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When you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? 

Maxine Hong Kingston

You are Asian! Your brain forgets sometimes. But then your face reminds you.

Charles Yu

NARCISSA BLACK, EIGHT YEARS OLD

When Andromeda and Bellatrix were at Hogwarts, Narcissa was all alone. Father spent every day Andromeda and Bellatrix were away locked in his office, leaving Narcissa with the house elves and the family portraits. Sometimes Aunt Walburga brought Sirius and Regulus over, but they were both babies, and—worse—boys. 

Playing in the portrait hall was forbidden, but if Narcissa was quiet, the elves wouldn’t tell her father. The Blacks were not warm people, and their portraits were not good company. Narcissa’s mother’s portrait was of a slender, regal woman in a green qipao so dark it was nearly black, so still she looked like a Muggle painting. Narcissa sat in front of it for hours and her mother barely spared her a word. When she did speak she looked at Narcissa like she was looking through her and spoke in quiet, formal Mandarin. Sometimes she spoke in Shanghainese, which Narcissa didn’t understand at all. 

Narcissa’s mother died when she was born, which Bella reminded her of constantly. “That’s why Father doesn’t like you,” she would say. Andromeda would scold her, but she never said it wasn’t true, which meant that Bella was right. Andromeda was sort of like Narcissa’s mother, even though she was only six years older. According to Bella, she even picked Narcissa’s name. That’s why she was the only one of her cousins named after a flower instead of a star. 

“It makes you special,” Andromeda said. But she had to say that, because she chose it. 

None of the rest of the Sacred Twenty-Eight were Chinese, which Andromeda said also made them special. Their mother was from Shanghai, and the Blacks were an old Chinese family that had settled in England generations ago. Andromeda always sang to Narcissa in Mandarin before bed. She said it was a secret Black family lullaby. 

“You must remember that you are from a good family,” Aunt Walburga always said. “Your blood is very pure.” Pure Chinese and pure magic, since the dawn of civilization itself. Some people said black was the color of death, or evil, but black was the color of the rich soil of the Yangtze, the soil out of which the Black family grew and the soil that made them wealthy. 

Aunt Walburga declared Andromeda the sweetest, Bella the cleverest, Narcissa the most beautiful. Aunt Walburga was a loud woman. She spoke Mandarin so quickly Narcissa could hardly understand her, and she always sounded like she was shouting even when she wasn’t angry. She hated Muggles and Squibs and blood traitors, and she loved making dumplings. She knew charms to fold dumplings into a hundred different shapes, flowers and clouds and pinwheels stuffed with shrimp and pork and chives. 

Aunt Walburga was from Suzhou, which she said made her even more traditional than Narcissa’s mother. “Shanghai has become British,” she said. Narcissa thought that she might be homesick, because London was even more British than Shanghai. In Suzhou Aunt Walburga lived in a traditional estate with huge courtyards and ponds filled with carp and lotuses. In London she lived among Muggles. She said that the Muggles were dirty. They smoked and left trash in the street. They didn’t have magic and had to do everything by hand. 

Narcissa had never met a Muggle, not really. Usually they would Floo everywhere, but when they walked through the Muggle neighborhood around Grimmauld Place Aunt Walburga or Andromeda would tighten their grips on her hand, as if a Muggle would snatch her up. Aunt Walburga, Uncle Orion, and Bella really hated Muggles. Narcissa didn’t know how her parents felt about them, because her mother was dead and her father never talked to her. 

Mostly Narcissa felt sorry for Muggles. They had still photos and empty lives and all they did was work. When they got sick or hurt, they died. Their lives were full of suffering. How could someone cook with no magic, or clean with no house elves? Narcissa was happy to be a witch. 

Once a year, Narcissa’s father got a Portkey to Suzhou, where the girls could have new robes custom-made by Chinese tailors. In China magic was in the air, the walls, the streets. Wizards were called cultivators and their magic came from swords, not wands. The cultivators kept themselves so separate that there were entire cities with no Muggles, like Suzhou and Tianjin and Xiamen. They all wore silk and linen hanfu in every color, unlike in England, where nearly everyone wore black. They had jade talismans for everything: for luck and for love, for entering warded areas and for avoiding Muggles. Bella had one of those. It was a green snake. Andromeda had an amber love talisman carved into the shape of a phoenix, and Narcissa’s was a purple dragon. 

