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Chapter Text

Hermione’s quill made a soft, steady sound as it moved - the rhythm of someone who had long since surrendered to the tedium of paperwork.

Her eyes were tired and her back ached after hours in the impractical chair, as scuffed and uneven as the rest of the archive room in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, with its low ceiling and the faint hum of wards that never quite worked as intended. Hermione had grown used to its unremarkable austerity: the smell of old paper and damp wool, the dust that came from files nobody had opened since before the war.

She was nearly through the day’s list. The entries ran alphabetically, a catalogue of magical beings whose rights and protections had been recorded in Ministry manuals over the decades. She had checked centaurs, goblins, merfolk - each in turn, methodically confirming the citations, noting inconsistencies, and adding brief marginal references where modern rulings had altered old classifications. It was dull work, the kind that only she and perhaps two others in the Department ever did properly.

The last entry remained: Veela. She read through the sparse notes first: historical temperament, magical sensitivity, a handful of other minor annotations. Then she opened a folder which apparently contained a report on Veela ancestry and legal disclosure - an unfinished one, begging for updates nobody ever bothered to provide. She sighed, rolled back her sleeves, and began sorting its contents into something resembling order.

The attached genealogies were old, copied from pre-war archives: neat rows of intermarried names, sigils of long-forgotten alliances. She had worked through half a dozen families already, marking the ones that carried confirmed Veela ancestry: the Delacours, the Rosiers, a few continental lines that had drifted into Britain.

The next parchment was unlabelled except for a cataloguing number. It opened out into an elaborate family tree, the ink faded to brown.

Halfway down the page, she noticed something unusual. A name had been missing - not lost or unknown, but deliberately taken out. The surrounding lines were redrawn with care, but there was a break in the pattern, a faint ripple in the parchment.

Hermione frowned and cast a minor revealing charm. The erased text flickered faintly back into view: Lysandra. No maiden name. And beside it, almost hidden in the decorative scrollwork, a sigil she recognised from the classification lexicon - the one denoting Veela origin.

That was odd.

Veela bloodlines were well documented: most families with that heritage made a point of keeping it quiet but not secret.

She checked the surrounding names: Abraxas… Lucius. Draco.

It took her a moment longer than it should have. When she realised which family tree she was looking at, she gave a short, incredulous laugh.

It was absurd. The Malfoys prided themselves on purity and lineage. A Veela ancestor in that family would have been a scandal. But the sigil was clear, and the record, though partially scrubbed, looked authentic.

Hermione sat back, the quill tapping softly against the desk. If the entry was genuine - if Lysandra had been who the scroll suggested - then her son would have been half-Veela.

She hesitated before writing down his name. Lucius Malfoy.

She turned to her notes, skimming through the Ministry’s technical summaries on Veela heritage. The entries were brief, and most of them concerned women. There were almost no records about male descendants. One paragraph, half a century old, mentioned heightened empathic sensitivity. Another, from a later revision, phrased it less gently: Excessive receptivity to emotional resonance. Prolonged exposure to strong human emotions may induce psychosis or collapse.

Hermione stopped reading.

Azkaban was not merely cold or bleak. It was saturated with emotion: the residue of fear, hatred, despair. The dementors might well have been removed, but their influence remained - some said it will likely last for generations. Hermione remembered her single visit there, years before, for a legal inspection: the air itself felt wrong, heavy, as though grief floated in it like fog. She had lasted forty minutes before her hands began to shake - and it had taken nearly two hours afterwards to steady her breathing.

She pictured him there. Confined among hundreds whose every breath carried terror and regret - and feeling it all. Not metaphorically, but actually feeling it - as a deafening sound. As physical pain - without pause, without shelter.

The thought made her stomach clench.

She told herself it was almost certainly a clerical error. Records of that period were unreliable, post-war revisions had been hurried. There were half a dozen ways to explain the mark: a mistranscribed sigil, a misattributed ancestor, perhaps even an instance of bureaucratic embellishment. All plausible.

Still, the unease would not leave her.

That evening she remained long after her colleagues had gone, her lamp burning in the otherwise darkened office. The Ministry was never silent - its magic hummed faintly through the corridors, a mechanical kind of vigilance.

She sat very still, her quill motionless above a blank page. If the record was true, then Lucius Malfoy - currently confined under indefinite sentence - was not merely imprisoned, but actively tortured. Legally, by a system too blind or too indifferent to notice.

The thought was intolerable. Not for the sake of the man himself - she did not think of him kindly - but the principle. This was the sort of thing she had joined the Ministry to fight, not to facilitate. And she could not unsee it now.

By the following day, she had decided. She would find an excuse and go to Azkaban, quietly. She would see him once, confirm the truth of the matter, and if she was wrong, no one need know. But if she was right…

She folded the parchment carefully and sealed it in her case.

The sea around Azkaban was the colour of slate, its surface unbroken except for the rhythm of the oars. The boat moved slowly through the mist, the guards silent, their faces turned away from the wind. The air had a taste to it, metallic and cold.

Hermione kept her eyes on the outline of the fortress rising from the water.

At the gates she gave her name, her department, and the pretext of her visit - a procedural review of record-keeping standards for long-term detainees.

The guard who took her papers nodded, but when she added, “I’m here to see Lucius Malfoy,” his expression changed. It was not surprise exactly - more discomfort. He passed the papers to his colleague, who read the name, then let out a low whistle.

“Good luck, then,” the second guard said under his breath.

The first shot him a warning look, and the corners of his mouth twitched in what might have been an uneasy smile. Then he let her in.

They walked through the narrow stone corridors, the air thick with damp and salt. The sound of the sea echoed faintly from somewhere below.

When the guard stopped before a heavy door and turned the key, she braced herself.

The room beyond was narrow and dimly lit, its single window admitting a thin, colourless light.

Lucius Malfoy sat on his cot, perfectly upright, hands folded as if awaiting a formal appointment. There was something disquieting in the stillness, a quiet gravity that seemed to draw the air around him. The light caught at his hair - pale as ever, falling past his shoulders - and she thought, absurdly, of frost.

The beard was what surprised her - short, darker than his hair, entirely unfamiliar. It changed his face, but not to his disadvantage. It lent him a kind of austere elegance, severe yet arresting.

She had expected ruin, or at least decay. Instead, there was this - a beauty that felt misplaced here, too vivid against the greyness of the walls.

When he lifted his head, the movement was deliberate - but too slow, as though the motion cost him a measure of strength.

“Miss Granger,” he said, each syllable immaculate. Slowly, he rose. “This is an unexpected pleasure. Or perhaps… an inspection?”

Hermione closed the door quietly behind her. “A review, officially. In practice - I wanted to speak with you.”

His brows lifted a fraction. “I wasn’t aware that the Ministry had developed a sudden interest in conversation.”

She ignored the comment. “I’ve been reviewing old archives,” she said. “Genealogies, among other things. One of them concerned your family.”

He regarded her with mild amusement. “Then I hope you found them suitably dull.”

“There was an erasure,” she said. “A name struck out. Your mother, Lysandra.”

The amusement did not fade, but it became brittle, as though it had turned to glass.

“Ah. Gossip. The archivists do enjoy their little mysteries.”

“It wasn’t gossip,” Hermione said quietly. “The notation was clear enough. And the sigil beside it - I recognised it.”

Something changed then - not in his face, which remained controlled, but in the air. The silence thickened, alive with the suggestion of something volatile beneath the surface.

When he spoke again, his voice was soft. “Miss Granger, if your purpose here is to indulge a curiosity, I suggest you direct it elsewhere. Old clerical symbols are unreliable things.”

“They are,” she said. “Except when they’re not.”

He have her a faint, dismissive smile. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

Hermione drew a slow breath. “We both know that’s not true. Mr Malfoy—”

“Do not stand there and imagine that I require rescue.” His voice did not rise - it scarcely altered in volume, yet it cut cleanly across hers. “I will not be made a subject of pity - least of all by you.”

“I’m not here out of pity,” she said, her voice low. “If what I found is true, your imprisonment may be unlawful.”

His eyes met hers - pale, steady, and exhausted. “I appreciate the zeal of your… humanitarian impulses, but they are not needed here.”

“They are if you’re being harmed. If—”

A sound from somewhere down the corridor - a low, broken sob - made him flinch. It was slight, almost imperceptible, but the movement ran through him like a current. Hermione saw it and spoke before she could stop herself.

“It’s hurting you, isn’t it?”

He swallowed and straightened. “Whatever you think you understand, you do not.”

“I could file for reassessment,” she said, ignoring the tremor in her own voice. “You wouldn’t even need to—”

“No.” The word came like a blade, calm and final. “You will do nothing. You will forget this conversation and leave the idea buried where you found it.”

She stared at him. “You’d rather stay here? Like this?”

A faint smile touched his mouth - too controlled to be real. “There are worse prisons than walls and stone, Miss Granger. At least this one is honest.”

She didn’t know what to say to that.

“Now,” he said quietly, “be so good as to leave.”

She didn’t move.

His eyes met her again, bright now, his voice sharper than before. “Do you hear me? Leave.”

As the door closed, she heard, faintly, a sound - not a voice, not a groan, but the low exhale of someone struggling for control.

The guards were waiting outside. As they led her back through the corridor, one of them asked, half-joking, “All right, then?”

She didn’t answer.

The sound of the bolt sliding home carried a certain finality.

Lucius did not move until the echo had dissolved into the usual silence - the steady drip of water somewhere beyond the wall, the quiet murmur of someone praying into their hands.

Then came the rest of it.

He could feel them long before he heard them: the bruised, unending tide of emotion that seeped through stone. Despair had a weight to it, a taste - iron and ash. Terror prickled like static along his skin. Remorse, hopelessness, rage - they pressed against him in slow, suffocating waves. He had learned to hold himself still and silent through it, though the strain left his hands trembling.

Once, he could master it. He could quiet the echo of others until they blurred into nothing. He could tame the pull, the reflex that could coax obedience, fascination, ruin. Years of practice, a lifetime of control. But here, among the broken, the effort was constant - and losing ground. Every week the barrier thinned, his restraint a little slower to answer. Sometimes, for an hour or two, it slipped.

Then the guards would come, eyes too bright, movements too careful. One had tried to bring him wine, another had wept at the door, whispering his name. Both were transferred within the week.

He had asked the warden, once, for stricter wards. The irony was not lost on him.

He sat back on the narrow cot, forcing his spine straight against the stone. The tremor returned, running along his arm in small spasms. He forced it still. Dignity, after all, was a discipline - and the only one he had left.

Granger’s face came to him unbidden: steady, intelligent, unafraid. Of all the people to discover that, it had to be her. The universe retained its sense of humour.

She had looked at him with something close to pity. Pity was contamination. He could not allow that.

He closed his eyes, drew another shallow breath, and counted it out until the room steadied. Control, then stillness. That was the order of things.

When the next wave came - a surge of grief from somewhere below, dark and resonant - he let it wash through him. The pain was almost clean in its simplicity.

He fixed his gaze on the narrow slit of light above the cot until the edges blurred, and tried, for the thousandth time, to remember what quiet had sounded like.

Chapter Text

When the door opened again, Lucius assumed it was a guard. They never knocked - the sound of the lock was its own announcement.

He did not look up until he heard the scrape of shoes that were not standard issue. He turned his head.

A week had passed and here she stood again, framed by the dull light of the corridor, hair drawn back, her face set in professional calm. He rose.

“Miss Granger,” he said, the words coming slower than he intended. “I cannot help but feel this borders on fixation.”

Her chin lifted a fraction. “Call it persistence. I brought something for you to read.”

She crossed the narrow space and set a sheaf of parchment on his cot. The faint scent of ink and rain clung to them. Legal documents. Department seal. All order and good intention.

Lucius did not move to touch them.

“They’re not binding,” she said. “No signatures. But I thought you might at least want to know the framework.”

The word moved through the room like a draught.

“Such a delicate euphemism,” he said. “Does it comfort you to turn dissection into procedure?”

“It’s law,” Hermione said. “And your status as a Veela hybrid renders your confinement unlawful.”

“I am not—” He stopped himself.

Once the word was spoken - Veela - people never saw anything else. Not a man. Not a mind. Only a riddle wrapped in revulsion or desire. Both equally obscene.

He steadied his breath, smoothed the tension from his hands. If she had come to examine a creature, she would find none.

She was still speaking, something about reassessment, procedure, decency. The words blurred. He fixed his gaze on the small pile of parchment, each page stamped with bureaucratic virtue.

“You’ve gone to remarkable trouble,” he said at last. “Your definition of justice must be a generous one.”

“Read them,” she said. “That’s all I ask. No action, no agreement. Just… look.”

When the door closed behind her, he didn’t move. He waited until the echo of her footsteps dissolved into the corridor before allowing the mask to slip. His hand went to his ribs, pressing hard where the pain had settled like a blade between breaths.

Control first, then stillness.

He waited hours before touching the papers.

The Ministry’s seal gleamed faintly at the top, its golden sheen almost smug in the dim light. He broke it with surgical care. The first line met his eyes with bureaucratic serenity: Confirmation of Non-Human Heritage, for the Purpose of Judicial Reclassification and Custodial Adjustment.

He read it twice. A third time.

The words were polite, bloodless - and repugnant. They required him to confirm what he had spent a lifetime erasing: to name himself a creature, a category beside trolls and werewolves.

A bureaucratic mercy. A humanitarian insult.

He sat still for a long while, jaw set, pulse tight in his throat. Of course he’d known how the law regarded creatures. He had written half the decrees that codified their inferiority. He had never imagined it turned upon himself.

The memory came unbidden: his father’s study, the smell of brandy and old wood polish, his mother standing too near the fire, her hair a fantastical shimmer of gold. Lucius might have been seven or eight. He hadn’t understood the argument, only the finality of his father’s voice when he said, “You should have told me.”

He never understood how his father had failed to see it sooner. Perhaps it was a testament to the quality of the marriage itself - arranged, of course, and devoid of warmth or curiosity.

But when Abraxas did see his wife for what she really was, and looked at their son with new recognition, the decision was immediate. By morning, Lysandra was gone - sent to an estate in Provence under the pretext of an extended convalescence.

She never returned. Her name vanished from the family ledgers as if she had never existed. And his father never spoke of this again.

Lucius had learned, that day, that silence was not merely dignity. It was survival.

Everything else, he taught himself.

He had gone to the library at night, reading whatever scraps he could find. There was very little there. Records of Veela were rare enough - of male descendants, nearly nonexistent. Those few he found spoke vaguely of instability, of influence over others that bordered on coercion. No guidance, no remedy - only speculation wrapped in disdain.

So he learned by trial and error. How the air changed when he entered a room. How admiration was useful but could tip into fixation if he let himself slip. How a smile could blur into surrender if he was careless.

When Abraxas died, the last witness to the truth died with him. And Lucius, by then already cultivated, elegant, and untouchable, had built a life on restraint. He knew precisely how far to let his presence extend, how to thread command through civility. Power, he discovered, was a matter of calibration.

He allowed it use only where strategy required. In politics, a trace of it could smooth a conversation, tip a vote, end an argument before it began. But each time he felt that subtle shift in the air - the involuntary yield of another will - revulsion followed close behind.

So beyond that, he lived as if it did not exist. Every instinct smothered, every impulse strangled before it could reach daylight. And in time, that control became identity. A performance so perfect he almost believed it himself.

Then came marriage, for alliance. Narcissa, proud and cool, was his perfect mirror.

He had intended to keep his secret buried - and had managed to, for a time. But the Dark Lord, bored and omniscient, had enjoyed prying at the small cracks in his followers’ facades. He had entered Lucius’s mind one evening, idly, as one might leaf through a book - and found it. The discovery had amused him. He had told it, softly, to those nearest. Lucius still remembered Bella’s laughter, Narcissa’s stunned silence, his own faint smile.

By some miracle, it had gone no further. Bella was already half-mad and soon after, dead. Narcissa - horrified, but disciplined. She stayed, of course. She had her son to think of, appearances to preserve. But the morning after Voldemort’s fall, she left without a word, taking only what was hers by law and blood. The annulment was quiet. No reasons recorded.

Draco, at least, had been spared. Only pale hair and clear eyes, no echo of deeper inheritance. Lucius watched, always, for the smallest sign - and thanked every god he did not believe in when none appeared. And so, Draco did not know. He must never know.

Not that keeping any secret from his son was complicated these days - after the war, Draco had cut all ties and disappeared on the other side of the ocean, where few knew his name. Lucius could not fault him.

He looked again at the parchment.

Non-Human Heritage.

He had spent a lifetime ensuring that sentence could never apply to him. He had carved himself into the shape of respectability, sanded away what instinct had made. Now they asked him to exhume it - to name himself as the thing that had cost him his mother, his marriage, his peace.

He would not.

Not to Granger. Not to the Ministry. Not to anyone.

Let the record stay false. Let him rot quietly here, among the mad and the broken. Better this cell, this endless ache, than to open the door he had sealed shut long ago.

He folded the papers carefully, set them aside, and closed his eyes until the pressure behind them eased.

Control first. Then stillness.

The following week she came again.

He was standing when she entered - motionless before the narrow window, the pallid light washing over him. There was something disquieting in the symmetry of him, as though neglect had failed to blunt his grace.

The papers she had brought the week before lay on the cot, looking untouched save for the meticulous alignment of their corners.

“You’ve read them?” she asked.

“I have.”

The air in the room seemed thinner when he spoke. She was aware of her own pulse, the odd, unhelpful warmth rising under her collar.

“And?”

“I find the premise insulting,” he said evenly. “Though I commend the precision of the insult.”

His composure was infuriating - not the arrogance she remembered from the war, but a more disciplined stillness. The voice of a man who refused to be moved, even as the cost of that refusal was written in the set of his shoulders.

“You understand that the documents merely establish that your sentence is—”

“Unenforceable under creature law,” he finished for her. “Yes.”

