Chapter Text
The acrid stench of mold clung to the air like an ancient curse. It invaded the nostrils, provoking a wave of nausea with every breath—a foul blend of rot and stagnant dampness that seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth itself. The walls, slick with icy water, wept in unison with the lost souls they imprisoned. Each droplet falling to the hard floor echoed like a death knell, marking time in this cell where neither day nor night held meaning. The air, biting, crept beneath the clothes, into the bones. A wintry breath from another world—the world of the dead.
Harry was shivering violently. His numb fingers no longer had the strength to hold his knees, which he had pulled up to his chest in an instinctive gesture of survival. Every tremor wrung a silent moan from his body. His skin, grimy and stretched over protruding bones, clung to him, and his eyes, red and dry, wept despite his will. Silent tears rolled down his hollow cheeks, vanishing into the filth of his thin, tattered tunic. He no longer even felt them. He felt nothing—nothing but the cold, the crushing weight of solitude, and the bitter shame gnawing at his insides.
How had it come to this?
Voldemort was dead. Truly dead. The thought struck like a hammer against the anvil of his mind—cold, irrefutable. And yet, the victory tasted of ash. The Dark Lord had left behind only ruins, pain, and ghosts. He had ruled through terror, destroyed on a whim, manipulated for pleasure. A puppeteer with razor-wire strings, a serpent whispering venomous promises to broken souls.
A buried, darker part of Harry let out a short, bitter laugh. A hollow sound, scraped raw by madness and sorrow. Voldemort hadn’t merely spread chaos—he had ripped Harry’s parents from life, shattered Sirius, condemned Remus to endless wandering. He had taken them, one by one, like a collector of tragedies. So yes, Harry felt relief. He had ended the nightmare. With his own hands. A grim, vengeful kind of justice that repaired nothing, but soothed a fracture in his chest.
But it hadn’t been enough. His death hadn’t fixed everything.
A metallic creak sliced through the air, and Harry’s heart clenched sharply. He instinctively brought his hands to his ears, but the desperate reflex did nothing to muffle the sounds that followed. The screams. The pleading. Then the howls—so raw, so intense they seemed to reverberate through the walls, shaking the very foundations of their prison.
Draco Malfoy.
The name burst forth, harsh and sudden, like a door slammed shut in the void. That arrogant fool had tried to save him a month earlier. Why? He still didn’t know. Maybe, in an improbable moment of clarity, Draco had recovered a shred of honor—or maybe just a sliver of hope for a future he wanted to change. But it had been too late. Far too late.
The Battle of Hogwarts had been more than a clash—it had been the end of a world, a cataclysm etched into flesh and stone. The school’s centuries-old walls had cracked under the fury of spells, towers had collapsed in a thunder of fire and unbridled magic. Even the sky seemed to bleed, dyed with ash and crimson, screaming back the cursed incantations that tore through the night.
The ground, once solid and paved, had become a field of black mud, mixed with the scarlet of fallen bodies. An open-air tomb. A sea of corpses, where grotesque giant limbs entangled with the frail bodies of students, where the charred wings of a Thestral lay beside the mottled hide of a fallen Centaur. Here and there, flashes of light had flared—last spasms of duels that always ended the same way: in a gasp, a cry, or a silence too abrupt.
Harry had watched too many familiar faces fade. Fred—his laughter extinguished forever, his smile frozen in a painful expression of disbelief. Ginny—his Ginny—whom he’d thought eternal in her fire, cut down in a final cry of rage and light. Her absence gnawed at him a little more each day, like a fragment of soul torn away. Others had fallen too—classmates whose names he’d never learned, professors, creatures, friends.
And still, the Wizards had risen. Dust-covered, bloodied, their eyes red from too many tears or too much killing, they had stood like survivors of a shipwreck, gripping their shattered, bloodstained wands. Voldemort was dead. And the world, they said, could finally breathe.
Exhausted, Harry had ended up believing it too. He had allowed himself to lower his guard. To imagine that maybe, just maybe, he could live rather than merely survive. Foolishly. Naively. He hadn’t known that evil, like weeds, always grew back stronger after the storm.
Just like Grindelwald before him, Tom Riddle had left behind a trail of fanatics—loyal followers willing to do anything, disciples who were clever, patient, organized. And above all, furious. The Dark Lord hadn’t merely forged monsters; he had planted seeds. And some of them were now in full bloom.
