Chapter Text
"Malfoy. Visitor."
It took him a moment to get up.
It always did, now. Five years of sea air through a wall. Five years of food that would have been sent back from any table he'd ever sat at. His body ached in the mornings. His body ached in the evenings too, just differently.
The guard did not wait for him, and did not slow, and Lucius followed at the pace he was given.
He wondered who the visitor was. His solicitor, most likely.
Or, and here he permitted himself a small private warmth, it might be Greengrass. Or Greengrass's man. It had not even been a day since the letter, and a letter of that kind is a door left ajar. Cyrus had never in his life been a patient man; it would be entirely in character for him to want to strike a deal before the demand grew, or send someone, to sit down and begin the real conversation.
One would not wish to appear eager. One would observe, first, that Draco is much in demand. One would let it be understood that there have been enquiries, (which there have not) and then one would allow oneself to be persuaded, slowly, over two or three exchanges, into precisely the arrangement one had wanted from the outset.
My son is unmarried, he thought, and there are matters to discuss.
He was, in this, entirely correct.
Or the visitor could be Narcissa.
He allowed himself the thought for precisely a moment. She came when she could. She came less than she once had. He had never asked her why, because he knew why, and because a man had to keep one or two things un-said or he would have nothing left that was his.
Still. He arranged his face. He straightened his back. He had worn the same grey prison wool for five years and there was a way of wearing it, and he had found it, and he would not have his wife see him any other way.
The guard opened the door.
And the mudblood was sitting at the table.
She had her ankles crossed and a document case on the table under one hand. She was sitting the way a woman sits in her own office, yet she was in a room built to hold the worst people in Britain, on an island in the middle of the North Sea. And she was smiling at him with what appeared to be genuine warmth.
Something went through Lucius Malfoy that took him a moment to identify, because he had not felt it in five years and had rather assumed it had been taken from him along with everything else.
It was anticipation.
He crossed the room. He sat down opposite her, unhurried, and settled his hands on the table, and let the silence do its work, because the first man to speak in a negotiation is the man who wants it more.
She let him have it. She seemed, if anything, to be enjoying it too.
"I am experiencing," Lucius said at last, "a most peculiar sense of deja vu, Miss Granger."
And Hermione Granger laughed.
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
The cell beneath the Ministry had been clean. That was what he remembered. Clean stone and a folded blanket and no cruelty anywhere in it, which was worse than cruelty, because it meant they had not put him there to break him. They had simply put him down, the way one sets a thing aside when one's hands are full.
He had known what was coming. That was the trouble. He had been to Azkaban before, eight months of it, after the Department of Mysteries, and it had taken something out of him that had never grown back. The Dark Lord had opened those doors and Lucius had been grateful, and that was a thing he did not permit himself to look at directly, then or ever.
So he had sat in a clean room for a fortnight with a dread that had a face.
And then the door had opened, and Potter's Mudblood had walked in.
He had known her at once. Everyone had known that face; it had been on every wall in Britain, UNDESIRABLE NUMBER TWO in letters four inches high, and his own hand had signed the order that paid for the printing.
But he had known her longer than that. He had known her as a complaint. Five years of them. Granger got top marks again. Granger. Granger. Granger. His son at twelve, incandescent. Lucius Malfoy had been living with this girl's name at his breakfast table for the better part of a decade. He had been living with his son's loathing of her (which he had been, if he was honest, rather proud of) for just as long.
He had met her once, and remembered it perfectly.
Flourish and Blotts. The Lockhart signing. That preening fraud on his dais with his teeth out, and half of wizarding Britain queuing to be lied to, and a small bushy-haired child clutching her books to her chest and gazing up at the man with her entire stupid heart in her face.
That was the girl. That was the brightest witch of her age.
He had never bought it. And who had awarded her the laurel in the first place? Dumbledore, presumably. A sentimentalist. A man who had spent a lifetime collecting strays, the werewolf, the half-giant, the Weasleys. Calling the collection virtue, as though a thing became precious by being pitied. He had gathered up every broken creature in Britain and told each of them in turn that they were remarkable, and they had loved him for it. Not one of them ever asked why a man should need so many people to be indebted to him.