“The shopkeeper said it will bring you riches,” Andromeda said. 

The sisters bought hairpins that were secretly daggers and charmed bangles and fans with blades hidden along the edge of the folded paper. Their father bought them a magic treasure box that each of them could unlock in a different way. Narcissa wanted a set of tiny enchanted dolls who acted out folktales, but Bella laughed at her and said she was being a baby. 

She was back home unpacking when she found the dolls hidden in the bottom of her bag. She never thanked Andromeda, and her sister never mentioned it.

Aunt Walburga, surprisingly, liked the dolls. She said they reminded her of her childhood and she taught them more stories. Narcissa loved the one about the butterfly lovers most of all. The two of them would set the dolls up on the corner of the table and they would act out stories of love and magic and revenge while Aunt Walburga charmed the cleaver and Narcissa practiced her dumpling folds. 

In spite of everything the Black sisters were close. Andromeda scolded and Bella teased, but Narcissa loved them. Sometimes she wanted to kill them, but she loved them. She liked feeling like they had a secret world all to themselves. They could speak Mandarin in the street and English in front of Aunt Walburga and no one would be able to understand them. Some nights, they all fell asleep in Andromeda’s bed, a sweet sisterly pile, and Narcissa would wake up with Andromeda’s hair in her mouth and Bella’s hand curled around her ankle. 

They all had matching dark hair and almond-shaped eyes. Andromeda’s hair had a bit of a wave and Bella’s skin was a warmer tan, but otherwise they looked the same. They also looked like their cousin, Sirius, which he already hated, even though he was even younger than Narcissa. 

“I’m not a girl,” he would say, kicking his feet girlishly. “I’m a boy .”

Narcissa should have been a boy, like Sirius and Regulus. Aunt Walburga told her that once. Everyone had been convinced that she would be a boy. Her mother had been craving sour foods and her belly was shaped like a boy. But then Narcissa was born, and her mother died before she ever held or even saw her third daughter.

Sirius was always getting away with things because he was a boy. When the two of them misbehaved only Narcissa was scolded or smacked or sent to her room. Sirius was allowed a toy broomstick and a sword. Narcissa had to behave and be quiet and boil Aunt Walburga’s silkworms. Sirius was terrible at Mandarin, also; he was always talking to everyone in English and he never paid attention to stroke order. 

“When you grow up, make sure to have a son,” Aunt Walburga said, even though Sirius was her son and he was awful. But when Narcissa would play pretend, alone in her room, she would have a baby daughter, and she would give her lots of hugs and kisses and say sweet words to her, and she would give her a sword. 

SIRIUS BLACK, FIFTEEN YEARS OLD

“As if it wasn’t bad enough that they're blood purists,” Sirius said. “They had to go and be chinks, too.”

“I don’t think you should say that,” Remus said. Remus, who Sirius’ mother would kill on sight, probably. 

“None of your business, Remus,” Sirius said. 

“I also don’t think you should say that,” James said, pushing up his glasses. “Hey, does anyone know the primary ingredients of a Sleeping Draught?” James knew about things like racial slurs and too-high expectations, but the difference between them was that James’ parents loved him, and as far as Sirius was concerned that was the only thing that mattered. 

“Shut up, James,” Sirius said. James just raised his eyebrows. “My mum thinks that all Muggles should die.”

“And also she likes Narcissa better than me,” Sirius said, petulantly. Being liked less than his cousin was, objectively, better than murdering Muggles. At least he was self-aware. “It’s always Narcissa this, Narcissa that, Narcissa is Slytherin Head Girl—”

“Narcissa is a bitch,” Peter said passionately.

“Peter!” James and Remus said in unison.

“Honestly,” Remus muttered. 

Sirius laughed. “Peter’s right, though. And she’s still not half as bad as Bella.”

Peter nodded. James and Remus winced. Bellatrix had been more or less normal at Hogwarts, only as sinister as Sirius would expect from a Slytherin. You wouldn’t have caught Bellatrix in a Muggle Studies class, but you also wouldn’t have caught her at a pogrom—it would have been unbecoming of a Black. She was beautiful and rude and haughty, but not evil.