She reminded herself whom she was speaking to - a man who had stood by while others suffered. Her forearm still bore the trace of Bellatrix Lestrange’s knife.

But justice, to her, had never been vengeance. It was meant to draw boundaries, not blood. Punishment, properly measured, was not meant to destroy. And what she saw before her - the exhaustion held together by sheer will - was destruction by slow degrees.

“I’m offering you a remedy,” she said quietly.

“And I am declining it.”

The words hung in the air, bare and absolute.

Hermione drew a steady breath. “You do understand the implications? You will continue to suffer here.”

“I understand them perfectly.” He turned slightly, the movement deliberate, a measured retreat toward the light. “But my situation is not something for you to amend.” His tone remained courteous, but the dismissal in it was final.

She turned to go, and his voice followed her - still quiet, but edged with fatigue.

“Miss Granger. I would prefer that you not come again on this errand. It is unnecessary.”

She hesitated another moment, then left.

Outside, the corridor air felt heavy, thick with damp and warding spells. She walked fast, as if distance might clear her head. But the image of him - silent, restrained, his dignity balanced against the edge of pain - refused to fade.

She told herself that this was over. He had refused - that should have been enough.

It wasn’t.

By the time she reached her office, the papers from his case were already spread across her desk. The law was precise, but not perfect - there had to be a way through. Some loophole, some precedent she could use.

So she began to search. But after hours of cross-referencing and annotation, she saw the futility of it. The law, as written, could not be bent from the outside. To find a way through, she would need to understand more about his condition, his limits.

Before the ink on her notes had dried, she knew she would have to go back.

By the fifth week, even the guards had stopped glancing up when she gave his name. Routine dulled curiosity.

He was always standing when she entered, pale and composed, the same slight inclination of his head. At first, he would protest - coldly, formally. Miss Granger, this is unnecessary. Miss Granger, this exercise grows repetitive. Miss Granger, you are wasting your time.

Eventually, even that faded. He would let her speak, answer little, and wait for her to leave.

She brought parchment: articles, fragments of academic speculation on Veela heritage and magical resonance.

“I thought,” she said once, “that perhaps you could confirm which of these accounts are accurate. It might help to establish precedent.”

He regarded the papers as though they were something faintly distasteful.

She asked her questions. His replies were tight, brief, and useless.

“Do you ever—”

“No.”

“Have you noticed—”

“I have not.”

She asked new questions - he refused to answer. She brought revised drafts of her reports - he didn’t touch them. The weeks began to blur.

The realisation came somewhere entirely ordinary.

She was in the Department conference room, a pile of case files open before her, half-listening as a colleague spoke about the management of werewolves’ post-transformation rights.

“…they revert to near-human function after a few hours,” the man was saying, “but you can’t really treat them as—”

“As what?” Hermione said sharply, the memory of Lupin’s face vivid in her mind.

The room fell still.

“As people?” she finished, her voice cutting through the pause. “Because that’s exactly what they are. They’re human. Every law that suggests otherwise is—”

She stopped.

The words - righteous, instinctive - echoed back at her.

She had been doing the same thing, hadn’t she? Week after week, she’d come to Lucius Malfoy with her questions and her papers. She had meant to help him, of course she had - but in doing so, she’d reduced a man to a case file, a symptom. The thought left her throat tight.

If she meant to help him, she would have to start again.

Chapter Text

She hesitated before stepping inside. For the first time, her hands were empty. No parchment, no quill - nothing to shield her with purpose. The absence made her feel oddly exposed.

He was standing, as always, by the window. When he turned, his expression held the same wary composure - as if bracing for another round of inquiry.

“Miss Granger,” he said, his voice low, tired.

“Mr Malfoy.” She managed a small nod. “How are you today?”

That earned her a flicker of surprise, faint but visible.

“I believe the word is unchanged,” he said, his tone dry. “Though I suppose that makes me a disappointment to your research.”

She smiled and let the remark pass. Taking a step farther in, she allowed her eyes to wander. The walls were bare stone, worn smooth with time. The cot, precisely made, blanket folded to the inch. The single slit of a window, where the pale light gathered around him.

“It’s orderly here,” she said. “I’ve seen worse offices at the Ministry.”

He did not answer, gaze steady on the world beyond the bars.

“And you have a view, at least,” she went on. “And sunlight. If I were locked away, I think I’d miss that the most. Light. And books.”

At that, his head turned slightly. The light caught on the line of his cheek, the paleness rendered almost luminous. She saw the tightening at his jaw, the controlled shallowness of his breath. She said nothing.

She had begun to speak again - something inconsequential about how the cells were built - when his voice cut through, quiet and deliberate.

“I miss them too.”

The words hung there, almost lost beneath the wind.

She turned to him, startled by the softness in this voice. “Then perhaps,” she said gently, “there’s a book I could bring you. Nothing official.”

For a moment, she thought he might accept. The air seemed to still, caught between them. Then, just as quickly, it passed.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said, the composure settling back like armour.

She inclined her head. “As you wish.”

They spoke a little longer, of nothing in particular. When she turned to leave, he remained by the window, hands clasped loosely behind his back.

“I’ll come again next week,” she said quietly.

He didn’t answer, but she thought she saw, in the reflection of the window, a flicker of something that wasn’t quite indifference.

Their exchanges were brief - fragments of civility suspended between long silences. But the pattern held: she would arrive, and he would be standing by the window.

She began to speak of the world beyond the island - first by accident, then deliberately. She told him of the spring markets, of minor legislation, Ministry gossip. It was, at first, a nervous attempt to fill the quiet. But she realised, after a while, that he was listening - not politely, but attentively.

So she told him more. About the committees, the endless debates, the inefficiency that drove her mad and that, she suspected, he would privately find appalling.

He listened. Once or twice, he even asked a question. Always factual, always measured, as if testing whether conversation was still a thing he remembered how to do.

And when she stopped speaking, there was a stillness in the room that didn’t feel like dismissal.

On her way out the following week, she hesitated by the door. From her satchel, she drew a folded newspaper - that day’s Daily Prophet, already creased from her commute. Without a word, she set it down on his cot.

He looked at it, then at her. She didn’t explain, didn’t meet his eyes.

“I’ll see you next week,” she said quietly, and left before he could answer.

The sound of the lock followed her down the corridor.

The next visit came after a storm. Rain still clung to her cloak when the door opened. The sound of it - steady, rhythmic - filled the corridor behind her.

He was standing by the window again, though his posture seemed strained, the light too pale against the hollows beneath his eyes.

“You’ve had rain,” she said, shaking a few droplets from her sleeve. “I imagine it sounds different here.”

“It does,” he said. “Closer. As if the walls are breathing.”

She hesitated, hearing in his tone something thin and frayed. “Have you slept?”

A flicker of amusement - brief, brittle. “There are… interruptions.”

It was the closest he had ever come to admitting anything.

She moved nearer to the narrow window. Beyond the bars, the sea was the colour of iron. “In the city, the rain always smells of smoke. Here it smells clean. I’d forgotten that.”

He didn’t answer, but she thought she saw the faintest shift - a lessening of the tension that usually held him upright.

They stood like that for a while, side by side, saying nothing. The quiet between them had changed: no longer a wall, but something nearer understanding.

When she finally turned to go, his hand moved slightly, as though to steady himself on the edge of the cot, but he caught the motion and folded it away before it could be seen.

“Until next week,” she said.

He inclined his head, composed again, though his knuckles had whitened against the fabric of his sleeve.

The next week, she came in with damp hair. She paused by the cot, still shaking her head in disbelief.

“The crossing was… rather more lively than I expected,” she said, half-smiling. “Our oarsman tried some new charm to speed things along. We ended up spinning in circles, the guard flustered, and me clinging to the rail, laughing like a fool.”

“I presume applause was optional?” His words slipped out, light and effortless, as if he had forgotten himself.

A quick, startled laugh broke from her lips, and the surprise in his eyes mirrored her own. The moment lingered, brittle and absurd, before he gathered himself again.

She left soon after. Yet as she walked back along the corridor, her pulse was unreasonably quick - not from nerves, but from something harder to name.

The next visit was quieter. He seemed withdrawn, and she, uncertain of the reason, kept to safe topics.

Yet when she moved to leave, his gaze followed her, intent - and that small attention stayed with her long after she’d gone.

She came every week.

He had stopped counting which one this was. Time here did not lend itself to measure - the days blurred, identical and airless, marked only by the thin light and the ebb and swell of other men’s despair.

Her voice was the only thing that cut through it.

The rhythm of her visits had become the last reliable structure left to him. Between visits, the world dissolved into the same colourless monotony. With her, it returned for a little while.

He had not expected that. He had not expected that anyone could make silence bearable.

At first, her visits had been an intrusion - another reminder of how far he had fallen, forced to endure scrutiny from the very people who had every reason to despise him. Another reminder that even his solitude was no longer his own.

But the rhythm of her appearances had changed something.

Now, when her footsteps sounded in the corridor - that brisk, even pace - he felt the familiar tightening in his chest, but it was no longer resistance. It was anticipation, almost relief.

The air seemed less heavy when she entered. Her voice carved a kind of order through the noise that pressed at his skull - the constant scraping of other people’s anguish that never quite receded. When she spoke, the noise dimmed, as if the walls leaned closer to listen.

He had not realised, until she made it impossible to ignore, how much he had missed being spoken to.

Sometimes, he found himself answering too readily - words slipping past the old defences before he could retrieve them. Other times, he withdrew, retreating to silence, irritated by his own lapses, by the vulnerability they implied.

Still, she came.

And though he knew that her persistence was purely professional, he had begun to fear the truth: that he relied on it.

She was nervous.

He noticed it the moment she entered - a tension just beneath the surface, unease that made her voice a shade too careful. It pricked his curiosity.

“I wrote to someone,” she said at last, standing by the cot, her hands folded together as though to stop them from fidgeting. “Someone who might know more about—” she hesitated, “—about what might help.”

He waited.

“I didn’t share your name, or any details,” Hermione added quickly. “But she replied this morning.” From her satchel, she drew a folded letter. “Her name is Fleur Weasley. You may remember her from the war. She—well, she was kind enough to ask her family.”

She extended the letter toward him. He did not move to take it. After a pause, she set it on the corner of the cot.

Then, perhaps sensing that he would not speak, she changed the subject - something about staffing changes at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, the usual bureaucratic reshuffling. He answered politely where required, the conversation meandering for the rest of her visit.

When the door closed behind her, the silence that followed felt heavier than before.

He stood for a while, considering the letter. The parchment was thin, the writing light and elegant, the kind of hand that came from good schooling and an unhurried life.

Dear Hermione,

I should say first that I cannot truly speak for a man who carries Veela blood - a woman’s body and a man’s do not answer the same way. I cannot claim to know what your friend endures.

Still, I have asked my mother and a few women in the family about the small remedies that help them when the noise of others becomes too much. Perhaps these things may be of use.

1. Spend time outside whenever the weather allows. Sunlight steadies both skin and mind.
2. Proximity to family soothes the senses - familiar blood lessens the noise of others.
3. Cold water - on the hands, the face, a cloth at the neck - reminds the body where it ends.
4. A humming exercise: breathe in for four, hum for four, breathe out for four. It draws the attention inward and makes the edge of other people’s feelings less sharp.

I hope this finds you - and your friend - safe and steady.

Yours,
Fleur

He read it twice.

The first two suggestions were immediately useless. The third one was a possibility in theory, but in practice it was doubtful: he would have to wait for rain, gather the water somehow.

The fourth item, however, arrested him. Something in its smallness appealed.

He lay back on the cot and stared at the ceiling. He had never allowed himself small rituals. The Veela in him had been trained out of sight. He had spent a life controlling, calibrating, denying.

Tentatively, he counted the breaths, keeping the hum inside the teeth, a vibration against bone. Inward hum, then out. Four counts in, hum four, out four.

At first it was nothing but a self-conscious effort. Then something shifted. The pressure at his temples eased, almost imperceptibly. The clamour of others - that constant abrasion at the edges of thought - dimmed to a murmur.

He stilled, listening.

He tried it again, letting the hum be a small, private metronome. It was not silence, not peace. But it was less.

For a moment he simply lay there, wary of the quiet, afraid to move lest it break.

The next time she came, she didn’t mention the letter at all. She spoke instead of a meeting at the Ministry - some dispute between departments that had, by her account, lasted nearly three hours and achieved nothing of substance. He listened, content to let the sound of her voice fill the air.

When she was about to leave, he heard himself speak before he had quite decided to.

“Miss Granger.”

She turned at the door.

“Thank you,” he said, slowly. “For the letter.”

For a moment, she simply looked at him. Then a small, genuine smile touched her face - the kind that seemed unguarded, almost private.

“Were any of the suggestions useful?” she asked. Her voice was soft.

He inclined his head. “Yes.”

“I’m glad.”

She left then, the faint echo of her steps receding down the corridor.

He sat back, listening until even that sound was gone.

Chapter Text

She had missed a week.

It wasn’t deliberate. The days had simply folded over one another - meetings, signatures, crises. The Ministry was in chaos: the new legislation on magical creature welfare had half the Department in uproar, and every name on every parchment seemed to require her personal intervention.

It was only when she paused long enough to breathe that she realised how much time had passed. The guilt was immediate and disproportionate. She told herself it was duty. She knew it wasn’t entirely that.

When the cell door opened, she knew at once that something was wrong.

Lucius was standing, or trying to. His hand rested on the stone wall for balance, his breath coming too shallowly to be steady.

He looked, impossibly, more spectral today, the light drawing itself thin around what remained. The beauty of him had become terrible, hollow. The faint tremor ran along his jaw, betraying the effort it cost to remain upright.

“Something’s happened,” she said, stepping closer despite herself. “You’re in pain.”

He didn’t answer. His gaze had gone distant, as if he were listening to something far away.

“Please,” she said quietly. “Tell me what I can do.” From up close, she could see the perspiration on his forehead.

“Miss Granger.” His voice was hoarse, the vowels clipped with effort. “If you wish to help, grant me the dignity of not being seen like this.”

She froze, the words cutting more cleanly than anger might have done.

She hesitated, her throat tight, but there was nothing in his face that allowed argument.

When she stepped back into the corridor, the air felt charged, uneasy. Down the hall, a low moan rose and broke. She turned to the guard who had escorted her and forced her voice steady.

“Is there some reason the prisoners seem more agitated today?”

He looked at her, surprised by the question, then gave a short, grim nod. “Aye. Post came last night. Hundred-odd appeal refusals, all in one go. Happens every year. Puts the whole place on edge.”

Hermione’s heart sank.

A hundred people losing the last thread of hope that held them together - she could almost feel it now, the despair thick in the air, a pressure behind the ribs.

For him, it must have been agony.

She stopped as though remembering something. “I forgot my—” she gestured vaguely, “—notes. I’ll only be a moment.”

The guard hesitated. Something in his manner changed - a flicker of concern, perhaps even pity.

“Be careful, miss.”

She looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Malfoy,” he said in a low voice. “There’s something not right with him. He… does something to the wards. Makes them fluctuate. Men who stand duty on this floor come away wrong. Last night one had to be reassigned. Couldn’t stop shaking.”

She met his eyes, startled. His warning was sincere.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’ll be quick.”

When the door opened again, Lucius was sitting on the edge of the cot, bent forward, his hands clenched white around his knees. The effort of breathing seemed to cost him.

He looked up at the sound, startled. He tried to rise and stumbled. She stepped forward before she could think.

“How close do they have to be - the people who cause you pain?”

His jaw tightened. “Why does that matter?”

“I promise I’ll leave,” she said. “If you answer me.”

For a moment, he only stared at her. Then, between gritted teeth, “All of them do. But the floors above and below… it’s worse there.”

She nodded once, slowly. “Thank you.”

She closed the door softly behind her.

She came again before the week was out.

This time, the guard led her not down the familiar central staircase, but upward - past the echoing landings and the rows of identical iron doors. The air grew colder as they climbed, thinner, edged with salt. At the very top, the corridor narrowed to a single passage.

“End cell,” the guard said gruffly, unlocking the gate.

Hermione nodded and followed.

The corridor that awaited her was shorter than the others, its right-hand wall lined with a row of iron doors. Most of the cells were empty now, left open - only the last door bore the telltale shimmer of active wards. A corner cell, two walls touching only the elements.

The best she could do. She hoped it would be enough.

When the door opened, she paused on the threshold. The space was still small - bare stone, narrow cot, iron fixtures - yet it felt lighter. There were two windows now, both slit-thin but placed at an angle, so that the afternoon sun crossed the room instead of being swallowed by it.

Lucius sat at the point where those lines of light met, half-leaning against the wall, one hand resting on the ledge of the nearer window. The wind moved faint strands of his pale hair. The light seemed to bend around him, as it always did.

Today, though he still looked drained, his breathing was steady.

When he saw her, he rose at once. His movements were measured, but there was a quiet grace in them, the remnant of an old discipline that refused to die.

“Miss Granger,” he said, after a moment, “I understand that I have you to thank for this sudden improvement in accommodation.”

Hermione allowed herself a small smile. “A Ministry official can file a complaint if a prisoner’s cell shows structural damage. I’m fairly sure I saw a crack in that wall - who knows, it might lead to a prisoner escaping.”

A faint smile curved his mouth.

“How fortunate,” he murmured. “To have civil servants with such a discerning eye.”

“Is it any better?” she asked quietly.

He hesitated. “Considerably.”

She exhaled, a small breath she hadn’t realised she was holding.

“May I ask,” he said, after a pause, “why you would trouble yourself with such… particulars?”

“Because it was what I could do.”

A small silence followed. His gaze shifted to the window, the line of his shoulders relaxing infinitesimally.

“And do you never tire of that?” His tone was mild, but there was an undercurrent in it - not mockery, something nearer to fatigue.

“Tire of what?”

