A/N: Trigger warning: panic attack self-harm; I'll put a summary of this chapter at the beginning of the next chapter for those who need to skip this one.

Draco

The Wilkinses invited Draco and Theo to supper Saturday evening after the store closed for the day. Theo's reaction to the small home above the store was less subtle than Draco's initial surprise.

"This is the entire house?" he whispered in Draco's ear with a puzzled expression. "Lydia's house is three times this size."

"I learned months ago that the Wilkinses are not normal Muggles," Draco replied.

"Boys?" Monica gestured to the dining table that was a third of the size of the one at the Zabini cottage. Draco and Theo took seats opposite each other, while the Wilkinses joined them at either end of the six-person table. A spread of roast, potatoes, brussel sprouts, and an unidentifiable vegetable sat on the table, adorned by four glasses of a deep red wine.

"Thank you for inviting us," Theo said as he reached for the potatoes. The three others at the table rolled their eyes as the man dug into the food without ceremony. Draco often wondered how the Notts managed to conduct themselves in pure-blood circles when their manners were more reminiscent of Weasleys.

"Chrys," Draco growled. "Were you raised by wolves?" He tried to hide his embarrassment from their hosts, but he felt the heat rise in his cheeks anyway.

Theo grinned. "You have enough etiquette for the both of us."

"You're lucky I can't hex you right now."

Wendell waved his hand. "Have at it. We won't tell." The glimmer in his eye told Draco that he secretly hoped to see another demonstration of magic. Draco seriously considered it and dropped his wand from his sleeve of his suit jacket into his right hand before he sighed and cursed the conscience he'd unwittingly grown.

"I'd love to, but I can't." He glared at Theo, who was putting on an exaggerated show of delicately cutting his roast and taking prim bites. "Trust me, there is nothing I'd like to do more right now. You look like Pansy."

"Classmate," Theo explained to the Wilkinses. "Why can't we do magic here?" he asked Draco. "They know. It's not like we can break the Statute of Secrecy any more than we've already done." He raised an eyebrow. "Besides, aren't you the one who said you can make your magic undetectable? And you did cast that—"

"The—Chrysos Granger, shut up." Draco ground his teeth together.

Monica deposited the odd-looking vegetables on her plate and made a tsk sound. "That's bad for your teeth, love."

"What?" Draco asked, surprised at her choice of criticism. Just like normal, neither baker commented on the discussion of magic or obvious secrets, and it unsettled him. They hadn't pried about anything since the day they saw the Dark Mark. He didn't know if it was a sign of respect for his privacy or if there was something else going on.

"Grinding your teeth. It's going to wear them down and cause problems with your jaw. There are varied long-term ramifications that are rather unpleasant."

Draco looked from wife to husband, utterly puzzled. Wendell nodded his agreement. "We were dentists when we lived in Britain."

"What's a dentist?" Theo asked.

Both Wilkinses looked surprised. "You've never been to a dentist?" Monica asked. Theo shrugged. "We're doctors that specialize in teeth."

"Doctors," Theo mused. "Those are like Healers, right? Lydia said something about going to a doctor when she broke her arm." Draco was completely out of his depth with the conversation, not having heard the term before. "Healers that specialize in teeth. I don't think St. Mungo's has anything like that. What kind of things can happen to teeth, other than knocking them out?"

"Well, you can get cavities from eating too many sweets."

Theo and Draco both raised their eyebrows. "Really?" Theo ran his tongue over his teeth, as if trying to detect an anomaly from all the chocolate he'd managed to eat lately. "That's gotta be a Muggle thing."

"Lucky," Wendell said with faux-bitterness. "I had three fillings by the time I was ten. That's what you put into teeth to prevent the cavities from growing."

Something about the conversation bothered Draco, though he couldn't quite figure out why. "You said you were Healers—doctors—in Britain? Why aren't you practicing anymore?" A flash of pain crossed Monica's face and Draco knew he'd hit on something sensitive.

Monica set down her fork and looked so forcefully at her husband that she seemed to be anchoring herself to his presence. "When we moved to Perth, we fully intended to set up a practice there after a brief holiday. We had to take written and practical examinations to get licenced to practise dentistry there and, well..." Her face coloured and Draco recognized an expression of deep shame. "We failed the written examinations." A fierce look overcame the shame and her brown eyes flashed. "I don't know how it happened. We were dentists for almost twenty years and we could do most procedures in our sleep, but it's like we woke up one day and forgot everything we'd ever learned."