He had called that girl brilliant for the same reason he called the half-giant gentle and the werewolf good. Because she was his.
There was nothing bright about her. She had mud-coloured eyes and mud-coloured hair, and she had spent her girlhood following Potter into rooms that would have killed a sensible person. Four months ago she had lain on the floor of his drawing room and declined to give up her friends while his sister-in-law took her apart.
Some would call that brave.
He called it a total absence of self-preservation, which the sentimental mistake for courage.
A guard had come in behind her carrying a chair.
She sat. She crossed her ankles. She set a document case across her knees.
She was a young woman in a plain coat with a mended cuff, alone in a locked stone room with a Death Eater, four months after his family had nearly killed her on his floor.
Yes, he had thought, settling in. Definitely a stupid girl.
"Mr Malfoy."
"Miss Granger."
She let the silence run for eight seconds. Then she said:
"I'm going to make you an offer, and you're going to want to insult me before you take it, and I'd rather you got that out of the way now, because I have somewhere to be at four."
He laughed. It came out of him before he could stop it, cracked far too loud for a room that size. He heard it die against the stone and did not entirely recognise it as his own.
"Forgive me," he said, and did not mean it, and knew she knew.
"There's nothing to forgive." She opened the case. "Your trial is next week. You'll be convicted."
"You have Yaxley," he said, because it seemed important to be seen to fight. "You have Dolohov. You have Rowle, and Selwyn, and half the Sacred Twenty-Eight in the cells on this corridor. I am hardly short of company."
"They have plenty of monsters," she agreed. "They're short of a face."
He said nothing.
"Yaxley tortured people. Dolohov killed them. Everyone understands a monster; the public will watch them fall and feel nothing but relief." She looked up. "You stood beside Cornelius Fudge and told him there was nothing to worry about. You were in that graveyard. You were at the ritual that brought him back, and then you went on to dine with the Minister for Magic and told him to his face that a child was a liar."
She said it without heat, and that was somehow worse.
"They can hate a killer for an afternoon," she said. "They'll hate you for the rest of their lives, because you are the reason nobody stopped it. And you are rich and you photograph beautifully, and there is not a family in Britain that buried someone this year who won't want to look at your face while you are sentenced."
Every word of it was true.
"You have come a long way," he said, "to tell me what I already know."
"No," she said. "I've come a long way to tell you what you don't. Which is what happens to your son."
And there it was.
She reached into the case and took out a bundle of newspapers, and tossed them at him.
They struck his chest and slid, and he caught two and let the rest go to the floor, and something in him went hot and stayed hot for a long moment afterwards, because no one had thrown anything at Lucius Malfoy in his life. He wasn't a damned House elf!
BOY WHO KILLED DUMBLEDORE FACES WIZENGAMOT.
MALFOY HEIR: "HE LET THEM IN," SAY SURVIVORS.
THE FACE OF A MURDERER.
And underneath, in a column three inches wide, a Wizengamot member Lucius had personally dined with on many occasions, explaining to a reporter that there could be no clemency for the murder of the greatest wizard of the age, that the public would not stand for it.
"Severus killed him," he said.
"I know."
"Severus killed him. My son never touched him. My son lowered his wand."
"I know that too," said Hermione Granger. "So do six people. Four of them are dead. The other two are Harry Potter and me, and Harry has not yet been asked, because nobody wants the answer." She nodded at the papers. "The rest of the country believes your son cornered Albus Dumbledore on a tower and killed him. The Prophet has printed it, and you of all people know the power the written word carries, don't you? There are children in this country who learned to read on that sentence."
Lucius found that his hands had gone white.
"They will not give him the Kiss," she went on. "The Ministry wants to appear merciful. So they'll spare him the Dementors and give him life instead. They will call it clemency. There will be photographs of the sentencing, and everyone will feel we have all become very civilized."
Life.
"He is eighteen," Lucius said.
"Yes."
She let it sit. And then, in the same reasonable voice, she took his House apart.