Everything changed when Andromeda went and married a Muggle. Sirius’s mother had flown into a satisfying, incandescent rage. Sirius loved, perversely, to see his mother become exactly who she was. A terrifying and pathetic woman. Blasting Andromeda off the family tree had been the least of it. She had torn curtains and smashed furniture. There was a portrait of the five Black cousins in the hall, and she shredded the canvas. Portrait Regulus cowered in the circle of Andromeda’s arms, and that had only enraged Walburga more.

In real life, Regulus refused to speak to Sirius, which was fine by him. Before he’d gone to Hogwarts, he would have run down the hall to Sirius’s room, and the two of them would have read or played at sword fighting, their mother’s screams relegated to background noise. Now, though, Regulus knew that Sirius was not a valuable ally, and Sirius couldn’t blame him. Sirius was already a Gryffindor, and when Narcissa had delivered the news that Andromeda had eloped with a Muggle called Ted, of all things, Sirius burst out laughing and said that Andromeda always had been his favorite cousin, a performance that had earned him a series of Stinging Hexes down his spine. To put it gently, their parents were batshit crazy. Strategically speaking, Regulus was better off without him. 

They all coped with Andromeda leaving in different ways. Narcissa and Regulus became even quieter, and Bellatrix and Sirius had both become more obnoxious. Bellatrix hung out with cult weirdos and Sirius only ever wore Muggle clothes at home, for example.

“That’s not really equivalent,” James said. 

“What?”

“Peter thinks you can substitute persimmon juice for Mandrake leaf in a Sleeping Draught,” Remus said. 

“Persimmon juice isn’t even magical,” Sirius said. 

“Anything can have magical properties,” James said. “It’s just not a good substitute.”

“They taste the same,” Peter said defensively. 

“And have the three of you worked that out yet?” Remus asked. 

“No,” Peter said glumly. 

“When we do, you’ll be sorry,” Sirius said. 

Remus raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were doing me a huge favor,” he said. “You’ll be so impressed, Remus, that’s what someone said.”

James, Peter, and Sirius had kept the secret for nearly three years. James and Sirius privately believed that Peter would be the one to give it up, but in the end it had been Sirius. He’d had a single shot of Firewhiskey courtesy of Marlene McKinnon after Gryffindor beat Slytherin in Quidditch, and then Remus had sprawled across his lap and said, “so, what’s this secret you’ve been keeping from me,” and Sirius had given up the whole game. 

It was that or kiss him on the mouth in front of the whole Gryffindor common room, and this way at least Remus would have to be equally annoyed at James and Peter. 

“I’m never telling you anything again,” James said.

“Whatever,” Sirius said. 

“We’ll figure it out, Remus,” Peter said. 

“I literally didn’t ask,” Remus said. “You three just want to feel cool.” 

“We can’t even tell anyone,” Sirius pointed out. 

Remus scoffed. “Sirius Black, ninety percent of everything you do is to appear cool to James.”

Sirius was wounded. This was deeply untrue. Everything Sirius did was to appear cool to Remus, and it didn’t even work, because Remus thought that Sirius was uncool. “What’s the other ten percent, then?”

“To piss off your mum,” James said. 

“Ouch,” Sirius said. Giddily, because it was true. Because his mother hated him but James Potter knew him, and loved him. “I hope you become a frog.”

“Your mother’s a frog,” Peter said. Sirius laughed so hard he fell backward out of his chair and hit his head. 

None of them became a frog. Peter was a rat, which was fine because his ego was only one that could bear it. James was a stag, and Sirius was a huge, black dog. 

“You’re furry,” Remus said, scratching the dog behind the ears. Yes , Sirius thought, and also, touch me more , which was so embarrassing he promptly became a person again. 

This unfortunately meant that instead of Remus’s fingers being buried in the dog’s fur, his fingers were buried in Sirius’ hair . 

“I can’t believe I’m a rat,” Peter said mournfully.

“At least you can transform into a rat in the castle,” James said. “When can I ever become a deer?”

“About once a month,” Remus said. He was still touching Sirius’s hair. 

“A rat,” Peter said.

“It could be worse,” James said, “you could be a frog.”

“I suppose,” Peter said. 

“Your hair is nice,” Remus said. “It’s very soft.”

Sirius dug words out of the far corner of his brain. “Asian hair,” he said. 

“My hair isn’t like that,” James said. 

“And everyone loves your hair, so please stop complaining.” James had a ton of thick, dark hair that always smelled nice. 

“I don’t think James will ever be bald,” Peter said. 

“I hope not,” James said. “I would rather die than be bald.”