"Monica remembered more than I did," Wendell confessed. "It was the oddest thing. I could remember the most obscure details from conditions I'd only seen once or twice, but I couldn't remember the steps for excavating a cavity. I did perfectly fine on the practical, like my muscle memory was there but my brain had stayed on holiday."

"We had to recalibrate after that, and returned to another passion of ours that we hadn't explored since the early days of our marriage. After a few weeks we invested in a bakery, and the rest is history." Monica gave the young men a weak smile. "So now you know our history, warts and all."

Wendell turned the dinner to lighter subjects and asked what 'magic school' was like. Carefully avoiding the names of the Hogwarts houses (Theo had predicted Draco's retaliatory Taboo), Theo regaled the couple with anecdotes of their various Defence Against the Dark Arts professors and Divination classes while Draco's mind kept working. Something was off about their story. Something was terribly, terribly wrong and he felt like he was overlooking an obvious conclusion.

The sound of a giggle broke into Draco's thoughts and he came back to the current conversation.

"That sounds like quite the sight. Wendell, could you imagine a poltergeist chasing Dr. Matheson out of the university? Blasted man caused us so much stress, I thought our daughter would be born naturally predisposed to pulling her hair out."

Draco and Wendell shared a grim look as Monica realized what she said. The vague expression crossed her face again and she sat back in her chair. "I did it again, didn't I?" she whispered.

Theo looked puzzled and gave Draco a questioning look. Draco shook his head. Later, he mouthed.

Wendell stood and walked to his wife, pulling her from the chair and walking her back to their bedroom. As he came back to the table, he frowned and sat down in Monica's vacant seat. "It's happening more frequently," he said to Draco with a definite air of defeat. "We've got an appointment with a neurologist—brain doctor—in Bordeaux next week. They're going to examine her for Alzheimer's and dementia." He didn't explain either of the diseases, but Draco knew from his expression that either diagnosis would be devastating. "She's too young for this."

"At what age does it normally occur?"

"Mid- to late-sixties. Maybe older, sometimes younger, but very rarely this young. She should still have another twenty years."

A mind-deteriorating disease twenty years too early, memories of a child she never had, an expression like a fog clearing, and waking up one day without knowing something she'd known for another twenty years.

But, she wasn't the only one, Draco realized. If their experience in Australia was anything to go by, Wendell had lost his memories too. The difference was he hadn't created the memories of a daughter. But he had lost his faith in magic nearly twenty years ago. It was all too coincidental, the repetition of twenty years.

What if Wendell hadn't lost his faith in magic twenty years ago? The Wilkinses accepted it too easily for it to be such a long-dormant belief.

"May I ask a sensitive question?" Draco asked with a careful tone he mimicked from Wendell's initial confrontation about Draco's magic.

Wendell gave him a hesitant look. "You may."

"The daughter. When does Monica believe she was born? She mentioned being pregnant during school." An idea began to form in the back of Draco's mind, but it was absurd. Who would have performed a Memory Charm on a random pair of Muggles?

Wendell cringed at the question but answered. "We had that class with Dr. Matheson twenty years ago exactly."

"Around the same time you lost your belief in magic?"

Now the man looked suspicious in addition to uncomfortable. "Whereabouts. What are you getting at?"

Draco chose his words carefully. He didn't believe in fate, but if his suspicions were correct, it could explain why the Wilkinses intrigued him so much that he kept coming back. Maybe his subconscious knew there was something more to the couple.

"May I perform a—diagnostic spell—on Monica?"

Curiosity mixed with caution and something else—fear?—showed on Wendell's face. He looked at Theo, who looked just as puzzled as he had from the beginning of the conversation. "I don't know. What would it do?"

"Her symptoms match something else I've seen."

"Something in your world?" Draco nodded. Wendell bit the inside of his cheek. "But we're not...but we're Muggles. How can we be affected by something from your world?"

Images from the war flashed through Draco's mind, images of Death Eaters Obliviating Muggles in the midst of torturing them. Their minds weren't strong enough to take extended torture, or so he was told. Obliviating them extended their ability to stay cognizant of their pain. 'Playing with our food before we eat,' Aunt Bellatrix had cackled.

"It can affect Muggles, too," he said. His voice cracked in the middle of the sentence. He knew what his nightmares would be tonight.

