Chapter Text
The thin blue folder on Hermione Granger’s desk looked deceptively ordinary. Across the front, in gold Ministry lettering, it read: Post-War Wizarding Rehabilitation Pilot Program.
Only four participants. It sounded modest, almost negligible. But Hermione knew the stakes were enormous. If this pilot succeeded, it would be rolled out across all of Britain. The future of hundreds of broken, damaged witches and wizards rested entirely on how these four people fared.
Hermione let out a long, unsteady breath and opened the first file.
Penelope Blackwood
Age: 28
House: Ravenclaw (graduated with honors)
Blood status: Pure-blood
Last 6 years: Inpatient psychiatric ward, St. Mungo’s Hospital
Notable trait: Legilimens
Hermione read a few lines, frowning with a deep pang of sympathy. “Six years…” she murmured to herself. “Poor girl.”
She turned the page. The silence of her office broke with a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Hermione called.
The secretary stepped in. “Miss Granger, Mr. Bengal would like you in his office in half an hour.”
“All right. Thank you.”
Hermione returned to the remaining files, determined to finish. The next one belonged to George Weasley.
She went still. The dry parchment text vanished as memories surged up—Fred, Ron, the Weasley family in tears, and the ghost of a smile George hadn’t truly worn since the Battle of Hogwarts. The file laid out, in clinical detail, a severe and pervasive psychological disorder stemming from the loss of his brother. Ron had all but begged her to secure George a place here. The family was desperate; they didn’t know how to reach him anymore.
After a long, aching pause, Hermione forced herself to open the next folder.
Draco Malfoy
“Merlin’s beard…” she whispered, her voice failing her.
She stared at the name, reading it again, as though the ink might somehow rearrange itself. Former Auror. Convicted criminal. Azkaban survivor. Unstable and prone to aggression.
Hermione closed the file without a word, her hands trembling against the cardstock. She’d braced herself for anyone. For Pansy Parkinson—whose short, brutal file sat at the very bottom of the stack: victim of domestic abuse. She’d even braced herself for a stranger like Penelope Blackwood.
But not him. Not Draco Malfoy.
The next morning, the heavy sitting room of the designated house offered none of the warmth its crackling fire seemed to promise. Hermione stood by the hearth, clutching the files so tightly the folders crumpled beneath her damp fingers.
Theodore Nott, her fellow coordinator, noticed the frantic motion of her hands.
“Hermione. Breathe,” he said gently, stepping closer. “You’re gripping those files like they’re a shield.”
“I’m used to reports, Theo,” she admitted, her voice taut. “Paper doesn’t look at you like you’re the enemy. Paper doesn’t have a shattered mind. I’m terrified of getting this wrong—of breaking them even further.”
“We won’t,” Theo murmured, though the tension in his own shoulders betrayed him.
The fire suddenly roared to life in a burst of vivid emerald flame.
A girl stepped out of it. She was short, with a mass of black curls cut through by one sharp, striking streak of grey. Her skin was so pale it looked almost glassy—as if she might shatter under a heavy enough stare. Her deep, dark eyes darted feverishly around the room before settling on Hermione. She studied them both closely.
“I’m Penelope, nice to meet you!” the girl said in a rush, her words tumbling breathlessly over one another. “Am I first? What now—do I wait? Can I sit? I just… I’m not sure how this works. At St. Mungo’s everything ran on a strict schedule. Though—why am I even explaining? You already know all this.”
Hermione’s surprise dissolved instantly into professional warmth.
“Hello, Penelope. Sit, please—wherever’s comfortable,” Hermione said, stepping forward and gesturing to a deep leather armchair. “This is Theodore Nott, my colleague. Don’t worry, there are no strict protocols today.”
Penelope all but collapsed into the chair, though she didn’t relax—her fingers dug into the leather arms. She breathed in the scent of pine wood deeply, eyes closed.
“It smells like… my grandmother’s house,” she whispered.
The fragile quiet lasted only a moment before the fire roared again.
