Green Light in the Dark

by AStrangeHopefulDreamer

AU in which Sirius Black had a daughter with Marlene McKinnon. Following the death of her mother and godparents and the imprisonment of her father, Aurora Black is moved from home to home with various members of the Black family until she finally arrives at Hogwarts and finds not only new friends, but a true home. (Please keep comments respectful and think before you type.)

95. In Which Place

The Hogwarts Express departed at eleven o'clock, and Aurora almost missed it. It wasn't her fault — Harry bloody Potter forgot not one, not two, but three of his essential textbooks which meant they had to fly back over half of Norfolk on her father's damned motorcycle. Then, his wretched owl had thrown a tantrum about the wind direction or some other such nonsense, thus working Stella up into a mid-air frenzy when she had already taken so much coaxing to calm down enough to fly anyway, and they had made it to the platform with five minutes to spare and hardly any time for Aurora to hug her father goodbye.

"Remember and keep writing to us," he made her promise, "me and Andromeda and Ted and Dora."

"Of course I will," she'd said, rolling her eyes, "when do I ever forget an obligation?"

"I know," he'd chuckled while Potter stood off to the side, chatting to Dean Thomas and his mother again. "Stay safe, sweetheart. And good luck on your exams, but don't work yourself too hard."

"Dad..."

"You'll smash it, I know you will." He kissed her fondly on the forehead and for once she didn't grumble. There was a growing part of her that didn't want to leave him, didn't want to go back, both knowing the threat posed to her and her father's reaction to it. She worried how he would be alone in the house again, if he would work himself into anger or anxiety thinking of the worst happening. "Love you."

She smiled strained, and hugged him tightly. "See you in the summer," was her response, and as the train whistle blew, she hurried away with her trunk, leaping onto the train.

Potter followed swiftly behind, Hedwig squawking at his haste. Dean Thomas was with him, whispering something that made the other boy laugh.

"I'm off to find Theo and Gwen," Aurora announced over her shoulder, more so he wouldn't try and aimlessly follow her, "they'll wonder if I've gotten lost. Don't lose any limbs before we get to school."

"Of course not, Lady Black."

She resisted the childish urge to stuck her tongue out at him as Dean snorted in amusement. But the boys slipped into the next empty compartment and she was glad of it — though, admittedly, not as glad as she usually was to have shaken Potter off — venturing down the train.

She spotted Theo before she found Gwen. To her surprise, they were not together. Instead, Theo sat with his siblings and the Carrow sisters, all of whom looked at her in surprise when she knocked on the door.

"Morning," she greeted, meeting Theo's eyes, which lit up with something for just a moment before he looked sternly back down again. That was odd, but she brushed it off and pushed on. "Good Easter, all?"

"Spectacular," said Flora Carrow in a clipped voice, looking her up and down. Aurora was aware her hair must be rather windswept from the journey and the rush, and hurriedly sought to remedy it, feeling herself flush under all their gazes.

"Good, good. Have you seen Gwen anywhere, Theo?"

"Hm?" He glanced up, with a strangely blank look on his face. "Oh, no, sorry. She must be further down the train; I've just been with this lot."

"Oh, right. I'm sure she'll turn up -- do you want to come with me?"

The answer normally was a given; of course. But this time he paused, and glanced at his brothers and sister and said, in a careful sort of way, "No, thank you. I'm fine where I am."

"Oh." Taken aback, Aurora forced a corrective smile. "Well, alright, enjoy yourselves. I'll see you later!"

"See you," said Wilfred with a rather haughty tone that gave her pause for just a second. Her face slipped into one of displeasure as she looked back at him, eyebrows raised in an intentionally haughty manner for one barely acceptable second, and then a cool smile as she left, in search of Gwen once more.

She found her friend sat looking gloomy in a compartment all of her own, lying flat-out across three seats with a book face-down on her stomach.

"Studying not going well then?" Aurora asked by way of greeting, hauling her trunk into the compartment and reaching up to stow it away. Stella was let out her cage and immediately jumped up onto Gwen, who gave a start and scowled.

"God, I'm so bored, where have you been? You seen Nott?"

"He's sat with his siblings and the Carrows," she said, and Gwen wrinkled her nose. "I, on the other hand, have been halfway up and down the country on a search for Potter misplaced possessions, and terrorised by his frankly feral owl." She dropped down onto a seat with a groan and propped her legs up onto Gwendolyn's. "I'm glad to be rid of him."