“Doing the right thing.”

She met his gaze. “Sparing someone pain is not something I could ever regret.”

He inclined his head slightly, as though conceding a point. “A noble philosophy. Though I imagine a heavy one to bear.”

“You say that as if decency were a burden.”

“In my experience,” he said, “it often is.” There was no venom in it, only a quiet statement of fact. “The right thing is rarely kind, and it seldom thanks its advocates.”

Her brow furrowed. “That’s a dreadful way to see the world.”

“It’s the only way that’s ever proven consistent,” he replied quietly. “Besides, I would say that the world has rather finished with me.”

“Then why keep going?”

He smiled faintly, the expression almost kind. “Habit, Miss Granger. It’s remarkable what one can live on.”

“You sound as if you’ve given up entirely.”

He tilted his head, considering her. “And what would you have me do instead?”

“Live,” she said, more sharply than intended. “You could at least pretend you want to live.”

“My dear,” he said softly, “I have done nothing but pretend for fifty years.”

She could not forget the way he had said it.

The words had followed her back to London, through corridors of glass and stacks of parchment, through endless meetings.

She was unsettled because of the cruelty of it - that casual grace with which he spoke of despair should not have been possible.

Perhaps that was why, the following week, she brought him a book - a single volume, worn at the edges, from her own shelves. She hesitated before placing it on the narrow cot.

He looked at it but didn’t comment.

The next week, it was waiting for her when she arrived - carefully set aside, spine aligned precisely with the edge of the cot. She replaced it with another.

It became routine. She didn’t know what he might prefer, so she chose by instinct: Cicero, Boccaccio, Tennyson, Rilke. In one volume, she slipped a pencil, more out of habit than anything else.

Each week, the books were returned, their covers immaculate. She began to think he left them untouched, and told herself she didn’t mind.

Then one evening, at home, she opened one and found a faint line of pencil running through the margins. Notes in a narrow, elegant hand: brief observations on language, structure, with dry wit that surfaced now and then. He disputed a translation here, corrected a quotation there. Sometimes a single word - clever, or sentimental - stood alone in the margin like a verdict.

But what struck her most were the questions. Small, unexpected ones. Why beauty as consolation? Does grief lose meaning when shared? When does conviction become vanity?

She read and reread them, hearing his voice in the clipped precision of the phrasing, the deliberate restraint behind each line. For the first time, she caught a glimpse of the mind that lay beneath the armour - lucid, disciplined, and deeply intelligent.

She closed the book slowly, her finger resting against the faint indentation of his handwriting.

After that, she chose the next volumes with deliberate care.

And somewhere between the lending and the returning, between her choosing and his silent replies, she realised she had begun to look forward to those notes, wondering what thoughts she might find.

When she arrived that day, he was standing by the window as always. Without preamble, he held out the book she had lent him - Yeats, bound in faded green.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, taking it from him and handing him another volume.

He inclined his head, and that was all. Their ritual complete.

They moved on to other matters - the Ministry, the reforms that consumed her days. She told him, without quite meaning to, how endless it sometimes felt, this battle to repair systems rotten on the inside.

“Still trying to hold the centre, Miss Granger?”

Something in her chest tightened. She recognised the line. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. It was from the very book now resting in her bag. He had not only read it. He had remembered. Word for word.

It startled her so much that she broke their pattern.

“It reminds me,” she said carefully, “of something you wrote in the Tennyson - that beauty becomes dangerous when it’s mistaken for order.”

For a heartbeat, he was utterly still. Then his gaze shifted to her - searching, as though reassessing her entirely. It was evident he hadn’t expected her to read the notes. And certainly not to recall them.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “Tennyson believed order was redemptive. That faith or form could outlast ruin. Yeats knew better.”

She watched the light shift across his face, the pale gleam of his hair against the stone.

“Better?” she asked.

“Or worse,” he allowed, the corner of his mouth moving faintly. “He saw that even order decays. That we mistake symmetry for meaning - until it breaks, and we find there was nothing beneath it.”

Hermione nodded slowly. “And yet he still wrote. Still tried to make sense of it.”

“Compulsion, perhaps.” His gaze turned toward the window again. “We all need to believe that something can be mended. Even if it never can.”

The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. She found herself tracing the spine of the book with her thumb, her mind filled with a kind of reluctant wonder.

When she looked up again, he was watching her.

He sat by the window, a copy of Lord Jim open on his knee.

The print was small, the paper thin and foxed at the edges, but he read with the absorption of a man who had long since exhausted other forms of thought. Conrad’s prose appealed to him - its precision, its quiet understanding of cowardice. The passage before him spoke of the weight of a single act, the kind that fixes a man’s name in the minds of others and in his own. It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog.

Lucius closed the book. The words struck too close. He had lived half his life in that fog - the conviction of purpose, the blindness it required.

Somewhere down the corridor, a prisoner began to shout - wordless, raw. The sound scraped against his skull, and the tide of emotion that followed hit him like a current: rage, despair, a confusion of broken thoughts. He exhaled through the pain, humming until the noise dulled to something distant.

It was bearable now. It had not been, before she came.

The cell - higher, quieter - had been her doing. The humming exercise too - he would never have found out about it otherwise. And the books - always one at a time, always chosen with some intuitive precision - had become his tether. They demanded attention, imposed order. With them, the days had edges again.

He had to admit, he had misjudged her. He had expected a brief, well-meaning intervention: a handful of visits, polite, determined, and ultimately futile. He had assumed that once she confirmed the truth of him, she would retreat - appalled, or simply sensible. And yet, she kept returning, bringing a breath of the outside world. He had then assumed that would be all she would bring. He had been wrong again.

What she had done for him, what she continued to do with every weekly visit - it was beyond any expectation.

And gradually, he became aware of something else.

He could feel her - a faint shift in the air when she entered, a trace of mood brushing against his own. Normally, such subtleties would have gone unnoticed. Her emotions were never loud. But here, in this place steeped in despair, the difference was impossible to ignore. The contrast made her presence audible.

So he listened, once or twice, without quite meaning to.

There was composure, the steady precision of someone who thought before speaking. Determination. At times, a flicker of amusement or a faint strain of compassion. 

And, as the weeks went on, he realised not only what emotions were there - but which were not. Contempt. Fear. Disgust.

The discovery unsettled him more than he cared to admit. She was the only living person who knew what he was, and still looked him in the eye.

It was confounding.

And worse, it made him wait for her visits. The sound of her voice, the discipline of her questions, the improbable calm she carried with her - all of it anchored him in ways he would rather not name.

She came as she always did: punctual, the faint scent of rain clinging to her cloak. The familiar exchange of volumes took place without ceremony - his copy of Lord Jim for whatever she had chosen next - and soon they were speaking of the Ministry again.

He let her talk. He had learned that she didn’t so much report as think aloud - the measured rhythm of a mind testing its own logic. Her words brushed against phrases like legal precedent, implementation delays, interspecies negotiation. He asked the occasional question, not merely to be polite, but because her conviction that even chaos might be reasoned with amused and fascinated him in equal measure.

He found himself, quite unexpectedly, wanting to know more than the politics.

When she paused to take a breath, he said, quietly, “And when you are not untangling the Ministry, Miss Granger, what occupies you then?”

She looked faintly surprised, as though he had touched on something too ordinary for the walls around them. “Reading, when I can.”

He allowed himself a small smile. “May I ask - what sort of reading?”

Her mouth curved. “You’ll laugh. It’s a muggle novel - A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr. It’s about a man restoring an old church mural after the war. Quiet. Sad. But somehow… hopeful.”

He shook his head slightly. “I have never heard of it.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said, smiling again. “It’s very English in its melancholy. Nothing happens, and everything matters.”

He regarded her a moment longer than he should have. “Rather like in life itself.”

Their silence after felt oddly companionable. She turned the book he had given back to her in her hands, tracing the edges of its worn spine.

“I haven’t had much time for reading, actually,” she said after a moment. “I’ve been… caught up with the house.”

“The house?”

“My parents’ old one,” she said, lowering her gaze. “I’ve been working on it. Adding magic. Carefully. It was a muggle home - ordinary, lovely. It’s mine now, and I’m trying to make it fit both of my worlds.”

He could almost picture it: a table scattered with parchment and blueprints, the scent of paint mingled with potion smoke. It struck him with inevitability: of course she would try to reconcile what others would abandon.

“That sounds,” he said after a moment, “precisely like you.”

She looked up, startled, but said nothing. Only the faintest colour rose to her cheeks before she smiled - unsure, but genuine.

When she left, he did not at once open the book she had given him. He traced the unfamiliar title on the cover, and caught himself wondering what she looked like when she read in that half-magical house.

Chapter Text

She had meant the remark lightly.

“You always look tired,” she said as he handed her back the book.

He gave a faint, distracted smile. “Control,” he murmured, almost to himself. “It’s exhausting.”

She hadn’t known what to say to that. By the time she found words, the moment had closed.

After that, she began to hear it. Not often, never deliberately. It slipped into conversation the way breath does into speech - unnoticed, inevitable. When she spoke of Ministry reforms, he said once, “Some of us were born to cause harm. The least we can do is limit the radius.” When she mentioned the difficulty of compromise, he observed, “Restraint is simply the art of disguising one’s nature.”

He never looked for her reaction. The words were too casual, too factual - as if he were naming the weather. They were not confessions. They were conditions of existence.

That is precisely what unsettled her.

She had seen restraint in him before - the immaculate composure, the practiced calm. She had heard despair, too. She had believed it was Azkaban - the cold, the silence, the unending pain. Anyone would crumble under such conditions, even him.

But gradually, she realised it wasn’t the prison that had hollowed him. It was himself.

His stillness, his self-command - they weren’t signs of pride but of vigilance. He wasn’t merely enduring confinement - he was containing himself.

That night, she lay awake for a long time, unable to quiet her mind.

It struck her then: how someone could hate his own existence so completely. It made her begin, at last, to understand the tragedy of him.

She tried to summon anger - for everything he had been, for everything he had done - but it wouldn’t come. All she could think of was that single, unguarded sentence. Control is exhausting.

She wondered how long a person could survive themselves.

He knew she was coming before the guards even passed his door.

Not by sound but by the sudden, bright surge that reached him through stone.
Anticipation. Hope. Hers, not his. When the door opened, it was written plainly on her face.

“I’ve been reading case files,” she said, almost breathless. “There was one: a man transferred from Azkaban to house arrest. They argued medical vulnerability. It worked.”

He said nothing.

“If we frame it right,” she went on, “it might apply to you as well. There’s precedent now. We could avoid revealing… your heritage.”

He looked at her, at a loss for words.

She had already done enough. More than enough. She had given him silence, light, books - all the small mercies that had made the difference between sanity and surrender.

And still, she sought ways to give him more.

He found his voice at last, careful and quiet. “You believe the Ministry might entertain such a proposal?”

“I believe it’s worth trying.”

Of course she had the documents ready. She left them tucked in a book for him.

When the door closed behind her, he sat motionless until the air stilled around him. The air still carried her hope, bright and stubborn. It was a dangerous thing to let touch him. And yet.

Their meetings had changed.

She still brought books, but now there were also documents, the corners marked with her handwriting. They would go through each clause together, cross out phrasing, weigh the tone of every argument.

She would arrive, and he would offer her the only one place to sit: the narrow cot by the window. He remained on the floor, back against the wall, the distance between them measured by the space where the light fell.

That afternoon, she was tracing a line across one of the forms with her finger, explaining the next step of the petition. Her voice was brisk, practical - but there was something in the way she spoke, a kind of fervour that had nothing to do with duty.

He realised, suddenly, that this had long ceased to be Ministry work. She had made it personal. She had chosen to give her time, her thought, her belief - to him.

For a moment, he could not speak. Gratitude came like a blow - too large, too dangerous to name.

When he looked up again, he noticed she seemed tired. The faint strain around her mouth, the slight pause before she spoke.

Without thinking, he reached forward and closed the folder between them.

“Enough bureaucracy for one afternoon,” he said, his voice calm. “Tell me, how fares your house?”

She blinked. “My house?”

“The renovation. Last I heard, you were enchanting the plumbing into submission.”

That drew the laugh from her - soft, startled, genuine. The sound seemed almost impossible in this place. He found himself absurdly gratified by it.

While she spoke, describing the disaster in vivid detail, he let himself watch her hands, the brightness in her eyes, the way life seemed to follow her voice.

When she left, her laughter stayed with him, a warmth that would not quite fade.

It came to him without warning.

One afternoon, as she spoke - a loose strand of hair escaping from her bun, her hands moving in quiet emphasis - he understood. There was no sudden jolt, no revelation - only the slow, irrevocable awareness of something that had already happened. Somewhere between her laughter and her stubborn sense of purpose, he had fallen for her.

He could not have said when it began. Perhaps it was in the way she read aloud, or in her insistence that he argue back, challenge her reasoning. Or simply in her steady presence - the proof that something still lived beyond despair.

The moment the truth took shape, he felt the shock of it like a fever.

And then came the discipline.

He rebuilt the walls inside his mind brick by brick, the way he once had in the first years here, when madness had hovered at the edge of thought. He watched every inflection of his tone, every glance, every impulse.

Because if he ever forgot himself - if he let that buried Veela current slip its leash - she would respond. Not by choice. Not because she wanted him. But because she would have no choice at all.

The thought turned his stomach.

He would rather she despised him than be drawn to him under that compulsion. Affection, from her, could never be trusted. He told himself this over and over. Whatever he felt would remain unspoken, unreturned. That was the only honour left to him.

And yet, the paradox of it consumed him. For every moment he repressed the instinct to reach toward her, another thought rose to take its place - quiet, corrosive, impossible to silence: When she looked at him, what did she see?

He tried to read her expression, the subtle play of light in her eyes, the minute shifts of distance or ease. Did she see the creature, the thing he loathed in himself? Or did she, by some miracle, see the man beneath all that? He wanted her to. Desperately. And he hated himself for wanting it.

The question circled him in a slow, tightening orbit. It threaded through every conversation, every silence between words. When she smiled, he searched her mind for pity. When she frowned, he expected disgust. When she simply listened, calm and unafraid, the quiet hope of it felt almost unbearable.

Control was survival - it always had been. Only now, survival meant a different thing entirely.

The weeks blurred together, each visit marked by the steady rhythm of paper and ink, argument and counterargument. She brought documents, she took notes, and all the while she felt the petition taking shape beneath her hands. Each clause, each carefully framed sentence, carried an insistent hope - she truly believed that they might succeed.

By the end of each visit, the petition put aside, they had fallen into a different rhythm. These were quieter moments: talking of books she had brought, of his memories of Wiltshire. She found herself anticipating these conversations almost as much as the work itself, a ritual that granted her peace.

One afternoon, she was gathering her papers, straightening the edges, when he spoke, his voice soft.

“You risk too much for a man who may not deserve it.”

She looked up, the words sinking with a weight she had come to recognise: the old self-hatred, the bone-deep conviction that he was unworthy. She reached for him, instinctively, letting her hand brush against his arm.

“Then let me decide what is deserved,” she said gently.

She felt it before she could see it - the sudden, taut stillness that ran from his shoulders to his fingers. His eyes flickered, sharp and careful, and then he drew back, almost imperceptibly, yet enough to remove the warmth she had offered.

The moment stretched, delicate and fraught, and she realised, with a pang of unease, that she had crossed some  boundary she did not understand.

“I’m sorry—” she began, but he cut her short, shaking his head.

“There is nothing to apologise for,” he said quietly, his smile polite but strained. “Have a wonderful week, Miss Granger.”

And just like that, the moment passed. She left with her folder under her arm.

When the door closed behind her, he remained standing for a long while, his breath deep and slow.

He could still feel it - the faint pressure of her fingers against his sleeve, the warmth that had passed through the cloth and settled, uninvited, in his chest.

He drew another breath, willing his body to stillness. It took longer than it should have.

Control had never failed him before. Yet for a heartbeat - no more than that - something in him had yielded to the unbearable sweetness of being seen. The moment her hand brushed his arm, a thousand buried impulses rose at once: the Veela’s instinct to draw, and the man’s desperate longing to accept it and answer warmth with warmth.

He had smothered both immediately. He had to. If he let even a trace of his nature slip, if his allure so much as stirred the air between them, he could warp her mind, her choices, her will.

He straightened and composed his expression. Control first. Always control.

And yet, beneath the surface of his discipline, her voice still echoed: Then let me decide what is deserved. He closed his eyes. He would not allow himself to wonder what she meant. He could not afford to.

The petition was finally filed.

It felt anticlimactic - no grand moment of triumph, only a neat stack of parchment, her signature drying in the margin, and a clerk’s indifferent nod as he placed it among the others waiting for review. Still, as she watched the papers vanish into the bureaucratic current, Hermione felt a flicker of satisfaction. Months of argument, drafting, and careful phrasing had distilled into something tangible. For the first time, Lucius Malfoy’s future rested in something other than stone and despair.

The feeling lasted until the following morning, when she was summoned.

A polite memorandum folded twice and sealed with the Department’s blue wax. The kind that carried no real threat, only a promise of discomfort.

She had half-expected it.

There had been glances lately, a certain chill in conversation, that faint lift of a colleague’s brow when she requested another day at Azkaban. Someone had finally put the pattern together.

The meeting was brief. Two senior officers, one taking notes, the other speaking with that soft precision that always implied censure. They praised her commitment, her vision, her tireless pursuit of justice - then observed that her rehabilitation project seemed to occupy more hours than it ought. There were still drafts of the Veela legislation waiting, and deadlines approaching.

Perhaps, one of them suggested mildly, she might wish to prioritise.

She answered as expected - deferential, composed. When she left the office, her pulse still beat hard in her throat.

Back in her room, she sat at her desk, staring at the orderly stacks of parchment waiting for her attention. They were right, she told herself. The petition was submitted, the process could take months. She could do nothing more for him now. It was sensible to step back.

