A/N: If you've made it this far, congratulations 🎉 and thank you so much for all your support! From now on, updates are going to slow down and won't be regular. 3–4 new chapters will be posted every few days.
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It was the first Hogsmeade visit of the school year.
The morning mist had not yet lifted. A platinum-haired boy moved briskly through it, following the main cobbled street of Hogsmeade with his hands in his pockets and his head slightly down.
He turned out of Honeydukes, passed through the clusters of Hogwarts students gathered outside Dervish and Banges, walked past Zonko's Joke Shop without glancing at it, and finally — beneath the watchful patrol of several Dementors drifting overhead — pushed open the door of the Three Broomsticks.
The Three Broomsticks was warm in the way only a very old inn could be: low beams, a fire going, the smell of Butterbeer and something spiced. People came here to sit down and stay awhile, which was precisely why Madam Rosmerta did such good business.
At this hour it was still quiet. Draco took stock of the room from the doorway, exchanged a few words with Madam Rosmerta, who was collecting glasses near the entrance, and made his way to an empty booth in the far corner.
Across the table from him sat a man who looked as though he had been put together from all the best materials available and then left in the dark for a decade.
He was handsome in the way that suggested he had once been striking, before whatever had happened to him. His skin was unhealthily pale, his black hair fell loose across his eyes, and he sat with the stillness of someone who had stopped bothering to pretend he was fine. He raised his near-empty glass of Firewhisky and waved it at Madam Rosmerta without looking up.
She came over, carrying a tray, and refreshed his glass. Draco was fairly certain she gave Sirius Black a look of considerable interest as she set it down; he didn't react. She placed a glass of sparkling water in front of Draco with rather less ceremony and withdrew.
Nearby, a group of older Hogwarts girls had clustered in a booth and were whispering to each other, occasionally erupting into muffled giggles. Sirius paid them no more attention than he paid anything else.
He raised his eyes when Draco sat down opposite him, and looked at him without warmth.
The gentle, easy manner Sirius had shown around Harry's Gryffindor friends was absent. After the night in Dumbledore's office — after watching what Draco Malfoy had done and said and known in that room — Sirius had adjusted his assessment considerably.
The boy opposite him was not a boy in any ordinary sense. The open, curious manner he had displayed at Grimmauld Place, the seemingly innocent questions — Sirius suspected now that a great deal of it had been performance. Not every third-year student spent their evenings in the Headmaster's office working through things with Albus Dumbledore. Draco Malfoy was involved in this business more deeply than he had appeared, and possibly more deeply than Harry.
Which raised questions worth keeping in mind.
Draco felt the assessment. He kept his expression neutral and felt a surge of cold dislike for the man opposite him. What Sirius had done to his mother — using her, drawing her into something dangerous without her knowledge — sat in his chest like a stone.
He was a brave man, by any measure. He had destroyed the Hufflepuff Cup. That was real, and it mattered.
He was also an arrogant, heedless fool who had never in his life considered the damage he left in his wake.
If Harry hadn't specifically asked, Draco thought, he would have spent this entire afternoon at Honeydukes helping a certain oblivious girl choose sweets, which would have been infinitely preferable to this.
"Draco Malfoy," Sirius said. "To what do I owe this."
"Harry asked me to pass on a message," Draco said, taking a measured sip of water.
That surprised him, slightly. Some of the wariness shifted. "I thought he'd come himself."
"He's been given detention by Professor Snape. He won't be in Hogsmeade today."
"Ah," said Sirius.
"He's worried about you. He says you haven't been answering his letters." Draco looked at him steadily. "Write back to your godson, Sirius Black. He's been anxious since you left the hospital wing."
"You're very concerned about him," Sirius said, studying him. "The two of you are genuinely close? A Gryffindor and a Slytherin? Hogwarts has changed more than I thought."
"The houses still bicker constantly. I get told every few days by someone in Slytherin to keep my distance from the Gryffindors," Draco said. "It hasn't stopped anything."
"And how did you and Harry come to be friends to begin with?" Sirius asked, his tone casual and not remotely casual.
"I don't see why I should explain my friendship with Harry to you," Draco said, his voice sharpening. "Given that you haven't explained why you deceived my mother into handing you something that didn't belong to you."
Sirius flicked his wand under the table. The noise of the pub dissolved around them instantly — a Muffliato, or something similar. The girls' laughter became a visual without a sound. The warmth of the inn remained; the world outside their booth did not.
"I don't believe Dumbledore left you ignorant of what that cup was," Sirius said, with the directness of someone who has decided to stop circling. "And you took something from me as well, didn't you? The locket."
"Yes. And then your house-elf helped destroy it," Draco said. "I didn't deceive anyone to get it. On that point, I was considerably more straightforward than you."
