Chapter Text
A Friday: January 5th, 2007
Theodore Nott measured his life in Fridays. They were his favorite days: a predictable segment of the week when his haunted family manor could play host to something light, forcing its darkness back to the corners where it waited. There had been a time, notably the entirety of 2006, when Fridays became the centerpiece around which Theo built himself up, a way to dig his way out of the easy isolation his ancestral estate could offer—had offered—in the immediate aftermath of a war he’d wanted no part of but that shredded his family name regardless.
In his more self-pitying moments, Theo liked to lament the burdens he bore: crimes of a dead father, carried by a living son. So dramatic. Sole heir to a once revered family name, now quietly dismissed in polite company and openly reviled in the impolite. He didn’t allow himself such thoughts too often, not when he was but one of many from old families whose futures had all taken a sharp turn for the worse in the last decade.
But sometimes indulging in the drama of it helped. Just barely.
So on this particular Friday, per tradition, Theo prepared for all manner of raucous fun-having with his friends. That was the only requirement, truly. Fridays were for fun and fun only. It made no difference to Theo whether that fun came in the form of gambling (via Pansy, utterly ruthless), alcohol (via Blaise, usually in tandem with nicotine), muggle history lessons (via Hermione, but only after several drinks), or idiotic attempts at inebriated dueling (via Draco and Theo, just because they could).
What Theo did not expect on the first Friday of a new year was for Harry Potter’s patronus to find him in the middle of the afternoon with an urgent message. Even if it had come at the prediction of Blaise’s extremely underwhelming party trick as a subpar Seer, Theo still wouldn’t have expected any kind of missive from Harry Potter. Because Harry Potter only knew of Theo’s existence by virtue of Hermione and Draco’s association. And they most certainly weren’t on summons in the middle of an afternoon terms.
Theo’s spine ached as he stooped over the workbench in what was once his late father’s vault of illegal objects and occasional experimentation lab. The space had been warded centuries before behind several layers of repellant magic, a blood lock long since outlawed, and a trick portrait that Theo felt added just the right amount of whimsy. The hidden room could only be accessed by blood relatives of the Nott family with knowledge of the correct spells to pass through the extensive and dangerous wards. Honestly excessive.
It took Theo almost five years to break through the defenses because his father had gone and gotten himself killed on the wrong side of a war without showing Theo how to access it. Not that Theo had ever expected his father to share a fucking thing with him, especially access to Nott Manor’s most guarded vault. Centuries of auror raids had failed to find and dismantle it. The Dark Lord didn’t even know of its existence when he used the manor to house a whole slew of second-rate snatchers and Death Eaters who hadn’t warranted an invitation to the Malfoy Estate. It was the prize of Nott Manor and therefore something that Theodore Nott Sr. likely had no intention of ever sharing with the son who did nothing but disappoint him. But Theo certainly wasn’t bitter about that fact in the slightest.
So Theo broke in. It took much longer than expected: Draco got bored after two years, Blaise only sat around and smoked, providing extremely unhelpful feedback to the point where Theo wanted to snap his wand in two, and Pansy didn’t even bother pretending she cared.
But once Theo cracked it and could finally enter the room his father had kept from him, something he ought to have had a right to based purely on his birth, he found—nothing. The dark, cavernous space in the bowels of the manor had apparently been gutted. Only the evil lurking in the shadows remained: fixed in the dark, haunted corners of the room that taunted Theo like all the other shadows in the manor, except the shadows here had teeth. And when Theo talked to these dark corners, told them to fuck off and leave him alone, occasionally they talked back.
Theo turned the vault into a workspace of his own, a place where he tinkered with the magical objects that interested him, with the only things that held his attention during his endless days as lord of an empty estate and a dying family.
So as Theo stood, fiddling with one of the hundreds of illegal portkeys that he most certainly would not be telling Hermione he’d been working on, a bright silver stag galloped through the stone walls and stopped directly in front of him. For a silent moment, Theo stared at the stag as it stared at him, suddenly overcome by jealousy for a bit of magic he doubted he’d ever be able to master. He didn’t much care for things being beyond his reach.
But Theo was not built for things like patronuses, not for the feelings meant to fuel them.
Then Harry Potter’s voice shouted at him from the stag’s mouth.
“Get to Malfoy’s now— ” His voice cut off before resuming again, gruff and distant, sounds of something clattering in the background. “Fuck, Malfoy? Nott—now. Get here now. Bring a portkey to St. Mungo’s.”
As Theo apparated, instantly and without hesitation at the boy wonder’s command, Theo questioned how much time it took for a patronus to deliver a message and how much trouble he was in if Harry fucking Potter knew about one of his many illegal portkeys.
—
Hermione had blood on her face. She sat slumped against the wall in the hallway of her flat, breathing heavily. The door to the guest room lay on the ground nearby, ripped from its hinges; an explosion of debris spilled out into the hallway. Fuck. She’d hidden all his illegal shit in that room and, from the sound of it, Harry Potter, auror on the rise, was already inside.