That day in Hogsmeade, the atmosphere had been light—almost peaceful. Bathed in the amber glow of the afternoon, the Hog’s Head had been filled with laughter and conversation. Harry, Ron, and Hermione had been sharing a simple meal, far from their more eccentric admirers, steaming Butterbeers in hand, talking about the future—about what came next, now that Voldemort was gone. He remembered Hermione’s sly smile, Ron’s conspiratorial wink. Most of all, he remembered that fleeting moment of happiness. That last instant of innocence, of carefree naivety before the chaos.
The first explosions shattered the windows, sending glowing shards of glass flying in every direction. The main door was blown off its hinges, torn apart like dry straw. And through the smoke, they appeared.
Around fifty former Death Eaters—some masked, others not—their faces twisted with raw hatred. They cast spells with wild delight, Unforgivables flying in every direction like confetti tossed by overexcited children on Carnival Day. There were screams, cries of fear and pain, bodies falling like puppets with their strings cut, the stench of burnt flesh and charred wood filling the air.
Harry had leapt to his feet, wand already in hand, too used to fighting for his life. Adrenaline drowned out everything else. He struck, he killed, without thinking. Avada Kedavra escaped his lips like a breath. A flash of brilliant green—instant death. The Ministry? Who cared? These people were butchers. He was the Chosen One, the survivor. He allowed himself to do what others didn’t dare even consider. High society would look the other way—everything was forgiven when you were a hero.
But war spared no one.
Ron had been the first to fall. A dark curse struck his wand hand—his casting hand. The flesh rotted before their eyes, vile pustules bursting with a sickening sound. Ron’s scream tore through the air like thunder. Paralyzed by pain, he hadn’t seen the second spell coming. A jet of red light silenced him forever.
Hermione had screamed—a cry of pure agony, an animalistic sound, broken by tears. She had thrown herself toward her fiancé without hesitation. In her desperation, she hadn’t seen the two Death Eaters flanking her, wands raised. Sectumsempra sliced through the air, cruel in its surgical precision.
Hermione’s throat erupted beneath the invisible blade. Blood sprayed in a hot geyser—vivid red on her dress, her hair, the floor. She staggered, eyes wide, her hands flying to her throat, trying in vain to stop the life pouring out of her. She collapsed onto Ron in a grotesque gurgle—a desperate rasp that still haunted Harry’s nightmares.
And him... he had lost his mind. Completely. He had stopped thinking, stopped planning. No more strategy. Only fury—black, unrelenting rage. A need for absolute vengeance. He was no longer a wizard, but a predator. Spells shot from his wand without conscious command—bursts of red, green, blue—screams of pain, of rage. He saw nothing but a red haze, a tide of blood and the strangely satisfying sound of howls.
He didn’t even remember which spell had stopped him. Maybe a Stupefy. Maybe a Cruciatus Curse that had drained him of every last ounce of strength. Or perhaps it was just complete exhaustion. Because at that moment, Harry Potter had stopped being a hero—he was nothing more than a wounded, feral beast, ready to bite until death came.
When the Death Eaters had realized who it was they held in their hands, a sick elation had swept through them—a perverse, almost gleeful exhilaration, as though fate had handed them an unimaginable gift. Harry Potter. The Chosen One. The Boy Who Lived. The one who had defeated their Master—not once, but twice. And the most bitter irony? He had nothing to offer them. He no longer belonged to any structure of significance—the Ministry ignored him, and the Order of the Phoenix was nothing more than a faded memory, wiped away by the ashes of Hogwarts. He held no secrets, no hidden cards up his sleeve. Nothing but the weight of his own legend. And that was more than enough.
They didn’t want him for what he knew. They wanted him for what he was. The hero. The myth. The prize. And more than that—a toy. Something to break. Slowly. Completely.
How long had he been here, in this damp, frozen cell, this tomb without a sky where light seemed banished by the sheer gravity of suffering? He couldn’t have said. Days and nights had melted into one another, into a sticky, choking fog where pain was the only measure of time.