Wendell nodded in deep thought for a long moment before he turned back to Draco. "Whatever you want to do—it's not going to hurt her?"

"No. It's perfectly safe." If I remember how to do it.

Wendell stood. "Okay. Does Chrys need to be there?"

Draco shook his head. "No, he can wait out here."

"Please?" Wendell asked Theo. The bewildered wizard agreed and sat at the table with his hands folded in his lap.

They walked to the Wilkinses' bedroom, where Monica laid atop a queen-sized bed covered in red and gold bedclothes. Gryffindor, Draco thought. He looked around the rest of the room. The hints of red and gold were everywhere. Were they wizards and their memories of magic had been wiped? No, that wouldn't make sense, because it seemed only the last twenty years had been affected. They would have remembered attending Hogwarts or Beauxbatons.

Draco knelt by the bed as Monica sat up in confusion. "Why are you—?" she started before words failed.

"May I try something on you?"

She gave a questioning look to her husband. He nodded to her and she swallowed thickly. Draco noticed a slight sheen of tears in her eyes. "Okay." She moved to sit at the edge of the bed with her feet flat on the floor. Her hands twisted in her lap and Draco took them in his own to still her.

With took a breath, he focused on her eyes. He hadn't done this in over a year, since Aunt Bellatrix had stopped teaching him mind magicks.

Wordlessly, he entered her mind and waded through memories of the bakery and France, nights with friends in Perth, a large sign that read 'London Heathrow Airport', and quickly encountered exactly what he expected. A white fog seemed to be encircling something, and older memories appeared off to the sides: a blue-trimmed two-storey home, a sterile room with someone outstretched on an odd-looking chair, and watching the rain with a cup of tea warming her hand. An innocuous giggle ran through the last memory, clearly not belonging to the woman or her husband. It sounded like a little girl.

Like a daughter.

The fog swayed and drifted. In some locations, it was weaker than in others. He could almost see something through it, something vaguely red that seemed to be adding to the fog on its own, but that fog was different. Like steam. Shadows assaulted the red object, dashing to and from it in rapid, inconsistent succession.

The fog cleared just a mite more and he saw the clear outline of a carriage. The red object was a train, and one he would know anywhere.

"Hogwarts," he breathed.

"What?" Monica asked.

Draco pulled himself out of her mind as realization sunk in. She wasn't crazy and she wasn't ill, but if he wasn't careful she could become both. Proceeding from here would have to be done with the utmost caution.

Monica pulled her hands from Draco's and wrung them in her skirt. "What did you see? Am I crazy?"

He shook his head. "No. But if it happened to you, that means..." Draco let out a harsh breath and he turned to examine Wendell. "She's not the only one who forgot, and if I'm right, you should be having—" He cut off as a shadow of guilt fell over Wendell's face. Something Draco couldn't name—anger? protectiveness? disappointment?—filled his chest. "You see her too. There's no way you wouldn't. Whoever did this was an amateur. You remember her too."

The guilt grew deeper on Wendell's face and Draco identified his own feeling as anger. How could this Muggle let his wife feel like she was sick when he had the same problem? Did he think just because he could hide it, he wasn't as damaged?

"What is he talking about, husband?" Monica's eyes were bright with barely contained tears as confusion coloured her cheeks.

"You're not crazy," Draco said, not giving the Muggle a chance to answer. He clenched a fist around his wand, fighting the desire to hex Wendell. "You're not crazy. Your memories are real."

A tear trailed down Monica's face. "If they're real, why can't I remember them except sometimes?" If anything, she sounded more panicked than before.

"Someone, a wizard or witch, tampered with your memory. Whoever it was did a thorough job, but not well enough to prevent some of your memories from escaping from time to time." He sat back on his heels and spun the wand out of nervous habit. Periwinkle sparks glittered mockingly in the air. "When I look at your mind, I see a fog. It's thin in some places, which is where the memories are coming from. I expect that the fog starts to clear when you're under stress, because your mind is trying to clear out anything that doesn't belong. It's a defence mechanism. Tell me what else you remember."

Monica shook her head, the tears falling more freely now. "When you were just—I saw a train. Didn't I? Did I see a train?"

Draco set his wand on the ground and held out his hands to take hers again. "You saw a train. It was red, right? With steam coming out?" She nodded and sniffed. "That's the train I took to school after every holiday. You've been on the platform, which means I can assume your daughter is a witch."