"Tell me about it. My siblings are driving me nuts. Too much chocolate if you ask me. Yas told me loads of gossip about the girls at her school thoug, there's this big group of them that think they're the bees-knees — you know the type — all fallen out over a party, apparently three different girls all made out with this one other girl's boyfriend over the course of one weekend and somehow they're still together but the girls all hate each other. It's kind of amusing if you forget how sad it is."

Aurora hummed in agreement. "If we ever fall out over boys whom we forgive so mindlessly, I dearly hope one of us hexes the other's head on the right way round."

Gwen laughed and reached her hand out to slap Aurora's own in a 'high-five' — or, Aurora thought more accurately, a 'low-five', if there was such a thing, given their position. "Yeah, well, boys are twats. Wizard boys included."

"Robin?"

"He's so bad at replying to letters. I know he's busy and like, that's fine but also owl post does not take that long to get to Scotland and he wrote one letter that arrived yesterday. It's just annoying."

"You can't expect him to write every hour of the day. You know you'd find that insufferable."

"Yeah, but he's just... He isn't exactly a romantic. He's fun, and he's my best friend—" Aurora put a hand to her heart in feigned offense and Gwen laughed lightly "—but sometimes you just want a bit more intimacy than... The physical stuff."

Aurora wrinkled her nose. "I see what you mean. I'd say tell him that. If he isn't willing to listen, that's on him -- but sometimes people just work better as friends."

"Aurora Black, agony aunt."

She looked at Gwen, confused. "I'm not your aunt. I'm not anyone's aunt. I don't even have any siblings."

Gwen laughed and swatted her hand. "Oh, I love you, Aurora."

With a faint and still rather confused smile, Aurora laughed, and found herself glad to be back in the company of a friend again. But she found her thoughts turning back to the darker matters of the holiday and as she looked over at Gwen, wondered if it was a concern she could possibly share. Gwen noticed her looking after a moment of quiet, and glanced over, frowning.

"What's up? Cassius?"

"Oh, no — he's fine actually. Really nice..." In all the other mess, she'd half-forgotten his Skeeter warning. "Apparently Rita Skeeter tried approaching him for comment about me but he refused to say anything — he wrote to me just to let me know. But no, it's — it's something else. But if I tell you, you cannot tell another soul. I mean it," she added at the indignant look in Gwen's eye, "it's not gossip, Gwen. It's serious."

At that, her friend frowned. "You know I'd never gossip about you, Aurora. Only to you. But what happened?"

She went over, from as near the start as she could comfortably get, the events that had occurred at Black Manor — with some contextual details about her childhood that made Gwen's eyes practically bulge from their sockets — and the reappearance of her uncle's spirit, and the translating of Hydrus's blessing. When she finished, Gwen was fully sitting up straight, and staring at her, book forgotten and fallen on the ground.

"No shit," was all she could say at first. "Bloody hell, Aurora — why didn't you tell me about the psychopathic cousin before?"

"Well, I wasn't sure if I had or not to be honest, but it was never relevant before."

"You — your cousin tried to murder you when you were a baby? What the fuck?"

"I am sure I've told you this."

"I mean you mentioned your mum, vaguely — but hell, now this woman wants to kill you?"

"Seems like it. It makes sense. She probably sees herself as the rightful Lady Black, given my less than ideal parentage. Part of me wonders if she'd always intended to kill me, but..." But she would never let herself wander too far down that avenue of thought. She couldn't burden herself with anymore guilt, or her father's pain. "Anyway, what's a year without a mad family member set on my murder? I bet you're feeling safer than ever now."

Gwen gave her a flat look. "Shut up."

"Sorry. But, well, the long and short of it is, Bellatrix is likely to try and escape Azkaban at some point, though I'm not sure of her timing or reasoning why. Probably she thinks she has a chance of connection in the outside world, if she does want to establish herself as Lady Black instead of me." Though, she thought with a rather sick feeling, there was one other contender to the title, should he have it fall to him. She knew Draco would never hurt her — yet she wasn't sure she could put it past Bellatrix to manipulate him into taking the position after Aurora's own death. "If she thinks the tides are turning in her favour, that's bad news for all of us. And then, of course, there's my uncle."

