He straightened, breathing once – twice – before turning to face the beginning of whatever came next.  

Chapter Text

Theo

Theo arrived at the Institute's main hall at a near run, Tom just a step behind him. Hermione's Patronus had reached him mid-lecture, dissolving in a flurry of silver words that left his pulse stumbling. He hadn't even dismissed the students properly – he had simply gone, wand in hand, dread curling beneath his ribs.

The doors groaned open before him.

The moment he stepped inside, the air shifted and became thick, charged, and taut with something that felt like wrongness lingering in the bones of the room. He crossed the hall in long, purposeful strides, magic already stirring sharply beneath his skin. Tom followed silently, boots echoing softly against the flagstones, his expression grave but unreadable, eyes fixed first on Draco – and then on the table at the centre of the room.

Theo stopped beside Draco, and the world suddenly narrowed, destroying everything he had managed to build and rebuild so far.

Blaise Zabini lay before them like some broken offering. For a heartbeat, he found himself struggling to breathe.

This was his once-friend. His once-something-complicated that neither of them ever named. He had not seen him since the war fractured them all into unrecognisable pieces. Since he lost him in the fire at Hogwarts. Since he thought Draco had killed him in the explosion of Azkaban. Still, at this very moment, he recognised every ruined line of his friend. His deep-brown skin had been leeched into something ashy and wrong, his features hollowed, edges too sharp where they had once been smooth and aristocratic. His curls clung damply to his forehead, plastered by sweat. Spell-residue shimmered faintly across his forearms and chest – thin, crystalline threads of Light magic, hostile even in its decay.

He felt something cold slide down his spine. This wasn't mere injury, but dismantling.

"Merlin," he whispered. "Draco... how long has he been like this?"

His friend shook his head, jaw clenched. "We don't know."

Hermione stepped closer, voice low. "Ron found him like this. It seems to be Purification magic with active residue."

His gaze snapped to her. "Active? After this long?"

She nodded. "We think the spellwork was layered."

He swore softly, then forced himself to breathe and stepped forward. He laid his palm a hair above Blaise's sternum, not touching but close enough for diagnostic magic to reach.

Cold hit him like a wave. Not physical cold but a magical one, the echo of Light infiltration that had sunk too deep into nerve and marrow.

He inhaled sharply.

"His core is splintered," he declared softly. "Not destroyed, but fractured. I feel it's already trying to rebuild itself, but it's too slow, and the Light residue is... binding it. Trapping it."

Hermione's eyes widened. "A soul-binding effect?"

"Yes," he nodded. "A primitive one, though. Brutal but still effective."

Weasley, who had been silent until now, paled. "You think you can fix him?"

He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he let his magic sink deeper– gently, carefully – into the trembling threads of Blaise's core. Beneath the layers of Light, beneath the decay, he found something else. Something dark and furious. Something very much alive. His breath caught once more.

"He's fighting," he whispered, relieved. "After all this time, he's still fighting."

Draco closed his eyes as Theo pulled back from Blaise's core, magic snapping in thin threads. "We need to stabilise him first," he said, turning to Hermione. "We'll need chalk, obsidian, blackroot oil, and a containment ring. We need to do a ritual to protect him from the Light residue inside him."

She nodded briskly, quickly leaving the main hall in search of the ingredients.

Weasley hesitated, looking between them all. "Shouldn't we move him to a more comfortable place? You must have an infirmary."

Draco nodded, grabbing Theo by the shoulder. "Let's move him, alright? We'll start treating him once he's settled."

  He nodded, already devising ways of helping Blaise as they talked about how to move him without worsening his state.

Blaise

Darkness had texture.

He hadn't known that before. It wasn't the blank, cold, silent void he used to imagine when he pictured death. This darkness was thick. Soft in some places, dense in others. Something he drifted through, rather than something that swallowed him whole.

He was alive. That fact hovered at the edge of perception like a half-formed word. Alive meant pain; pain meant breath; breath meant body – and a body meant weight. He felt all of those things faintly, like memories of sensations rather than the sensations themselves.

Somewhere far beyond the dark, a voice murmured low, steady and eventually familiar:

"... don't know what happened to him... no spell residue we recognise..."

It was Weasley. Blaise would have laughed if the part of him capable of laughter hadn't been floating several feet away from the rest. Ronald bloody Weasley. Of all people, the one to drag him out of his hellscape he'd been trapped in... had to be a Weasley.

He tried to move, but his body refused. He tried to open his eyes –nothing, still. So, he surrendered to drifting, and the voice continued.

"...he was like that when I found him. I didn't touch anything, I just brought him here..."

There was anxiety in Weasley's tone. Guilt, perhaps, as well. That would have amused him once – that Weasley, who had always been so painfully straightforward and so Gryffindor, felt guilt over him of all people. Over a Slytherin. Over a Zabini.

Another voice joined the first – sharper, higher, with that unwavering edge he remembered from classrooms. That would be Granger. He felt something warm coil low in his chest with the realisation that the world he'd left behind hadn't fully collapsed. There were still pieces moving, still minds thinking, still magic breathing...

"...stabilised him so we can examine the curse properly..."

Curse... Indeed, there had been a curse. It returned to him in broken shards –the smell of stone in the dark, a wand he barely recognised above him, pain threading itself into his bones, something tearing through the edges of his soul. Not killing, but holding him, binding him to life only to suffer. He remembered the cold hands of Light-alined Medimages holding him down. The blinding lamps. The silence of the cell. The way he screamed, but only inside his own mind. He had stopped trying to die sometime after the second year. Time had become a concept for other people.

He continued drifting.

"...core is plintered... not destroyed, but fractured. I feel it's already trying to rebuild itself..."

That was a third voice – softer, deeper. Controlled, unlike the two others. He knew that voice very well.

Theo... A slow ache expanded in his chest, a bruise blooming outward. He remembered Theo differently from how he remembered anyone else. Flashes of grey mornings in the Slytherin dormitory, of nights spent pretending they weren't terrified of their parents or their futures – two boys raised in shadows, using each other for warmth in winters that were more emotional than seasonal.

Theo had never been gentle, which had suited Blaise perfectly. Love was foreign to both of them, but care they understood in their own twisted, silent way. He remembered Theo's hands in his hair, the press of his forehead, the unspoken promise: you don't have to break alone...their relationship– if you could call something so raw and fragmented that – had been a rebellion against the emptiness. A lesson, too – even the darkest hearts were still permitted to feel, even if they couldn't love, they could care, they could want, and they could try.

But it had been another lifetime, one before the war, before the fire, before he vanished into the cracks of the world. He wanted –desperately – to open his eyes now. To see Theo's face, older, harder, but still with that haunted undertow he used to trace with his fingers. He wanted to tell him that he did survive. That he was still there. But his body remained stubbornly still.

  In the midst of everything, he also recognised another voice, one as familiar as Theo's... Draco. If Blaise had had lungs he could move, he would have screamed his best friend's name. Draco sounded older now and infinitely more tired than he remembered. He didn't sound like the arrogant boy with immaculate hair he knew, but like a man who knew pain. He heard him calling his name, and it almost pulled him back into his body, because his friend never said his name like that– not gently, not with emotion bleeding into the consonants. Sure, once they had been the sort of friends born from proximity and survival, not trust per se. But there had been loyalty, the kind only Slytherins were able to give. If he could have moved even one muscle, he would have reached for him. Still, the darkness held him tight, and his mind drifted again, slipping through old memories, faces dissolving into each other.