His body had become a distant recollection. Every inch of skin screamed. His muscles convulsed in uncontrollable spasms. His buttocks, his thighs, his back—every part where the skin had broken under their blows—was on fire. Sometimes, when he barely moved, he could feel the flesh tear, like parchment left too long in the sun. The faintest tremor, the softest breath, would spark a fresh wave of torment. Even his hair seemed to ache, as though his entire skull wanted to detach itself from his neck, too heavy with blood and shame.
And then there was the fire. The terrible bite of magical fire, which didn’t always leave visible marks, but carved itself deep into his nerves, until he sometimes thought he might lose his mind. And then the frost—freezing, searing in its own way—locking up limbs already too weak to tremble. A cycle of punishments that crushed his endurance.
He remembered the Cruciatus Curse, of course. How could he forget? It wasn’t pain. It was obliteration. The collapse of everything that made him human. The pinnacle of madness. But the worst part might not have been what he remembered. It was what he didn’t.
There were gaping holes in his memory—terrifying silences between the screams. Slippery recollections, like shadows in the fog. One face remained. A jailer. Greasy features. A mouth split by a smile too wide. Eyes glinting with refined cruelty. Harry remembered watching him approach—slowly, deliberately. He remembered the fingers, undoing the buttons of his black tunic one by one. He remembered the suffocating silence. The metallic taste of dread on his tongue. And then—nothing.
An Obliviate, cast with surgical precision. And still, Harry didn’t want the memory back. Because a part of him already knew. And he wasn’t sure he could survive knowing it again.
Silence fell—sudden and heavy—in the corridor.
The screams. From the cell next door. From Draco. They had stopped. Not because it was over. No. Here, nothing ever truly ended.
He held his breath, straining to listen despite the constant ringing in his skull. Nothing. Not a sob, not a ragged breath. Only silence. A silence thick as tar.
He hoped Draco had passed out. That was the best-case scenario. The most likely one, too. Because Death Eaters weren’t known for giving breaks. They weren’t human. They were only hatred and vice, shaped in violence like golems made of darkness.
And yet, despite himself—despite the pain, despite the hatred—he felt something. A stubborn worry, faint as an ember, but persistent. Not for the former Slytherin he had once despised. But for the broken young man trapped in the next cell, whispering the same mute prayers into the dark. For that fool who had suffered because he’d tried to get him out, risking his life—and his mind—in a desperate attempt.
He closed his eyes. Not to sleep. He hadn’t slept in a long time. Sleep, here, was a cruel illusion, a mental trap between waves of agony. He closed his eyes for another reason: so he wouldn’t cry. Because here, even tears burned like acid. Because here, crying was a quiet confession that he was no longer anything—that he was nothing more than a hollow, shattered shell.
A day passed. Or at least, what he assumed was a day. Here, time had become a painful abstraction, a concept as elusive as light itself. Darkness reigned unchecked—unyielding, merciless. A total, absolute black, as if the darkness had swallowed the whole world. It had no scent, no color, no edge. It wasn’t the absence of light—it was its own entity, heavy and suffocating, pressing down on his shoulders like a cloak of frozen lead.
And then… something changed.
A sound. Faint at first. Almost a whisper. Then clearer. Harsher.
The metallic scraping of chains dragged across stone. A grating, sinister sound, slicing through Harry’s ears like the scream of a wounded beast. Then footsteps—hurried, uneven. Too fast, then suddenly faltering, as if the figure behind the noise had lost its balance. A ragged breath.
And finally, the sharp slam of a door flung open in barely restrained fury.
He didn’t have time to sit up before the impact came. A dull crash. A body. Thrown like a worthless sack of flesh against the frozen wall of the neighboring cell. The sound of flesh meeting bare stone was revolting. Organic. Final.
Harry bolted upright, moved by a primal, instinctive terror. His muscles screamed in protest, tearing with every movement. Pain stabbed through his ribs, and his sweat-slicked skin stretched beneath the tatters of his clothing. But he didn’t care. He no longer thought about his own body. His heart was pounding so violently he thought it might burst from his chest.
Because that sound... He knew it. A body. Thrown. Lifeless.
"Draco?" he breathed, his voice barely audible, hoarse, worn thin by panic.
Nothing. Not a word. Not a breath. Just that abominable silence, colder even than the screams of agony that had echoed here before. It wasn’t the silence of peace. It was a heavy, opaque silence. The silence that follows death.