"I have a daughter? She's a...Muggle-born?"

"That's what I believe."

Monica shot a watery look at Wendell before looking at Draco with terrified hope. "Can you fix me?"

His heart fell and he clenched his hands tighter around hers. "It's difficult, and it's delicate. Healers undergo years of training to learn to remove Memory Charms." Her face lost the glimmer of hopefulness and Draco cursed as words exited his mouth without permission. "But my family is different. We're naturals. I might—I might be able to do it, but I need to research and find out how."

"How long will that take?"

Draco grimaced. "The books I need are in my cousin's home in London."

"Which would mean risking arrest." Monica gave him a weak smile. "I understand."

"I would risk it," he said, realizing it was true. For her, he would, just as he would for his own mother. "I would risk it, except that the person who inherited the house when my cousin died is an Auror."

"He's your police, you mean?" Draco nodded. Monica pulled her hands from Draco's and laid them over the top of his. "Thank you. At least now I have a reason for this."

"It might break down on its own," he said, trying to give her one last strand of hope. "Like I said, it was done by an amateur. So there's still a chance."

Monica rested her right hand on the side of his face and tried another smile. "You're sweet, Argyros." He saw that she didn't believe for a minute the Memory Charm would naturally disappear. She gave a long sigh and sniffed again. "I think I should try to sleep now."

Draco nodded and stood, motioning for Wendell to follow him back to the dining room. As soon as they were as far out of earshot as they could get, Draco turned on the man and clenched his jaw. "You let her believe she was crazy," he hissed with a venom he hadn't felt since learning his parents had been captured. Wendell's expression changed from guilty to defensive, but Draco didn't give him an opportunity to speak. "How could you do that to her? She deserves better from someone who claims to love her, but you were too concerned with trying to appear sane that you let her—" Draco stumbled over his words as words raged in his mind.

"What's going on?" Theo asked as he stood to join the conversation.

"They're under a Memory Charm. I realized it when they said their daughter was born twenty years ago, because his—" Draco used his wand to point at Wendell and quietly enjoyed the look of fear on the Muggle's face, "—belief in magic disappeared twenty years ago."

"And that led you to think Memory Charm because...?"

"They believed us too easily, like it was something they believed inherently. It went deeper than conscious thought. Monica's barriers are breaking down, which is why she can remember their daughter, and he—he remembers her too, but he let Monica believe she was the only one. He let her believe she was crazy," Draco spat. He turned on the Muggle again. "I have seen crazy. I have lived with crazy. I have been tortured by crazy, and Monica does not deserve to be put in the same category as them. It's cruel. What you did was manipulative and cruel." He closed his eyes and took a calming breath before addressing Theo. "Everything hinges on something from twenty years ago. Monica remembers being pregnant twenty years ago, and...I saw the Hogwarts Express in her memories."

Theo's eyes widened. "The daughter is a Muggle-born?"

"That's my conclusion, and if she's in fact nearly twenty years old, she'll have been in our year or the year above us." Draco nodded, falling back into his thoughts. "And it appears someone tried to wipe her from their memories. That would explain the extent of the charm. They tried to wipe all traces of magic, but didn't realize that the Wilkinses knew about magic before their daughter was born."

"Why would someone wipe a Muggle-born from her parents' memories?"

"If I could figure out when it happened, that might tell—Perth." Draco looked at Wendell and examined his face. The man looked completely befuddled by the theorizing happening in his dining room. "Her recent memories were clear until just before they moved to Perth. Wendell, when exactly did you move?"

Wendell furrowed his eyebrows. "End of July, two years ago."

"The Ministry fell on August first," Draco said. "Someone modified the memories of a Muggle-born's parents just after the war started." Horror drained the blood from Draco's face. "Theo," he said, and cursed the waver in his voice, "which Muggle-born girl would have enemies willing to take her parents permanently out of her life, and yet keep them alive to taunt her?"

An identical expression spread across Theo's face. "Granger."

Without asking for permission and without caution, Draco delved into Wendell's mind. Again, he found the fog and sought out a weak spot. Theoretically, he could cross the barrier and have access to all of the memories behind it. As long as he didn't get pulled out of the man's mind from inside the barrier, the exercise wouldn't cause any real damage. For the moment, he couldn't bring himself to care if he inflicted damage or not.