Hermione blinked up at him, her eyes didn’t track him quite the way they normally did, usually so alert and assessing. Theo knelt beside her, inspecting the blood on her face and the clouding in her eyes. He forced himself to swallow the nausea.
“Is this yours, Granger?” he asked, summoning a towel from the kitchen and attempting to clean the mess. His stomach twisted. He really, truly, hated the sight of blood.
She stared at him, a touch too long, before she answered with a shake of her head.
“Draco,” she said. “Draco’s—”
And as if summoned by the sound of his name, Theo heard a growl and string of curses from what sounded like an exceptionally angry Draco Malfoy.
“Quit fucking touching me, Potter—”
“How else do you expect me to get you out of here?” Potter said, his voice tight but controlled.
Theo stood and took the half step required to peer around the corner into the guest room. It looked like a herd of erumpents had stampeded through it, indiscriminately smashing everything inside to dust. On the far side of the room, Potter had Draco partially levitated, half-slung across his shoulder.
Theo had to turn around, the sight of whatever was happening on Draco’s chest, drenched in blood, immediately sent Theo’s head spinning.
“Point of clarification, is anyone actually dying right now?” Theo asked. He smashed his eyelids together in an effort to erase the crimson nightmare on his friend’s chest from his immediate memory.
“No,” Draco ground out. “Just a lot of fucking pain.”
Theo's uncoiled just enough; he could handle a maiming.
“In that case, fuck—Draco. We’ve talked about this. No bleeding around me.” Theo struggled to find his balance between an impulse towards humor and the appropriate gravity in a serious, though evidently not life threatening, situation. Theo stared at the picture hanging on the wall across from him, delaying having to turn back around and face the scene in that room for as long as possible.
“I will hex you,” was all Draco said. He’d forced his words through a heavy grunt, followed by a groan, and then something Theo might cautiously label a whimper. All in all, he appeared to be in a tremendous amount of pain. Which wasn’t surprising, considering the amount of blood soaked into Theo’s retinas.
The exasperated noise from behind Theo sounded like it came from Potter.
“Nott—do you have the portkey?” Potter asked in a level tone, remarkably calm as Draco released another pained sound.
Theo blew out a breath, patting at his pockets, brain suddenly stalled for where he’d stashed it just moments before he apparated from his workshop. All he could think or see behind his eyelids was the blood, and what looked suspiciously like bone poking out around Draco’s collar. Theo swallowed back an impulse to gag, pulling the portkey from the back left pocket of his trousers. He braced himself and turned back to the mayhem.
“I’m not asking where it came from, Nott,” Potter said with his surprising control. “Just toss it here so I can get Malfoy to the hospital. Bring Hermione through the Floo, yeah?”
So much fucking blood. And the mess. A room in tatters.
“Theo.” The command in Potter’s tone pulled Theo out of his own head. “Can you do that? Hermione needs medical attention, too. I have no idea which of their experiments got on her. But I need to take Malfoy now so toss me the portkey.”
Yes sir, Auror Potter, sir.
Theo set a two second delay on the portkey and threw it to Potter. Theo didn’t bother waiting to see if he caught it. The man had been a seeker after all, now was his moment to put that skill to the test. Theo turned to Hermione.
“I’m feeling a little fuzzy, Theo,” she said, looking up at him from where she had her head leaned back against the wall, both hands planted against the floor beneath her. She took a deep breath, holding it in her chest as Theo knelt beside her again. “How did Draco look?” she asked as she released the breath, head swaying against the wall.
“Bloody. I’m displeased with him.”
The noise Hermione made sounded somewhere between a laugh and a groan.
“If you’re joking he must be okay—” her voice caught. “There was bone, Theo.”
Theo held the revulsion in his throat, distressingly close to a gag.
“No need to revisit it, Granger. I was lucky enough to witness. Let’s just get you to St. Mungo’s, shall we?”
Theo wrapped her arm around his shoulder, supporting most of her weight as he tried to help her to stand. He had to adjust as he pulled her to full height; Theo’s tall, weedy build meant that Hermione’s arms could hardly reach his shoulders.
“Around the waist, Granger. Hold tight. Do I need to try carrying you?” He struggled, trying to find a way to support her with his rather inconsiderable strength. Athleticism had never been one of Theo’s key attributes.
“No, I can stand,” she muttered, her voice distant. But Theo saw her do that thing she did, that Hermione thing where she grit her teeth and squared her shoulders and told whatever it was getting in her way to fuck off, thank you very much. It was probably his favorite thing about the witch. “I told Harry he’s not allowed to ask about the portkey,” she continued, wobbly steps walking with him towards the fireplace.
“Much appreciated, Granger,” Theo said. He wobbled in his efforts to keep her standing.
And once they’d travelled through the Floo, meeting with a team of healers on the other side, Theo bid her farewell, shaken but on the mend.
Barely two weeks later she had no idea who he was.
—
Definitely not a Friday: January 18th, 2007
Theo hated hospitals. One trip to St. Mungo’s barely ten days earlier had been plenty of exposure, and on his favorite day of the week, no less. It was the lime green they wore, forever seared into his memory from the time he spent here in his childhood, watching his mother die, waiting for the moment that Theodore Nott Sr. became Theo’s only family. Even at nine years old, Theo had an idea of what that cold reality would look like. And the reality did not disappoint. Or rather, it did: very much.
