I was already on my second coffee of the morning when Mad-Eye's portrait went off on one, again. This week he'd already scared the poor pimply young wizard who'd just been taken on to do the rounds of the Ministry selling pumpkin pasties and other snacks, and shouted at Hestia Jones, so I went out to quieten him down and apologise to whoever was on the receiving end this time.

The current target of Mad-Eye's current paranoid outburst looked nothing short of horrified as he turned to see my door opening. He was quite young, thin and sickly-looking, unshaven, with a great deal of nervous energy. He seemed familiar in a nondescript sort of way. His collection of Muggle clothing was what could most kindly be termed eccentric albeit in the typical wizarding fashion: a rather tired-looking blue frilled shirt, a lab coat, striped jogging bottoms and worn winklepickers.

"Can I help you?"

"I need to… I need to tell you something." From his accent I could tell that he was a pureblood, or at the very least had moved in those circles long enough to pass as one.

"Are you all right?" I asked, slightly alarmed. He looked awful.

"Not really," he said. "I've got to talk to you, Potter, I've got to! You'll understand, afterwards."

It was something in the rough way he used my surname that made me realize who I was speaking to: Theodore Nott, in my year at school, a Slytherin. It was no wonder I hadn't recognized him immediately; he looked terrible. It wasn't so much from Hogwarts that I remembered him. In my line of work, you have to have a good memory for suspicious characters and his family, both sides of it, was notorious. After the war he'd been interviewed, as had every person with connections to the Death Eaters, although his name hadn't come up since. He hadn't been Marked, as far as I was aware, and there was no other evidence to suggest that he'd fought for Voldemort. Not that that proved anything. Lack of evidence was not the same as proof, but Kingsley Shaklebolt's Ministry was not willing to take the risk that it would lock up an innocent person.

Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, in my experience of being an Auror. Because Dark wizards naturally tend to be clannish and loyal to one another, I was used to gathering evidence by stealth. I didn't think it was a trick; in any case, nobody knew the extent of the wards I'd set on my office, which would go a long, long way to protecting me should the situation not unfold as I anticipated. But I would still stay vigilant. I had a meeting at two, for which I needed to do a little preparation, but I couldn't imagine that whatever it was Nott wanted to say would take that long.

"All right, look, why don't you come into my office?" I said.

At first I thought he was drunk, even though it was only ten in the morning. Maybe he had had something, but he was so agitated you couldn't really tell. He had deep shadows under his eyes, his hair was dirty and unkempt.

I held the door open and waited for him to go inside. He eyed me suspiciously and for a moment I thought he wouldn't do it, but he edged through the door eventually and I followed him in. A relief: I was not going to turn my back on him for a second.

"Sit down," I said, walking round the desk, shoulders angled towards him at all times, hand on my wand, ready. "Please."

He hesitated, then sat. Once he was settled, I took a seat too.

"Now, what is it that you wanted to tell me? " I said.

"There's a woman buried in the rose garden of my family's house," he said. "A Muggle woman. She was tortured before she was killed, and I helped do it. I was fifteen." He fidgeted precariously on the edge of the spare chair opposite my desk, cocking his head as if to say, Now what do you think of that?

"Fifteen?" I was stunned.

Nott bowed his head. I was still trying to process everything he'd just said.

"A woman?"

He replied almost angrily, "Yes."

"You helped? Who else was there?"

"My father."

"The Death Eater."

"Yes."

"Anyone else?"

"No."

"Your father wanted you to follow in his footsteps?"

"You might say that."

"Did you?"

""I wasn't a Death Eater, if that's what you mean," he said. "But I might as well have been, for all the good it's done me." He sounded bitter and defeated.

"So why are you telling me this now?"

"I had to tell someone. I couldn't live with it any longer."

"But it's been…ten years."

"I know. God, it's felt every bit of ten years! I thought it would get better, you know?"

"Why did you come to me?"

"I don't know!" he snapped. "What the hell am I doing?" There was a pause and then, more calmly, he said, "I think maybe I'm making a big mistake."

"No, you're doing the right thing."

"I knew you'd say that. Maybe I came to you because I knew you wouldn't let me get away with it." The hysterical edge was creeping back into his voice.

"All right," I said. "Just... just calm down. Now, we'll just go through a few things. When did this happen?"