“Not all of us can be the heir to the Sleekeazy’s fortune,” Sirius said. 

“I like your hair,” Remus said. 

“But you are the heir to a fortune,” Peter said. 

“Not meritoriously,” Sirius said. “The fortune of sitting around doing nothing but exploiting Muggles for thousands of years.”

“Meritoriously,” James said. “Exploiting. Talk dirty to me.”

“Woof,” Sirius said. 

“Why does Sirius get to be a dog, anyway?” Peter asked. 

“My name is literally Black, comma, Dog,” Sirius said. 

“He’s loyal,” Remus answered. “And stupid.”

“Am not.”

“You definitely are,” James said. 

“Just because you think your family is wrong doesn’t mean you’re not loyal,” Peter said encouragingly. “You're loyal to us, and we’re like a family.”

Sirius swallowed around a lump in his throat. His eyes burned, so he blinked fast a bunch of times. Remus’s fingers stilled in his hair. “Thanks, man,” he croaked. “Hey, can you tell Remus and James that I’m not stupid?”

“No,” Peter said. 

Sirius loved being the dog. It was nice to have a body that belonged only to him. Hating himself was, like everything else, a family curse. He was Chinese, and a Black, and he looked just like his father, who he hated, his mother, who he hated, Bellatrix and Narcissa, who he hated, Regulus, who he pitied, and Andromeda, who he hated, for having the courage to walk away. Sirius would always be one of them. No matter how much distance he put between them, no matter what clothes he wore or what language he spoke, he would still have his face. 

But the dog was his alone. The dog was friendly. The dog was kind. The dog didn’t belong to them. 

The wolf loved the dog. Sirius knew that Remus didn’t recognize him as the wolf, but he liked to think something in Remus knew something in him. The red string of fate , Andromeda might have called it. A string that tied her to a Muggle and Sirius to a boy who also happened to be a werewolf. When Remus woke up curled around the dog on the floor of the Shack, covered in black fur instead of blood, Sirius nearly cried. 

James did cry. “I love you guys,” he said. “I love you guys so much.” And then Peter cried because James was crying, and then Sirius cried, and Remus, who was tougher than all the rest of them combined, did not cry even once. 

“Thank you,” he said, quietly, and that just set the rest of them off again. 

“Are you in love with James?” Remus sat next to Sirius on his bed. It was two days until the full moon, and he looked pale. The question came out of nowhere. Sirius hadn’t expected Remus to ask it. 

There was this thing, with Remus. Sirius always felt like they were circling something—something big. Sirius’s parents didn’t love each other, and they also didn’t love him. But if they did, maybe he would have called that thing love. The problem was that Sirius was no good for love. He wouldn’t know the first thing about it. 

“James? James is in love with Lily Evans.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Remus said. 

“No,” Sirius said, slowly. “I’m not in love with James. He’s James .” 

“Oh,” Remus said.

“Where is he, anyway?” 

“James?”

Sirius rolled his eyes. “No, Peeves.”

“You’re a dick,” Remus said. “He’s in the common room.”

“Well,” Sirius said, awkwardly. The air was too thick, too heavy. He was going to do something he would regret. “I guess I should go find him.”

“Or you could stay,” Remus said. Sirius wanted to stay.

Against all odds, Walburga Black was not, per se, a homophobe. Would she be unhappy if her oldest son was gay? Almost certainly. She would be furious. But it would not be worse than anything Sirius had already done to shame her. She would probably be relieved, actually, that he would not add any half-blood Blacks to the family tree. Like everything else, procreating was best left to Regulus. 

“I just want one thing in my life that isn’t about my mother,” Sirius said. 

“You’re in your head again,” Remus said. 

“This is not about them,” Sirius said. “This is about me.”

“Sirius,” Remus said gently. “You think too much.”

“You’re the one who's always telling me that I should think before I act,” Sirius said. 

“And when have you ever listened to me?”

So Sirius leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. Remus’s lips were soft, and was a gentle kisser. Sirius wondered whether he’d been kissed before, and by who. He could hear his mother screaming at him, and also Bella, what would Bella say? At least he could pretend not to understand his mother. Shut up , he thought, shut up , shut up . 

Finally Remus pulled away. Sirius felt like his whole body was just his heart, pumping too much blood into all of his veins. He wanted to kiss Remus again. He wanted to get his hands all over every inch of him, with a violence that scared him. “Hey,” Remus said. “I can hear you thinking.” 