His heart pounded so hard it split the inside of his skull. Blindly, he moved forward, every step on the uneven ground an agony. His fingers brushed the cold stone of the wall that separated him from the next cell. He pressed his forehead against it, breathing shallowly, his hands clenched like claws against the rough joints.
"Draco!" he called again—louder this time, more desperate.
Still nothing. Not even a groan. Nothingness.
Harry stayed there, frozen by fear, his back hunched, muscles drawn taut like bowstrings about to snap. He waited. He waited like a man sentenced to death, knees tucked up, arms wrapped around them, searching in the dark for a scrap of warmth. He no longer knew if he was trembling from cold or fear. Maybe both. He felt hollow. Empty. Gnawed at by the unknown.
And then, he spoke. He didn’t know why. Maybe to convince himself he was still real.
His voice trembled, fractured. He spoke softly, half to himself, like a madman whispering to his reflection. Phrases without meaning. Memories, sometimes prayers. Useless words. He spoke to drown out the silence.
But the more hours passed, the deeper the fear crept beneath his skin, like a slow, insidious mold.What if Draco was dead? What if he was just another corpse now, a warning left for him—a bloody lesson? What if they had placed him there on purpose, so he would hear him rot?
So the stench of decay would reach him, slowly, inevitably, finishing him off piece by piece?
He would have begged for it not to be true. He would have prayed—if he still believed in gods.
And then, just as his eyelids were falling under the weight of a painful, nervous exhaustion... A sound broke the darkness.
A breath. Faint. Torn. Alive.
"…Draco?" Harry whispered, frozen, as if the slightest word might extinguish the fragile miracle before him.
And this time—an answer. A rasp, raw and broken. But real.
"…Potter?"
The shock hit him like lightning—sudden and violent. His breath caught in his throat, his stomach twisted with an overflow of emotion. The very air could have exploded in blinding light and it wouldn’t have stunned him more. His eyes burned with tears he refused to shed—not here, not now. But his heart—his heart burst with relief.
"You're alive… fuck. You scared the shit out of me, you bastard…" he stammered, half laughing, half choking on a wave of nausea.
From the other side, a rough, bitter chuckle answered him. Fractured, like the boy who had made it.
"Shame…"
Silence fell again. But it was different now. No longer the silence of solitude. It was a silence inhabited—tired, painful, but human. A silence shared between two broken souls, who had fought too long, lost too much, but who still breathed. Two enemies from another time, joined in hell, clinging to one another as the only real thing left.
After what felt like an eternity, Harry gathered his courage. He swallowed, his throat still raw, and murmured, almost shyly:
"Hey… do you think you could call your Elves? Yours. Maybe they could get us out of here."
The silence that followed was long. Very long. Then, an answer—slow, ragged, trembling. An admission.
"No. They won’t come. They obey my father."
A pause. Then the sentence fell like a blade.
"He’s the one who gave me up."
Harry felt his stomach twist, as though someone had driven a blade of ice straight into his gut. He froze, his breath caught in the void of disbelief, his thoughts paralyzed. His mind refused to comprehend, to accept. It couldn’t be—not really…
"Lucius?" he whispered at last, voice pale and strangled. "Your own father…?"
Draco didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. His silence, sharper than any confession, said it all.
What could he have said, anyway? That the man who had watched him come into the world—whom he had called “Father”—had betrayed him to save his own skin? That he’d handed him over to torturers without a word, without a glance, without even a flicker of shame? That he’d stood witness to his suffering like a man forced to watch an unpleasant but necessary spectacle? That he had done nothing—nothing—to save him?
The world tilted around Harry, as if it had suddenly upended itself, drunk on horror. A cold shiver ran up his spine. Even after everything he’d seen—so many deaths, so many lies, so much loss—this kind of betrayal still felt unthinkable. Even the Dursleys—cruel, neglectful, indifferent—had protected him, in their own twisted, unconscious way. Badly. Unknowingly. But they had.
Lucius had knowingly handed over his own son.
But Harry didn’t have the luxury of rage. Or pity. Not now. Not here. All he had were the facts. And an idea. Fragile. Almost absurd. But it was a spark—and that was all he needed.
He took a deep breath, searching for a foothold in this sea of darkness.
"You’re a Black, aren’t you? Through your mother?" he asked, his voice calmer than he felt.