"The ghost."

"Not a ghost. A spirit. He wasn't quite tethered, in the way ghosts are. He couldn't control his form, either, I don't think. Death sent him away." No more questions. Death was keeping something from Aurora, and it terrified her. "I just don't know what it all means." It was exhausting to worry about.

"Damn," Gwen said, "here I was worrying about Robin not fulfilling enough of my romance hero fantasies."

"Honestly, I'd much rather hear about that. Something..." She refrained from the word mundane. "Normal. Instead of whatever fuckery is going on in my family. And — whatever my Uncle Regulus did to get himself killed, I think my great-grandfather knew! But his portrait won't tell me anything because portraits are fucking stupid memories and they're beholden to their owners' secrets and it is so irritating and Hydrus's is just the worst."

"Sorry, the idea of you just having a casual chat with some medieval portraits is quite funny."

"Oh, it was hardly casual — believe me, there was enough posturing in that room that I could have as well been at Merlin's Day. And all Arcturus could do was tell me to go into some creepy rooms — which admittedly did lead me to this blessing, which is a nuisance to translate beyond the original text — and I think that might actually have been what let Regulus's spirit free? I'm not sure." She shook her head, leaning back. "Sometimes I wish my family were just normal. Apparently we have multiple blood curses on us."

"You are a bit fucked up, to be fair, Aurora. I mean, you are right bloody short, we should've known there was a curse involved there."

She kicked her friend's shin lightly, but somehow Gwen's joking made her feel a bit better. It made everything feel somewhat more manageable than it did when it was just her and her family and their fear and anger and paranoia and pain. It gave normality, and that was what she craved.

"Don't be stupid," she muttered, but she didn't fully mean it. "I don't know what I'm meant to do."

"Make it out of school alive?" Gwen suggested.

"If only."

They spent the rest of the journey trying to ignore the elephant in the room, though Gwen occasionally would poke at it again with another question about what she seemed to consider a rather abnormal family life and childhood. Aurora tried to answer as best she could, thought with a growing sense of unease. This was not of course dampened but the complete absence of Theo throughout the journey. Of course, it was natural for him to spend time with his siblings, especially if the holiday had been hard on him, but Aurora couldn't shake the feeling that something was off about his not even once coming to see them, even to say hi to Gwen. She worried about him, about what must have happened while he was at home, if his mother had gotten much worse and he and his siblings had had to witness it. Her heart went out to him, wishing he'd come to her because she understood, but also understanding perfectly why he felt he couldn't.

They only saw him once they set off for the carriages to school, and he was separated from the Notts and Carrows who had filled enough seats themselves. He didn't look as disappointed by this as Aurora had thought he might; instead, he looked almost relieved.

"Hello to you again," she said softly when he clambered into their carriage, greeting one another with faint smiles.

He adjusted his tie awkwardly, and ran nervous hands through his hair. "Hi — Gwen, I didn't get to see you on the train. Good holiday?"

Gwen narrowed her eyes. "Yes. You?"

"It was..." His gaze slid to Aurora, a quiet pleading look there, before he looked back to Gwen again. "Not as bad as I thought."

That was something, at least, she supposed. "We had to entertain the Carrows a lot," he elaborated, "which kept Mum lively." She hated that word, how it twisted. Theo even had his own grimace as he said it. "The Parkinsons were over a lot too, and the Averys. Saw the Flints a couple times, the Greengrasses — Narcissa and Lucius came over briefly, but that was only to speak to my mother and grandfather."

"Sounds busy."

"Yeah." He glanced down. "Was great fun." She was sure he had meant to hide the sarcastic bite of his voice, but it was not lost on her.

"And how are the Carrows?" Aurora found herself asking, thinking back to the twins' presence on the train. "You seem closer."

"Yes." Theodore's voice took on a vague, faraway tone. "Yes, well, my grandfather saw to that. Anyway. I find I have to do some reading now, they kept me far too distracted in there."

She wanted to point out that they never would have distracted him in such a way, but didn't. It wasn't for her to pass comment on, even if she had missed his quiet, amicable company on the train. Even if, right now, something felt off-tilt about the way he was talking without looking at her. Detached, tensed. Something was wrong that he didn't dare voice, and she found that she didn't like this change in dynamic at all.

