Chapter Text
The Osprey Room breathed like an old habit. Steam curled against clouded windows, smoke settling in rafters the way ink soaks into paper, stubborn and permanent. Sirius slipped through the doorway without fanfare, hair tucked behind his ears, collar turned up against a wind that smelled of wet cobblestones and hex residue. The mid-day press had thinned to clerks with hunched shoulders and parchment-stained fingers, their badges pinned like borrowed courage. In the corner a piano tried to remember a song and failed.
The failure was not silence, it was a stutter. Keys caught on felt, a hesitant chord collapsing into two wrong notes, then the hush a room makes when it pretends not to hear. The melody reached again, three tentative steps, and lost its footing.
He bypassed the counter, uninterested in pleasantries, and ignored the tables where light still caught on glass. Instead he threaded along the wall where sconces guttered low and slid into a bench beneath a crooked mirror that had never reflected anyone honestly. In the glass he was a smear of dark coat and sharper eyes, not the Black heir, not the cousin in every scandal, only a man too tired to look at himself straight on.
Mugs thudded and cutlery scraped, the ordinary noise gathering into a soundscape with that slippery quality he remembered from other nights when a room would hand over something if a person sat still enough. He rested a boot against the bench rung, forced his leg to stop bouncing, and let the murmur gather.
Two Aurors came in with rain on their shoulders. Not the polished kind from Prophet spreads, these wore exhaustion like a second uniform. Their boots echoed briefly on stone floors, heels sharp, their voices clipped in the habit of people trained to file even feelings. The sound carried ahead of them in strands, a shape without words until they reached the counter, flashed badges, and asked for firewhisky.
“Shift went sideways,” one muttered, rough with fatigue. “Paperwork stacked so high I couldn’t see the bloody desk.”
“Because they swapped names again,” the other said, lowering his voice. “Carrow back inside, but someone else walked out. Not a nobody either.”
The first gave him a look sharp enough to cut. “You want to keep breathing? Keep your voice down.”
They moved to a table near the hearth, habits guiding them, not too close to the fire, not too far from the door.
“Still wasn’t supposed to be Carrow,” the rough voice added after a swallow of whisky. “He was never the first choice. Someone higher up made the trade.”
The words sat like grit on Sirius’s tongue. He swallowed against the urge to spit. Not the first choice. That meant a list. He could almost hear Hermione, patient and certain, folding logic until hidden seams showed. Laws did not arrive from nowhere. Hands made them, and hands left fingerprints.
Another sound rose under the thought, older than the Osprey Room: his mother’s quill tapping the edge of a dinner plate, columns recited in a voice as clean as cutlery. Names sorted, circled, crossed out, her own private census of who belonged and who deserved ruin. The Ministry’s lists carried the same poison in cleaner ink, turning cruelty into order, prejudice into law.
The piano surrendered. Silence rippled outward from its last wrong note. In the gap, someone laughed too loudly, careless and drunk, and the sound clipped off when it met the looks of men paid to notice.
He let the room’s heat curl into his sinuses, sharper than any drink. In the mirror a barmaid moved between tables with a tray balanced on her palm. Her earrings flashed like small coins. They flashed again when she turned, a quick bright signal in the smoke, more talisman than jewelry. For a moment he could almost believe they were meant to be noticed. He counted the ordinary to anchor himself, a habit from the years when rooms tilted without warning. Keep count of what stays. Then the dangerous things stand out.
The Aurors leaned in, voices dropping to a murmur.
“File was butchered,” the rough one muttered. “Whole first page blacked out, but the margins weren’t clean. Someone slipped a name in after the fact.”
His partner’s head jerked up. “Stop. You want to keep your post, you don’t say that out loud.”
The barman wiped the same ring of ale for the third time, gaze fixed on the counter. The air noticed anyway, tightening as if the room itself had learned to draw breath when the Ministry did.
Sirius rolled a shoulder, working the stiffness out. Sleep had been thin, chased off by the weight of whispers and the Prophet’s headlines, each one prying at the bond between Hermione and Remus like fingers worrying a crack. The Marriage Law had landed like wall, immovable, and its weight bled into every corner of their lives until even the air felt compromised. He pictured Remus restless on the narrow sofa, book sliding from his chest, jaw tight even in dreams. He pictured Hermione bent over parchment by candlelight, ink smudged along her hand, refusing to yield. The mix of worry and unwanted tenderness carved a hairline crack through his temper.
He drifted closer without making it obvious, a slow migration to a better angle. A framed print hung crooked above the Aurors’ table, a watercolor of Diagon Alley faded into dignified obscurity. He stopped beneath it and pretended to study brushwork like a man whose worst trouble was a landlord.
“Switch assignments at the last minute,” the rough voice muttered. “Who does that? The one they let walk… sharper, meaner. Smarter than Carrow ever was.”
His partner’s reply cut quick and soft. “Stop talking before someone hears you.”