Silence. Then, a faint chuckle from the other side of the wall—a sound torn from a throat far too worn.
“What, you planning to give me a family tree to celebrate my not-quite-death?”
Harry rolled his eyes—an almost absurd gesture in the pitch-blackness of their cell. There was nothing left to look at. Not even a shadow. Not even the memory of light. And yet the reflex, foolish as it was, tethered him to something human. He clung to Draco’s biting sarcasm like a battered lifebuoy in a bottomless ocean. It wasn’t helpful. It wasn’t even relevant. But it was real. Almost normal. And in a world that had lost all sense of itself, that illusion was worth more than gold.
“Kreacher,” he said hoarsely, each word like splinters in his throat. “He’s a House-Elf. He used to serve Sirius. Real nasty piece of work—stubborn, ungrateful, downright unpleasant. But... he helped me during the war. He’s still bound to the House of Black. Maybe he’d listen to you.”
The silence that followed settled on them like a lead weight. It wasn’t just the absence of sound anymore—it had become a force in itself, a crushing, suffocating presence. The air seemed to tighten around them, as if the cell itself were holding its breath, suspended on this thin, trembling thread of hope.
Then Draco shattered it, his tone mockingly light. His voice shook despite himself, but he wrapped it in that desperate arrogance he wore like armor.
“So your grand plan is to beg some crusty Elf who probably hates my guts? You sure you haven’t taken one too many hits to the head, Potter?”
Harry didn’t even flinch. His reply came sharp, dry—almost weary.
“Got a better idea?”
A sigh answered him. Long. Ragged. The kind of exhale that came from a man surrendering to the obvious. There was no plan. No miracle waiting in the wings. Just one last attempt—fragile as a flickering flame in an airless room. Then, in a whisper, like a prayer to a forgotten god, Draco spoke:
“Kreacher… by the blood of Walburga Black… if you hear me… come.”
Silence fell again. But this time, it was different. It buzzed with energy. Tension. Expectation.
And then—suddenly—a crack. Violent. As if the fabric of reality had been torn open all at once. The air around them vibrated, heavy with old magic—warped, laden with a will not their own. A presence had arrived.
At the center of the cell, a shape began to form—emerging like a nightmare a thousand years old. Small. Withered. Hunched in on itself, as if made of folds and creases and ancient spite. Two pale, bulbous eyes gleamed in the dark like sickly little moons. They swept across the room—cold, merciless—before settling, one by one, on the two prisoners.
Kreacher.
He was here.
Harry froze, his breath caught in his chest, his heart pounding like a war drum. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. After so many days in this hellhole, so many humiliations, so much pain, so much loss... there was finally something. An opening. A possibility.
But the Elf didn’t move at first. He remained still, his face twisted in a mixture of contempt, exhaustion, and another emotion, even more complex: doubt.
His sharp gaze, despite the years, landed on Draco.
“Master Draco?” he growled, his voice raspy, gravelly, each syllable weighted with centuries of servitude and resentment.
The title left his mouth like an insult. Draco, pale as a sheet, coughed painfully. He nodded slowly, without conviction.
“I... yes. I suppose,” he murmured, as if he didn’t even believe the weight of those words himself.
But it was Harry who stirred first. Slowly, painfully, he dragged himself across the icy floor on his knees. His legs trembled, covered in scratches and open wounds. Each movement tore a silent groan from him. When he reached the bars, he clung to them, his fingers turning white with the strain. And, with a gasp, he spoke:
“Kreacher. Help us. Please... Take us far away from here. Somewhere they can never touch us again.”
The Elf stared at him for a long time. A very long time. Longer than he’d ever looked at him before. He examined Harry as one might study a broken object, unsure of what to do with it. Then his gaze slowly drifted to Draco, slumped against the wall, one hand pressed against a broken rib, his eyes vacant.
Kreacher pinched his lips together. His fingers curled around the worn fabric of his loincloth. He could leave. He could leave them there. Nothing was stopping him. He was no longer bound by blood, nor by duty. And the truth was, he despised them both.
But then, a murmur slipped from his cracked lips, barely audible:
“Master Regulus…”
He closed his eyes, and in the dimness, his face seemed to crumble under the weight of an old sorrow. The memory of a young, noble man, brave and selfless, who had thrown himself into the wolf’s den to atone for the sins of his family. A master he had loved, perhaps more than was wise. A master he had seen die. And whom he had betrayed, many years before he even understood it.
