Chapter 128. The Blacks.
Central London. Evening.
Two people were lying on the roof of one of the drawbridge towers, loosely tangled together: a young man looking thoroughly comfortable, and a woman whose narrowed eyes suggested she was reconsidering every decision that had led her here.
"How much longer?" the aristocrat asked, her voice flat with weary displeasure.
He smiled softly and shook his head. "A little longer."
"We've been up here for half an hour."
"The Aurors are still cleaning up the park, and your house is a hundred meters away. Better to wait them out." His hand, apparently of its own accord, drifted downward.
"Hey. Hand. Higher."
"All right, all right," he said, with the air of a man making a great personal sacrifice, and moved it back to her waist.
Bellatrix exhaled slowly and looked down at his chest. She had to reluctantly admit that it was well-built, unusual for someone of his background. He was wearing only a shirt, and the lines of muscle beneath it were quite clear. For one traitorous moment, the thought crossed her mind that she wanted to touch them.
What is wrong with you? She shook her head sharply. In the next instant, Severus took her hand and placed it precisely where her thoughts had just been. "What do you think you're..." She snatched it back as if she'd touched a hot stove and glared at him. The amusement on his face only made the heat in her cheeks worse.
"I could always take the shirt off, if you'd prefer..."
"Shut up. I'm not interested."
"The way you were looking at me, I genuinely thought tonight might be the night you finally ravished me and had to face the consequences." Bellatrix had reached her absolute limit. She wanted to hex him into next week and simultaneously disappear through the ceiling, and the second impulse was winning by a significant margin.
He did not need Legilimency. Her face was the color of a Gryffindor tie.
"All right, I'll stop." He laughed without any attempt at restraint, bounced to his feet and pulled her up with him. The audacity of it knocked her sideways for a moment, and then...
"What are you doing?! Let go of me, I'll..."
"There she is!" he said, with every appearance of genuine delight, watching her try to take his head off. "Calm down." He ducked the fist, set her on her feet, and stepped back. "They're gone. Let's go."
She watched him narrowly for a moment, making sure it was safe to exist within arm's reach.
"Come on, I'll walk you home." He held out his hand with a smirk. She took a step back instead. "I promise I won't bite."
"I'm going to kill you one day," Bellatrix said, but she put her hand in his anyway. A moment later they were gone.
He did not take them back to the park. He went straight to the Black house instead, and the moment they arrived, Severus felt the weight of two watchful gazes nearby. Three figures were waiting by the entrance: Regulus, staring at them as if he could not quite believe what he was seeing; Narcissa, watching with undisguised interest; and Walburga Black, head of the family, who wore her hostility openly and had not taken her eyes off him for a moment.
"We've got a welcoming committee," he murmured, glancing sidelong at Bellatrix. "I take it they had no idea where you were going?" She answered with a hiss of irritation. "Bellatrix, inside. Now." Walburga's voice was cold and precise. "You two as well." Regulus and Narcissa obeyed without argument, though both kept looking back over their shoulders as they went.
"A beautiful evening." Severus bent and kissed Bellatrix's palm. She gave him a stiff nod and followed the others in. The front door closed. He turned to Walburga. "Good evening, Madam Black. Lovely night for it, isn't it?" She stared at him. "Now I see where Bella gets it."
"Stop playing games. She will be married shortly. The only reason I have not acted against you is that the Ministry stands behind you, but I will not sit by while you drag our family's name through the dirt."
"I can assure you the matter you're thinking of will resolve itself quite soon, one way or another." He let the pause linger. Walburga's frown deepened. A few seconds later her expression shifted as she caught his meaning.
"So you're behind it."
"Who can say?"
"You actually believe I would let you marry her?"
"Madam, Bellatrix is twenty-seven years old. She is perfectly capable of choosing her own husband. And while I may be a half-blood, I have more than enough strength, wealth, and reach to make life very difficult for any family that stands in the way." He smiled pleasantly at her. Her expression flickered through several emotions at once.
"That will not happen." She steadied herself with visible effort, fixed him with the full force of her stare, and an elderly house-elf appeared at her elbow.
"Please don't invent a conflict that doesn't exist yet. Your authority as head of the family is temporary, held in trust until your husband returns. This is not a decision you can make alone."
"I said it will not happen, and that is final. I will not see her married to a half-blood. I will not allow our blood to be tainted." The contempt in her voice should have made him angry. Instead, it produced something closer to pity, and she noticed.