Sirius almost smiled. Someone already had.
The door opened and a colder gust nosed across the floor. Three Magical Transportation clerks entered, paper-cut fingers, hunched shoulders, the look of people who spent their days moving others while not being moved themselves. One carried a folded notice with the Ministry seal, damp and crumpled. He slapped it on the counter and asked the barman for change. The red wax had smeared, staining the paper like a bruise.
Sirius drifted back to his bench and sat, heat sliding along his spine. He wanted to laugh, reckless and bright, to bleed the tension from the air, but that would draw eyes. He slouched instead, lazy in the way of a man with nowhere to be, and counted heartbeats until they obeyed.
He thought of lists. His mother’s petty inventories of neighbors and bloodlines and sin. The Ministry’s clean, quiet ledgers, sealed with signatures that turned cruelty into procedure. He could almost see Hermione’s hands moving across a table piled with drafts, fingers tapping margins when she found a pattern. He wanted to bring her more than anger. He wanted a thread she could pull until the whole thing came down.
Across the room the Aurors finished their drinks. The rough-voiced one rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, the way a man does after runes refuse to line up. They stood. Coins. Nods. A soft word for the barman. The door swallowed them and left behind a curl of cold and the lemon sting of cleaner.
Sirius waited long enough to look like he had nowhere to be. At the door he paused by the abandoned notice, stomach tightening at the sight of another Ministry decree left in plain view. He wanted to tear it in half and then in half again, to scatter the pieces like confetti, childish, useless, satisfying. He let the urge pass. His hands had better work to do.
Outside, night pressed close. Lanterns threw light onto wet stone and made puddles look like dark eyes. He pulled his coat tight and set off toward the nearest alley, a cut-through that smelled of cats and old magic. The sky held a heavy color that promised more rain before morning. He walked fast, not quite a run, a pace that kept thoughts from chewing a hole in themselves.
None of it was random. Prisoners traded, names shuffled, Carrow pushed in only after someone higher made room.
He tasted the words again, bitter on his tongue, and filed them where Hermione would want them, neat and ready. Reckless humor tugged at his mouth, his oldest trick for hiding how fear could drop a man to his knees. He let it have an inch, the grin too sharp to pass for ease.
Grimmauld waited with temperamental wards and the people who made it bearable. He pictured the way Remus would straighten when he came through the door, the way Harry would look up and measure him. He pictured Hermione’s ink-stained fingers still moving over parchment when the rest of them forgot to breathe.
He cut through the last lane and stepped into deeper dark that meant home if he insisted on it hard enough. He did not look over his shoulder. He kept the room in his head, the voices, the smeared seal, every small ordinary detail she would use to untangle the rest. Not random. He set his jaw. Not a chance. It wasn’t his list to solve. But hers, she’d unpick it until the whole rotten seam came apart.
The house gave little back when the door shut behind him, but the library was the one room that still remembered how to breathe. Dust softened shelf edges, wax drifted in slow rivers down half-burned candles, and the air tasted of paper gone brittle with age. Hermione sat cross-legged on the carpet, skirt rumpled around her knees, a barricade of parchment scattered like fallen leaves.
The mantel clock had slipped past midnight. It’s tick was faint, an old man’s heart refusing to give up, and it kept her anchored as her quill raced. The words came jagged. Lists, dates, revisions. Whole passages in law drafts had been scored out, black ink swallowing lines into rectangular voids. She pressed harder, copying the gaps into her notes, teeth clenched as if pressure alone could force the text back into existence.
The blocks were not simple ink. Heat-charms had sealed them to the fibers so the parchment shone faintly when tilted. Margin notes were sanded thin where a correcting quill had scraped, leaving a pale drag like weathered bone. In the gutters, a faint runic stitch glimmered cold blue when her wandlight skimmed across, a binding meant to keep erasure from loosening.
Names bled through despite the redactions. Thrice, Avery. Four times, Mulciber. A pattern that should not exist if the process were truly random. Her fingers trembled when she turned the parchment, not with fatigue, with recognition. This was bureaucracy wielded like machinery, gears turning to target, to select, to make ruin look like chance.
She rubbed her temple, smearing a faint streak of ink across skin. The candle guttered when she leaned too close, its flame bowing under her breath. The wards hummed faintly through her bones, that strange vibration she noticed whenever she lingered too long over Ministry lies. She tried to ignore it, drew a line under the latest set of notes, quill tip digging until the parchment nearly tore.
Her eyes burned, dry from hours without proper blinks. She forced them wider and reached for the next file, fingertips brushing another blacked-out block. Worse than the rest, an entire section sealed. The Ministry had gone past redaction. They’d erased.
Her gut hardened. She set the quill down, flexed cramped fingers, and pressed both palms to the floor as if she could ground herself against the truth trying to claw free. Information had always been power. Tonight it felt like a warning aimed directly at her.