“He wouldn’t have hesitated,” he whispered, his teeth clenched. “Not for a second. He would’ve reached out. Even to idiots like you.”
He opened his eyes. Something shimmered in them, a strange crack, almost painful.
“Kreacher cannot face his Master’s gaze if he lets two children die in a cellar like rats…”
A growl of exasperation followed, bitter.
“Always have to do things myself. Even after they’re dead…”
Then, with a sharp, resigned gesture, he snapped his fingers.
The world exploded.
The cold vanished. The chains disappeared. The stale air, the smell of mildew, of iron and dried blood… all was swept away. In their place, a muffled silence, the soft creak of ancient wood. The scent of polished wood, of old dust, and something even more intangible—the magic of a familiar place.
Harry opened his eyes.
At first, it was a strange, almost painful sensation: the light. A real, living light, that brushed his skin like a forgotten memory. It filtered through heavy burgundy curtains, soft, gentle, warm. Nothing like the icy damp of the cell, the thick darkness he had breathed in for days. Here, the air felt lighter, richer. He could smell the wax, the old dust, the polished furniture, and the frozen memories.
He blinked several times, as if to make sure it wasn’t an illusion, a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation or pain. His gaze slowly drifted around him. The walls were covered in dark tapestries depicting golden snakes, Gothic crests, and oil-painted portraits, as dusty as they were silent.
A distant scream sliced through the air, sharp like a blade on glass. It ricocheted off the walls, pierced the curtains, and woke the shadows.
"Stains in MY house!"
The voice of Walburga Black. Harsh. Intact. Unyielding.
But Harry paid only half-hearted attention. He stood frozen, half-collapsed, his legs trembling like frozen branches. His mouth hung open, his breath shallow. Each inhalation felt miraculous, each heartbeat an unthought-of gift.
They were here. They had made it.
Number 12, Grimmauld Place. The Black family mansion.
Walburga’s scream continued to tear through the air, filled with curses and venomous phrases denouncing infamy and betrayal. But Harry, he could barely hear anything anymore. The sounds were distant, muffled under a glass bell. He smiled. A vacant, trembling, absurd smile. His eyes burned, filled with hot tears he no longer even tried to hold back. Control was no longer an option. Not now. Not after this.
Beside him, Draco collapsed. Literally. His legs gave way, like a house of cards blown over by a sigh. He fell to his knees, his arms hanging limply, his head drooping. His gaze was vacant, distant, unable to grasp the reality of what he saw. He stared without seeing, lips parted, breath ragged. He looked like a survivor of a shipwreck too long, washed up on an unfamiliar shore, unable to believe he wasn’t drowning anymore.
Freedom, for him, was nothing euphoric. It was too brutal, too sudden, almost violent. It took him by surprise.
Harry, though, was still standing. But he was as stiff as a statue, head tilted back, eyes wide, caught between shock and wonder. He inhaled slowly, deeply, as if the air had a taste, a texture, a new weight. He felt it flow into his lungs, cleansing him from the inside. This simple act—breathing—almost made him stagger.
And then, without warning, it was the laughter.
A pure, uncontrollable burst, almost painful as it came from far away. A hysterical, jerky, hollow laugh, but so very human. It rose from his throat like a feverish wave, shaking his shoulders, buckling his legs. He laughed and cried at the same time, his cheeks wet, his arms limp. He laughed like someone who had screamed after holding their breath for too long.
Walburga was still screaming, somewhere in the mansion, in her enraged frame. But she seemed suddenly so far away, so insignificant. Kreacher, meanwhile, stood there, arms crossed, brow furrowed in a quiet sneer of disdain. He looked like an old butler exasperated by the eccentricities of a family he no longer understood. He shook his head, tired, as though he had predicted this ridiculous reaction.
But Harry didn’t care. He couldn’t care less. He wasn’t dead. Draco wasn’t either. They were injured, broken, eaten from the inside out, but they were alive. And for Harry, that was all that mattered.
And something, deeply buried within him, in that ancestral part of him that felt the ruptures, the turning points, the destinies unfolding, whispered that this day was not an end. It was a beginning. One of those that changes everything. And in that conviction, Harry finally found a semblance of peace.