After a long minute's search, he found a point weak enough to cross. The memories here were concentrated, and nearly all of them contained a little girl. He heard the same giggle from Monica's memories. The memories became clearer as he moved through the man's painstakingly organized mind. A tiny baby swaddled in pink; a little girl in pink satin shoes with ribbons tied around her ankles; a six- or seven-year-old girl with outrageously frizzy hair screaming and dishes flying through the air to shatter on the walls; goblins staring down across a high counter as Muggle money was swapped for Galleons, Sickles, and Knuts; an eleven-year-old in Muggle clothes running onto the red train while waving goodbye with a brilliant, buck-toothed smile; the same girl three years older laughing as she spun on a dais at Madam Malkins' in periwinkle dress robes; a letter in careful script inviting her to an August first wedding at a place called The Burrow; and then he hit the wall.

Satisfied but unnerved, Draco moved carefully back through the memories to the thinnest point in the fog. He paused as another scene came to the forefront: a tall blond man with a decorative snake-headed cane trailed by an equally blond, scrawny boy with identical sneers on their faces, walking through bookshelves toward the girl, a black-haired boy, and a mess of gingers. Harsh words were exchanged, between both the children and the adults, until the red-haired father leapt at the blond man, knocking over shelves and landing punches.

Draco sped to the way out and pulled himself out of Wendell's mind, his own eyes wide and breath short. He continued looking at the man, trying to place him in Flourish and Blotts the day of the fight between Lucius Malfoy and Arthur Weasley.

"Dra—Argyros? Are you okay?" Theo asked. Draco shook his head and continued staring at Wendell.

"You were right," he whispered. "You were right." The weight of the situation began to fall and Draco found it harder and harder to breathe. Of all the Muggles, of all the places, of all the worst possible coincidences, this was one of the most devastating. He tried to bury the hurt and the disappointment and the fear, but they kept bubbling in his chest. How could he be so stupid? The resemblance was there the whole time if he'd only looked—Monica and Granger shared the same eyes; Wendell and Granger had the same absurd curly and frizzed hair. They over-explained everything, were utterly fascinated by his studies, and approached baking with the fervour of perfectionists.

He tried to regulate his breathing so he didn't begin to hyperventilate. If Granger's parents were here, it meant she wouldn't be far behind. How long would it take her to find them after she finished her N.E.W.T.s?

But, his mind reasoned, does she even know they're alive? If someone wiped their memories and sent them off to Australia, they could have faked their deaths. Another argument rose in his mind that contradicted his reasoning. Why keep them alive if Granger wasn't meant to find them eventually, if only to torture her with the fact they can't remember her?

"We have to leave," Draco said, not looking at Theo or Wendell. "We have to leave. It's not safe here."

"They're really Granger's parents?"

Draco nodded and rolled his neck to the side, trying to keep the despair off his face. Of all the Muggles to get attached to, he had to find Hermione Granger's parents. He had to care about Hermione Granger's parents, and make promises to Hermione Granger's parents.

"Tell Monica..." Draco struggled for words as Wendell fought to find words of his own. Coherency became hard as he tried to breathe. "Tell Monica I'm sorry. Chrys." Draco nodded to the door that led to the stairs. He stumbled as they reached the top step. Why couldn't he breathe?

"So you won't help us—her—because of what? Because you know our daughter?"

Draco spun on the balls of his feet and faced the Muggle. "Because Hermione Granger is Harry Potter's best friend," he panted. "Your daughter is one of the people hunting us, and when she realizes you're here, she's going to come and we'll go to prison."

"Then find a way to break the charm so we can leave and find her first," Wendell said. "And then you'll be safe here."

"I don't want to be here if you're not!" Draco snapped, finally admitting something he'd been afraid to even think, much less say aloud. He leaned against the wall and tried to suck in more air. After a long moment, he was calm enough to speak. "I've been without my family for a year. You and Monica and Theo are all I've got."

Wendell looked at Theo and understanding lit in his eyes. "You said 'Granger'. You took her last name because it was the first Muggle surname you could think of, didn't you?"

Draco cursed the Muggle's intellectual capacity—another thing that should have tipped him off that Wendell and Monica were related to the blasted know-it-all. His silence was more than enough for Wendell to learn the truth.

"Then you're Theo," Wendell addressed the naturally brunet wizard.

"Theodore Nott," Theo affirmed. Draco elbowed him in the side. For a Slytherin, the man lacked basic self-preservation instincts.