And yet the thought filled her with unease.

It was not only the work that held her there. She realised how much she had come to depend on those hours in the cold stone room. The exchange of books, the quiet conversation, the precision of his mind - it all lingered with her long after she’d left Azkaban’s gates. She would catch herself recalling his voice, the turn of phrase he used when unpicking a problem, the unexpected gentleness in him.

The petition gave her purpose, yes, but the hours beside him gave her quiet. She had not expected that - to find calm in a man she had once feared.

More and more, as the days passed, she found her thoughts straying to him. A passage in a book, a debate at the Ministry, a phrase overheard - each one sparked the impulse to tell him, to ask what he would think.

Somewhere along the way, he had ceased to be a project, or a cause. He had become part of her thoughts. Constant. Necessary.

The passage in Virginia Woolf was marked, the book resting on his knee. He had rehearsed a short, dry remark about it - one he thought might make her smile. The anticipation of her reaction was a quiet, steady pulse under his skin. When the door opened, he rose as always.

One glance at her face and the air shifted. There was a gravity there he hadn’t seen before.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to slow down my visits,” she said, looking at the floor. “There’s been some pressure at work. Apparently I’ve not been… delivering results.”

It was astonishing, the speed of it - the way panic could rise and freeze in the same breath.

He inclined his head slowly, his voice even. “May I ask - does it concern the Veela research?”

“Yes. Mostly that.”

“Then,” he said, too quickly, “allow me to give you results.”

Her eyes lifted, startled. “Mr Malfoy, you don’t have to—”

That gentleness - careful, instinctive - struck something raw in him. She knew, without ever being told, where the wound lay.

But fear is a merciless thing.

He forced calm into every word. “You have done more for me than I can ever repay. Let me offer something in return.”

“You owe me nothing.”

“Nevertheless,” he said, still courteous, still perfectly composed, “the records your department relies upon are unreliable. Many were written by observers who had never encountered a Veela in their life. You cannot amend them without someone of the blood. Allow me to ensure others like me are… accurately represented.”

The words hung between them. Her eyes searched his face - uncertain, soft with compassion. He wanted to recoil from it and cling to it both.

At last, she nodded. “If you’re sure.”

“I am.”

When the door closed behind her, he remained standing, hands folded neatly behind his back. He had bought himself time - with the one truth he had sworn never to expose.

But she would return. For now, that was enough.

Chapter Text

He spent the week steeling himself as if for a duel. Every thought of her return carried the dread of what must be said - what he must reveal.

Yet this was the price of her continued visits, and he would pay it.

When she stepped inside, there was a quiet question behind her eyes. He recognised it at once: hesitation, concern, the wish not to hurt.

So he made the choice for them both - his voice measured, though his chest was tight.

“Miss Granger,” he started, deliberate, “when you first came, you spoke of the records - or rather, the lack of them - concerning males of Veela blood. You asked whether I could shift.”

Her gaze met his, cautious, intent.

“I cannot,” he said. “Nor can I fly. Veela are, as you know, invariably female. A man may only inherit half the blood, and the half does not confer the… transformations. Whether that is due to gender or to partial heritage, I cannot say.”

She absorbed this, a faint crease between her brows.

“You further asked,” he continued, “about the empathic sensibility. As you may have observed, human emotion has its… weight. When it is strong, or prolonged, it becomes painful - like light too bright to look upon. That is why Azkaban is difficult.”

She shifted, then spoke, almost in a whisper. “And what helps, then?”

“Distance, ideally. Which is why I’m grateful for the change of cell. And the humming exercises your friend suggested - those help too.”

“Do they make it go away?”

He shook his head slightly. “No. But they dull it. Make it bearable enough to think.”

Her expression wavered.

“It is more than I could have hoped,” he said gently, the words settling into the silence between them.

She hesitated, then asked, “And what about other emotions, the ones that aren’t as strong - can you read them as well? For instance, are you able to tell what I’m feeling now?”

Alarm flickered - sharp, electric. He had never spoken of this, never allowed anyone this close. For a moment, he could only hear his pulse.

She saw his pause and, almost immediately, faltered.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

He inclined his head, forcing steadiness into his tone. “This is quite all right.” He listened, briefly, carefully. “I can feel your empathy,” he said at last, “and the nervousness beneath it.”

Her eyes widened.

He met her gaze fully, deliberately. “With emotions such as these, I do not need to look. I can choose not to.” He swallowed. “I do not intrude, Miss Granger.”

It was vital she believe him. The thought that she might see him as something to be feared lodged coldly beneath his ribs. He watched her face intently. Every measured word, every scrap of composure was a plea in disguise - that she would not turn away. Not now.

The silence stretched.

When she spoke, her voice was careful. “And… touch? Is that painful too?”

It took no effort to understand what she meant. The memory was immediate - her hand on his arm, the warmth of it, and the instant recoil he had forced upon himself. She could never know what that moment had been - the collision of instinct and restraint, the terror of harming what he most wished to protect.

“No,” he said at last. “Touch is not painful.”

Her eyes searched his face. Questions hovered but never took shape. He was grateful.

When it was time for her to go, she reached into her satchel and placed a book on the cot - the next one in their quiet exchange. The gesture caught him unprepared. Of all things she might have offered, this simple continuance meant to him most.

He let his hand rest briefly on the worn cover to ground himself.

The door closed behind her, and he exhaled, the composure of the hour slipping from his shoulders. The silence of the cell pressed close again - until the hinges creaked once more.

The door opened a fraction.

“Mr Malfoy,” she said softly, “thank you for everything you’re doing. I know that—Thank you.”

For a heartbeat, he could not trust himself to answer. Then, steadying his voice, he asked, “Shall I see you next week, Miss Granger?”

Her smile was small but certain. “Yes.”

The door closed fully.

She came once a week, sometimes twice - the scent of paper and cold air clinging to her coat. Each time she brought books, reports, fragments of text she wanted him to verify. He would sit where the light fell across the floor, reading each line with a detached precision, answering what he could.

Most of the accounts were wrong. Wildly, almost offensively so. He corrected what he dared: small adjustments, phrased without bitterness. Too much honesty might undo everything, too much reticence and she might not return. It was a delicate balance - to say enough to help her, enough to keep her coming, yet never so much that she might glimpse what he could not afford her to see.

And so it went. Week after week, that fragile equilibrium held.

Until the afternoon she asked about allure.

He had known the question would come. Still, the sound of the word made him tense.

He kept his tone even. “It is not a conscious act,” he said. “It is instinctive - biological. A means of survival. The body speaks a language the mind cannot fully command.”

Her next words came softly, but they landed like a blow.

“Could you show me?”

He stilled. The space between them tightened, the sound of the sea against the stone faint and far away.

“Miss Granger,” he said, after a pause, “No.”

She looked at him - not surprised, only thoughtful.

“I don’t mean to intrude,” she said. “It’s only that… every account describes it differently. I can’t tell what’s truth and what’s invention. I’d rather understand than speculate.”

“You cannot understand,” he said, suddenly getting up, the words harsher than he intended. He steadied his voice. “It isn’t something meant to be observed. It… acts. It alters perception.”

“I know.” Her tone was quiet, almost apologetic. “But surely you can control it.”

“I can,” he said. “That is precisely why I do not use it.”

She hesitated then, studying him. “You think I’d be frightened.”

“I know you would be.”

For a long moment, there was only the sound of parchment shifting as she folded her notes. Then, quietly: “You haven’t frightened me yet, Mr Malfoy.”

He looked away. The light caught the pale curve of her hand against the paper. He had thought himself immune to such things. He was wrong.

“It isn’t that simple,” he said, almost to himself. “The allure… it is persuasion without intent. It makes what should be a choice feel like a desire. I could not—” He stopped, the rest unspoken.

She waited. She always waited.

When she spoke again, her tone was kind.

“You live with this every day. I’d like to know what that means for you.”

He met her gaze, and what he saw there drove a hairline crack through the armour of his restraint.

She wanted to understand him. Not the creature, not the myth - the man.

The realisation left him breathless.

“I cannot promise safety,” he said at last.

“I trust you,” she answered simply.

No one had said that to him in decades.

He looked down, pulse unsteady. Every instinct screamed against what came next. But when he looked up, she was still there - calm, unafraid, wanting truth.

The temptation was too great.

Slowly, deliberately, he drew a breath, and let a fraction of his restraint fall away.

Suddenly, she thought she heard music.

Not quite sound - more like the idea of it, a vibration under the skin. It seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

She turned toward him to ask if he heard it too - and the words died in her throat.

Lucius Malfoy stood utterly still, his back to the wall, the light from the narrow window falling across his face. For an instant, she didn’t recognise him. The severity she had come to expect was gone. His pale face seemed touched by warmth for the first time. The tension that once defined him had eased, leaving something finer, gentler. He looked almost serene.

When his eyes met hers, they were unguarded in a way that disarmed her entirely. For a heartbeat, she could not look away.

Something inside her eased. Slowly, she rose from the cot. Every step toward him felt inevitable, as if it had been decided long before this moment.

She thought back to the man he had been when she first walked into his cell: cold, remote. Then she thought of their first tentative exchanges, of his sharp, brilliant mind gradually revealing itself. And how, between the books, the legal discussions and the sparks of dry wit, he had become so much more to her, stirring feelings she hesitated to name but could not deny.

And now this: the quiet courage of a man revealing what he had despised. The tenderness of the act caught her off guard.

Her hand moved of its own accord. The touch was light, uncertain - the fabric of his shirt rough under her fingers, the warmth of his body beneath it startling in its closeness. She let her hand rise, tracing the line of his collarbone, the curve of his throat, until it rested against his cheek. The contact steadied her - it felt right.

Then she realised his chest wasn’t moving at all - he wasn’t breathing. She glanced up. His jaw was rigid, his gaze fixed beyond her, unseeing.

“Lucius?” she whispered, the name slipping out before she knew she’d said it.

The moment cracked. The faint sound that had hung in the air vanished. In an instant he was gone - across the cell, one hand braced against the wall, his breath coming hard and uneven.

She froze where she was, the warmth of him still imprinted on her palm.

“Lucius?” she said again.

He didn’t look up. His head hung low, hair falling forward.

Her stomach twisted. “Did I hurt you?”

He shook his head once, sharply, but still didn’t meet her eyes.

She took a hesitant step towards him, then stopped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

A hollow sound escaped him, not quite a laugh. “You didn’t mean to?”

Something in her chest broke at the sound. “No, listen to me. I only wanted to—” She faltered, searching for words that didn’t sound absurd.

He turned then, and she saw the effort it cost him to meet her eyes. “You must understand,” he said quietly, “Under the influence of the allure, what you feel isn’t yours. It’s mine. I—.”

She shook her head, stricken. “But that’s just it,” she said. “Nothing changed. Not my thoughts, not what I felt. It only made it easier to reach out. That’s all.”

His eyes shut briefly.

When he spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

She wanted to go to him, to reach across the silence, but something in his stance - shoulders drawn tight, every line braced as if against a blow - held her still.

“I do know,” she said, her voice steady. “And I’m not afraid of you.”

“You should be,” he said softly, his eyes focused on the floor in the far corner of the cell. “Because I am.”

Her breath caught.

He straightened slowly, and when his eyes met hers again, all trace of softness was gone. “Miss Granger—please. Go.”

For a long moment she couldn’t move. Then, slowly, she nodded, the sound of her own heartbeat impossibly loud in the stillness.

At the door, she looked back once. He hadn’t moved. The line of his shoulders was still that of a man fighting himself.

When the door closed behind her, the echo seemed to take something with it.

He remained where he was until the echo died.

He didn’t know what, precisely, he had imagined might happen if he loosened his restraint, even by a fraction. Some measured experiment, perhaps - a brief, clinical demonstration. Not this. Not her hand just over his hammering heart. Not the sound of his name on her lips, unguarded and soft, breaking through the last of his control.

A hollow anger rose in him then - at himself, at the absurd fragility of his resolve. He had known the risk and still he’d let her persuade him, because she had said she wanted to understand him. Was he really that weak?

He drew a slow breath. The trace of her touch lingered like a brand, impossible to forget. It meant nothing, he told himself. The allure had steered her hand. Whatever softness he thought he had seen in her eyes was his own wish reflected back at him - nothing more.

Still, the echo of his name caught somewhere in his chest. He had imagined it before, in moments his resolve faltered, wondered what it might sound like on her lips. Now he wished he hadn’t. It was never freely given - it had only been taken.

He pressed his hands together to steady them. The conclusion was inescapable. Her visits would have to end. He could not - would not - risk her safety again.

He would tell her the next time she came. If there was a next time.

He had prepared for the loss with all the grim steadiness of a man walking to his own execution.

He spent the week rehearsing the words he would say, each version stripped a little further of sentiment, polished into something that might sound almost rational. It was necessary, he told himself. The only decent act left to him.

When she came again, he felt her before he saw her - the sharp brightness of her mood cutting through the dull air of the corridor. And then the door opened, and she was there, parchment in hand, her face alight with joy.

“It’s been approved,” she said, breathless. “The petition. You’ll be moved to house arrest next month.”

For a moment, the words didn’t register. Then they did - and the breath went out of him.

She had done it. Again.

He inclined his head, the gesture deliberate, meant to hide how his throat had tightened. “Miss Granger… I hardly know how to thank you.”

When she moved as if to come closer and stopped herself, something in him twisted. She had seen what he was now. She would not come near him again. It hurt, but it was right.

And even that ache was softened by the rush of quiet, incredulous relief.

He wouldn’t have to lose her yet. He wouldn’t have to say the words, watch her face change, feel the door close between them. This would end naturally now, soon, and before it did, there would be more time - one more visit, perhaps two. He could live on that.

As she spoke of arrangements and signatures, he listened only to the sound of her voice.

Chapter Text

It was late when she came.

The torches in the corridor burned low, their light wavering across the stone. She had never visited at this hour before, but there had been no other way - too many papers, too many signatures, too many last-minute arrangements.

And she had to come. It was his last night here.

He started when she appeared at the door. For a long moment he simply stared, as if uncertain she was real, before remembering himself and rising swiftly from where he’d been sitting.

“Miss Granger,” he said, voice low.

Then he gestured toward the cot, the same polite invitation he always offered.

She crossed to it, slower than usual. The book she had lent him lay there. Wilde. She picked it up, thumb resting on the pencil that marked his place - just twenty or so pages from the end.

“You’ve left them on the verge of discovering everyone’s real name. How inconsiderate of me to interrupt now.”

A faint smile touched his mouth. “It seems appropriate.”

“That I interrupt?”

“That I’m left waiting for a revelation.” His gaze met hers for a moment, unreadable, before he looked away. “I’ll finish it tonight. You can have it back in the morning - if you still mean to oversee the transfer yourself.”

She looked at him.

Since the day he’d shown her the Veela allure, he had withdrawn behind formality again. She knew he believed he had harmed her. The thought of it, of his quiet unnecessary guilt, tightened something in her chest.

He was wrong. The allure hadn’t changed what she felt - it had only stripped away hesitation. She had touched him because she wanted to. If she let him leave Azkaban believing otherwise, he would take that wound with him.

“You can take your time,” she said, tracing the edge of the pages. “Perhaps… I might collect it later. In Wiltshire.”

He looked up sharply. She felt the air between them still.

“You’ve told me so much about the library,” she went on softly, “and the gardens. I’d like to see them.”

He looked away. “That wouldn’t be wise.”

“Does that mean you don’t want me to come?”

He hesitated. “It means you shouldn’t.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Something shifted in his face, the muscle at his jaw tightening.

She crossed the few steps between them. He stood very still, one hand flexing at his side. She reached for it, giving him every chance to withdraw. He didn’t.

“If you truly don’t wish to see me again,” she said quietly, “tell me, and I’ll leave you be.”

His gaze fell to their joined hands. He swallowed but said nothing.

“I’d like to come,” she whispered. “You didn’t hurt me, or frighten me away.”

For a moment he didn’t move. The silence between them felt fragile, suspended.

Then came the sharp rap of the guard’s knock.

“Time, Miss Granger.”

She let go slowly. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

He inclined his head, but didn’t look up.

When the door closed behind her, she stood for a moment in the corridor, her hand still tingling faintly from his.

He did not sleep.

The hours passed soundlessly, measured only by the slow swing of torchlight through the bars and the distant pulse of the sea beyond the walls.

Tomorrow he would leave this place.

Even now, the thought felt unreal. He had never truly believed he would see Malfoy Manor again - the symmetry of its corridors, the sweep of the lawn through the library windows, the smell of Wiltshire air. The memory had long since turned from hope to ache. And now it was being restored to him - because of her.

He sat with her book in his hands, turning it absently over. Its weight steadied him.

He saw her still - the lamplight on her hair, the calm insistence in her voice when she said she would come to his home.

He had wanted to ask her not to.

He had wanted, just as fiercely, to let her.

Freedom - he ought to have been thinking of that: of sunlight, of air, of silence not broken by chains. Yet all his thoughts circled back to her: the warmth of her voice, the gentle defiance with which she met him, the way she had reached for his hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

He told himself, again and again, that he could not risk drawing her further in, not after what he had already done. But the arguments had grown hollow, rehearsed too often to convince even him.

He closed his eyes. The cell smelled of damp stone and salt, but beneath it lingered something else - like parchment and jasmine. It was unbearable, that she had left even the air changed.

For hours he sat that way, waging the same losing battle.

By dawn, the first wash of grey light reached the floor. The book was still open across his knees, the pencil resting where it had when she found it. He looked at it for a long while before closing it, slow and deliberate, as though the act itself were confession.

He had said he would finish it tonight, but he already knew he wouldn’t.

Not until she was there to take it from his hands. In Wiltshire.

The morning passed like a dream he could not quite wake from.