"I took you for an intelligent woman. I was wrong. Bella didn't take after you at all. Now I understand that her difficulties don't come solely from a family curse. You've had your share in them. Is it any wonder Andromeda and Sirius fled the moment they were old enough to realize what was happening to them? You people marry your cousins to keep your bloodlines clean, and then you're surprised when Squibs are born, when children come out wrong, when the whole edifice starts cracking from within." At the mention of those two names, the family's most polished shames, the ones she had burned from the tapestry herself, Walburga's knuckles went white and something dangerous flickered in her eyes.
The house-elf felt his mistress's rage and lunged forward, both hands thrust out at Severus.
"Don't you dare speak ill of the Mistress!" he shrieked. The moment his magic reached out, something slammed down on him like a falling wall, driving him flat into the pavement. A spear of fire assembled itself in the air above him, blazing white, its point angled to strike.
All the color left Walburga's face. The ease of it, the absolute lack of effort, was beyond anything she had prepared for. For the first time in a very long time, genuine panic moved through her.
"Tobby. That's enough." Severus looked down at the house-elf, who was still glaring upward with bloodshot eyes.
"Yes, Master." The pressure vanished. The fire spear disappeared. The street went dark again.
"I have no interest in telling you how to run your life. That's entirely your business." He spoke without particular urgency, as if discussing the weather. "But take what I've said seriously. Blood purity as a doctrine leads to one place, and that place is extinction. The Slytherin line shows the way: one heir left at the end, and even that one is likely to be a Squib, or at best something like the Dark Lord himself. But." The aura he projected was not dramatic. It simply arrived, pressing down on everything around it, and Walburga felt her knees weaken as fear struck her before she could name it. "If you hurt Bella or Regulus. If you force them into anything they don't want. If you try to break them. If you do anything along those lines." His eyes went red. His voice dropped until it was barely a murmur. "I will dismantle your family and remove every trace of it from history, and I'll do the same to the Lestranges while I'm at it. I am not threatening you. I am telling you what will happen. Think carefully."
The aura cut off as cleanly as a light being turned off. Something cracked as the house-elf's small ward shattered. The family appeared at the upstairs window.
"I won't keep you any longer. I'm sure you have a great deal to attend to." He stepped forward, took her hand with every appearance of courtly grace, and kissed the back of it. Goosebumps spread across her skin. "A pleasure, Madam Black. I hope you'll think over what I've said, and perhaps look up the work of Robert Cross, a half-blood who set out in considerable detail, with evidence, exactly what happens to families that breed too close. Good evening." A small wave to the faces at the window, and he was gone.
The house-elf took a long moment to find his feet. He looked up at his mistress and his eyes filled with tears.
"M-Mistress, please forgive me, I couldn't..."
"Be quiet." Walburga did not look at him. She walked toward the house, her face waxy and pale. The red eyes followed her. She was the head of this family, and she would not let anyone see her shaken. But one thing was now completely, unmistakably clear: he had meant every word. He had the means to do exactly what he had described, and that was what frightened her most, far more than the fire or the eyes or the crushing weight of that aura. He had simply been stating facts.
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Chapter 129. Ministry of Magic.
The date had been less than ideal, and the meeting with the Blacks had been heated in all the wrong ways. Even so, the very next morning Severus was back at his desk, refining the ritual he needed to absorb top-tier magic from the crystals Shafiq had been stockpiling on his behalf.
With those crystals, he expected to push himself to the peak of Magister rank. Then, four years later, once his core had properly settled, he would absorb the magic from the Heart of the Ent King and cross into Archmage rank. Ents had an extraordinary capacity for regeneration, born of their deep connection to nature, and that quality should offset the worst of what such a steep jump would do to his body.
The original plan had been to draw the process out over ten years, two careful stages, nothing rushed. Then the Devils had arrived and made caution a luxury he could not afford. The timeline had collapsed, and with it the finished ritual he had spent three months building, which had been calibrated for a very specific number of crystals and a fifteen-year arc to Archmage rank. Now he had to rebuild it from the inside out, and on top of that, construct an entirely separate ritual for the Heart, which held several times more magic than the crystals and of considerably purer quality. The same amount of time again, at least. Probably more.
He had briefly considered using both hearts the Ent King had given him and getting it over with in a single step. The math had quickly talked him out of it. His core would not survive the volume. With that much foreign magic flooding the system at once, his body might begin rewriting itself to accommodate it, and he had no desire to spend the rest of his life as an Ent. So it would be work, steady and methodical, with Nagini's condition checked almost every hour in the meantime.
He kept an eye on Bellatrix as well. Walburga was the sort of woman from whom you could expect anything, threats or no threats. And yet, oddly, since the previous evening she had not gone near Bellatrix at all. At breakfast she had behaved as though the previous night had never happened. That should have been reassuring. Instead, it made Severus careful, because things going smoothly was not something he was inclined to trust.