Draco Malfoy stepped onto the rug. The temperature in the room seemed to drop instantly. His cold, sharp grey eyes found Hermione at once, ignoring Theo entirely.
Hermione’s breath caught. For one horrible second, the sitting room dissolved, replaced by the great hall of Malfoy Manor—Bellatrix’s mad laughter echoing, the cold edge of silver at her throat. She forced her chin up, but felt her fingers begin to tremble again. Draco noticed. A faint, bitter, well-worn smirk touched his mouth.
“Granger,” he drawled, low and flat. “Should’ve guessed the Ministry would send its golden girl to babysit the deviants.”
“Mr. Malfoy,” her voice wavered on the first syllable, but she steadied it. “This is a rehabilitation center, not a prison. I’m not here as your warden.”
Theo stepped quickly into the space between them, breaking the suffocating eye contact, and clapped a firm hand on Draco’s shoulder.
“Draco. Glad you made it.”
Malfoy’s gaze shifted to Nott, his shoulders easing by a fraction.
“Theo. At least there’s one familiar face without a halo of righteousness hovering over it.”
Within the hour, the rest of the group arrived. George slipped out of the fireplace in silence, accepting Hermione’s tight embrace without a word, and Pansy appeared soon after, pale but composed under Theo’s warm greeting.
They now sat around the large wooden kitchen table. The introductions were done, and Hermione laid out the ground rules: no alcohol, no nicotine, and daily morning transfers to the Ministry for department rotations.
“The schedules aren’t finalized yet,” Theo explained, leaning against the counter. “Tomorrow’s your first day. Does anyone have a particular preference?”
“The Potions department would suit me best,” Draco said dryly, turning an untouched cup of black tea in his hands.
While Hermione and Theo took notes, Penelope leaned slightly toward Draco. Her dark eyes glittered with an unsettling intensity.
“They put you in Azkaban for two years because you were brewing illegal potions and selling them on the black market, weren’t they?” she murmured.
Draco’s head snapped toward her, his eyes narrowing dangerously.
“How do you know that? Don’t answer that, actually. Look at Granger—she looks like she has absolutely no idea what she’s about to be dealing with.”
“I can read the Daily Prophet, Malfoy,” Penelope replied, a faint, cryptic smile playing at her lips.
Draco frowned, studying the sharp angles of her face, some strange flicker of recognition stirring in the back of his mind.
“You look remarkably like someone… I can’t place it.”
“Oh, you’re not the first to say that,” Penelope murmured, a barely-there wink following the words.
She turned her gaze to the window, her thoughts drifting for a moment to the shadow of her father. An Unspeakable. A man who’d spent his whole life buried in the Department of Mysteries, hidden behind state secrets, quietly mastering the darkest arts at home. A man who had looked into her mind until she learned to look into everyone else’s.
By the time the meeting wrapped up, George had quietly asked for a rotation near the Auror Office, and Pansy expressed a preference for the Archives, favoring old parchment over living people.
“Well, then,” Hermione said, rising. “We’ll have everything ready by tomorrow morning. We’ll leave you to settle in.”
Once the coordinators vanished into the fireplace, a heavy silence settled over the kitchen. For a full fifteen minutes, no one said a word. The reality of their shared confinement hung thick in the air. Pansy murmured a quiet word of sympathy to George, who nodded before heading up to his room. Draco paced the perimeter of the room like a caged animal, then made his way up to the third floor.
Penelope walked into her new bedroom on the second floor and stopped. The room was spacious, done in deep blues and silvery greys—a quiet nod to Ravenclaw. A large canopy bed stood at its center, but after six years of sleeping in a sterile, white, brightly lit hospital ward, the sheer comfort of the space felt almost unnervingly loud.
She unpacked her modest belongings with a flick of her wand, took a long shower, and changed into a soft robe. Sleep was impossible. Too much freedom. Too many other people’s thoughts had brushed against her mind in a single day. She sat on the edge of the mattress, trembling faintly in the dark.