-*

After Easter, the stress of exams truly began to sink in. All other thoughts had to be cast to the wayside, and the increasingly muddled translations crammed into the margins of Hydrus Black's blessing were resigned only to night-time musings when she ought to be asleep but couldn't bring herself to drift into subconscious, any space of vulnerability or dreams. The extra Latin was increasingly difficult once it deviated from the classical, and Aurora had to consult her dictionary more times than her pride would truly allow her to admit. Often she found herself huddled in an alcove she had discovered in a corner of the common room, surrounded by books, at a high-backed chair behind a desk facing the door.

She didn't like to have her back to the door. Especially not if she was alone.

Aurora always had been bad for secluding herself when worried, when she had let her mountains of work get on top of each other. Most of her friends didn't understand — oh, they had exams, of course, but she was the only one dealing with seven different political parties vying for her endorsement at the same time, the only one trying to unravel however-many curses that felt like they were curling tighter and tighter around her.

Still, her friends — some of them, at least — had gotten used to this. Three days into her self-imposed study isolation, Pansy scraped a chair over to Aurora in the corner of the common room and said, "This is an intervention."

Aurora looked up at her, trying to be amused, but failing. There were still five letters she had to reply to before she could get onto her Potions reading, and she wanted to get through four chapters of it tonight. "I'm not sure what needs to be intervened with, Pans."

Pansy rolled her eyes and leaned across the desk. "You haven't even told me how much Potter annoyed you over Easter yet. You've been back for ages."

"Three days," Aurora said with a strained chuckle, turning her attention back to the letter from Georgiana Farley, a Moderate candidate fo Cornwall, who wanted to discuss local policy 'at the earliest convenient' as if any time was ever convenient at the moment. She'd only just managed to get a handle on what Farley even stood for when Pansy sat down, and still felt like she was hopelessly in the dark. "I'm sorry. I've just been busy."

"We're all busy," Pansy said, "you're overworking yourself. When was the last time you took a break?"

"Dinner."

"You and Nott debated the theory behind Unforgivable Curses the whole way through dinner," Pansy rebutted. "You listed three citations."

"Here I thought our conversations were too boring for you to pay attention to," Aurora said as lightly as she could, while getting more and more irritated. That conversation had been the first time she'd even spoken to Theo since the train journey, though in fairness, Aurora hadn't been speaking to anyone as much as usual, and Theo had been distant himself. Even now she was too aware of the two minutes that had elapsed while she and Pansy had been talking; that was two minutes she could have been spending on work — minutes added up, after all.

"Your conversations are too loud for us to ignore," was Pansy's reply, which made Aurora smile faintly. "Anyway, basically, I came over here because we're all playing Gobstones and Draco insists that he'll only play in pairs if he gets to play with you. He's also moaning because you haven't spoken to him all day."

"Haven't I?" She blinked, surprise, but going over the day in her head, she realised she hadn't really spoken to many people. Even breakfast, she'd been reading, then going over all her post from the morning. "Oh."

"Honestly, you'd become a hermit if it weren't for us, that's the last thing you need right now." She glanced disapprovingly at Aurora's stacks of books and letters and said in a brisk way, "Come on, then, before my cousin tries to join in."

"I can't," she said, and the regret in her heart was real. "I've just too much to do, Pans."

"Well, this is something to do, too, and I think you'll find gobstones is much more fun."

"I'll join if I manage to finish this off," she promised, but Pansy didn't look like she believed her. "I won't be too long, I hope."

"We'll wait for you."

"No."

She already knew that was be fruitless; then waiting for her meant she gave an expectation that she wouldn't take much longer than ten minutes or so, a reasonable time to wait for someone to join. But she knew this would take her much, much longer than that.

"I'll just slot in when you finish a round or something, or I'll watch." She forced a smile. Pansy sighed.

"But we're all playing!"

"Nott isn't."

Theo was currently sitting with his brother, Wilfred, and the two Carrow sisters, as well as the younger Avery girl. He looked rather annoyed about it, and was at any rate engrossed in the pages of a book, not unlike Aurora herself — or, at least, how she ought to be.

"Nott's avoiding my cousin Cecil," Pansy said darkly. Aurora frowned.

"Why?"