Pansy tapped her nails irritably against the arm of the chair to Theo’s right. On his left, Blaise had stolen another chair from the waiting area and used it to prop his feet up. He kept flexing his fingers, stress speaking through his hands. Theo almost reached out to stop him, to stop Pansy too, to try and offer his friends the same kind of comfort he needed for himself.
Across from them, Harry and Ginny Potter sat together, looking equally drawn and fatigued. In the narrow walkway between the two parties, Draco paced mercilessly, carving a canyon of grief in the tacky linoleum floors. It had been hours since Draco sat, minutes since he snapped, and mere seconds since he sighed.
Draco froze, eyes focused down the hallway towards the room where Hermione lay unconscious, victim to one of the many hazards of her work with dark artifacts. She’d been unconscious for nearly three days.
Her healers stood outside the door conversing. They motioned to Draco, who immediately launched down the hallway, purposeful footsteps reverberating through the space. In an intrusive sort of musing, Theo couldn’t help but think how a few tapestries could help cut down on all that echoing. And his manor had plenty to spare.
Annoyingly, Potter also rose, making himself available near Draco. Theo ground his teeth together. Fucking friendship seniority. Theo cared, too. They all did. But being Theodore Nott meant a different thing than being Harry Potter.
Harry Potter commanded respect, got immediate attention from healers, expedited testing, received thanks for merely existing. He and Hermione existed in a state of general exaltation the rest of them could only hope to graze by proximity.
Theodore Nott, if recognized at all, mostly got uneasy stares, sneers, and not-so-subtle glances at his left arm, searching for a brand that wasn’t there. Only Draco had that honor.
Draco’s raised voice snapped Theo’s attention to him. Potter had his hands on Draco’s shoulders, trying to steer him away from Hermione’s room. One of the healers eyed Draco with obvious caution before entering her room.
“What is it now?” Pansy said from next to Theo. Her voice lilted so close to a petulant whine that Theo almost felt like he was back at Hogwarts, sometime around fourth or fifth year when she thought that tone would convince Draco to sleep with her.
Theo stood, his body brimming with anxious energy, built up over three days of waiting, on and off, in and out of the hospital. And now, so close to when the healers planned to wake Hermione, his skin felt stretched and thin, ready to burst.
He reached Draco and Potter three strides later, brows lifted in question.
“Ten minutes,” Draco said. He sounded winded, two simple words spilling with the force of a man brimming with adrenaline.
“They’re waking her now,” Potter added when Draco didn’t continue. “They said Malfoy could see her in about ten minutes.”
Some of Theo's tension sank, slipping down between his vertebrae, a snake slithering down his spine. He could feel the muscles in his neck relaxing. He nodded. They waited.
Fifteen minutes later, the tension had coiled its way all the way back up Theo’s back, twitching and angry at every clack of Draco’s shoes and every turn in his pacing as he counted the passing minutes in furious footsteps.
“What the fuck is taking so long?” Draco half breathed, half shouted, mid-pace. His eyes searched them for an answer none could give. Draco released a sharp breath and left to speak—more likely shout—at the nurses. This Hermione-specific version of Draco knew no pleasantries, kept no manners, and would have made their collective society etiquette tutors aghast at his curtness. And there could be no stopping it. Theo didn’t even bother trying.
Blaise reached over, placing a hand on Theo’s leg, halting the frantic bouncing he hadn’t even realized he’d been engaged in. Theo glanced up at Blaise’s dark eyes, grateful for the escape from his own head.
“Me too,” Blaise said, giving Theo’s leg a small squeeze before retracting his hand, leaving traces of warmth and comfort in its place.
Draco started shouting from down the hall and Potter shot to his feet.
Theo had to resist the urge to roll his eyes.
“He’s going to blow up eventually, Potter. Might as well let him.”
“We’re in public, Nott.”
“And?”
Potter just shook his head and jogged down the hallway where Draco had started screaming, fully out of control. Theo heard a nurse calling for security as the scene escalated. Potter pulled at Draco’s shoulders again, trying to halt a lunge towards Hermione’s door.
“Where the fuck is my wife?” Draco roared, shoving Potter off of him. The man had officially lost it. Theo felt halfway there himself, and he was merely a second-rate friend in the days’ rankings.
Ginny rose to her feet, too, hovering partway between where Theo sat with Blaise and Pansy and where her husband tried and failed to hold Draco back. Theo tilted his head to better peer around Blaise at the sound of a loud crack. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t get a tiny bit of amusement out of Potter’s bleeding nose. Theo had tried to warn him.
“He’s going to get himself stunned,” Pansy complained with a heavy breath.
“Yeah,” Theo said.
“Probably for the best,” Blaise added.
Theo looked down. Blaise’s hand was on his leg again, halting another series of anxious jitters. He kept it there this time; it helped.