"And you're...?" Wendell waited for Draco to fill in the blank.

Instead, he snarled at the Muggle. "My name is none of your concern. Neither is my next destination or the rest of my life." The world began to go black at the edges and numbness crept into his fingers. He pulled at his hair as he gasped. "I should have known better than to stay here. I knew something was off, and it's just my luck that—GODDAMMIT!" he yelled. "This—this—" He recklessly pulled up the sleeves of the blazer and button-down shirt on his left arm and began to claw at the Dark Mark, as if he could rip it off with his fingernails. "Ever since this—it's—I never—why did they—" He let out another yell of frustration and crumpled to the floor, his nails digging into the open jaw of the fading black skull. Drops of blood pooled around his fingers, but the Mark still watched him with its dead eyes.

"Draco—" Theo started but his voice only caused Draco to dig his nails deeper into his skin.

Get it off, get it off, get it off.

A pair of arms pulled him forcefully against a body. They didn't try to pull his right hand away from his left arm, just circled his upper arms and chest with unforgiving strength. As he started to hyperventilate, the arms became stronger, compressing his ribs and pushing against his sternum. He became vaguely aware of someone chanting in his ear. The world swum by in waves and he tried to focus on the pain in his arm, but he just felt numb. He pressed harder, wanting to feel the pain, but it wouldn't come. Why wouldn't it come? He clawed at it again, searching for something, anything, that would make the numbness go away. Shallow channels of red crisscrossed the skin around the Dark Mark. They weren't enough. They weren't doing anything. It wasn't moving.

GET IT OFF, GET IT OFF, GET IT OFF.

Draco, you're okay. Draco. Draco, you're okay. Draco. Draco, you're okay.

The chant became clearer as he stopped clawing and held his nails in place, pressing with all his strength. Centuries passed before he could breathe without choking. His hands unclenched until he no longer dug into his arm. The hands on his chest moved down to his wrists and pulled his arms up until they were crossed beneath the other pair. The strength returned to compressing him, but the chant never stopped and eventually he realized he was crying.

"Draco, you're okay. Draco. Draco, you're okay," Monica's voice murmured in his ear.

His vision cleared and he saw the pale faces of Theo and Wendell staring. His cheeks started to burn red as he realized what happened. He had never fully lost control in front of anyone else before. He swallowed what he could of his tears and started to pull away from Monica, but she pulled back.

"Not yet," she whispered. She stopped chanting but breathed deeper, and he gradually followed her deliberate rhythm until he calmed down.

When she released him, Draco curled into himself and buried his head in his hands. The anger was gone; all he had left was embarrassment and despair.

"What happened?" he heard Monica ask the others.

"He looked in my mind, same as he did you, and saw our daughter," Wendell said in a low tone.

"And that caused...?"

"She's one of them," Theo answered. "She got a medal for her service in the war and everything." Draco felt Monica move closer and he realized she was sitting on the floor with one leg folded under her body while the other was outstretched against his right side. She had created a cocoon to shelter him, and it made his shame and guilt and fear all the worse. She was Granger's mother. He didn't deserve her protection.

"She was on the winning side?" Wendell asked, echoing Draco's earlier sentiments about winning and losing sides, versus right and wrong.

Draco gave a bitter chuckle that stopped their conversation. "The winning side." He lifted his head and met Wendell's eyes. "Granger—Hermione—was on the right side." Separating himself from Monica, he rested his head against the wall and stared at the ceiling. She crossed her legs but otherwise stayed in place. "My aunt tortured her. Your daughter. Granger and bloody Potter," he spat the name, "had stolen something—a sword, I think—from my aunt's Gringotts vault, so she tortured her. My parents and I stood in the room and watched. Aunt Bellatrix's favourite curse was the Cruciatus. As the name implies, it causes excruciating pain that feels like you're being ripped limb from limb, set on fire, and cut open with knives all at once."

He closed his eyes and choked out a breath, unable to stop the truth from pouring out of his mouth. The panic attack seemed to have acted as some morbid Veritaserum. He could imagine their expressions of horror. Even if they didn't remember Granger, he still described someone being tortured. He imagined Theo standing there with a grim set to his mouth, understanding full well the feeling of watching that. Of enduring it. Of committing it.