"Draco has no heir. If he is convicted, he never will. He is legally dead for the purposes of inheritance from the day of sentencing, and the escheat provisions run ten years, after which the vaults, the properties, and the holdings pass to the Ministry." She paused. "Along with the Malfoy seat. And the Black seat, since he holds that as well, being the last of both lines. Two votes on the Wizengamot, vacant, to be reassigned at the discretion of whichever Minister happens to be sitting."
"And you propose to prevent this," he said, when he could.
"I propose to defend him."
"You."
"Me."
"A schoolgirl."
"A war hero," she said. "Which is far more useful, and considerably harder to argue with. I'm the most popular person in Britain these days. Myself and Harry. The papers have settled on 'the Golden Girl,' which is nauseating and will not last." She shrugged. "I would like to spend it on something before it's gone."
"On my son?"
"On myself."
Lucius blinked.
"I intend to change the world, Mr Malfoy," she said, and she said it the way one states a fact of weather. "I intend to free the oppressed. And you are going to help me do it. When the time is right, I will come to you, and I will ask you for what I need, and you will give it to me."
There was silence.
And then Lucius Malfoy began, quietly, to enjoy himself.
Ah.
Because here it was, the whole shape of her, and it was so beautifully, so gratifyingly ordinary.
She wanted a vote.
Of course she did. Look at her: the mended cuff, the war medals, the causes. She was going to spend the next forty years dragging her earnest little bills into that chamber, and she had done the arithmetic, this hungry girl, and worked out that fame rots, and that in twenty years she would be a portrait in a corridor, and that the only currency in Britain that does not rot is a seat.
And there was one sitting in a cell with eight hundred years behind it.
She did not want to save his son. She wanted to own him. She wanted a Malfoy in plum robes who could not refuse her, for the rest of his natural life, voting for house-elves and muggle-born education and whatever else she dreamed up, and she had found the one instrument in wizarding law that could deliver it, and she had come to buy it from a man who was about to lose everything anyway.
It was, Lucius thought, with something dangerously close to admiration, exactly what he would have done.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"You want the seat," he said.
She simply smiled at him, and handed him a contract.
It was short. That surprised him; there were nine lines in a small, extremely legible hand, and every one of them said precisely what it said and nothing more.
If Hermione Jean Granger secures the acquittal of Draco Lucius Malfoy, the House of Malfoy shall owe her a life debt, to be called at a time of her choosing, in a form of her choosing, and the House shall not refuse.
And beneath it:
Should the House refuse, the forfeit shall not be the life of Lucius Abraxas Malfoy, which is of no value to the holder of this debt, but the total value of that life: all vaults, all properties, all holdings, all interests, entire and without exception.
He read it three times.
"A form of your choosing," he said.
"Yes."
"That is very broad."
"It is."
"You will forgive me for observing that no competent man signs an open instrument."
"You'll forgive me for observing," she said, "that you are not currently a man with alternatives."
He should have stopped there.
He would have a great deal of time, later, to consider the fact that he did not stop there, and to construct various explanations, none of which were true. The true one was very simple and he never once permitted himself to think it.
The true one was that he had been sitting in a clean room for a fortnight with nothing to do but be afraid, and a girl had walked in and offered him a negotiation, and for the first time in months Lucius Malfoy had been a man at a table again, and he had not wanted it to end.
So he read the forfeit clause, and found it faintly gauche, the sort of belt-and-braces over-lawyering a young operator resorts to before she has learned that these things are settled between gentlemen with a handshake and a favour. And he considered the terms of the thing she was actually asking for, which was a vote, and which he could live with. And then he did the arithmetic, the way he had done arithmetic all his life.
Refuse, and Draco is buried alive, and the vaults go to a committee, and the seats go to a committee, and the name ends, and I sit in a cell for the rest of my life having lost every single thing I have ever touched.
Sign, and my son walks free, and holds his seat, and one day a girl in a cheap coat comes and tells me how to vote.
It was not a decision. It was barely a choice.
And there was, Salazar help him, a certain grim pleasure in it: the seat survives. His son would sit in that chamber. The Malfoy vote would still be counted, when the counting was done. He would be in a cell and his family would be in ruins, and the House of Malfoy would still have one hand on the wheel of the world.