—
Actually a Friday: January 19th, 2007
“I cancelled drinks tonight because I wanted to be alone, Blaise,” Theo said, following the smell of smoke in his home that ever diligently alerted him to Blaise’s presence. On this particular evening, Blaise had chosen a sitting room in the east wing: home to an obscene number of tapestries depicting a variety of Goblin Rebellions Theo didn’t remember a single thing about.
Blaise didn’t acknowledge him as Theo entered the room, he simply continued smoking his cigar, feet propped on a late eighteenth century coffee table. Under normal circumstances Theo would have kicked Blaise’s feet off the antique piece of furniture and doubled down on some admonishing.
But when the healers finally woke Hermione, she had no memory of the last six years of her life. Which included her entire friendship with Theo.
So naturally, Theo wasn’t exactly in the mood.
“These tapestries are going to be ruined.” Theo sighed, sinking onto the sofa across from Blaise.
“Pity.” Blaise pulled a fresh cigar from his pocket. He sent it floating towards Theo, the closest thing to consolation Blaise probably knew how to offer. And in all honesty, probably the only kind Theo knew how to accept. “If they’re already ruined…” Blaise added, leaving his implications, as he often did, unspoken.
Theo rotated on the sofa, propping his legs up and laying back with his head on the arm. With a quick couple of spells he cut and lit his cigar, accepting several thousand galleons worth of tapestries as a total loss. They were too much of a hassle to have cleaned; he’d just sell them like he did with the rest of the textiles Blaise seemed to enjoy ruining.
“Have you talked to Draco today?” Theo asked as he stared at the ceiling above him. Often, he spent so much of his time focused on the dark corners of the manor living at eye level that he forgot how high some of the ceilings ran, and how shadowed and impervious to light they could be. The perfect hideaway for a demon laying in wait. He scowled.
“No,” Blaise said. “You?”
“No.”
This was why he wanted to be alone. Theo didn’t have the energy for conversation. His brain didn’t have the capacity for complex thought: not after three days of worry, of consoling his best friend on the verge of a breakdown, and of his own selfish grief over the news he’d been forgotten. And he knew his grief had nothing on Draco’s. Theo didn’t have the right to be upset, not like that.
“She doesn’t remember him,” Theo said in the silence of a room slowly filling with a cloud of smoke.
“Not how he’d like, no.”
Theo had to ask.
“Did you See this?”
Blaise didn’t answer. In the following quiet that clawed across the space between them, as real as any noise, Theo wondered if he even asked the question at all. Or perhaps it had stalled in the space between genesis and exodus, lodged somewhere inside him. Theo rotated his head against the arm of the sofa so he could see Blaise’s face, attempting to decipher if he’d spoken, thought, or simply buried his words in a graveyard of better intentions.
Blaise looked at him with the lines around his eyes strung tight, a battle fought across his face to still his expression and suppress whatever emotion dared to be known. It was a rare slip in the utter unruffability that came with everything Blaise Zabini said or did.
Theo found he didn’t know how to place what he saw. Had it been offense? Hurt? Resignation? Over fifteen years of friendship with Blaise didn’t make glimpsing behind his mask any easier. The look, whatever it was, faded.
“I don’t See much,” Blaise finally said.
“Pity.” Theo parroted Blaise’s earlier word.
“And if I had,” he said. “I couldn’t change it.”
“And you’re sure that’s how that works?” Theo asked. His friend rarely spoke of his occasional and self-described as useless flashes of divination.
“It has to be,” Blaise said, drawing a deep puff off his cigar before releasing a plume of smoke in front of him, obscuring any chance Theo might have had at witnessing any further wayward expressions. Theo turned his head back towards the ceiling, ornate molding obscured by darkness.
“The one you’re waiting for?” Theo asked quietly.
Once, years before and plied with copious amounts of alcohol, Blaise admitted he’d seen something while they were still kids at Hogwarts, long before the burden of being idiot adults with no idea what they were doing found and saddled them. Even with lowered inhibitions and gratuitous bribery, Blaise wouldn’t share a single detail of what he’d seen. The curiosity got to Theo sometimes, a tickling in the back of his mind, reminding him that his friend had a secret he wanted to know.
Because whatever it was, Blaise waited for it, hoping for it like it was the most important thing in his world.
“Yeah,” Blaise said as the smoke cleared.
—
Not a Friday: February 3rd, 2007
Just weeks later and Theo had gone restless, turned rabid, itching for the routines that once kept him comforted, that quieted the shadows in his home. Friday nights without Draco and Hermione had become sad, morbid affairs full of speculation, commiseration, and what was probably an inadvisable amount of alcohol.
Especially considering the amount of drinking Theo did with Draco in companionship of his pain, waxing poetic late into the night about his circumstances. Theo had no idea how to help, other than to offer access to his home and his liquor collection.
And then there were the nightmares, a fresh take on his familiar friend. Instead of dreaming exclusively of the manor during the war, or his father, or his mother, Theo had started dreaming of Hermione and of the last time he’d spoken to her.