"Aunt Bellatrix used the curse on Granger three or four times, but she never gave up. She denied again and again that she'd stolen the sword. Aunt Bellatrix changed methods and took out this cursed knife and pinned Granger to the floor. She carved the word 'Mudblood' into her arm. It's a slur for Muggle-borns that means 'dirty blood'." Breathe in. Breathe out. "Her blood looked exactly like mine. Dirty blood, pure blood, it all looks the same." Another breath.

"After that, Aunt Bellatrix went back to the Cruciatus. Granger passed out, and then Potter and Weasley came into the room, veritable knights in shining armour. It was chaos after that. Mother and I were fighting Potter and Weasley as they tried to rescue her. Aunt Bellatrix held her hostage with that same knife at her throat. The chandelier collapsed and fell on her—on Granger—and I didn't see what happened after that. Mother and I had shards of glass in our faces from the chandelier. Potter and Weasley somehow got Granger out from under the mess and Disapparated." He squeezed his eyes shut tighter, not wanting to see the looks on Wendell and Theo's faces. He was grateful Monica was sitting just out of his peripheral. Seeing her look at him with disgust would tear him apart. "Next time I saw her, it was a month later and she was fighting at Hogwarts. We fought again in the Room of Hidden Things and then Crabbe used Fiendfyre to try to kill Potter, but he couldn't control it." Draco choked as he saw the image of his friend falling into the flames. "Everything was on fire, everything was burning, and then Crabbe—" He stopped.

After a long pause, Theo cut in. "Crabbe is dead?"

"Fell on his own sword," Draco coughed with a humourless laugh. "Goyle was unconscious and I was panicking and somehow bloody Potter managed to get two broomsticks to fly out. He came back for me. Weasley and Granger went back for Goyle and we made it out. They literally saved our lives when we would have left them to burn if the roles were reversed." He shook his head, rolling it against the wall. "They saved my life after being held prisoner in my home. That's where your daughter was tortured. My home. My drawing room. In front of me, by my own blood."

As another silence fell, Draco felt calmer than he expected after making such a confession.

"I think you should leave now," Wendell said, breaking the silence with a brittle voice.

The corners of Draco's mouth curled up as he settled into his familiar sneer. "I told you I fought in a war. What did you expect? That I spent my time planting gardens and trying to make nice with the other side? At some point, we all stopped fighting for what we believed in and started fighting for our lives. We did what we had to in order to survive, damn the cost. The price of my survival was threatening my classmates with death and watching my crazy aunt torture people and staring at bodies bound and gagged, dangling over my table waiting to be eaten by that fucking snake. And that's not a metaphor." He clenched his jaw, the sneer never wavering. "I didn't want any of this, but I wouldn't have survived on the other side. My family were targets. Nothing could have kept us safe if we defected."

Wendell seemed to be fighting himself while Monica shifted and watched Draco with an expression that was neither forgiveness nor condemnation. Theo's face was impassive, the default countenance of a Slytherin whose thoughts were whirring at an impossible speed. The wizard had never heard about the horrors at Malfoy Manor and clearly thought Crabbe had merely disappeared.

"The scars on your face are from the chandelier," Monica said finally. Draco nodded, too emotionally exhausted to say much more. "Why didn't you magically heal them? I imagine glass doesn't normally scar."

"Oh, but we did use magic." Draco's laugh was a harsh, hollow sound he barely recognized as his own. "A healing potion of the Dark Lord's own design. He made my father apply it." An absent finger ran over the puckered web of scars on the left side of his face. "It burned as the skin swelled closed. My skin stitched together but the swelling never receded. He said it was there to remind me how I'd failed yet again." He closed his eyes again, willing the memories to recede. "I don't want to talk about it anymore."

"Our daughter," Wendell said, and Draco groaned. He didn't want to talk about Granger. He didn't want to talk about anything. He wanted to take a triple dose of Dreamless Sleep and wake up in a week to find out the entire evening was just a nightmare.

"Did she survive the war?" Monica asked.

Draco opened his eyes and anchored himself to the Muggle woman. She was the calm in the storm that clouded his mind and it bothered him. He shouldn't need her, and even more, he shouldn't want her. But he couldn't stop. She filled the space his mother had left hollow and he was clinging to her like a drowning man held a rope.

"Granger survived. She's finishing up her final year at Hogwarts and she'll sit her N.E.W.T.s in about a month and a half. After that, who knows what she's going to do? But I'm sure her first order of business is going to be finding you."