Even if the hand was being guided by a mudblood.
He could live with that. Lucius Malfoy could live with being outmanoeuvred. He had never been able to live with being irrelevant.
There was nothing to sign on.
He looked about the cell for a moment, absurdly, as though a desk might have arrived; and then he set the parchment flat against his own knee, and bent over it, in his shirtsleeves, on a bench, in a cell beneath the Ministry, with eight hundred years of House Malfoy under his hand.
She did not offer a quill. There was no quill.
She simply lifted two fingers, and did not speak, and did not reach for a wand.
And his thumb sliced opened.
It was a small cut, clean, entirely painless, and it had been done from three feet away by a girl who had not said a word. Lucius Malfoy felt his whole face begin to move and stopped it, ruthlessly, the way one stops a horse.
Wandless. Silent.
He looked at the bead of blood on his thumb for perhaps a second and a half.
"Clever," he said.
And pressed it to the parchment, and felt the magic take: warm, and final, and closing around his wrist like a hand.
And Hermione Granger said, "Thank you," and put the parchment in her case, and left, and the lock turned over behind her.
And Lucius sat alone in a clean stone room among the newspapers on the floor, and thought, with the small, pleasant satisfaction of a man who has closed a difficult transaction on favourable terms:
Poor girl. She thinks she got the better of me.
AZKABAN. NOW.
"I am experiencing a most peculiar sense of deja vu, Miss Granger."
And Hermione Granger laughed. It was a warm sound, and entirely genuine, and it did not belong within a hundred miles of this building.
"Yes," she said. "I imagine you are." She folded her hands. "Though this time, I've come to collect."
Ah.
Five years, and here it was, and he found, to his considerable interest, that his heart was beating rather faster than it had any business doing.
He sat back. He permitted himself, at long last, the ghost of the old drawl.
"I confess I had wondered what took you so long," he said. "Did it finally occur to you that one vote would not be enough? Have you spent five years building your coalition, Miss Granger? Gathering the smaller houses, so that when you came to spend the Malfoy seat it might actually purchase you something?"
He was enjoying himself. He was aware that he was enjoying himself and had decided not to be ashamed of it. It had been five years since anyone had come to this island to want something from him, and the wanting was better than food.
"Or," he said, "perhaps you simply waited for the price to recover. I could hardly blame you. The name is beginning to carry weight again, is it not? My son has done rather well. One hears things, even here."
One heard, for instance, that Cyrus Greengrass had written a letter.
It had come with yesterday's post. Lucius had read it five times. All delicacy and old-friend warmth, all remarking-upon and merely-observing: how gratifying to see young Draco restoring the family name. And still unmarried, one notes, at four and twenty.
He had not yet replied. He had been composing the reply. He had been savouring the reply, turning the sentences over, because it was the first letter in five years that had treated Lucius Malfoy as a man who still had something to trade.
He had not, yet, put quill to parchment.
"So," he said, spreading his hands, magnanimous, delighted, a man receiving an old rival in his own drawing room. "You have come to spend your debt, and I am, as ever, at your disposal. Tell me, Miss Granger. What is it we are voting for?"
Hermione Granger tilted her head.
"Oh, Lucius," she said. "Whatever do you mean?"
He blinked.
"I have nothing before the Wizengamot," she said. "No bill. No motion. Nothing requiring a vote, from your House or anyone else's." She smiled at him, pleasantly, patiently, and it was the same smile, exactly the same smile, and five years too late Lucius Malfoy understood that he had never once, in his life, been able to read it.
"I am here," she said, "for precisely what I told you I came for, when we made our agreement. 'To change the world. To free the oppressed.'"
And Lucius Malfoy laughed at her.
He laughed, and it was almost fond, and he shook his head at the sheer unkillable absurdity of the girl, sitting in Azkaban in a good coat with her ankles crossed, still saying it, still believing it, and he said:
"And tell me, you silly girl. How exactly do you plan to use me to do that?"
Hermione Granger looked at him.
"By giving me Draco's hand in marriage, of course."