"Over Easter — I'm not sure what happened, exactly, but they were all having dinner at the Notts' — my cousins and aunt and uncle, the Carrows, and the Averys. My aunt came away rather annoyed, according to Mother. Theo caused something of a stir."

"Over what?"

Theo never had been one to cause a stir. Pansy shrugged. "I don't know. Mother didn't say, but it seems to have caused something of a rift, anyway. But that's not the point — are you coming to play, or not?"

Letting out a sigh, Aurora looked over her notes and letters again. "Give me an hour."

"Aurora, it's already half past nine!"

"Well, I'll try to join by half ten. You'll all be much easier to beat then anyway."

Pansy just rolled her eyes, and gave Aurora's books a cursory scan before sighing and standing up. "Fine. But I will give you exactly an hour because you need to do something that isn't stare at words before you go to bed."

"Merlin, you sound like my dad."

Her friend just stared at her, then huffed. "Okay, I can't decide if you still mean that to be an insult or not but I don't care, I'm right. And Draco agrees with me."

"Draco'll agree with anything you say," Aurora teased, and the light blush it caused Pansy was enough to make the girl shake her head.

"One hour," she said in a firm voice, giving Aurora a mock-stern look that reminded her — quite disconcertingly — of Madam Pince, the school librarian.

Maybe she had been spending too much time in the library.

"One hour," Aurora agreed, and, satisfied, Pansy pranced off back to the sofa to break the news.

Aurora sighed and returned to the letter she had been drafting, trying to pick up the thread of her thoughts about Farley's stance on the integrated market. Across the room, she caught sight of Theo Nott — usually her partner in her studies, now alone in a bubble even beside his own siblings — and sighed, massaging her temples. Perhaps only two letters, then, and a skim-read of her Potions work. She had read it before after all, this was just revision, to fill in the gaps in her notes.

But nothing she did felt like enough. Exams loomed before her, a dark spectre, but worse was the world outside of school, the tangled web of politics she had yet to learn how to navigate, the curses and legacy of enchantment that was dancing around her, marking out her life.

One hour, she reminded herself, with a glance at the clock on the wall. She had better work quickly. No distractions allowed.

-*

The next day, having spent almost an hour playing gobstones before her friends all went to bed, and then going back to her research on curse stones, Aurora was exhausted. She woke at six in the morning to go for a run at sunrise, then launched into her correspondence so that she could send all her letters off with the morning post, before Gwen was even awake. By the time she got to the Great Hall for breakfast, she was ready for a nap, her eyes glazing over as she revised her History readings.

She was, as she often was, one of the first students in the Great Hall. Cassius and Graham were there, just a few seats away from her, and Theo had come in a few minutes after Aurora had. He sat down the far end of the table, away from her, and she didn't have the energy to try and make conversation with him anyway.

The next few days, as classes began to wind down and they were still expected to keep up studying, Aurora found herself overrun with work, and now trying to live up to her friends' expectations of her participating socially. Theo retained his quiet solitude and she matched him in it. It was just as well; no matter how much she might want to bounce ideas off of him, as she usually did, when she was poring over the geological properties of Lapis Nocte, and the Black family chronicles, she could not. This was something she had to do for herself; all of this, her studying and her correspondence and her search for the curse, this was all on her and her alone.

Strangely, her solace from her friends' expectations and Theo's quiet, came in the form of Hermione Granger. She had said, one hot afternoon after the bell rang at the end of Arithmancy, "Black, would you mind going over Hadrian's formulae this evening in the library? I'm afraid I still don't understand it as much as I should."

It had been an odd and unexpected suggestion, but, Aurora found, not entirely unwelcome. Of course it would be odd, but, next to Theodore, Hermione was the brightest student Aurora found herself acquainted with. And so she had surprised even herself by saying, "Sure. Would you like to meet after dinner?"

She had to revise the formulae anyway; they were ridiculously complicated.

Thus began a friendship which she would not have even entertained the thought of a year prior, but which had proven mutually beneficial. Hermione was more skilled at Runes than Aurora, but Aurora proficient and better-read in Arithmancy. They found balance in other subjects too; Hermione excelled in Charms where Aurora was adept at Transfiguration; Aurora had a mind for the stars in Astronomy where Hermione could recite bestiaries at the drop of a hat; in History they found mutual love of knowledge and obscure fact — even that which was irrelevant to their course — and in Herbology a mutual frustration over the unpredictability of sentient plant lives.