The candle sputtered again. She caught it before it drowned in its own wax, trimmed the wick with her wand, and watched the light steady. The little flame seemed defiant. Hermione sat back on her heels and watched it as if it could answer the question circling her chest.
She reached for her coat to shake loose the last of the day’s grit and something thudded in the pocket, small and dense. A coin she didn’t recognize lay in her palm, heavier than it should’ve been, its rim warm as if it remembered a hand. The face bore a simple ring of runes she couldn’t place at a glance. She turned it once, twice, then slid it between a pair of notes as a makeshift marker. Someone must’ve slipped it to her at the Ministry, or the barman had given wrong change. She let the ordinary explanation stand. The coin held the page open.
She had just forced a proper blink, palm pressed across aching eyes, when the door banged the frame.
“Kitten.” Sirius’s voice cut through candlelight and ink like a curse. He strode in with his coat still dripping, hair wild, grin sharp and wrong, the kind he wore when something ugly gnawed at him and he refused to let it show. “You’re gonna like this. Turns out you’re on a list.”
Her quill clattered from her hand. “What?”
He dropped into the nearest chair as if he owned the air, boots bumping the table edge. “Aurors in the Osprey, drunk enough to mutter, sober enough not to invent. Carrow wasn’t first choice. Your name’s been in circulation.”
The candle bowed. Hermione shoved aside the parchment barricade, pulse tripping. “List of what?”
His grin slipped, grim underneath. “Assignments. Matches. Targets. Pick whichever polite word the Ministry prefers this week.”
The words cracked through her like stone splitting under frost. Her throat went dry.
Behind her, the door groaned again. Remus filled the threshold, shoulders tight, eyes already tracking Sirius, measuring for damage. His voice was quiet, which was worse. “List of what?”
Sirius’s boot slid from the table and thudded to the floor. He leaned forward, elbows to knees. “Of you, Moony. Of her. I heard it clear.”
Hermione forced herself upright, spine steady under the weight of their gazes. “Then it isn’t chance.” Her voice scraped, and held. “The same hand that slipped names into Sirius’s list is the one blacking out these pages. Redactions, substitutions, different disguises for the same rot.”
Sirius raked a hand through his hair, restless energy sparking from every line. “Coincidence? When Aurors whisper names shuffled like cards, like someone chose which poor bastard went to the gallows and which stayed home. And yours—” He broke off, eyes bright with something too near fear.
Remus’s jaw tightened. He stepped fully into the room, the wolf’s edge close to the surface. “Then they’ve already crossed a line.” His hand hovered near her shoulder without touching, claiming without giving in.
Harry appeared behind him, hair rumpled, wand still in his fist. “What’s going on?”
Sirius laughed without humor. “What’s going on is your Ministry’s files have Hermione penciled in like a spare part.”
Ron stumbled in behind, ears red, fists balled. “They what?”
The air went thick. Candles threw longer shadows. Hermione steadied herself with a long inhale, ink and wax burning her throat. She met each of them in turn, Harry steady, Ron blazing, Sirius fraying, Remus taut and dangerous. The weight pressed down and she lifted her chin anyway.
“The proof will be in the drafts,” she said, low but certain. “And I’ll find it.”
The wards hummed at the corners of the house, as if even the walls heard the promise.
The room didn’t calm after her words. It pressed closer, as though the house itself leaned in to listen. Candles guttered in unison, shadows crowding the corners.
Hermione dropped back to the floor, hands steady on parchment though her pulse still ran too fast. Sirius’s report tangled with her notes, echoing until she wanted to scrape the sound from her ears. She dragged the next file nearer, forcing her quill to move, daring the redactions to give her something she could use.
The strokes here were thicker, black ink scored so heavily it bled through, entire paragraphs sealed from sight. She copied the shapes anyway, lines and voids side by side, quill scratching hard enough to tear. A bead of ink pooled against the margin until it looked like the line itself was bleeding.
Ron muttered curses as he paced tight circles, the floorboards complaining under his weight. Harry stayed rooted in the doorway, jaw locked, wand never quite lowered. Remus hadn’t moved from her side; his fingers flexed against his thigh as if each breath kept something feral at bay. Sirius prowled the edges of the room, his restlessness burning holes into the quiet.
“Hear it enough,” he said, sharp, “and it stops being rumor. Someone’s drawing lots. They just haven’t told us the rules.”
Hermione’s hand stilled. There, in the margin, half a word had escaped the censors, written in a different hand. Her skin prickled as she traced it, and when she flipped the sheet, the name beneath had been slashed away entirely, only a jagged smear where letters had lived.
She stared at the void until the rest of the room blurred, their voices collapsing into a low thrum. The quill moved of its own will, one hard line cutting across her notes.
Carrow did not get me by chance.
The nib snapped, the sound sharp and wrong, like the piano in the Osprey faltering into silence. Ink bloomed like a wound.
The house shuddered. The wards hummed low and dark, as if even the walls recognized a truth too dangerous to name.