"She's top of our class," Theo added. "She's utterly brilliant and brave to a fault. You should be proud of her."

Monica put a hand over her mouth and fought the brightness in her eyes. Granger's eyes. "She's real." Relief, disbelief, and careful hope warred on her face. She looked back at Draco. "I'm not imagining this, am I? I'm not hallucinating?"

"She's real," Draco said. He stretched out his legs before pulling them back and stacking his arms and chin on his knees. "She's an obnoxious know-it-all who reads every textbook before term starts and campaigns for the rights of house-elves and censures anyone out past curfew. She's got hair that—well, it looks like what I've got right now—and her front teeth are too big for her mouth. Her best friends are an orphan who was literally prophesied to defeat the Dark Lord, and a ginger who can barely tie his own hand-me-down shoes. She has a bloody menace of a cat, from what I've heard, which matches her perfectly since she's a menace to anyone she deems lesser than herself, which is ironic for a Muggle-born." He stopped, realizing that such a harsh assessment of their phantom daughter was the last thing they needed to hear. "But Theo's right. She's brilliant and brave, and I'd wager a good number of Galleons that she is the reason Potter's side won the war."

"And what does our daughter think of you?"

The question from Wendell was sharp and designed to hurt. Draco considered not answering it and walking out, or giving some self-gratifying explanation of his own brilliance as compared to hers. But while Wendell deserved both of those, Monica deserved the ugly truth. "It's safe to say your daughter hates me." Monica nodded, as if it was the answer she expected. "I tormented her from the moment she was Sorted into the House opposite mine. Then she was a know-it-all who sneered at anyone who didn't have an encyclopaedia for a brain. Then she was a Muggle-born who somehow achieved higher marks than I did even though my family name and my blood meant I was magically superior. Finally, she was Potter's best friend, and Potter was the enemy. To say we loathed one another is putting it gently."

"Do you still hate her?"

Draco rested his forehead on his arms and sighed before he looked up again. "The last three years of my life have been purely driven by the need to survive. It's hard to hate someone who managed to go through hell and not only survive, but ensure the survival of others. So, no. I don't hate your daughter. I don't like her, but my reasons to hate her disappeared during the war."

To his right, Monica moved fully into view, her legs kicked to the side as she leaned on her right hand. "If she—what's her name?"

"Hermione," he whispered.

"Hermione." A faint smile twisted on Monica's lips. "If Hermione finds us, she'll turn you in. Won't she?" He nodded. "Is there anything I can do that will convince you to stay?"

Astounded silence filled the room as the three men gaped at Monica. "You—after all that—you want me to stay? Are you out of your mind?"

She gave a bitter smile. "Until an hour ago, I thought I was." She sat up and his disbelieving eyes tracked her. "In everything you said, I heard a cold recollection of facts. You have never displayed any malicious intent toward Wendell or myself. If anything, you've been kind." She watched Draco earnestly, as if trying to pour her conviction into his soul. "We already knew you were raised to hate us, and that's not your fault. You were fifteen when your side was picked for you. It's not your fault. You were a child. Now you're an adult. It's the choices you make now, by your own volition, that define who you are. And from what I've seen over the last five months, I believe you can become someone you're proud of. Whatever that means for you."

Draco nodded, the numbness returning to his body as he felt Monica's faith overwhelm his senses. After everything he confessed, how could she still believe in him? How could she still want to stand by him? She was Granger's mother, for God's sake.

"I think we need to go home," Theo said, and took hold of Draco's upper arm to pull him to his feet. "Draco and I need to decide what happens from here."

"Understood. We'll be here if you decide to stay. Do you need me to let you out?"

Theo shook his head. "We can Disapparate from the kitchen."

Once the two wizards stumbled down the stairs, Theo gripped Draco's arm. "You're in no condition to Apparate alone. Hang tight."

They arrived at the beginning of the path to the Zabinis' cottage. Draco dropped to the balls of his feet and put his head between his knees. "Tell me that was a nightmare. Tell me it's time to wake up. Tell me they aren't Granger's parents. Tell me I did not just confess to two people how their daughter was tortured in my house." He raised his head to the light of the waning moon. "This can't be real. This is just a nightmare. It has to be a nightmare."

Theo stood at his side, shuffling his feet awkwardly on the gravel. "We knew from the time we got up it was going to be a shite day, Draco."

The distressed man bounced on his toes twice before standing to full height. "Happy Second of May."