"16th August, 1995," he said immediately, as if he only knew the existence of one date in all of time. I wait. That's a solid Auror technique - don't say anything, and wait to see if your subject gives you more detail just to break the silence. Eventually he continued, "It wasn't long after the end of the fourth year. Diggory had just been killed, but no-one believed the Dark Lord had really risen except, you, your friends, and the Death Eater families. My father told me about it straight away after I got home for the summer. One day a few weeks later I came home and she was there. Suspended in the air in the drawing room, she couldn't get down."

"The Muggle?"

"Yes. She wasn't that much older than I was. I don't know how long she had been there but…she was still crying with fear, though her eyes were already red. I didn't know why she was there... well, no, I think I suspected, but... I didn't want to do it. But there was no way around it. To be my father's son... I had to, you know..."

"No, I don't know," I said coldly. "Let's be clear about this. Your father had you torture and kill a Muggle woman as some kind of Death Eater initiation. Is that correct?"

"It wasn't an initiation. More like a… lesson, and I obviously didn't do as well at it as he'd hoped."

"Did you receive any other 'lessons' of this kind?"

"No... well, not with humans."

"And afterwards? What did you do?"

"I buried her."

"Did you tell anyone about this, anyone at all?"

"No. Who would I tell?"

"Malfoy, maybe? One of the other Slytherins."

"We're not that close," he said. "I wouldn't bring them into it."

"You don't trust them?"

"It's not that. They'd...look at me differently."

"Malfoy was a Death Eater."

"Malfoy never did anything like this."

"As far as you know."

He considered this for a moment before conceding. "I suppose. Look, I can't stop thinking about her." He buried his face in his hands. "It was horrible."

"I'm sure it was."

"You don't understand. We…mutilated her."

"Mutilated?" I felt sick.

"My father wanted to teach me things. Magic I would use in the service of the Dark Lord. "

I used an old interrogation technique. "When did you become a Death Eater?"

"I didn't! I told you!"

"You never used those spells again?"

"Of course not!" He exclaimed, although he touched his left forearm in a way that seemed suspicious. "Not after that night."

"All right," I said. "I'll believe you. But I will need you to tell me what happened, from the beginning."

"Is this an interrogation?"

"It's the only way you'll be free."

"That's not what I asked."

"Call it an interview, an interrogation, whatever you like. I'm morally and legally bound to investigate what you've just told me. But I thought you'd decided to face the consequences of your actions?"

"I have, I just… it's hard. And I know I won't get any sympathy. But can't you at least tell me how long I'm looking at?"

"How long?"

"In Azkaban."

"I couldn't say. It might not even come to that. You were under age at the time of the incident. But it won't be me who decides."

He didn't say anything.

"So. Are you going to tell me?"

"I suppose I might as well, now," he laughed rather shakily. "I should be glad you're giving me a chance to explain myself. Or enough rope to hang myself. But really, you just need to know about my family. We're not like you, but most traditional pure-blood families are like mine, really. That's why we do what we do."

"You have a choice…"

"Maybe. But family, duty, blood - these are all important to old families. Any decision you make has to be justified through that… prism. It's difficult, sometimes, balancing what you want with what's expected of you. You forget, a lot of the time, that you have a right to any wants or needs at all. My mother and father were brought together by an obligation to perpetuate their respective family lines, and I was born to serve the Dark Lord. There is no illusion of romance in many pureblood unions. If you really want the story from the beginning, that's it. Certainly, my parents' marriage was one of convenience…"

The End

Thanks for reading, everyone who has made it this far. Thank you to everyone who has left a review and particularly xXMizz Alec VolturiXx, who has been offering kind words of support for years. This story has been over a decade in the making and I have not been particularly diligent about updating, so thanks for your patience. It's finally complete!

But... I do have something else on the way, a sequel of sorts, which I will shamelessly flog here. While I didn't love 'The Cursed Child', it did help to give shape to Theodore Nott's character, particularly who he would become later in life. I hadn't been sure which way he would go and in his younger incarnation his sense of self was so indistinct and fragmented that I'd really struggled pin down his voice - you may have noticed that none of the chapters of this story are actually directly narrated by him.

That voice came to me immediately after reading the play, and I just had to write it down - several thousand words and I've just been adding to them ever since. It's almost as long as this story now. Although he is never on stage, I thought that Theodore's perspective of the events of 'The Cursed Child' would be an interesting story to tell, and I always knew that I was going to tell it in real time so that I could use contemporary references if I wanted (and have a deadline to work to). While I was not predicting anything quite so cataclysmic as the events of 2020, I did find it bizarre and slightly hubristic that the play was set in the future as though nothing could significantly change. And now we are nearly there...

I'll be sharing the first chapter on 25 August, so please do check it out.