Theo might have tried harder to make that time with Hermione count had he known their trip to St. Mungo’s would be so final. He wouldn’t have handed her off to the healers so quickly. Wouldn’t have waved his goodbyes in a haste to wash his hands of the blood that had gotten on him before checking in with Draco.
Much appreciated, Granger. What pathetic parting words.
The worst was the embarrassment when he woke. Embarrassment for having had the nightmares to begin with. He had no right to be this affected, not when Draco had lost the most important person in his life and Theo had lost, what? A fifth of his friend group?
Theo spent far too much time in the middle of the night talking to his demon in the darkness and tinkering with portkeys in his workshop, at a loss for how else to keep the nightmares and the guilt at bay. He used actual keys in his fiddling: brass ones, silver ones, antique ones, shiny and new ones, any key he could get his hands on, Theo turned into a portkey.
He stared at them, lined up on the workbench in front of him as he sat on a stool. Low light from a single lamp illuminated the lab in the middle of the night, so late he did not know the hour: somewhere bleeding between what felt a little like morning, a little like night, and a lot like a dream.
The thing with teeth lurked in the shadows, taunting him with a silent presence.
On this night, the work bench held twenty portkeys coming and twenty-two going. Theo toiled on another one coming, incapable of allowing the disparity between the two versions to grow too large. Twenty portkeys designed to bring him back to the manor, twenty-two to take him away. He couldn’t quite escape it, the need to vanish from this place, to leave in an instant in a blur of magic much more satisfying than a simple apparation. But the guilt drew him in again, the blood ties to this place that haunted him. So even as he made portkey after portkey designed to take him away, he almost always had to make its counterpart: the one that brought him back, straight to his bedroom or the parlor or the greenhouses.
It was a therapeutic way to practice his very specific skill set. And a self-destructive way to remind himself of the trap that snared him. And he was annoyingly self-aware enough to realize it.
He glanced at the dark corner of the lab, a type of breathing blackness that moved even when it didn’t, the very air and space and void of the darkness slowly expanding and contracting as the thing within it watched him.
Theo flicked his wand, sending a key soaring toward the dark corner, clattering against the stone wall he could not see. Another flick, another careening key. Over and over and over again until one key going remained on the bench.
“A point for going, today,” Theo mused.
Without a care to the hour, and only modest curiosity about his destination, Theo picked up the key and activated it, hurtling himself somewhere, anywhere, but there.
—
Also not a Friday: February 7th, 2007
Sometimes in lieu of pointless brooding, Theo opted for pointless lounging. It was a brooding-adjacent activity, but tended to involve less self loathing and a little more self respect. On this particular night, it even involved a book, a warm fire, and a sitting room near the east wing kitchens that had yet to meet Blaise Zabini’s smoking habit.
He nearly dropped his book at the sound of his own name shouted through the otherwise empty manor.
It immediately took him back. He knew Draco didn’t mean to do it, but his friend had the capacity to shout with such vitriol that there were moments where it reminded Theo so keenly of his own father’s voice that he had to forcibly shake the comparison from his mind.
His father did not shout for him through the manor halls, not anymore.
But Draco, apparently, did.
Theo let his book fall closed. Not that he’d been enjoying it much anyway.
“Theo!” The shout came again, closer. Draco had an uncanny ability to find Theo wherever he tried to hide in his sprawling manor. He suspected it had something to do with Draco’s own childhood in an expansive estate where one could literally shout in a dwelling occupied by several other people and never be heard.
More than likely though, Theo suspected his elves had little loyalty and ratted him out to Draco whenever he asked.
Theo rose, walking to the dark corridor and peering into it.
Draco had only made it about halfway down the hall before slumping against a wall just shy of an offensively hideous bust of Theo’s great grandfather. He’d considered tipping the thing over to see how many pieces it might shatter into on a variety of occasions. Most of them inebriated. An alarming number of them sober. The piece was probably priceless.
“Draco?” Theo asked, walking to his friend with a sad sigh held inside his chest, knowing the action and sound of it would do no good. Not when this sort of mood had seized Draco’s senses.
Theo stopped in front of Draco as he sat with his back against the wall, arms propped on bent knees, eyes seeking something from the ceiling. Theo called for an elf to retrieve a bottle of scotch and took his place against the opposite wall.
When the elf returned with two glasses and a bottle of alcohol—admittedly a touch more expensive than Theo had planned on cracking into—it only took one glance at his distraught friend to deem the sacrifice worth the cost.
“Do you want me to cast some light in here or is this more of a dark corridor conversation?” Theo asked as he sent a glass of liquor towards Draco.
Even in the near pitch black, Draco’s bright blond hair gave him away, flashing in the darkness. He released a morbid kind of laugh, reaching for the glass.
“Definitely a conversation for darkened corridors.” He downed in a single gulp what Theo had meant as a drink for sipping.
“Should I invite my demon? It loves the dark,” Theo asked, trying to get a feel for the severity of Draco’s mood.
He could feel Draco rolling his eyes in the dark, setting the glass down on the granite floor with a loud clink. The lack of grace told Theo this was not Draco’s first drink of the evening.
“Should I assume that dinner with team Gryffindor did not go well?”