Pansy had commented on it one evening in the common room, after Aurora had returned from yet another late study session. Most of her friends were lounging on sofas, done in from a hard day's work which they would never admit to and which Aurora felt guilt at not continuing, even though she had promised she would join them. Theodore sat in a corner with Daphne and the Carrow sisters, hidden in a pile of books while the girls chattered around him. It was he who she wanted to go to first, before she had stopped herself. Pansy had seen the look in her eye and given her a knowing little frown.

Draco, oblivious to this, had merely asked, "Where have you been off to so late?"

Cassius Warrington, at a nearby table, glanced up and then looked down again immediately, as though afraid to have been caught. It made her stomach flip over in a way that she simply despised, and caused her thoughts to take an extra moment to arrange themselves before she could reply to her cousin.

"The library, of course," she told him, settling down on the sofa between Blaise and Lucille, the latter of whom handed her a handful of cards for the game they were playing. "Thanks, Luc. Ancient Runes really is exhausting at times. My eyes kept blurring everything together and such old texts, the ink bleeds and fades on the thin parchment."

The answer did not appease Draco, who frowned. "You've been in the library a lot. Crabbe said he saw you in there with Hermione Granger the other day."

She glanced at Vincent, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "What was Vince doing in the library?"

Draco waved a hand. "What were you doing with Hermione Granger?"

"Studying," Aurora said in a mocking tone designed to hide how the subject matter rattled her. "Don't worry, it isn't some illicit affair."

"But she's a..." He but back whatever word he had been about to say, annoyance flashing in his eyes. Pansy stiffened beside him with a warning look. "She's a Gryffindor. She's not good company."

Aurora shrugged. "She could've been Ravenclaw the way I see it. You're more than welcome to study with us too, Draco, but last time I tried to rope you in to looking at Arithmancy with me you said your eyes were going to bleed if you had to look at another equation, and your ears were going to bleed if you had to hear me prattle on about pyramids for one more minute, so forgive me for not thinking you would be particularly enthusiastic."

Draco grunted, but Pansy gave a small laugh. Lucille rolled her eyes and said, "Can we get on with the game, please? Aurora's social life was boring to start with and I doubt Hermione Granger's made it any more exciting by discussing their weird love for Cornelius bloody Agrippa."

"You should still be careful who you associate with," Draco said with a frown. Millicent and Blaise gave twin frustrated sighs. "I'm just saying — I've seen you with Potter a lot more, too."

"He is an inescapable reality of Hogwarts school," she said drily, "and, unfortunately, my home life. He's annoying, yes, but it would be foolish to discard his company. It doesn't mean anything, Draco. No need to be jealous."

"I'm not jealous of you!"

Her lips quirked into a smirk. "I meant of Potter, but of course."

Blaise snorted. "Shove off," Draco said, realising he was fighting a losing battle, and sank into the sofa with a melodramatic sigh. "Blaise, you've got the six of diamonds, and the six of hearts, hand them over."

"Fuck you," Blaise said, down to his last card in the deck. "How does everyone know what cards I get?"

"They haven't come up yet and no one else has asked for sixes. Aurora?"

She scanned her cards and asked, "Pansy, any eights?"

Pansy handed over the three she needed. "How did you do that?"

"You hold them all wrong, you always have. I could see them as soon as I came over." Aurora grinned, trying to force her mind to relax even as it drifted slowly to Theo and then back to the scrolls and books in her bag, to the onyx ring buried in a pocket. She would permit herself to play only a quarter of an hour before she returned to work; a little extra Potions work, and then to her room to deal with the petition letters that had arrived this morning, addressed to Lady Black. Appeals for endorsement from no less than six election candidates for Cornwall. And then, to the blessing that still haunted her, and the spectre of death she still searched for.

The lapis nocte ring was still sat in the left pocket of her robes, closest to her cousin Draco. She looked at him as she realised this, trying to work out if he had sensed anything, but as she could tell he hadn't.

Briefly, her mind wandered to what might happen if he asked him for his thoughts on it, if she revealed some or all of the situation. Not in front of everyone, of course, but out of the way, in secret.

She wasn't entirely sure what was stopping her. Perhaps the memory of Lucius Malfoy, unfair as that was, perhaps the taunting of Bellatrix Lestrange and the subconscious association that she would now have forever.