They came for him just after the bell - two guards, brisk. The papers were read aloud, one after another, each clause carrying the dull weight of finality. He signed where he was told to sign. His hand moved steadily, but the act felt distant, performed by someone else.

The rest unfolded in fragments. The corridor he had walked only once before. The clatter of keys. The closing echo of his own footsteps. The cold, sharp smell of the sea as they led him downstairs.

He had imagined this moment - but he had not imagined the noise.

The other prisoners’ despair rose and pooled like low thunder - the old, raw chorus returning with fresh intensity. He gripped the edge of the paper to still his hands from trembling. Anger flared, hot and immediate. The guards’ annoyed impatience and the aurors’ tight, clinical contempt, a stray flash of pity from somewhere - a dozen small judgments pressed at him. It was as if every emotion became a note and all of them played at once. His steps faltered.

And then, as he closed his eyes, a warmth cut through: a single brightness at the edge of the crowd.

She was standing among the gathered officials, her hair caught by the wind. She did not approach - the protocol forbade it. But her gaze followed him, steady and sure, and as their eyes met, something within him quieted. For the first time that morning, he could breathe.

She walked parallel to them, just beyond the wards, keeping pace until the last checkpoint. When the aurors paused to prepare for apparition, he turned his head and found her eyes again. She smiled. He thought of her hand in his last night, the shape of her palm stamped into his memory.

The command was given.

A moment later, the world folded in on itself - noise, light, wind - and Azkaban vanished.

He opened his eyes to stillness.

The air smelled of rain and earth, not salt. Walls rose in front if him, pale and familiar, surrounded by the blur of green.

He was home.

She waited a week before going.

It had seemed the right thing to do - to allow him time to breathe, to grow accustomed to space. But the days stretched oddly. She caught herself thinking of him too often: wondering how the house felt after so many years, how he was occupying his days. If the sometimes thought of her as she did of him.

When she finally went, the afternoon was bright, almost offensively so. The gates opened soundlessly, the gravel gave way beneath her shoes, and a house-elf met her at the door, bowing low and taking her coat with delicate hands.

When she looked up, he was descending the stairs.

For a moment she could only stare. The light from the tall windows was too soft, the air too still - like a painting come to life.

It was not the man she had visited in Azkaban - not the hollow, exhausted figure in threadbare prison robes. This was Lucius Malfoy as the world had once known him: immaculately dressed, silver hair smooth, face clean shaven again. The tension of constant pain that had clung to his features was no longer there. The release of it, visible now in the small relaxation around his eyes, made him - she thought, startled - almost breathtaking.

He descended the last steps with slow precision, as though remembering how.

“Miss Granger,” he said. His voice was low, measured, but there was a softness beneath the formality.

“Mr Malfoy.”

He seemed for a moment to falter, then caught himself.

“Would you join me for tea?” He paused. “It’s been a rather long time since I’ve had the pleasure of offering it.”

She smiled. “I’d be glad to.”

She sat in a deep armchair while he poured the tea himself, a simple act that felt strangely intimate.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

He paused, considering. “I am… adjusting,” he said finally, and the candour of it surprised her. “It is an odd thing, to wake and find the sea gone. I imagine it will take some time.”

He looked at her properly then, and added, with the smallest inclination of his head, “I cannot express how deeply I am indebted to you.”

The words were formal, but the way he said them was not. Something in it reached past politeness, and she felt the old ache of wishing he would allow himself to rest, just once, in the gentleness she saw hovering there.

Later, he took her to the library.

The sight stopped her completely. Shelves upon shelves, high as the ceiling, gleamed in the light from tall windows. The faint smell of leather and parchment hung in the air. A fire burned discreetly in the grate.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathed, walking further in.

She wandered between the shelves, fingertips brushing bindings, dizzy with the sheer number of titles. When she turned to speak, to ask a question about the collection, she caught his expression before he could conceal it: an unguarded warmth, the kind that belongs to someone seeing something precious.

It vanished almost instantly, replaced by composure - but it stayed with her, and she forgot what she was about to ask.

When at last she moved to leave, the book he returned in her hand, the afternoon had already begun to fade.

At the threshold, his voice stopped her.

“Miss Granger.”

She turned. He stood a little back, more tentative than she’d ever seen him.

“Would you—” He hesitated, swallowing once before the words came. “Would you consider coming again?”

Her smile came easily. “Next week?”

He exhaled, almost imperceptibly, and the faintest smile answered hers. “Next week,” he said.

It became a ritual again.

Once a week, precisely, she came. Always in the afternoon, when the light slanted through the windows and the house had settled into that peculiar hush it held now - too large for a single occupant, too well-ordered to betray it.

He found himself listening for her steps. The faint rhythm along the marble hall, the familiar murmur of greeting exchanged with the elf at the door. Absurd, how his pulse answered it.

And then she would appear.

The first few times he had been uncertain how to behave, suddenly unpractised in domestic civility after years of cold walls and silences. But she had a way of making it seem easy.

Now, it had begun to feel, dangerously, like something he could live for.

She still brought him her own books. But increasingly, she left with his. It had begun one afternoon when she’d lingered near a high shelf and asked, almost shyly, if she might borrow one. He had not expected the small thrill that went through him when she did.

Now he encouraged it. Quietly, discreetly, as though the very act of offering a book were a secret indulgence. He would watch as she moved among the shelves, tracing spines with her fingertips, head tilted in thought. There was something reverent in the way she touched them - his books, his sanctuary - and it moved him in ways he dared not name.

He no longer pretended he could ask her to stop coming. The idea had grown impossible.

He told himself he was acting rationally - that she was safe here, that he was in control. It was not as difficult now, with the air clean and the walls still, to master the thing within him. The Veela that had once roared under the weight of Azkaban’s anguish was quieter here, more pliant under discipline. And he guarded it fanatically.

He could be near her. He had proved it to himself, week after week.

He would not reach for her. He would not let the thought of it show. Instead, he would have these moments: her voice, her laughter, the sight of her sitting by the fire leafing through his books, unaware that he was memorising the line of her profile.

When she left, the house would fall silent again, and he would walk through the rooms she had passed through, still feeling the echo of her presence.

Chapter Text

The afternoon light was thinning, laying soft stripes across the carpet.

Hermione sat back against the cushions, observing the slow drift of steam from the pot between them. Across from her, Lucius watched the fire as if listening to it.

A book lay on the low table beside him, closed, a pencil tucked neatly inside to mark the place he’d stopped. One of hers. Her eyes lingered on it, and something in her chest gave a quiet twist.

After his transfer to Wiltshire, the notes had stopped.

He still borrowed her books, returned them with the same care, but the margins were empty. Perhaps he no longer needed that discipline, now that his mind had space again. She told herself she was glad. And she was. Mostly.

But she had missed them. Missed the surprise of opening a book and finding him there - his brilliance, his precision, the glimpses of thought between the lines.

Two weeks ago, she had found the courage to ask him to start annotating again.

He had looked up from his chair, startled, a flicker of something almost vulnerable passing through his eyes.

“You would like me to?” he’d asked, as if the idea were inconceivable.

She’d stumbled over her words. “I would. I… miss your thoughts.”

At that, he’d gone still. For a moment he was silent, his eyes soft, something unguarded flickering through them. Then he had nodded, once.

“Then it would be my pleasure.”

From the next book onward, the notes returned.

But they were not the same. These notes were deliberate - witty, elegant, laced with warmth. Each page felt like a conversation, one only she was meant to hear.

Now, looking at the closed book beside him, she smiled. She would open it later, and find his words waiting.

It was not just a book anymore.

It was something closer to a letter.

She waited as long as she could.

For weeks, she told herself there would be time later - that she would not ask this of him, not yet. He had done enough already. What he’d given her - the facts, the fragments of memory that had never been written down - were beyond anything she had hoped for. A lifetime of silence, translated into words. And she knew what it had cost him.

The subject of Veela was one he never approached unless prompted, and even then with visible effort. And distaste. Shame. She knew the self-loathing it stirred in him, and she would not wound that quiet dignity by pressing too hard.

But the more she learned, the harder it became to stay silent.

Everything he had told her pointed to the same bleak pattern: that male half-Veelas were left adrift, unaided, without guidance or language for what they were. Their Veela mothers, even when they wished to help, could only do so much - their experience was not the same. The blood ran differently in men. The pain did, too.

Hermione had begun to think that what was needed was something like the letter Fleur Weasley had once written, but on a larger scale.

And then there was the boy.

She had found him while tracing genealogies - barely thirteen, parents both gone, living with his grandfather. His mother had been a Veela. Which meant that, somewhere, the boy was growing into something he could neither name nor control. Lost. Afraid. She could not stop thinking about it.

So one afternoon, she asked.

They were sitting in the library, the light slanting through long windows. She spoke softly. She told him about the boy, about how he had no one who understood. She knew it was not fair to ask. But she asked all the same.

Lucius said nothing at first - he only sat back slightly, his face unreadable, eyes lowered to the table. For a moment she wished she could take the words back. Then, at last, he looked up.

“The letter,” he said quietly, “will be ready next week.”

It took her a second to understand. When she did, her throat tightened. She only nodded and looked down, blinking hard.

The house was very still.

Evening had settled across the fields, turning the windows to dim mirrors. In the study, only the low flame of a single lamp held back the dark. Lucius sat at his desk, sleeves rolled, a sheet of parchment before him. The nib of his quill hovered over the page.

He had written and destroyed three drafts already.

Words had always come easily to him - argument, persuasion, the elegant armour of rhetoric. But this required another language altogether, one that stripped the polish from thought and left only truth. He had not written such words in decades.

Outside, a nightbird called and was answered somewhere across the grounds. The sound broke the stillness. He set the nib to the parchment.

At first, the lines came haltingly, his own voice foreign to him. Then, as the sentences took shape, something loosened - the old precision returning, tempered now with something rawer.

He wrote:

To the boy who will not yet have a name for what he is,

You do not know me. It is better that you do not. Names carry too much history, and ours are seldom kind. But I know what you are. And I know the silence that surrounds you.

No one will explain it - not truly. They will tell you of beauty, of persuasion, of blood that sings differently. They will not tell you what it costs.

You will begin to feel it soon, if you have not already. The world around you will thrum louder than before - the ache of other people’s grief, the brightness of their want. Their emotions will find you as easily as scent finds air. You will think you are losing your mind. You are not. But you must learn to close the door.

There are ways.

Breathe through the soles of your feet.
Anchor yourself to the weight of a chair, a wall, a stone.

Do not fight the current - it will only tear at you - but learn to let it pass through, until it grows quiet again. The pain of it is the measure of your sensitivity, not your weakness.

The desire to answer what you feel - the pull to soothe, to draw, to feed on being wanted - will come too. It will not ask your permission. It will be sudden, violent, intoxicating. You will hate yourself for it.

Hate will not save you. Discipline will.

There is a hunger in us that is older than choice. It can ruin, if left ungoverned. But it can also protect. The same fire that seduces can shelter, if you learn to hold it still. The Veela in you was not made for cruelty. It was made for defence. Remember that.

When rage comes - and it will - it will come white and cold. Your skin will burn, your vision will narrow, and the air will shift around you. That is the moment to walk away, however far you must. Those who provoke you will not understand how easily you could end them. You must understand it for both of you.

There will be days when you despise yourself so completely that you would rather vanish. Do not. Every one of us has thought that. Survival, when you have every reason to hate what keeps you breathing, is a form of courage.

I will not tell you that it grows easier. It does not. But it becomes familiar, and that is its own kind of mercy.

If you have someone who looks at you without fear, hold to them. If you do not, then hold to yourself, until you can.

Yours sincerely,
L.

He set down the quill.

The air in the study felt different now, as if the act of writing had shifted something in it - lightened it, though he could not say how.

He read the letter once, slowly. Certain phrases struck too close: the ache of other people’s grief, the hunger older than choice. He almost struck them out, but stopped himself. The boy deserved honesty, not caution.

He folded the parchment carefully and sat back, one hand resting on the desk. His pulse had steadied. For the first time in years, he felt the clean echo of purpose.

He had not written the letter for the boy alone.

She came the following week, as she always did.

The light had changed - clearer now, almost sharp, the kind of early spring brightness that makes every shadow distinct.

He was waiting in the library. When she entered, he rose and handed her a folded sheet of parchment.

“For the boy,” he said.

She took it carefully. For a moment she only looked at him - a quiet, searching look - and then nodded once.

“I’ll see that it reaches him.”

He inclined his head, and that was all.

Afterwards, they settled into the quiet rhythm that had become habit.

He had her copy of The Count of Monte Cristo open before him, pencil resting between his fingers. She had spent several minutes walking along his shelves before choosing a volume bound in dark leather, a seventeenth-century work on magical history.

For a while, the only sound was the turn of pages and the faint scratch of graphite on paper.

Then she moved her chair.

Barely a foot, perhaps less. But the movement was deliberate: she turned until her back was to the window, leaving him in gentle shade, the light no longer falling directly across his face.

He had told her once, weeks ago, how certain brightness - sudden changes, glare, sharp reflections - unsettled the Veela senses after long confinement. She had nodded at the time, said nothing, and he had assumed she’d forgotten.

Now he saw she hadn’t.

She read on, unaware of his stillness, the light soft on her hair. The adjustment was so unthinking, so entirely natural, that it struck him with unexpected force.

She had not made a point of it. Not asked if he was comfortable. She had simply known, and moved accordingly. As if it were already part of the shared landscape between them.

For a long time he watched the line of sunlight creep slowly across the floor. He didn’t turn another page.

When she came again the next week, she did it once more, without seeming to notice. This time, he could not stay silent.

“May I ask,” he said, “why you insist on sitting there now?”

She looked up, following his glance to the window. “Oh. I don’t know. Habit, I suppose. It’s better for the light, isn’t it?”

He hesitated. “For me, perhaps. Less… intrusive.”

“Exactly.” She smiled, as though that settled the matter.

He frowned slightly. “You needn’t arrange yourself for my comfort, Miss Granger. I am quite capable of enduring a little light.”

Her expression softened - not indulgent, but steady. “I know. You endure too much already. There’s no need to add to it.”

He opened his mouth, but the words failed. There was no artifice in her tone, no gentleness meant to console. It was simple, unthinking truth.

When he didn’t answer, she added, almost absently, “You do the same for me, you know.”

He looked at her then. “Do I?”

“Of course,” she said, lightly. “You always light the fire before I arrive, even if you would not need it yourself. And you never interrupt when I’m gathering a thought - most people do. It’s kind.”

She smiled distractedly and bent back to her book, the matter already forgotten.

He sat very still.

That she saw him - saw him, and in seeing made no distinction between his odd, creature-born sensitivities and any ordinary human frailty - it unsettled him to the point of ache.

He had been despised, tolerated, even pitied on occasion. But to be understood, to have his small discomforts met as if they required no permission - that was something else entirely. It left him feeling raw.

For the rest of the afternoon he read beside her in silence.

The following week, she came with a letter in her hand.

There was a brightness in her expression that made the air between them feel different - alive, charged with urgency.

“He wrote back,” she said.

Lucius inclined his head. “The boy.”

“William,” she said softly. “Yes. It’s pages long. He says he’s been waiting his whole life for someone to explain what was happening to him. That he’s not mad, or monstrous. That he can sleep again.” She paused. “He’s… very young. He thanks you. Many times.”

Something in Lucius’s chest tightened. He looked toward the window, at the pale reach of afternoon light on the glass.

“I am glad,” he said quietly. “That he found some comfort in it.”

Hermione nodded, setting the letter down on the table. For a moment, she studied him.

“There are two things he asked about,” she said at last. “I wasn’t sure how to answer.”

He gestured slightly, granting permission.

She unfolded a small sheet of notes. “He writes about what he calls the burn - that when he’s frightened or angry, the air around him heats, and people feel it before he says a word. Is that real?”

Lucius hesitated, then nodded slowly.

“It is the body’s first warning. When emotion breaches control, the Veela instinct manifests as heat. It’s meant to drive danger away before harm is done.”

Her brow furrowed, absorbing it. “Does it hurt?”

“Only afterward,” he said. “The body interprets restraint as injury.”

Her gaze lifted at that, soft and searching, but she did not speak.

After a moment, he asked, “And the second?”

She hesitated, as though weighing whether she had the right to ask.

“He says sometimes, when he’s alone, he hears a sound - not outside, but in his head. Like wings beating, very faintly. He wonders if that means he’s going mad.”

Lucius’s breath faltered.

For a moment, memory rose - those still hours when the air itself had seemed to breathe, a faint vibration against the edges of thought. He had never spoken of it to anyone. Not even his mother.

He drew a careful breath. “No,” he said at last. “He isn’t mad.”

He searched for words, realising how few existed for this. “It isn’t truly sound. More… resonance. A kind of pressure in the air that isn’t there at all. I used to think of it as wind, when I was young. But wings—” He hesitated, meeting her eyes. “Yes. That’s not wrong, either.”

Something in her expression softened, a quiet understanding that made him wish he’d said less.

“Does it fade?” she asked.

“With age,” he said slowly. “Or discipline. I learned to mistake it for silence.”

She watched him for a long moment, and then her hand came across the table, light against his own.

He did not startle outwardly, but the shock of it ran through him - always the same: the warmth, the weight of her touch, the way his pulse stumbled under it. He had learned to master every reflex but this one.

Her thumb brushed across his knuckles, light, unthinking.

“Perhaps,” she said softly, “it isn’t meant to be silenced.”

He looked up. Her voice, her eyes, the impossible steadiness of her presence - something in all of it blurred the edge between restraint and longing.

“Perhaps,” he said.

Her hand stayed on his a moment longer before she drew it back. The room felt quieter for the loss.

Chapter Text

The correspondence continued.

Every week, without fail, she either brought William’s letter or took another in return. She no longer read them. It felt wrong now - intrusive somehow - as if to open those envelopes would be to trespass on something private.