A sharp flash of blond hair in the darkness, jerked from left to right. Theo heard a pained inhale chased by an explosive exhale. On the tail end, a strangled sob.
“Fuck,” Draco breathed, voice rough, as Theo imagined he did everything in his power to hold himself together.
Theo simply summoned the tumbler from Draco’s side of the corridor and refilled it, sending it back in the darkness. Theo’s eyes had adjusted enough that he could see the defeated slump in the silhouette of Draco’s shoulders.
“Weasley was there,” Draco finally said.
“Fuck,” Theo agreed.
Draco hadn’t outright said it to Theo, but he knew the timeline well enough. If Hermione had lost six years of her memory, which included her entire friendship with Theo and romantic relationship with Draco, that also put her squarely back into a time where she was in a relationship with Ronald Weasley.
Theo felt like vomiting out of sympathy. And then once again out of guilt for even daring to feel sorry for himself in all this.
“Do I need to plant a portkey on weasel to send him to the middle of an ocean somewhere?” Theo asked, only partly joking.
The following silence told him Draco might actually be considering murder.
“Lavender is pregnant.”
“So, no? Or after his wife gives birth?”
“Fuck, Theo.”
“I know, mate.”
Theo immediately regretted saying it. He didn’t know. He couldn’t come close to knowing, with or without his own personal brand of nightmares about the situation that generated a very Theo-specific sort of guilt.
He grasped for anything to shift the topic.
“Are you still sleeping on that sofa?”
He’d hoped perhaps for a chuckle, a dip into morbid humor that served Theo so well. Instead, the dark silhouette across from Theo stilled, not even breathing. Theo held his own breath, waiting, a grotesque, twisted sort of anticipation swelling inside him with an impulse towards inappropriate humor. Anything to shove the discomfort away.
“She can barely even speak to me,” Draco finally said in a voice so quiet Theo nearly missed it. “What do you think?”
“A yes to sofa sleeping arrangements then, got it.”
Theo grimaced in the aftermath of that confirmation. He jolted at the sound of Draco’s glass sliding across the hard ground.
“Another,” Draco said. His voice already heavy, weighed down by drink and despair.
“How much have you had tonight?” Theo asked carefully, already opening the bottle.
“Pour me a fucking drink, Theo. My wife thinks she loves her ex.”
“Right.”
Theo sent the glass back across the hallway, refilled per the request turned command. In the passing silence, Theo could barely stand the roar of Draco’s thoughts across from him, practically shouting into the void. The stench of something in the darkness, his something with teeth, crept up on him. He couldn’t quite tell if he imagined it or if he could actually trust his own senses. Either way, he ignored it, breathed through his mouth, redirected his thoughts towards sunlight and garden parties and suggestive eye contact with strangers in crowded bars.
“You won her once, you know,” Theo tried, needing to break the silence.
Draco’s hollow laugh echoed with painful sharpness through the long corridor, striking with force at marble busts and silenced portraits.
“Hermione can’t be won. She has to be convinced. She requires evidence. A specific set of circumstances...” Draco’s words had started to blur, slurred on a heavy tongue. “I can’t make those circumstances again.”
“So make new ones.”
“I don’t know how,” Draco whispered in a voice Theo hadn’t heard in years. It was the same voice that followed him around all of sixth year. A voice just a breath away from defeat. Theo didn’t know how to help his friend then, and he didn’t know how to help him now.
So he poured him another drink and sat in a dark hallway until the sun started to rise on a different, but no less difficult, day.
—
Friday: February 23rd, 2007
“Drinks tonight?” Blaise asked without preamble as he apparated into the Nott gardens where Theo had been desperately seeking a midday nap. Theo cracked an eye from where he lay on a lounge chair. Blaise tilted his head, watching Theo and then added, “Wouldn’t you say February isn’t ideal garden weather?”
“Warming charm,” Theo said, wrangling whatever maudlin mood he’d been indulging in and reentering the stage play of his life. “And no, not tonight. I’m doing so much drinking with Draco I can’t even consider doing more with you and Pansy.”
Blaise shrugged, sitting on the adjacent lounger and casting his own warming charm.
“Inviting yourself to my Friday afternoon of dramatic lounging, are you?” Theo asked, entirely unsurprised.
“You have too much free time.”
“Managing an empty manor is grueling work, I’m exhausted, honestly. Hence my garden nap.” Theo peeked at Blaise, who looked completely at ease with his feet up on the lounge chair, angled towards Theo, watching him intently. “Now is a great time for a cigarette, barely anything worth ruining out here. The upholstery on these loungers is barely older than I am, worth nothing.”
The corner of Blaise’s mouth twitched. A fleeting example of something approximately a smile, at least in Theo’s book. Theo couldn’t help but grin, watching it happen, which only forced Blaise to roll his eyes, the tug at the corners of his mouth pulling wider, entering smirk territory.
“Hardly seems worth it, in that case,” Blaise said, looking away and leaning his head back.
“Want me to call an elf for tea?” Theo asked, still watching his friend, stubborn arse always refused to give even an inch.