Ministry of Magic. Office of the Minister of Magic.
Harold Minchum sat behind his desk with the look of a man who had aged several years since lunch. He had been chewing the same pipe for twenty minutes, working through the interrogation report that had landed on his desk half an hour ago, and the picture it painted was giving him a headache that throbbed directly behind his eyes. Death Eaters on one side, and now this. Black Star. Four hundred trained wizards, patient enough to embed themselves in the Ministry over years if necessary, waiting for Britain to weaken just far enough before they moved.
"I genuinely regret taking this job." Harold set the parchment aside, blew out a long stream of smoke, and tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. "If not for that person, we might have lost the country before anyone noticed anything was wrong. I owe him a meeting. But that can wait, because right now I have considerably more urgent problems."
A knock.
"Minister..."
"Send him in." Harold looked at the transparent door. They had replaced it after Severus's last visit, specifically to avoid any repeat of that particular embarrassment.
Moody came in alone. Seven Aurors waited in the corridor. He stopped at the desk, parchment in hand, and if his complexion was anything to go by, the day had taken a significant toll.
"Minister. Every Ministry employee has been checked, barring those on current leave. Ten individuals were found carrying the Black Star mark." He extended the report and said nothing else.
"Well done, Moody. Take today and tomorrow off. Rest." Harold could see it clearly enough without being told: a full day of running that eye across every person in the building, looking for a magical mark they might be actively concealing, was not something the human body endured lightly.
"Thank you, Minister. Am I dismissed?"
"Go. I need you back at nine, day after tomorrow."
Moody's shoulders slumped visibly. He turned and walked out like a man heading somewhere he didn't want to go. In all his years since regaining his sight, he had never once wanted to tear the eye out of his head. Today had changed that.
He had almost made it to the door when another knock came from outside. Through the panel he saw an elderly woman, eighty years old, waiting to come in. All the blood drained from Moody's face at once. His mind, with the involuntary vividness of a man who had spent the last eight hours seeing through clothing and walls, produced an image he didn't want to see. He lunged for the waste bin and was immediately sick. Harold stared at him with genuine bewilderment.
Then Harold's gaze moved from the woman outside to the sickened Auror to the frantic spinning of the magical eye, and something clicked. He had the grace to look sympathetic.
"Madam Primpernelle, one moment." He looked at Moody, who had straightened up at last and was gripping the edge of the desk. "Three days. Apparition approved."
"Th-thank you." Gratitude. Raw, undisguised gratitude. Moody pulled out his wand, flicked it, and was gone before the words had fully left his mouth.
Harold took the pipe from his mouth and regarded the door for a moment.
Should have given him four days. You don't recover from something like that quickly. "Come in, Madam Primpernelle."
"Thank you, Minister." The old woman came in briskly and stopped a few paces from the desk.
"I'm having you post an open recruitment announcement for both Aurors and the clerical office of Magical Law Enforcement. Fudge mentioned being short-staffed, if I remember right."
"He did, but the budget..."
"Do as I've asked."
"Yes, Minister." Madam Primpernelle said it without enthusiasm, clearly unable to make the numbers work in her head. Every Knut the Ministry had was already going to Auror wages, operational costs, St Mungo's, and Hogwarts. They had cut staff because of this, not hired more. But she did not argue.
"Good. You're dismissed. On your way out, tell them to send Chester and Miller to me. Oh, and the interviews are in three days, ten in the morning."
"Yes." She nodded, still puzzled, and left.
Harold sat alone for a moment. He tapped the ash out of his pipe, set it down, and reached into the cabinet for a small packet of something that looked, in color and texture, remarkably like sawdust.
Before they force my hand entirely, let's see how many of them I can pick off first. He packed the pipe, drew a long breath, and leaned back in the chair. Will there ever actually be peace? And will I be alive to see it if there is?
That evening Severus was hunched over his desk, painting runes across a vast sheet of parchment in a sequence that spiraled outward into the shape of a star. His expression was dark. The work felt almost complete, and yet something at the back of his mind kept insisting he had missed something, one small thing, and that this one small thing would bring the whole ritual down.
"Damn it all." He put the brush down and looked over at Nagini, who was lying on her pillow watching him with quiet patience. "I need a break. Maybe whatever I'm missing will come to me if I stop staring at it." He got up, rolled his shoulders after a full day without moving, crossed to Nagini, and crouched down beside her. He touched the tip of her nose and checked her condition. Everything felt steady. "Good. Not long now." He smiled.
"Finally. I've been lying here for days."
"You lie around all day anyway."