But she could see, in the smallest ways, what the letters did to him. The first time, a faint astonishment. The next, something like pride. After that, calm - a steadiness she had never seen in him before.

The act of writing had given him purpose again.

That afternoon, she arrived as always. The rain had just passed, leaving the Wiltshire air washed clean, and the Manor seemed softer for it.

Lucius was waiting in the library. He had already cleared the table, parchment stacked neatly to one side. The order of it made her smile.

He waited until she sat before he spoke, and when he did, his tone was quieter than usual - more deliberate, as though weighing each word before releasing it.

“I have been thinking,” he began, “that William cannot be the only one. There must be others. Boys, men, living half their lives in confusion and fear, told nothing of what they are until it consumes them. It is… unnecessary.”

She said nothing, only listened.

“What they need is structure - a way to reach those who would otherwise hide, or be hidden.” He paused, then looked at her. “A programme. Guidance, if you will. Not as charity, but as right.”

For a heartbeat, she could not speak. She had thought of this - dreamed of it, even - but she had never dared to mention it to him. To do so had felt like asking him to reopen every wound he had learned to live with.

“You’re serious,” she said at last, her voice full of wonder.

“Entirely.” His eyes met hers. “If we can teach them what control means - what discipline truly requires - they might never have to learn as I did.”

She felt something tighten and rise in her chest, the kind of ache that came when compassion met admiration and had nowhere to go.

“That would change everything,” she whispered.

He gave the faintest nod, almost self-conscious. “I hoped you might help me shape it. You understand what must be done in practical terms. I can offer… perspective.”

The understatement nearly undid her.

“I’d be honoured,” she said.

Something in him eased - a minute shift, visible only in the way his shoulders settled, as though the admission had cost him more than she could see.

They began immediately.

By evening, the table was strewn with parchment: outlines, lists, rough frameworks of a network that might one day exist - part education, part refuge. She drafted legislation, he refined language.

Once, when she looked up, he was watching her - not with the distant reserve he used to wear like armour, but with a luminous kind of focus.

“What is it?” she asked softly.

“Nothing,” he said, and almost smiled. “Only that it is… curious. To build something, after so long dismantling.”

Her throat tightened. She reached for her quill again before she could say something foolish.

They worked until the light began to fail, until ink smudged on their fingers and the candles burned low.

When she rose to leave, she looked once more at the table, at the pages scattered between them - the beginnings of something neither had dared to imagine a year ago.

As she gathered her cloak, she said quietly, “You’re giving them a future.”

He looked at her then, a single, unguarded expression crossing his face.

“I am not doing it alone,” he said.

And she thought, as she met his gaze, that perhaps this was what redemption really looked like - not penance, not apology, but the slow, deliberate act of making something better than what had been lost.

It wasn’t more than a passing remark. They had been discussing the outline for the mentorship framework, notes and correspondence scattered between them, when she sighed - a small, tired sound, quickly stifled.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pressing a hand to her temple. “I’m just finding it difficult to work lately. The renovation is becoming unbearable - charms misfiring, scaffolding everywhere. And the programme’s too important to rush through at midnight.”

He looked at her over the table. She spoke lightly, almost apologetically, but the shadow beneath her eyes betrayed how thinly she was stretched.

“Then don’t,” he said simply. How easily he had leapt at the thought.

She blinked. “Don’t?”

“Don’t rush through it in the middle of the night, Miss Granger. Come here instead. The house is large, the library tolerable, and you might even find the tea acceptable.”

She hesitated, and he noted it with a quiet, controlled ache.

“I couldn’t impose,” she said, shaking her head. “You need your space.”

“My space,” he said dryly, “has rooms enough to house a Ministry department. And, for the moment, contains precisely one occupant.”

That earned a small smile from her, reluctant but real. “Still,” she murmured, “I’d be intruding.”

“On what?” he asked, too loudly. Then, more carefully, “On solitude that has long since worn out its welcome?”

She looked at him for a moment. “Are you sure?”

“Utterly.”

“Thank you,” she said at last.

“Excellent. I shall have the drawing room aired.”

When she came the following week carrying a small stack of parchment and the trace of plaster dust on her sleeve, the house seemed to wake.

He had left the newest draft for her that evening, folded neatly on the edge of the desk.

A page of definitions - terms they had agreed upon for the guidance text. The ink was still faintly new, the edges of the parchment pressed flat beneath a paperweight.

She unfolded it carefully.

Allure, in the males of Veela blood, is gravitational, and emitted rather than cast. It is involuntary, instinctive, and largely unconscious, but it can be contained. Its effects are variable but consistent in kind: heightened attention, docility, a tendency toward appeasement. The bearer perceives none of this. Control is therefore not the mastery of others, but the refusal to engage what cannot be trusted. To live peaceably requires distance, discipline, and the acceptance of solitude as safeguard.

She read it twice.

The tone was calm, clinical even - but beneath the precision she could hear what it cost him to write. That final line struck her most.

When he entered a few minutes later, she was standing by the window, the page in her hands.

“This passage,” she said quietly, “when you write of solitude - do you mean it literally?”

He paused mid-step, a faint tightening through his shoulders. Then, after a moment, he inclined his head. “Yes.”

She hesitated. “If you require distance to live peaceably—” Her voice faltered. “How did that work in marriage?”

He was silent for so long she thought he might not answer at all.

When he finally spoke, his voice was low. “It was not that kind of marriage.”

She looked up, startled, but he went on before she could speak.

“There were expectations,” he said evenly. “They were understood, and fulfilled. Affection was neither expected nor offered.” He reached for the papers on the desk, aligning their edges with unnecessary precision. “That was its strength, I suppose. It spared us both the illusion.”

Hermione said nothing. She could feel her throat tighten, a stinging ache behind her eyes.

Affection, she realised, was something he’d only ever witnessed from afar.

When she finally managed to speak, her voice was soft. “It’s elegantly written.”

He inclined his head without looking up. “Thank you.”

And she thought, as she set the page back on the desk, that of all the truths he’d given her, this was the one she would never be able to forget.

He worked later than usual that night, revising the section they had discussed. He told himself it was habit, dedication, but he knew better. The conversation had disquieted him. She had looked at him too gently when he spoke of solitude - as though she saw what he had not meant to reveal.

For the next few evenings they worked as before: quietly, surrounded by the scent of ink and firelight, the hush of turning pages.

Then, one evening, she mentioned it almost in passing - as if it were a matter of administration rather than intimacy.

“I’ve arranged for the Floo connection,” she said, sliding a folded parchment across the table, “between my house and yours. Approved and registered.”

He looked up sharply. “I… beg your pardon?”

Her tone was practical, untroubled. “It seemed sensible. I can send drafts directly. And if there’s an emergency—”

He could scarcely hear her over the sudden, hollow rush in his chest.

A Floo connection was a formality, yes - but also a declaration. A line drawn between two private spaces, sanctioned and visible. It meant that his name, his house, now stood linked to hers in Ministry record. Publicly. Without disguise.

She returned to her notes, unconcerned, as if she had not just altered the shape of his world with a single administrative signature.

He said nothing more.

But that evening, after she had gone, he found himself standing in the drawing room before the hearth. The new connection shimmered faintly in the grate - an unfamiliar hue in the green flame, signifying its private designation.

He did not touch it. He only watched.

It was nothing but smoke and spellwork, a line of magic running through the network like thousands of others across the country.

And yet it felt like proof - that somewhere beyond these walls, there existed one person who had, without hesitation, bound a part of her life to his.

And it was her.

From that day on, in the long hours after dusk, he would sometimes return to that room, sit in the chair nearest the fire, and watch the faint shimmer in the hearth.

He would trace the line of connection outward through stone and air, imagining it reaching the other end - to wherever she was working, her brow furrowed in thought, her quill moving across the page.

He knew it was foolish. Dangerous, even. That kind of closeness, however small, could only end one way. But it had become something he could neither command nor contain.

It was beginning to feel like hunger.

It happened by degrees, almost imperceptibly. A conversation that ran a little longer. A chair pulled fractionally closer. The warmth of her laughter unspooling through the stillness, drawing from him an answering sound he had not made in years.

He knew he was moving the boundary - each time telling himself it was only an inch, only this once - but the pattern was inexorable.

He no longer wanted the distance.

That realisation came one afternoon as she read aloud from a set of procedural guidelines she had brought with her - a document explaining, in exhausting detail, how to submit a programme proposal for Ministry approval.

“Step Four,” she read, squinting at the page, “requires prior approval from the Department of Regulatory Affairs before we can apply for consideration by the Oversight Board… which cannot be convened until after preliminary approval is granted by—” She broke off with a sigh. “They’ve designed it so nothing can ever actually be approved.”

Lucius looked up from his papers, one brow faintly raised.

“The Ministry’s favourite pastime: movement without progress. It’s a rare institution that can generate so much paperwork while achieving precisely nothing.”

Hermione gave him a look of mock outrage. “You say that as if you weren’t part of it for decades.”

He smiled faintly. “Ah, but you mistake survival for participation. One learns to nod at the right intervals, and never, under any circumstance, to volunteer efficiency.”

She gave a short laugh. “And yet you wonder why nothing ever changed.”

“Oh, I never wondered,” he said dryly. “I depended on it.”

Her laugh came, low and genuine. “Honestly, Lucius. You’re impossible.”

Her voice was bright with amusement, her eyes alive with it. He found himself smiling back, the echo of her laughter caught in his chest.

Then she seemed to realise what she’d said, and the warmth faltered. The colour rose faintly in her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I shouldn’t have—”

He reached out before the thought could dissolve.

His hand found hers - nothing more than the light pressure of fingers against skin, but it stilled her instantly. He had never initiated before, it had always been her doing, her small, fearless gestures of reassurance. But this time the impulse came from him - steady, certain.

“Please,” he said softly. “Keep using it.”

Her gaze flickered to his, searching. “Are you sure it doesn’t make you uncomfortable?”

He understood what she meant - the memory she was being careful with. That other moment, months ago, when his name had left her mouth under the influence of allure, and shame had driven him from it like a wound.

But this was different.

“I want you to,” he said. His voice was low, roughened slightly. Surely, he told himself, he could be allowed this much.

A pause. Then, slowly, her fingers turned in his, answering the touch.

“Then you must call me Hermione,” she said.

He inhaled deeply - and nodded.

It was the smallest thing, and yet it felt like everything: the fragile line that had held them apart shifting again, another fraction closer.

He didn’t let go until she did.

And when she rose to leave later, her name still echoed in his mind like a spell he had finally dared to say aloud.

The house was quiet.

Outside, rain swept softly against the tall windows, a thin, constant murmur that blurred the edges of sound. The fire had burned low in the grate, and its light trembled across the marble, touching the edges of the room with muted gold.

He sat where he often did now - the armchair by the hearth, a book open across his knee, a pencil resting lightly in his fingers. It was one of hers, of course.

The margin beside his thumb already bore a few neat lines - small provocations, worded just enough to invite reply. You’ll disagree with this, of course. Tell me why.

He paused, the ghost of amusement curving his mouth. The thought of her reading it later, brow furrowed in mock indignation, was enough to soften him. It was absurd, this quiet courtship of wit conducted through pencil marks. And yet, it had become the gentlest pleasure of his days.

He was searching for a phrasing - something elegant, something that might draw laughter out of her - when the hearth stirred.

The green flame brightened suddenly, throwing light across the carpet. For a heartbeat he stared, startled, before realising what it meant. The connection.

And then she was there.

Her figure resolved in the shimmer of fire, one hand holding a book against her chest, hair loose around her face. She hesitated on the threshold, as though uncertain whether she had overstepped.

“I—” she began, her voice low, a little breathless. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

He stood, his book closing under one hand, his pulse already betraying him. “Hermione. Of course not.”

“I just—” She glanced at the storm outside the windows, then back at him. “The noise at home was unbearable. I thought—” She stopped, as if the rest of the sentence were too much to admit. “I thought perhaps I might stay here for a while. Just to read.”

The firelight caught the curve of her fingers tightening on the book.

That she had thought of this room, this fire - of him - as somewhere to come for refuge… His chest was tight.

She was waiting, uncertain. “If it’s inconvenient—”

“No.” His voice came rougher than he intended. He cleared his throat. “No, not at all. You are—” He stopped, the words too formal, too empty for what he meant. He tried again, softly. “You are always welcome here.”

Something in his tone must have reached her, because her expression eased - the smallest smile, shy and grateful. She stepped forward, settling into the chair opposite his without another word.

He watched her for a moment - the way she curled her legs beneath her, the way she exhaled, slow and relieved. Then he sat again, the space between them filled with the familiar, companionable silence of pages turning and fire shifting.

After a while, she looked up briefly and met his eyes. “Thank you,” she said simply.

Time loosened around them.

The storm outside deepened, and the wind moved through the trees like breath. Now and then, the flames bent, and the shadows along the panelling seemed to lean closer.

After a time, the lines of her posture changed. Her head tilted slightly, her fingers loosened around the book’s spine. Another minute, and the page remained unturned. She had fallen asleep.

He watched, motionless. Her breathing was even, the faintest rise and fall beneath her collar.

He felt, absurdly, that any movement might break the spell of peace that had settled over her, over the room, over him. For the first time in longer than he could measure, he allowed himself to feel the shape of contentment.

And when, some time later, the fire sank into embers and she stirred, he still hadn’t moved. He only watched as she woke, startled to find herself there, and smiled - that small, private smile that always reached her eyes first.

He returned it.

“Forgive me,” she murmured, rising.

“There is nothing to forgive,” he said, his voice low.

She hesitated by the hearth, and for a moment the years between them - the history, the impossible path that had led her here - seemed to dissolve into something simple.

“Good night, Lucius,” she said.

“Good night, Hermione.”

Chapter Text

The rejection came on a Thursday.

The Ministry corridors were their usual blur of parchment and motion - brisk, impersonal, endless.

She’d been called to the Department of Regulatory Affairs to discuss the outcome of her proposal. It was all phrased politely enough, which was usually a bad sign.

The clerk who met her was a kind-faced man in late middle age, spectacles sliding down his nose, ink on his fingers. His office smelled faintly of tea and old paper.

He gestured for her to sit, already looking apologetic.

“I’m afraid the Board’s decision was final,” he said, voice careful. “They felt your proposal didn’t align with current Ministry priorities.”

“Priorities,” Hermione repeated. The word tasted flat. “Such as?”

He hesitated, shuffling the papers before him. “Public confidence. Resource efficiency. There’s been… pressure to focus on projects with broader visibility.”

“Visibility,” she said quietly.

He sighed. “Between you and me, Miss Granger, these minority initiatives rarely pass the first round. There’s no opposition in principle, mind you, just—” He made a small, helpless gesture. “They’d rather not spend money where they don’t have to.”

“So the Board feels the existence of an entire unprotected group simply falls outside its priorities?”

The clerk looked uncomfortable. “I don’t make the lists, Miss Granger.”

She looked at the folder on his desk - the same one she had submitted weeks ago, now bearing the red Ministry seal that meant closed.

“So that’s it,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, genuinely. “It’s a fine piece of work. Thoughtful. Just not the sort of thing they like to put their name to.”

The disappointment hit harder than she expected. She had spent months building it - every clause, every justification - and for a moment she could hardly speak.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked finally. “Any appeal process?”

“There is a reassessment form,” he said gently. “I’ll give you one. But I won’t pretend it changes much. It tends to disappear in the queue.”

She nodded once. “I’ll file it anyway.”

He smiled faintly. “I thought you might.”

She thanked him, took the form, and left before her voice could betray her.

The corridors felt colder on the way out.

By the time she reached the Atrium, the weight of it had settled: the endless hours, the letters, Lucius’s careful language - their work - reduced to a stamped page in someone’s file.

She had seen plenty of rejections before, but this one felt different. This one had been worth something.

As she stepped into the Floo, clutching the folder against her chest. She whispered the name of her street into the green flame, and vanished.

Her house was dark when she returned. She didn’t light the lamps straight away - she simply stood, the silence pressing close around her.

Only when she realised her hands were still shaking did she move.

Coat on the chair. Folder on the table. Kettle filled. The motions steadied her.

When the kettle hissed, she poured the water, added milk automatically, and took the cup to the window. The city below was washed in evening light, indifferent and endless.

She sat. The papers lay on the table where she’d left them, the Ministry seal like a wound against the parchment.

She had known, of course, that it was a risk. That nothing in the Ministry moved without politics and patience and the right names attached. But knowing it and feeling it were not the same.

For months she had built it line by line - his words, her arguments - and now it had all been dismissed.

Her throat tightened. For a moment she simply pressed her hands to her face, breathing against the weight of it. The sadness wasn’t loud, only deep, a kind of hollowing.

When she looked up again, the tea had gone cold.

Her first thought was that she couldn’t tell him. He had given too much of himself to this - his memories, his discipline, his fragile hope. She would not be the one to break it.

But the longer she sat, the less certain she became. The silence began to feel wrong. Cowardly, even.

He had never needed her protection - that had been her mistake from the beginning. What lay between them was never shelter, but understanding - and trust. And perhaps that was what it meant to care for him now: not to guard him from the blow, but to face it with him.

She rose, leaving the cup where it was, and crossed back to the hearth. The faint shimmer of the Floo danced in the grate, green and steady.

She straightened, spoke clearly into the flame: “Malfoy Manor.”

The green flame flared, and the familiar room resolved around her.

Lucius was by the hearth, reading, one hand resting on the arm of the chair. The moment she appeared, his expression shifted - the lift of surprise giving way to unguarded brightness, the same look that always met her when she came unannounced.

“Hermione,” he said softly, rising. “Is everything—”

She shook her head, the words catching before they formed. “No. Not exactly.”

He went still. “Tell me.”

She took a breath, steadying herself. “The proposal’s been rejected.” Her voice was low, level, but it betrayed her all the same - a tremor she couldn’t quite suppress.