“Have you thought about getting a job?”
Theo blinked. That was not a yes or no to tea. That was an entirely different conversation in and of itself.
“I’m not qualified for anything.” Theo shrugged, allowing himself a heavy sigh and dramatic roll of his eyes.
“You got nearly as many NEWTS as Granger.”
“Yes, well, my practical skills—my tinkering—is decidedly illegal unless sanctioned by the Ministry and they are not going to hire me.” Theo sat up, swinging his legs over the side of his chaise to rest on the ground, facing Blaise. He cocked a brow and gestured to himself, head to toe. “Death Eater progeny, entirely unhireable.”
“But very fashionable,” Blaise countered. “New shirt?”
“Your interest in my wardrobe rivals Pansy’s obsession with Granger’s, you know that?”
“You should consider investing in more blues, good for your coloring.”
Theo snorted, shaking his head. “You need a new hobby.”
Instead of continuing the conversation, as most people might have done, Blaise simply offered a blasé kind of shrug, shoulder lifting, head tilting, brows rising and falling, all to say if you say so.
Well, Theo certainly did say so.
“I miss trawling with Granger,” Theo said instead of pushing, seeking something banal to power the conversation he was already going to have to do all the heavy lifting in. Blaise rarely seemed in the mood to converse with actual words; today appeared to be no exception. Boyfriend hunting with Granger in Diagon Alley served as a plenty light hearted conversation topic.
“Why not just go without her?”
Theo mock gasped, hand pressed to his heart in outrage.
“And sully the sanctity of our traditions without her present? She would never forgive such a transgression. Our Granger may be a benevolent mistress, but even her magnanimity has its limits.”
“Sometimes I wonder if you hear yourself when you speak.”
“And sometimes I wonder how you manage to engage in full conversation without me,” Theo shot, mostly playful.
Blaise shrugged again, always fucking shrugging. Such a non-committal excuse of a response to half the things Theo said. He sent a glare in Blaise’s direction, a well-established signal that he was doing it again and needed to actually use his gods damned words.
Blaise rolled his eyes instead of shrugging and Theo very seriously considered sending a stinging jinx in his direction. But he’d left his wand on the table just out of reach and he was far too lazy to reach for it.
“No boyfriend hunting without Granger, then?” Blaise asked with a practiced kind of disinterest in his tone, the kind of tone he used whenever Theo forced him to converse beyond his preferred limits. He’d invited himself to Theo’s attempts at dramatic mid-afternoon lounging, the least he could do was participate in five minutes of conversation.
“Hardly in the mood,” Theo said. “With everything going on, can you say you’re interested in trying to find some girl to sleep with?”
Blaise’s brows came together, a crease between them betraying a deep thought scrawled inside his skull, waiting for Blaise to interpret it by speech.
“Most certainly not interested,” he said finally, slowly, and as opaque as ever. Honestly, having a conversation with Blaise sometimes felt like talking to a frustratingly sage but silent brick wall. If only there were a knowable series of steps—three up, two across and Diagon awaits—to get him to open up. There was more there, Theo knew it, in almost everything Blaise said. But he had to obscure it with all his not-quite-Seer layers of obfuscation and truly, who had the time for all that?
So Theo did the generous thing and agreed. At least for now.
“Right. It’s not a good time,” Theo said.
“It usually isn’t.”
—
Another Friday: March 16th, 2007
It started innocently enough.
By the time March rolled around, Theo had nearly driven himself mad talking to the dark corners of the manor, tinkering with specialized portkey designs—with devastatingly accurate results, thank you very much—and ignoring all of Blaise’s subtly unsubtle hints about getting a job or revamping his wardrobe.
Out of options to occupy himself in a productive way, he offered to reinstate Friday night drinks, which served the additional benefit of getting Pansy to quit complaining about needing her back-up friends.
“I swear, I’m this close to kidnapping her,” Pansy snapped as she stepped through the Floo, holding up her painted fingertips to illustrate the infinitesimal amount of space between Draco’s wishes and her own willpower.
“Who, Granger?” Theo asked, just to be certain they weren’t considering a different kidnapping he knew nothing about. He knew he was a bit out of the loop, but he wasn’t often that far behind on Pansy’s comings and goings.
“Of course, Granger. My best friend who Draco is holding hostage from me, like they’re the only ones affected by this.” She shrugged off her coat and handed it to a house elf. “I mean honestly, this whole story seems a little far-fetched to me, anyway,” Pansy continued, accepting a drink delivered by Blaise, who only raised a questioning brow towards Theo at Pansy’s small tirade. “Part of me thinks they’re just making it up to avoid us,” she concluded with a petulant huff as she landed in a seventeenth-century jacquard armchair Theo had already resigned himself to selling since Blaise’s arrival that evening, cigarette in hand.
“Pans,” Theo said, as serious as he could manage without wanting to cringe away from it. “Trust me. Draco is here almost every night. They are not making this up.”
Pansy pursed her lips before releasing a long sigh. “Yes, I know. I just—needed to say it. It’s all so—ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous.” She conveyed her conclusion of ridiculousness as if such a thing was the most offensive version of events imaginable.