A soft, hesitant knock sounded at the door.
Penelope crossed the room and unlocked it. “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Pansy,” came a fragile voice from the dim hallway.
Penelope opened the door wider without a word. Pansy stood there, biting her lower lip, looking smaller than she ever had at Hogwarts.
“Look… I know we’re not exactly close, and this whole thing is unbelievably strange,” Pansy said, eyes fixed on the floor. “But… could I stay in your room tonight? I just can’t be alone right now. It makes me feel… awful.”
Penelope studied her for a long moment. Then she stepped back silently, motioning her in.
“Come in.”
Pansy stepped over the threshold uncertainly. “Thank you…”
Penelope smiled—soft and genuine, the silver streak in her hair catching a glint of moonlight.
“Fair warning, I’m absolutely terrible at heart-to-hearts.”
For the first time all day, the corner of Pansy’s mouth lifted, just barely.
It was already three in the morning, and Draco still hadn’t managed to sleep. He lay staring at the ceiling, feeling irritation curdle inside him. What was he even doing here? Some gathering of freaks. And what galled him most was that Hermione Granger—still that insufferably proper Ministry girl—was now going to decide what he did and when.
Swearing under his breath, Draco got up, threw on a shirt, and headed for the kitchen, hoping to find at least a scrap of peace.
But the kitchen wasn’t empty.
“What are you doing here?” Draco snapped, stopping in the doorway, eyes narrowed.
Penelope, seated at the table, didn’t even flinch.
“Drinking tea. What, is that against Granger’s rules too?”
“Is there anything stronger than tea in this house?” Draco stepped further in, scanning the dark room.
Penelope stood, a spark of interest lighting her eyes.
“I think I saw something, hold on… What, can’t sleep? Bed too soft?” she said, mock-sweet, already rifling through the kitchen cupboards one by one.
Draco tensed at first, gathering his thoughts to throw up a mental shield, but the girl spun to face him before he could.
“Don’t bother, it won’t work on me anyway,” she said, and turned back to her search as if nothing had happened. “Oh, look at that. Seems like no one properly checked this house before we moved in.”
With that, Penelope triumphantly pulled a dusty bottle of firewhisky from the back of a cabinet and set it on the table, beside two glasses.
Draco didn’t move. He watched her with a heavy, almost furious stare—the kind that would have unsettled most people.
“How do you know about Azkaban? It was never in any papers. The Ministry sealed the file.”
Penelope sighed and began pouring the amber liquid.
“Relax. I read your thoughts. Not on purpose, I swear. When you first stepped out of the fireplace, I noticed the way you looked at Granger. You were genuinely enjoying how flustered and scared she seemed. And from there it just… followed. Purely professional curiosity. But I don’t do it often. It’s exhausting.”
She looked up at him, and the sarcasm had drained from her eyes.
“Where did you learn to shield your mind, anyway, Draco? I can feel it when someone tries to get in. At the hospital, they did it constantly. Took me a long time to learn how to fight it off.”
A thin, bitter smile crossed Malfoy’s lips.
“Bellatrix Lestrange taught me. My aunt. She was quite the expert, you know—getting inside people’s heads and tearing them apart from there.”
Penelope’s hand jerked. A thin stream of strong alcohol spilled past the glass, pooling onto the dark wood of the table.
“Oh—sorry. Here.”
She pushed the glass toward him hastily, trying to hide the sudden tremor in her fingers, and picked up her own. She needed, desperately, to change the subject—to keep the ghosts of her own past at bay.
“So… what was it like? Azkaban?”
Draco took the glass, turned it in his hands, and looked Penelope straight in the eye.
“What was the psych ward like?”
Neither answered. No words could have captured what either of them had lived through. They drank in silence, letting the burn of the alcohol drown out the memories.
Penelope set her empty glass down on the table. She was looking out the window at the dark garden, but before her eyes, one single name still hung, cold enough to freeze her blood.
Bellatrix.