He didn’t speak. For a moment she thought he hadn’t understood, but then he nodded once, calm, composed.

“I see,” he said quietly.

Something in her ached at that restraint. She had expected anger perhaps, or at least disappointment - something to match her own. But he seemed almost unsurprised.

Without a word, he extended his hand. “May I?”

She passed him the notice. He read it carefully, eyes moving once from top to bottom, then back again. His expression did not change, but she saw the faint tightening of his jaw.

When he looked up again, his voice was steady. “Then there are two matters to address,” he said. “Funding and visibility.”

She blinked, caught off guard by the practicality of it.

“Funding,” he continued, almost absently, “is easily seen to. I can provide what’s required myself. Anonymously, of course.” He spoke as if offering to replace a quill.

It took her a second to find her voice. “Lucius, that’s—”

He looked up. “A minor inconvenience,” he said evenly. “The greater question is visibility - how best to make our case. That, we must think on.”

She stared at him, stunned.

“You’d really do that?” she said softly.

His expression eased, the faintest suggestion of a smile ghosting across it.

“You seem surprised.”

“I am.”

He looked up then, and whatever he saw in her expression seemed to reach him. His composure softened - a flicker of warmth, almost uncertain, crossed his face.

“We’ve come too far to let it die in committee,” he said quietly.

For a heartbeat, neither of them spoke. She could feel the pulse of the fire behind her, the faint rustle of paper as his hand brushed the table.

She hadn’t realised until now how much she had needed to believe in something again - and how much she had needed him to believe with her.

And when he met her eyes once more and said, with quiet certainty, “We’ll make it work,” she suddenly knew they would.

They had spent the week searching for a way to make what they had built impossible to ignore - something that could not be reasoned away once seen.

They were no closer to finding it when the letter came, folded neatly among the routine post.

There was nothing remarkable about the seal - plain, wax faded to the colour of old brick - but the handwriting caught her eye at once. Careful, deliberate, the kind of hand that belonged to an older generation.

She opened it standing by her desk, and by the second line her throat had tightened.

It was from William’s grandfather.

He wrote with a kind of restrained dignity, and yet every line carried gratitude so fierce she could feel it through the page. He thanked the Ministry for the correspondence - for the letters that had brought his grandson back to himself. The boy, he said, was calmer now, no longer afraid of what he was becoming. He slept again. He smiled. The man did not know who had written those words, only that they had changed everything.

Hermione sat for a long time, the letter open on her desk, before she rose and took the Floo to Wiltshire.

Lucius was in the library when she found him.

“I brought you something,” she said, and handed him the letter.

He took it without question and began to read.

She watched as he did - the stillness in him, the way his expression changed almost imperceptibly: a faint narrowing of the eyes, the slow unguarded exhale when he reached the last line: I thank Merlin and Morgana both for those who create such light where it was nearly lost.

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The fire murmured, and the afternoon light moved quietly across the shelves.

“This—” she began, hesitating. “This could help us, you know.”

He lifted his gaze.

“For visibility,” she went on, the thought still forming as she spoke. “If others knew - if we had his permission to share even part of this, to show what the programme can do - it might persuade the Ministry to reconsider.”

Lucius considered her for a long moment, then looked again at the letter, turning it once in his hands.

“Yes,” he said finally. “It’s worth trying.”

Another week, and the world began, almost shyly, to yield.

William’s grandfather had written again. They had sent him word of the programme - their intention to build something lasting, something that might help others like his grandson. His reply was measured but warm: not only permission to use his letter, but an offer of further help should they need it. Anything that spares another family what we did not know how to name, he wrote. 

Soon after came the news about Fleur. Ron had mentioned it lightly - a boy, due in spring - and the thought had stayed with her long after.

That evening she wrote to Fleur again, explaining what she and Lucius were building. The reply arrived in less than two days: warm, decisive, full of that bright certainty that always seemed to surround her. She offered her name, her support, and her gratitude that someone had thought of the sons as well as the daughters.

She placed the letters beside her notes and sat for a while, letting the stillness settle. The work no longer felt impossible.

And beneath that certainty ran something steadier still: the knowledge that she would not have reached this point without him.

It wasn’t only his insight, or the calm he brought to every doubt, but the way his presence steadied her. What she felt for him had become something she could lean on - constant, and strong enough to hold.

She was reaching again.

Across the room, Hermione stood on her toes before one of the higher shelves, fingers stretched toward a volume that remained just beyond reach. He watched the attempt with private amusement.

She could have summoned it easily, of course - but her wand lay on the desk on the other side of the room, forgotten amid a sprawl of parchment.

He put down the quill and rose.

By the time he crossed the room, she had risen a little higher, one palm braced against the shelf for balance. The sight of her - focused, undeterred, a wisp of hair fallen loose against her cheek - drew a smile to his mouth before he could stop it.

He spoke softly, close enough that his voice did not need to carry.

“Allow me.”

He expected her to step aside. She didn’t.

So he reached past her, slow and deliberate, his hand finding the spine just above hers. For a heartbeat, the movement was purely practical - the familiar weight of the leather binding, the faint resistance as it slid free. And then awareness struck him, sudden and complete.

Her shoulder brushed his chest. Her hair, scented of something he could not name, tickled his jaw as she turned her head slightly, not away, but toward the sound of his breath.

The world seemed to narrow to that single point of nearness. His pulse thudded once, sharp, against his throat. He could feel her exhale - light, uneven - and for the span of a heartbeat he allowed himself to simply stand there: his hand on the shelf beside hers, his other holding the book, their reflections caught together in the glass of the cabinet before them.

Every instinct clamoured - to step back, to move closer, to do something. But he could not. The air between them felt charged, as if even a breath might tip them past whatever fragile equilibrium they had managed to hold.

At last, he remembered himself.

He drew a quiet breath and stepped back, as though retreating from a precipice.

“Here,” he said, his voice an octave lower than usual. “The book you wanted.”

She turned then, eyes bright, cheeks faintly flushed.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

He inclined his head, unable to trust himself to speak again, and watched as she carried the book back to the table - the echo of her nearness thrumming like a pulse in his chest.

They had spent the day working - refining the petition that would lend their proposal a voice beyond their own, a call for others to stand with them. By late afternoon, the language was settled, the arguments aligned, and the silence that followed felt earned.

They moved to the drawing room for tea. The fire had burned low. Outside, the light was thinning into dusk.

Across from him, she sat unmoving, her hands wrapped around her cup though she hadn’t lifted it. Then he sensed it: a current of nervousness, subtle but clear. He hadn’t felt it from her in months, and it caught him off guard. She had long seemed at peace here. With him.

He said nothing. He simply waited.

When she spoke at last, her voice was careful, almost hesitant. “I’d like to talk to you about something.”

He inclined his head, wary now. “Of course.”

Her hands folded together, fingers pale against the dark fabric of her skirt. She seemed to search for the beginning of what she meant to say.

“It’s something I’ve been reading,” she said. “Alongside the guidance material.” A pause. “Related to it, in a way.”

He waited, silent.

She drew a slow breath. “It concerns… human–Veela relationships.”

For a heartbeat, he thought he’d misheard her. The words reached him oddly delayed, as if through water.

“I should have told you sooner,” she went on quickly. “I only thought it might alarm you. After what happened before, when the allure—” She drew a breath. “But I know how I feel, Lucius. And I wanted to understand whether there could ever be a way for us to—” She stopped there, colour rising, but it was enough.

Her words seemed to land somewhere just behind his ribs.

He sat very still. The smallest movements - breath, thought - felt perilous.

“Miss Granger,” he said, and the formality sounded foreign even to himself. He tried again, barely above a whisper. “Hermione. You cannot mean this.”

But she did not look away. “I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.”

He closed his eyes. Had he done this? Had something slipped - a pulse of the thing he spent his life restraining - had it touched her without his knowing?

“Tell me,” he said, and it came out rough, urgent. “When did you begin to feel this? Was it after—”

“No.” Her answer was immediate. “It wasn’t like that. It’s coming from me, not you.”

He looked at her sharply, and she went on, quieter, almost apologetic.

“I came across something,” she said. “An old Scandinavian fragment - older than the Ministry’s classifications. It’s barely a few lines, more legend than record. But it suggested that for men with Veela blood, allure doesn’t act the same when… when feeling already exists.”

He frowned.

“It said the pull changes,” she continued, choosing her words with care. “That if there’s affection first, the allure doesn’t coerce at all. It only makes what’s already there… more visible. Draws attention to it. Removes hesitation.” Her voice fell to almost a whisper. “That fits what I experienced.”

He gave a short, mirthless breath. “A myth, Hermione. Nothing more. We’ve read a hundred like it - wishful inventions to soften what cannot be changed.”

Her gaze held his, steady. “Then let’s test it.”

He went still. “Test it?”

“You could try,” she said gently. “You could let the allure reach me again. If it’s true - if it only points to what already exists - then we’d know. I’d know.”

He rose before she could finish, the movement sudden, too sharp.

“No.”

“Lucius—”

“No.” His voice cracked against the word, louder than he meant. “You think I would use that on you again? After what it cost us both the first time?”

She flinched but did not look away.

He turned from her, the control fraying now. “You don’t understand. You cannot understand what it is to live with this - to question every kindness, every glance, to wonder if it’s yours or the echo of a curse you never cast. And you would have me risk you to prove a superstition?”

She rose too. “I didn’t mean—”

He shook his head, hard, unable to bear the look in her eyes.

“I will not discuss this further,” he said, voice low again but unsteady.

And before she could answer, he left the room, the door closing behind him sharper than he intended.

The corridor was empty.

He stopped halfway down, breath unsteady. He leaned against the wall, rested his head back against the cool stone. The anger was still there, sharp - but beneath it lay something heavier.

She had meant it.

It was the simplest truth, and the most unbearable: she wanted what he wanted, and he could not give it to her.

The thought broke him open. What she had offered was everything he had taught himself to live without, and he had driven her from it.

Because he wanted it too much. Because he could not risk her.

He stood there until the tremor left his hands, until the sound of the fire from the drawing room was only a memory. Then, slowly, he walked on, each step measured, as though rebuilding the distance she had just tried to close.

Chapter Text

He had drawn the line, and she kept to it.

Instead, she turned to what remained between them: the work.

The petition had begun to circulate. Fleur and Bill were the first to help - Fleur through her connections at Gringotts and among the part-Veela community, Bill through the steady network of curse-breakers and field wizards who still owed him favours. Then Harry offered to lend his name to it, with the unassuming certainty of someone who knew his name still opened doors.

Between them, the list grew. By the end of the month, there were more signatures than she had dared to hope for.

When it was complete, she gathered everything: the testimonials from Fleur and from William’s grandfather, the formal record of the private donation Lucius made without attribution, and the petition itself, signed and sealed. All of it went into a neat leather folder.

She took it to the Ministry herself.

The same clerk greeted her - kind-eyed, his spectacles still perpetually slipping down his nose. His office smelled faintly of tea and old ink.

“Miss Granger,” he said pleasantly. “Back again?”

“I am,” she said, setting the folder before him. “We’ve addressed every point the Board raised in the rejection notice. Additional funding, wider public endorsement. It’s all in here.”

He adjusted his spectacles and began leafing through the pages. She watched as his expression shifted - first polite attention, then genuine interest. He paused more than once, reading lines twice.

“This is… thorough,” he said at last, sounding almost impressed. “You’ve done a great deal of work since your last visit.”

“It matters,” she said simply. “Is there anything else I can do?”

He hesitated then, thumb tapping lightly against the edge of the parchment. For a moment he seemed to weigh something, his gaze flicking toward the closed door before returning to her.

“You didn’t hear this from me,” he murmured. “But there was a case last year - different subject, same problem. Good proposal, ignored. Then someone slipped it to the Prophet. Caused quite a stir. The Ministry approved it the following month.”

Hermione blinked. “You’re suggesting—?”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” he said quickly, then smiled, a small, boyish expression that didn’t fit his years. “Just… saying that sometimes, a little sunlight helps things grow.”

He straightened the stack of papers, then hesitated, a faint flush rising beneath the greying stubble of his jaw.

“You know,” he said, almost sheepish, “my niece was beside herself when I mentioned you’d been in my office once before. She is a great admirer of yours. Talks of you constantly. ‘The brightest witch of her age,’ she says. Would it be terribly improper to ask—might I have something signed for her? She’s twelve. Says she wants to work in Magical Law.”

For the first time in days, Hermione laughed, startled and helpless. “Merlin, it’s been years since anyone asked me for that.”

“She’ll treasure it,” he said earnestly. “And—if I may—did you truly ride a dragon out of Gringotts?”

She smiled, shaking her head as she reached for a scrap of parchment. “I did, and it was every bit as mad as it sounds. What’s her name?”

“Rose.”

He watched with evident delight as she signed her name - To Rose—May you change what others are afraid to touch. With every good wish, Hermione Granger - and handed it back to him.

When she left his office, the weight in her chest felt different - no longer paralysing.

The next morning, an unsigned envelope reached the newsroom of the Daily Prophet.

Inside were copies of the petition, the letters of support, and a brief note in tidy handwriting:

Fully funded. Broadly supported. Rejected without explanation. A Ministry initiative to guide and protect citizens of Veela descent now lies buried in committee. Perhaps the public would like to know why.

The article appeared a week later.

Lucius read it in the stillness of his study, the morning light falling in long, pale bars across the desk. The Prophet had devoted a full column to the story: Ministry Proposal for Veela Guidance Rejected Despite Public Support.

It was written with indignation polished into elegance, the sort of piece that made outrage sound like reason. He could almost hear her voice in every line.

Of course it was her. No one else would have cared enough to make them care.

He allowed himself a smile. He might have suggested something similar himself, had she asked.

The thought landed more sharply than he expected. Had she asked.

She hadn’t.

Their conversations had dwindled back to an hour a week - measured, mannerly, stripped of everything that once felt alive. No more evenings that ran past reason, no more reading in silence shared like understanding. Now there was only formality.

The last time, she came without a book.

He had noticed at once, absurdly hopeful it might be waiting in her satchel, forgotten, but no.

He said nothing. He could not trust his voice. He only watched her cross the room, sunlight caught in her hair, and felt the truth settle with quiet devastation: he had done this. He had built the distance he could no longer bear.

The house, once a refuge, had become a shell of her absence. The silence that used to soothe him now grated like stone. At night he wandered the corridors, drawn to doorways that still seemed to hold her laughter, the echo of a voice.

Once, he reached for a book - some political treatise he picked at random - and a slip of parchment fell free. Her handwriting curved across it, light and teasing: You’ll hate this argument, but I expect a proper rebuttal.

He stared at the words, then hurled the book away, the sound harsh in the stillness.

Later, he retrieved the note, smoothing the crease with unsteady fingers. It rested in his pocket still.

The owl came late in the evening - the formal sort, parchment crisp, handwriting she did not immediately recognise.

Dear Hermione,
Courtesy notice. The Prophet will be running something tomorrow - not by me. The author’s Tilman Cross, and he’s been sniffing around since your programme proposal went public. I thought you’d rather know before you read it over tea.
— Padma

Below that, a single line in smaller script: I’m sorry.

A clipping was attached. The headline leapt out first, thick black type that seemed to shout even in the quiet of her kitchen.

GRANGER’S SECRET: WHY DID SHE SAVE A DEATH EATER?
By Tilman Cross

Sources within the Ministry confirm that Hermione Granger - war heroine, and current advocate of Veela support project - personally petitioned for the transfer of Lucius Malfoy from Azkaban to house arrest.

Was this act a misguided gesture of mercy, or something more? Speculation ranges from private coercion to long-standing sympathies with certain former Death Eaters. Anonymous officials cite “undue influence” in recent Ministry petitions and question whether Granger’s latest project serves public interest - or personal debts.

She stopped reading there. The words blurred, the ink seemed to spread.

By the time she reached the Ministry next morning, the whispers had already begun. Eyes followed her through the corridors, too quickly averted when she looked back.

Her supervisors were waiting - two of them, both careful with their tone, the kind that prefaced reprimand disguised as sympathy.

The head of department gestured to a chair. “Miss Granger, you’ve seen the Prophet, I assume?”

“Yes.”

He folded his hands on the desk, expression grave in that practised Ministry way. “You understand, I hope, the difficulty this… situation presents. The article has placed the Department in an awkward light. Public confidence is delicate at the best of times, and your name has become somewhat entangled with Mr Malfoy’s.”

“Entangled,” she repeated, her voice even.

He inclined his head. “Strictly speaking, of course, there is no wrongdoing. But optics matter. And, as you know, the Board has just approved the Veela Guidance Programme as a formal departmental initiative. A scandal like this could jeopardise that. Some of the signatories are already reconsidering their public endorsements.”

The second supervisor, younger, leaned forward. “It’s not personal, Hermione. We all know how hard you’ve fought for this. But now that the programme carries the Ministry’s seal, it’s our shared responsibility to protect it. Having done so much to see it realised, surely you don’t wish to see it undermined.”

Hermione met his eyes. “Of course not.”

“Then,” he said gently, “you’ll understand why the Board feels it would be best if you issued a brief statement - something formal. A clarification that your past involvement with Lucius Malfoy was purely administrative, that there’s no continuing association.”

The silence that followed was taut. Hermione felt her pulse quicken, but her voice, when it came, was calm. “You want me to go on record and renounce him.”

“Not renounce,” the elder man said quickly. “Merely distance. For the sake of the Department’s integrity.”

She looked between them, disbelief giving way to anger. “The programme has nothing to do with Lucius Malfoy. And his transfer from Azkaban was legal - reviewed, approved, transparent. I have nothing to conceal and nothing to apologise for.”

The younger supervisor exhaled softly, as though regretful. “In that case, we’re left with no choice. Until public interest quiets, the Department believes it prudent for you to step back from direct oversight. Someone else will take the lead on the next phase.”

It took a heartbeat for the words to settle.