Theo didn’t have the energy or the liquor stores to entertain a brooding session this evening, not with Draco slowly drinking him dry in his own desperation. As master of the manor, Theo forced the people and the conversation within it to his will.
“No more moping for you, Parkinson. Good times are the only times to be had here.” Excepting, of course, for all the times that did not include that moment, other Friday nights, and any time Blaise invited himself over. All the other moments, objectively speaking, probably could not be legally classified as good times. Theo might go so far as to say they were generally bad times. Always had been, probably always would be.
And even as he forced his friends to socialize with him under a banner of false levity, ignoring comments from Blaise that his liquor collection could use some updating, which was entirely Draco Malfoy's fault, to be sure, Theo could not shake the words that Pansy had unknowingly branded into his brain.
I’m this close to kidnapping her.
In concept, it wasn’t the worst idea to ever cross Theo’s mind.
And so he did it.
—
The Vernal Equinox, not a Friday: March 21st, 2007
It went better than expected. Granger remembered his name from school: win number one. She didn’t hex him after he’d delivered a little extra meddling for Draco’s sake: win number two. And she’d even gone home and put their conversation to work, judging by Draco’s near incoherent glee when he stepped through Theo’s Floo later that night, overcome by the simple fact that his wife had used his given name: win number three.
All those things considered, Theo should have been in an excellent mood. Draco had slipped back through the Floo mere hours before to return to his constant vigil on that wretched couch, leaving Theo pleasantly buzzed off exorbitantly expensive scotch and feeling like a generally decent friend.
The shadows disagreed. Haunting. Taunting. Vicious, vile, cruel. The thing with teeth hiding in the darkness usually spared Theo its presence outside the workshop, reserving the dissection of his character and his deservedness of his station in life for the hallows of Nott Manor’s most secret, hidden places.
But sometimes, when the thing with teeth felt restless, especially displeased with Theo’s continued existence, it wandered through the other shadows in his ancestral home, taking stock of the other ways in which Theo had failed. Not just in experimental magic, but in maintaining a manor, disciplining his house elves, acting as a proper friend. Anything and everything that might besmirch his character or deflate his confidence.
Theo woke, heart pounding, a violent beating against his ribs. He couldn’t have slept for very long, the sun had yet to rise and he could still feel the pleasant buzz and warmth of alcohol swimming through his veins. His stomach turned, his skin clammy.
He felt the thing with teeth watching in the darkness.
Theo never knew what to do in these moments, lying paralyzed in his lush, comfortable bed in his enormous family home, comfortable and wealthy and wanting for nothing, yet—drenched in fear, tense with a flame-like anxiety surging beneath his skin.
To get his wand and cast a lumos? Drive light into the darkness? Or to wait it out and hope the thing that stalked him passed, oblivious to Theo’s awareness of it in the dark.
He tried to control his breathing, catching and stuttering and scratching against every muscle in his throat and every tooth in his mouth. Fitting that the darkness with teeth made him suddenly so aware of his own.
“I know you’re there,” Theo said to the blackness, a rush of alcohol and anxiety running him hot against his expensive sheets. “It’s amazing, the smell. I can always tell when you’re around, even though there’s nothing real about you to notice.”
The darkness did not answer. It rarely did. But sometimes, Theo found he liked to be heard anyway, so he said the things he thought. The things he never said when he had the chance.
“Do you have a problem with my helping Draco?” Theo went on, staring at the ceiling above him. Exactly which part of the darkness the thing with teeth lurked in didn’t matter, Theo could pick any darkness and feel heard all the same.
“Or is it his situation that’s offensive?”
A pause, a breath, an attempt to pull sight from the darkness. He couldn’t see anything, not beyond the nonsense tricks his eyes played on him in the absence of other input.
“Or is it the other thing?”
Theo wondered if his heart might burst from his chest, a spontaneous and violent introduction to the outside world by way of forcible exit.
“I can’t help it,” he insisted in the dark. “I didn’t mean to think it.”
He hated the sob that tore through his throat, the one he tried to smash back inside with the palm of his hand, the one he clawed at his chest to quiet.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said again. The stench of the thing with teeth had gone. Even something so vile as his demon couldn’t bear the revulsion of Theo’s disgust.
It had been a passing thought, an intrusive one, errant and unwanted and nevertheless as much a part of Theo consciousness as his desire for a good scotch or his affinity for Crookshanks.
When he’d left Granger that afternoon, after what had ultimately been a lovely day reintroducing her to what their friendship looked like, he couldn’t help but wonder how nice it might be if he’d been the one to lose his memories, especially the difficult ones. If he could forget, not just six years, but more. The war, his father, his mother’s death. All of it.
And he hated himself for having thought it the moment it blinked into existence inside his mind. Because he was intimately familiar with the pain such an experience had caused his friends, and himself.
And yet—he’d thought it anyway. And he couldn’t stop thinking it, pulled thin but not snapping, stretched between disgust and desire. He hated himself for wishing to forget. And he couldn’t stop himself from wishing for it.