"Are you here on your mother's behalf?" Sirius raised an eyebrow. The edge in his voice had a particular quality — not hostile, exactly, but testing. "Does Narcissa know what you've been doing?"
Draco felt a brief tightening in his chest.
"I suspect not. Otherwise she'd never have given the cup away so easily," Sirius said, reading his silence without any apparent difficulty. "I know what was on that cup, Draco. Just as I know what was in the locket. Dumbledore was vague with me, but you can't obscure that kind of magic from a Black. We've been neck-deep in Dark artefacts our whole lives."
Draco said nothing. He wrapped both hands around his glass and waited.
He had known this moment was coming, more or less, from the second he had understood what Regulus had done. The Black family's history ran deep; families with that kind of knowledge didn't stay ignorant of what they were looking at. Regulus had worked it out. There was no reason to assume his brother was less perceptive.
"That's a Horcrux, isn't it," Sirius said.
Not a question.
Of course. Draco's pulse beat harder, though nothing moved on his face.
"Does it matter whether it is or not?" he said.
"You've been investigating this in secret," Sirius said. "Without telling your parents. Without telling anyone." He looked at him for a long moment. "You intend to carry this alone. Like Regulus did."
The words landed accurately.
"What's that to you?" Draco said, after a pause. "And don't call Regulus a fool."
"Isn't he one?" Sirius took a long drink, and something in his eyes went briefly raw. "He's an absolute idiot. He knew where I stood. If he wanted to oppose Voldemort, he could have come to me — we could have worked together —"
"Don't say that name," Draco said sharply.
"Coward," Sirius said, not unkindly. "You're just like him. You act against Voldemort in the dark, and you can't even say his name. I've never understood what you Slytherins are thinking."
"No," Draco said, "you don't understand. You don't understand what Regulus was carrying. You don't understand what he was afraid of. You don't understand what it means to be a Slytherin trying to protect his family."
"Don't perform maturity at me," Sirius said, with a flash of impatience. "You're a child, and just because you're Slytherin doesn't mean you have some special window into my brother's mind. You never even met him."
"No, I didn't. But that doesn't mean I can't reason about his position." Draco's voice had found its edge. "You say he should have come to you, stood at your side openly. Do you understand what that would have meant? It would have meant the Black family openly opposing the Dark Lord — the same Dark Lord who had the Black family listed among his most devoted supporters. The entire family would have been a target. The entire family."
"That's a coward's reasoning," Sirius said flatly. "We should have opposed him openly —"
"Why do you think Walburga Black died in her own bed?" Draco cut in. "Why do you think she died of grief in that house, and not in Azkaban, or under the Dark Lord's wand? Because someone held the line and kept the family looking loyal and unthreatening while you were gone. The Black family was already tied to the Dark Lord's cause. Someone had to stand at the prow of that ship. It was either Regulus or you. You ran. He stayed. He found a way to resist from the inside, in the only way available to him — and he gave his life to do it quietly, without putting anyone else at risk."
"Preserve the family," Sirius said, with an edge of bitterness. "That sounds very noble. I'm not sure it would feel noble when you're on that island drinking that potion."
"If I were in his position," Draco said, "I would have done the same."
Sirius stared at him.
"You understand what you're saying?" His voice had changed. "You're not yet fourteen."
"I understand it perfectly well," Draco said. "He was willing to take the full weight of it — the danger, the responsibility, the secrecy — to protect people who didn't share his beliefs and wouldn't understand his choices. He treated Kreacher as part of the family, which is more than most pure-blood wizards ever managed. He drank the potion himself rather than let a house-elf suffer it twice." He paused, and his voice thinned slightly. "You were off building your Gryffindor life with your friends, Sirius Black. You never stopped to consider whether he could carry what was left behind — the family's expectations, his shattered faith, the fear of knowing what he now knew about the Dark Lord. He was eighteen. He had no one."
He stopped speaking.
The sadness that had been gathering throughout the conversation settled in his chest quietly. He recognised it, and recognised why.
That particular loneliness. The weight of a secret too large to share. The feeling of moving through something alone because there was no one who could possibly understand.
"I tried," Sirius said, after a long pause. His voice had lost some of its defiant edge. "I tried to persuade him to leave with me, to leave the Death Eaters, to get away from that house and those ideas. He wouldn't come."
"What you're not hearing," Draco said, more quietly, "is that it was never just a personal choice. Regulus leaving would not have been Regulus leaving. It would have been the Black family choosing a side — visibly, publicly — at the worst possible moment. He couldn't do that to them. He didn't want to."
"I can't call that courage," Sirius said. "I still think it's a Slytherin sort of survival — keeping your head down, manoeuvring in the dark, prolonging things without ever confronting them directly."
Draco looked at him coldly.