“Step back,” she said. “To what?”

“To the Archive Office,” the elder replied, already glancing at the file before him. “There’s a long-overdue update on post-war goblin relations. You’re uniquely qualified. It won’t be permanent.”

The room felt suddenly smaller.

“I see,” she said at last. “Then I’ll ensure all my notes and supporting documentation are transferred promptly.”

“Thank you,” he said, and almost sounded as if he meant it.

She rose. Her chair made no sound against the stone floor.

When she reached the corridor, the air felt thinner. Someone passing lowered a newspaper as she went by - the headline bold, unavoidable. She kept walking.

By the time she reached her house that evening, exhaustion had settled like dust. She made tea out of habit, didn’t drink it, and stood at the window watching the city blur into night.

The letters began arriving the next morning.

At first, she thought they were mistakes - a few misdirected words, a misunderstanding. But by the third day, the pattern had formed.

A handful offered kindness: We stand with you. Don’t let them silence what matters.

Most did not.

They questioned, accused, demanded: How much did he pay you? Have you forgotten who he was? Is this the legacy of the Golden Girl?

She stopped opening them.

When the time for her weekly visit came, she went to the Manor as always.

The drawing room was bright with late-afternoon light when she stepped through the Floo. Lucius was standing by the hearth, the Prophet folded in one hand, his posture too composed.

“Hermione.” He spoke her name with the careful weight of someone rehearsing control. “You’ve seen it, I presume.”

“I have.”

He nodded once. “Then you will understand the necessity of what I’m about to say. You must distance yourself. Publicly, and without delay.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The funds are already in place,” he continued, tone clipped but calm. “There will be no difficulty there. All that is required is a short statement - clarify that your connection to me ended long ago. Close the Floo connection.”

For a moment she could only stare at him. “You can’t be serious.”

His gaze held hers, steady and grave. “You know how the Ministry works. This kind of scandal spreads quickly and ruins what it touches. You have worked too hard to see your name destroyed on my account.”

She drew a breath. “I will do no such thing, and my name is not what matters.”

His gaze flickered. “Hermione—”

“I know who will take over the programme,” she said, more firmly. “Adriana Kersey, from Education. She’s competent, fair, and kinder than most. I’ll be able to advise her quietly. It will continue. Our work will hold. It doesn’t need my name to survive.”

Lucius’s composure wavered by a fraction. “You believe integrity will shield you. It will not. You’re being made a spectacle for what should never have been questioned. Spare yourself that, at least.”

“I won’t lie,” she said. “And I won’t recant a single thing I’ve done.”

The words hung between them, sharp and final. He turned away first, his gaze fixed on the window.

She could see how this hour could have gone differently, not long ago. A rant, perhaps, from her - then laughter, his dry wit cutting through the absurdity of it all.

But now he remained standing, composed, distant in the way that hurt most: not cruel, simply absent.

So she mirrored him. She finished her tea, thanked him, and left as though nothing had been lost.

And as she stood before her darkened hearth, she wondered if this was what he called protection - to guard her so fiercely that he vanished altogether.

Chapter Text

A couple of weeks later, the campaign had begun. Posters in Diagon Alley, a photograph of the first group of applicants - uncertain, serious-faced boys standing beside a smiling administrator.

Hermione sat at her kitchen table, teacup between her palms, and read each notice with a strange, divided ache. Pride, mostly. And something quieter beneath it - the hollow knowledge that what they had built now existed apart from them.

When the owl tapped against the window, she sighed.

The letters had mostly stopped by now - the noise had moved on to other scandals. Still, the sight of unfamiliar parchment made her stomach tighten. She unlatched the window and reached for it, half-prepared to burn whatever lay inside unread.

Then she saw the mark attached to the owl’s leg. International Postal Office.

Curiosity won. She broke the seal.

The handwriting was neat, careful in a way that spoke of thought, and hesitation. It took her a couple of lines to understand who it was from.

Granger,

I saw the article in the Prophet. About the programme - and about him.

I wanted to thank you. I know it must have cost you to intervene on his behalf.

It’s strange, reading his name again. I hardly know what his life looks like now, but if there’s peace in it, I suspect that’s your doing more than his.

I also owe you an apology - for school, for the war, for all the years when contempt was easier than thought. You understood things I’m only starting to grasp.

Take care of yourself, Granger.

Draco Malfoy

She set it down carefully beside her cup.

The house was silent. Through the window, the London morning glimmered pale and cool, indifferent to the letter lying open on her table.

Warmth spread through her - quiet, unexpected. It wasn’t forgiveness exactly, but something gentler. The sense that something broken, somewhere, had begun to mend.

She wrote back that evening - a short, honest note. She thanked him for writing, said she appreciated his gesture more than he might realise, and wished him well. No more than that, but it felt right.

When she sent it off, she didn’t expect to hear from him again.

But four days later, another owl came. His hand again.

She stared at the envelope for a long moment before opening it, half amused, half uncertain what to feel. The tone was different this time - still careful, but warmer, more curious. He wrote of his work abroad, of the strangeness of starting over, of how London sounded impossibly far away.

She found herself replying almost at once. And then again when another letter followed.

Over the next weeks, their exchange found its own rhythm. Draco wrote about New York in a way that made her see it: the chaos, the noise, the strange freedom of being swallowed by a crowd that didn’t care who he was. Hermione replied with glimpses of home: the weary rhythm of London mornings, the endless drizzle, how old school names still surfaced in conversation as if they’d all agreed to haunt one another.

One letter ended with a line about his father - just that he was well, that the transition home had been uneventful, and that he lived quietly now, mostly among his books. She thought Draco had a right to know at least that much.

He did not reply to that part.

The drawing room was cold.

He had let the fire sink hours ago, not allowing the elves to tend to it. The book on his knee lay open but long unread, his gaze fixed on the window instead - the black outline of trees, the reflection of the lamps behind him. He no longer pretended to follow the words.

This was how the evenings went now: silence of too large rooms. He had thought himself accustomed to solitude - it seemed he had only learned its surface.

The hearth flared suddenly, green light striking across the darkened room.

He looked up, pulse quickening before reason could catch it.

Only one person ever used that connection - yet not at this hour, not without warning. Not since—

She stepped through, brushing a trace of ash from her sleeve, and for a moment he forgot to breathe. All at once he remembered the sound of her laughter against the quiet, the late hours, the soft turning of pages.

“I’m sorry,” she began. “I shouldn’t have come without asking.” Her voice wasn’t the distant, careful tone of their recent meetings. It was the one he remembered - alive, real.

“You could never intrude here,” he managed, barely. “You know that. You are always welcome.”

Something in her gaze shifted at that - a flicker of warmth that reached him like sunlight.

“I just wanted to give you something,” she said, and stepped forward. In her hands was a stack of envelopes, bound neatly with twine, with a small note on top.

The handwriting stopped him cold.

He hadn’t seen it in years. That quick, slanted stroke - impatient, unmistakable. His son’s.

Hermione,

I’ll leave this to your judgment.

If you think he should see the letters, let him. I’m not up to writing yet, but perhaps this is close enough.

He looked up, stunned. “These are—?”

“From Draco,” she said quietly. “He’s well. Working, rebuilding his life. We’ve written for some time now.” Her eyes softened. “I thought you might want to read them.”

He looked at her, unable to speak. Gratitude, disbelief, something deeper than either caught in his throat.

Then she turned slightly towards the hearth, as if to leave, and he heard himself say her name, sharp with urgency.

She paused.

“Forgive me,” he said, low. “It’s late, I know. I only thought—” His voice faltered, softer now. “If you can spare a little time - please, stay. It’s been—” he searched for something safer than lonely, “—a long evening.”

The smallest flicker crossed her face - surprise, then more warmth.

Her voice was quiet. “Of course.”

He exhaled.

She crossed to the armchair by the window - her chair - and picked up a book from a small stack on the coffee table.

As she sat there, the newly relit firelight along her sleeve, turning pages in the quiet way he remembered, the room finally breathed again.

He sat opposite, the letters trembling faintly between his hands, and began to read his son’s words.

After she left, the quiet settled differently. Not peace, but the echo of her voice lingering in the air.

He told himself to sit, to read. Instead, he found himself pacing - he moved to the window, to the fire, back again. The restlessness refused to ease.

She had given him more than he could not have asked for - dignity, purpose, the first true kindness since his imprisonment - and now, again, she had brought him something beyond all measure: the sound of his son’s voice, even at a remove.

He wanted - no, needed - to do something for her.

Not to repay her. That was impossible. But simply to act, to return in some small way the life she had placed back in his hands. To make her smile, if he could.

He looked around the room - objects, relics, meaningless. What could he offer her from within these walls?

Then, unbidden, a memory surfaced. Months ago, she had stood by this same window as winter light fell over the grounds. She had spoken of her parents’ house - the garden behind it, where rows of bluebells and narcissus used to bloom every spring. The renovation spells she’d cast, she said, had scorched the soil - nothing would take root there now. It’s silly, I suppose, missing flowers. But she had smiled when she said it, a wistful curve.

He stopped pacing and called the elf.

She came on her usual day.

It had been a long week, full of letters, whispers, polite evasions in Ministry corridors. By the time she stepped through the Floo, she felt the weight of it behind her eyes. The Manor’s hush met her like a balm: the soft tick of the clock, the even warmth of the fire.

Lucius was waiting by the hearth. He greeted her with a nod, the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth.

She let herself sink into the armchair. “I was beginning to think civilisation might depend on your tea,” she said, half under her breath.

He poured it for her, but instead of handing it across at once, he hesitated.

“If you’re not too tired,” he said evenly, “would you look to the window a moment?”

She looked up, surprised. “Why?”

A pause, almost imperceptible. “I think,” he said, and there was something in his tone - uncertainty, almost shyness - “you might like to see it.”

He remained where he was, a few steps back, the fire behind him.

Puzzled, she rose, crossed the carpet, and looked out.

For a heartbeat, she couldn’t make sense of what she saw. Then her breath caught.

The east grounds - the long sweep of lawn that had been bare for as long as she could remember - were now a sea of colour. Thousands upon thousands of bluebells, their faint violet shimmering in the afternoon light, stretching to the edge of the trees. The breeze rippled through them, and the whole garden seemed to move.

She knew at once what he had remembered. The memory of that conversation returned with a sting behind her eyes.

For a moment she couldn’t speak. Then she turned back toward him.

He was watching her from the hearth, composed but still, as though afraid to break the moment.

When she finally found her voice, it was quiet. “They’re perfect, Lucius.”

Something eased in his face then. “I’m glad.”

She didn’t return to the armchair. Instead, she took her teacup and went back to the window, standing where the light and colour met the glass.

Behind her, she could feel his gaze - steady, unguarded, and for the first time in months, unmistakably warm.

Later, when she was leaving, he met her by the hearth.

“Before you go,” he said, and placed a book in her hands. It was A Room of One’s Own.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

He nodded once, nothing more, and she stepped into the green light.

When she reached home that evening and set the book on her desk, something slipped loose from between the pages - a folded slip of parchment, his hand unmistakable.

On page one hundred and thirty-four, I owe you an answer. Perhaps you might allow me another evening to attempt one.

She stood very still, the note trembling faintly between her fingers, and then smiled - soft, involuntary - as if some long-held breath had finally been released.

Chapter Text

The warmth returned by degrees.

In the weeks that followed, the air between them eased. They began to laugh again, as they once had, at the week’s absurdities in the Prophet, at the Ministry’s endless appetite for spectacle. Sometimes they read in companionable silence, the pages turning in the same slow rhythm.

She hadn’t realised how much she had missed that quiet - how easily the world seemed to settle back into place when they shared it.

And he must have missed it too. She saw it in the way his reserve softened, in the moments he allowed himself to look at her a fraction too long before speaking. The distance he had drawn still stood, but not like a wall anymore - more like a boundary he was trying, hesitantly, not to cross.

The line remained clear, though. No mention of allure. No allusion to what might exist beyond the safety of their quiet hours.

She tried to respect that, even as it ached - his careful kindness that held her near, yet never quite let her close. She kept to her visits, the rhythms they had built.

Until the day she came, and he was nowhere to be found.

Not in the drawing room, nor the library, nor his study. The chair by the fire stood empty, the ink on his desk had dried to brown.

Perhaps he was resting, she thought, and called his name. Once. Then again. Silence.

Unease began to take hold.

She crossed the hall and met one of the elves - Mipsy, the small one with the round, earnest eyes.

“Mipsy,” Hermione said gently, “do you know where your master is?”

The elf shifted, ears lowering. “Not at home, Miss,” she whispered.

Hermione froze. “Not—what do you mean, not home? He can’t—”

Mipsy’s hands twisted together, her voice breaking. “Master told Mipsy not to say.”

A crack split the air behind them - sharp, sudden, unmistakable. The sound of apparition. She followed the sound down the corridor.

He was there, just beyond the threshold of the east wing.

“Lucius,” she said, breathless as she reached him. “Are you all right?”

He inclined his head, a single precise movement. “Quite.”

Relief came first, then anger. “Quite?” she echoed. “Are you out of your mind? How long were you gone?”

“One hour.”

She stared. “An hour? The wards will have registered it - aurors could be here any moment! Do you want to go back to Azkaban?”

He did not interrupt. He simply stood there, letting her speak. When she paused for breath, she saw it - a strange intensity in him, not defiance but something sharper, almost urgent.

He inclined his head toward the drawing room. “If you would,” he said quietly.

She hesitated, then followed.

Once inside, he closed the door with deliberate care.

“You needn’t worry,” he said. “No one will come.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

“Because,” he said, as if it were self-evident, “I paid the two aurors on duty to look elsewhere for an hour. The wards were being recast today - a brief irregularity will not be noticed.”

Hermione gaped, appalled. “You bribed them? Lucius, that’s—!”

For a fleeting instant the corner of his mouth lifted but it vanished as quickly as it came.

He gestured toward the armchair. “Please, sit.”

She did, still tense, waiting.

“I would not endanger what you fought for,” he said. “But I needed to go. Just this once. It was… necessary.”

“Necessary?” she repeated, frowning. “I don’t understand.”

He paused, then reached into his coat and drew out a single folded page, its edge uneven - a letter, or part of one.

“It’s from William,” he said quietly. “Read the last paragraph.”

She took it and read.

So it seems I’m learning as much from the others as from the guidance notes themselves. There’s a sort of comfort in hearing how differently it can be lived. I spoke with Oisín last week - the young man from County Clare I mentioned before - and he’s to be married this summer. He said he’d been afraid to tell his fiancée what he was, until he realised she never seemed to feel the pull of it at all. She only felt him. That made me…

The page ended there.

When she looked up, Lucius was watching her - utterly still, as if afraid to breathe.

She scanned the page again before speaking, her voice low.

“Where did you go, Lucius?”

He didn’t answer at once. His gaze shifted to the window, where the last of the afternoon light touched the glass.

“To meet them,” he said finally. “The couple in the letter. I had to speak to them. See for myself.”

She blinked. “See—how did you even manage that?”

“I had help,” he said, and there was the faintest flicker of a smile. “Mrs Weasley’s.”

It took her a moment to understand. “Fleur?”

He inclined his head. “I wrote to her as soon as I read William’s letter. She’s been involved from the beginning, knew the names of every participant. She arranged it discreetly.”

Hermione stared. “And she wasn’t surprised? To hear from you?”

Something shifted in his expression.

“I told her,” he said quietly.

“Told her what?”

“Everything.”

The word seemed to catch the air. For a heartbeat, she couldn’t find her breath. He had hidden that truth for half a century - what he was, what it meant - and now, without warning, he had revealed it to someone else.

“You told her you’re—”

“Yes.” His voice was steady, though his hands weren’t. “It was the only way. I needed her to understand.”

She looked at him, the ache and astonishment rising together. “And?”

“I spoke to them both,” he said. “It appears what you once read was true. The allure doesn’t coerce those who love. It doesn’t bend will or reason - it only… reveals.”

The silence that followed seemed to tremble.

Then he moved, and suddenly, he was kneeling before her.

“Hermione.” He reached for her hand. “I have no right to ask,” he said, voice rough. “But would you let me try? As you once wished - to see what it does to you. To us.”

For a time, she couldn’t speak. The words were there, caught behind the sudden brightness in her eyes.

He waited, still as breath.

And when she finally nodded, he bowed his head, exhaling.

The afternoon had the kind of warmth that made even the air seem drowsy. The windows stood open, and the scent of rain and honeysuckle drifted through the room.

Ever since she had started visiting daily, almost a year ago, the heavy curtains disappeared, granting her an unobstructed view of the garden, and the field of bluebells that never seemed to wither. She suspected some kind of clever charm there.

Hermione sat reading in her chair by the window, one knee drawn up beneath her, a half-finished cup of tea cooling on the table.

Across the room, Lucius had been perfectly quiet for nearly an hour - which was, she thought, suspicious in itself.

It began with the faintest shift, a warmth that brushed her skin like the memory of touch. Her fingers tightened on the book.

“Lucius,” she said warningly.

A pause. Then, lightly: “Yes?”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“You know perfectly well.”

“I’m merely sitting here.”

She lowered the book just enough to see him. He looked entirely at ease, one leg crossed over the other, expression unreadable. Only the smallest gleam in his eyes betrayed him - and then she felt another pull.

“Stop it,” she said, though she was already smiling.

“I’m afraid I’m not sure what you mean.”

The air stirred again, and that was it - she laughed, helpless. “You’re impossible,” she said.

“So you’ve mentioned.”

She set the book aside, rose, and crossed to him. “Happy now?”

“Nearly.”

She shook her head, still laughing, and dropped down beside him on the sofa - sideways, her legs draped easily across his. One of his arms rested along the back of the seat - she leaned into his side until the space between them disappeared.

“Better?” she murmured, the words muffled against his neck.

“Yes,” he said quietly.

His arms came around her, gentle, sure.