"Not like this. Before, I could go wherever I wanted. I could go out with Nelly. This is just... lying here. It's like being in a cemetery. At least cemeteries have some atmosphere." Nagini had clearly been holding this grievance for some time.
"I know, and I'm sorry. But I can't change it right now. This work matters." He stroked her muzzle gently. "Not just our lives. The whole world, and I mean that literally."
"You've told me about them." She leaned in and rubbed her cheek softly against his. "But are they really so terrible?"
"You've never seen one alive. You genuinely don't know."
"But why does it have to fall to you? Why not bring everyone in, let people think about it together?"
"Because the people who would need to be brought in are, almost without exception, stupid, greedy, and convinced of their own importance. Half of them would decide they could control the things. The other half would actively want to release them." That was not speculation. In his old world, every account he had ever read of what the Devils had done began the same way: someone had decided to open the door deliberately. "And I am also preparing a contingency, in case everything else fails. If I cannot stop them, no one in this world can. That isn't arrogance. It is simply true."
"I understand." Nagini looked at him directly. "I believe you."
"I'm glad."
"...and I'll help. Whatever it takes."
It was a kind thing to say, and he would have been perfectly content without the second part. Still, the warmth in it was real. "Of course you will," he said, smiling. "A helper like you is exactly what I need." Nagini narrowed her eyes with pleasure and rubbed against his cheek again.
Wait...
His voice trembled with barely restrained emotion.
"Professor Dumbledore!"
At number four, Privet Drive, a light blazed through the air as the ward alarm triggered and a figure appeared at the door.
"Wait..." His voice carried an almost imperceptible tremor. "Professor Dumbledore..."
Severus raised his wand, his voice low and urgent. "Sirius Blackswan..."
He stepped into the garden, wand raised. "Sirius Blackswan, you are surrounded. Surrender now and I promise the Dark Lord will show mercy."
The black-cloaked figure in the garden stood motionless, his back to the door. Only when the man inside raised his wand and spoke did he slowly turn his head, his pale face emerging from the shadows, his cold eyes fixed on Severus.
The air between them crackled with tension.
"Severus," Blackswan said. His voice was impossibly tender. "Long time no see."
In the darkness, Severus's wand flickered slightly. He stared at the face of the man he had once called his brother in arms, the man who had betrayed Lily and James to Voldemort, the man who had been a brother to him for twenty years.
"You..." His voice caught in his throat.
Blackswan smiled. It was a faint, tired smile. "You came alone."
"Just... just give me one minute," Severus said, his voice strained. "I need to confirm..."
"Confirm what?" Blackswan's smile faded, replaced by an expression of profound sadness. "Confirm that I killed Lily and James? That I was the one who led You-Know-Who to them?"
The garden was silent save for the wind. The neighbors, awakened by the commotion, stayed inside, too frightened to look.
"I'm sorry," Blackswan said softly. "For everything."
"Sorry isn't enough!" Severus shouted. "They trusted you! James trusted you with his life! And you... you..."
He couldn't finish. The words died in his throat.
Blackswan closed his eyes. "I know. I know what I did. I know I can never be forgiven. But I need you to understand. The Dark Curtain didn't only affect the Weasleys. It affected me too."
"What..."
"That night, I wasn't in control of my own actions," Blackswan continued. "My mind was compromised by the Dark Curtain. I was just as much a victim as Lily and James were."
Severus lowered his wand slightly. "You're lying. You're always lying."
"Maybe," Blackswan admitted. "But ask yourself, why would I come here? Why would I wait for you? If I had really betrayed you, would I expose myself like this?"
Severus was silent for a long moment. Then: "Even if what you're saying is true, it doesn't excuse anything. James is dead. Lily is dead. And Wormtail..."
"Wormtail is alive," Blackswan said. "He's alive, and he's in the service of You-Know-Who. And I think I know where he is."
A long silence.
"You want me to help you catch Wormtail," Severus said flatly. "That's what this is about."
"I want you to help me make things right," Blackswan said. "One last time. Please."
Another silence. Then Severus raised his wand.
"Tell me everything."
Blackswan's eyes lit up. "You mean..."
"Don't make me regret this," Severus said coldly. "You have until dawn. Then I report you to the Ministry, or Dumbledore, or whoever. Your choice."
Blackswan nodded slowly. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me yet," Severus said. "We're not brothers. Not anymore."
He turned and walked toward the gate. At the gate, he paused and looked back.
"One more thing. If you betray me..."
"I won't," Blackswan said.
"You did before," Severus said. Then he walked out into the night.
Blackswan watched him go. Then he turned and vanished into the shadows of the garden.
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