"Eleven years in Azkaban," he said. "Your mother died alone in that house, and no one came to claim her. Pettigrew — the man who actually betrayed your friends — spent those same eleven years living freely. And now, out of Azkaban at last, with your name cleared, you're sitting in a pub at nine in the morning drinking Firewhisky and staring at the wall." He let that sit for a moment. "Is that what Gryffindor courage looks like? Because from where I'm sitting, it looks rather like abandonment dressed up as principle."
Sirius's jaw tightened.
Draco expected fury. What he got was different — a slow, defeated exhale, and an expression that had nothing left to defend.
"You're not wrong," Sirius said. The words came out flat and honest. "I never claimed to be noble. Truthfully, the version of Sirius Black who might have been worth something died alongside James Potter, when he was twenty-two. What's sitting here is what's left."
Draco studied him. There was something painful about the lack of defensiveness.
Sirius Black had once been a prodigy — the most vivid, magnetic presence at Hogwarts in his year, by every account. Smart and reckless and full of fire. Then Azkaban had taken him at twenty-two, and whatever the Dementors had not consumed, grief had. Twelve years. His own father had spent barely one year in Azkaban before it had broken him visibly. Twelve years, for Sirius, was unimaginable.
Draco let out a quiet breath. There was no point pressing a bruise.
"What happened to James Potter was a terrible blow," he said, more evenly. "I'm sorry for it. But what happened yesterday is done. You're not alone now. Harry is alive, and he needs you present, not half-absent." He paused. "And Pettigrew is still out there. Getting closer, by all accounts. Don't you want to be the one who finds him?"
The effect was immediate.
Something lit behind Sirius's eyes — cautious at first, then brighter. A different quality of alertness altogether, something that had been dormant and was now stretching out.
There it is. That's the man he should be.
"Pettigrew wouldn't come near Hogwarts to kill someone outright," Sirius said, sitting up slightly. "He hasn't got that kind of nerve."
"What if it isn't his own plan? What if someone directed him?" Draco asked, carefully. "He was in Azkaban for a time — what if a Death Eater there gave him something to do? An objective. That would change the calculation."
Sirius's expression sharpened further. He was thinking now, properly. "If it's not Pettigrew acting alone but Death Eaters using him as a tool — then it circles back to Voldemort."
"Don't —"
"Coward!" Sirius said, but there was something almost warm in it this time. He gave Draco a sideways look. "And you think you can destroy Horcruxes — you, who won't even say the name out loud."
"If you betray what I'm doing to my father, a former Death Eater, I will ensure your life becomes considerably more complicated," Draco said pleasantly. "And if it gets back to my mother, and she suffers for it, I will consider our arrangement over."
"I'm not going to betray you," Sirius said, with a short laugh that sounded more genuine than anything he'd produced since Draco walked in. "I'm going to help you, you ridiculous, cautious Slytherin."
Draco blinked.
"What?"
"I said I'll help." Sirius's eyes had taken on a sharpness that was something close to enjoyment. "You fool. You absolute, overcautious, sneaking-around-in-the-dark fool. I will help you." He looked at him directly. "Tell me what you need. What are the next steps?"
The reversal was drastic enough that Draco needed a moment to catch up.
"Is this some kind of trap?" he asked.
"It's not. And I am genuinely sorry about Narcissa," Sirius said. The lightness dropped out of his voice, just briefly. "I didn't know what you were doing. I didn't know she didn't know. If I'd understood the situation — if I'd been in your position, knowing that cup was a Horcrux and that this was the only way to get it destroyed — I would have made the same choice. I think you know that."
Draco considered it honestly. He was right.
He could not, however much he might wish to, construct a scenario in which he would have acted differently, given the same constraints and the same urgency.
He still hated it. He was not going to pretend otherwise.
"We don't speak of it again," Draco said finally. "And you leave my family out of whatever comes next."
"Agreed." Sirius extended his hand across the table.
A pause. Then Draco reached out and shook it.
"Now," Sirius said, leaning forward, his voice lower and a great deal sharper than it had been twenty minutes ago. "The cup, the locket — those aren't the only ones, are they. There are more Horcruxes."
Draco looked at him.
"Don't be surprised. The way you went about destroying that locket was too practised," Sirius said. "You were absolutely certain Fawkes could do it. That kind of certainty comes from experience — it means you'd seen it work before. Which means the locket wasn't the first one you'd destroyed. Which means there are others." He raised an eyebrow. "How many?"
"We don't know the total," Draco said, his voice measured. "We've destroyed several. We're currently searching for a ring — the Gaunt family ring, a Slytherin heirloom. And we believe that a woman named Hepzibah Smith may be a key to understanding how Tom Riddle — the Dark Lord — thought about these objects. Someone needs to trace her history."
Sirius Black smiled slowly.
It was not a comfortable smile. It was the smile of a man who has just been told there is something specific he can do, and who has been waiting, without quite knowing it, for something to do.