She had managed to let her father in, she reminded herself. And Andromeda and Ted and Dora, hell, Remus, and even Potter knew some of the situation, unfortunate and circumstantial as that fact may be. She ought to be able to do the same for Draco, even if only in the name of fairness, and she hated that she had her reservations, her fears.

After a few obligatory rounds, Aurora announced she was turning in for the night. But, the ring heavy on her mind, she gave Draco a significant look and gestured for him to join her for a moment. She did not miss the look that passed between her cousin and Pansy at that — both curious and concerned — but she pretended that she did, for their sakes.

In the corridor that led to the maze of girls' dorms, Aurora and Draco were alone, and she was relieved by it. It did feel like an age since she'd actually had a moment with her cousin, and it was clear he'd felt that, too.

"You alright?" Draco asked sceptically, eyebrows raised. "Has something happened?"

Bless him for asking, she thought. For what hadn't happened, at this point?

"No," she lied, "not right now. Just... Some things came to light over the break that I'm still trying to get my head around." It was like her own soul was resisting confiding in him. "I... Went back to the manor, spoke to the portraits, it was all very confusing. But I've got a project, a little family history — and artefact — in need of defending and conservation."

After all, it occurred to her, his family had no shortage of such dark artefacts, either. Draco himself had bragged about it. "And I just wondered," she said slowly, wondering how evasive she could possibly be as she fished the ring from her pocket, "can you sense any... Enchantments, on this?"

She knew Draco's family would have told him to recognise maleficent magic anyway. Even if not, the curse was strong enough to her that she could feel it beyond formal identification. But Draco's face, as his hand closed around the ring, was blank.

He looked at her for a moment longer and then shook his head. "No." The word sent a rock plummeting through her. Aurora nodded and took it back.

"I thought not."

"What is it?"

"I still don't know. Something bc connected to death but that's about as far as I can get. It's a strange thing."

"Is this what you've been burying your head in every night?" Draco asked knowingly. "I mean, even you can't be doing that much studying every night."

She nodded with a reluctant smile and put the ring safely back in her pocket, feeling a chill through her as she touched it. "Yes. It's a lot of work but I think it's important to preserve family history, don't you?" He nodded, just as enthusiastic as she had anticipated.

"Do you want any help with it?" Draco asked, voice so hopeful it hurt. "I could see if Dad knows—"

"I'd rather do it myself," she said as softly as she could, "please don't write your father — it's a Black family matter, right? Arcturus asked me especially." A white lie, but not one he would ever have the means to challenge.

"Course." He frowned, though. "Why's it linked to death, d'you think? Do you know anything about it?"

"No, I just hear... Whispers."

His eyes widened. "Whispers?"

"Yes. Like... People. Spirits."

"Oh." Draco's face fell. "I couldn't hear anything. D'you think that means anything?"

"Who knows?" But it did mean that the curse was specifically targeting her, something Callidora had also suspected. Of course, Draco's connection to the family magic was more distant than hers, but that he also could not hear any sort of spirit meant it was both speaking to her alone, and cursing her alone. It was centring on her, but it had been made centuries before her birth. "I don't know what any of it means. But, thanks for helping."

"Anytime." He cleared his throat, glancing around. "Listen, you — this ring isn't hurting you or anything, right? Cause sometimes this stuff can be harmful if you don't handle it right and it can get worse without you realising, Father always makes sure we're careful with that sort of thing. Don't hold onto it for too long, yeah?"

The irony almost made her smile. "I won't. I'm just curious, you know how I like to pick at things, but I'm sure I'll figure it out soon. Probably isn't even all that nefarious or complicated at all, but it's something I've to do myself."

"Yeah." Draco grinned. "Yeah, I get that." Then he gave her a pointed look. "I'll see you for breakfast?"

Aurora sighed and rolled her eyes. "You'd better wake up early."

"Course." He winked. "Ten o'clock sharp."

"Early."

"Saturday!"

"If you want breakfast—"

"I'll meet you in the common room at half eight," he promised, and she knew that was the best she would get.

She bid her cousin goodnight and was relaxed for a few minutes more, until she returned to her bedroom and got ready for bed, and then turned her attentions again to the ring and the dozens of books she hoped would one day give her her answer. If she was even looking in the right place.