“Shit,” Sirius said. “I’m sorry, I just—”

“We can pretend this never happened,” Remus said, stone-faced.

“Is that what you want?” 

“I just needed to be sure,” Remus said. Sirius had no idea what Remus could possibly need to be sure about. He, for one, felt less sure about everything. His head was spinning. 

“I need some air,” Sirius said. 

“Please don’t ever kiss me again,” Remus said. “Unless you mean it.”

Of course I meant it , Sirius thought, stumbling down the second-floor corridor. Remus told Sirius once that he thought he was fucked up in the head, because of my furry little problem , he said. Because everyone told him, his whole life, that he was a problem. A danger to himself and others. 

So maybe Remus thought that Sirius couldn’t kiss him properly because he was too fucked up in the head. Or because he was a boy. But the problem was Sirius, and his ancient, inherited insanities. 

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Snape said. He disgusted Sirius, the way he followed Mulciber and Avery around like a greasy shadow, the three of them scum, scum, scum. Lily liked him, but Lily liked most people, because she was a Muggleborn and she didn’t really know anyone like Sirius’ mother. Lily thought James and Sirius should take the high road. James and Sirius thought that it was fine for teenage blood purists to see the wrong side of a Bat-Bogey Hex at least once weekly and twice on Fridays. 

“They just say things,” Lily said. “They don’t mean them.” But then people started dying. “It wasn’t our classmates,” Lily said. “You shouldn’t be responsible for the bad things that your parents do. You know that, right, Sirius?”

Except that Sirius did think that it was fine for him to pay for the bad things that his parents did. He dreamed about dying in a blaze of glory. That would really show his mother.

“Why don’t you learn to mind your own business, Snivellus?” Sirius said, twirling his wand between his fingers for good measure.

Snape sneered. “You don’t scare me, Black.”

“I really could,” Sirius said. “I really should.”

“You think you’re so clever,” Snape said. “You and your friends. But everyone is going to find out about Remus Lupin, and then what?”

Sirius clenched his fist. Fuck his wand, he’d throw a punch. “Leave Remus alone.”

“He’s a danger to everyone at Hogwarts,” Snape said. 

“You’re a danger to my sense of smell, but I tolerate you,” Sirius said.

Snape raised an eyebrow. “So it’s not Potter. It’s Lupin.”

“What?”

“I bet my Head Girl would be interested to find out that you’re fucking a werewolf,” Snape said.

“I actually don’t give a fuck what Narcissa thinks she knows about me,” Sirius spat. 

“So you won’t mind if I tell her.”

“If I were you, I’d keep my big nose out of things that didn’t concern me.”

“Dumbledore will expel you,” Snape said. “I thought your kind cared a lot about that sort of thing.”

“I want you to think long and hard about what you mean by my kind .”

“Or what? You’ll sic your pet wolf on me?”

“Well, hypothetically,” Sirius said, slowly, “I wouldn’t touch the knot on the Whomping Willow on the night of the full moon, then.”

“So it’s true,” Snape said, his eyes glittering. 

“I didn’t say anything was true.”

“You didn’t have to,” Snape said. “Sirius Black is loyal to no one but himself.”

The thing about Sirius’s bad ideas was that he never had bad ideas—Sirius Black would never, ever admit that he‘d had a bad idea. Not to himself, and not to anyone else. He believed that this was yet another negative trait that he inherited from his parents, but who knew?

“Sirius, what the fuck is wrong with you?” 

Sirius shrugged. “He could use a little scaring,” he said.

“Do you even think?” James ran both his hands through his hair, the way he did when he was truly upset. “He’ll never forgive you for this.”

“I don’t care if Snivellus lives or dies, James,” Sirius said, patiently.

“Are you mad?” James shouted, grabbing Sirius by the shoulders. “I don’t care what he said to you. If Remus kills Snape —”

Sirius went cold all over. “He’d never forgive me,” he said. 

“Why do I always have to bail you out?” James is already halfway across the room, Invisibility Cloak in hand. 

“I do my share,” Sirius grumbled. 

James throws the Cloak over both of them. “Peter is meeting us there,” he said. “Listen. I know things are hard—” he cut himself off as they tiptoed through the Fat Lady’s frame— “but not everything is about you.”

“You are the worst,” Sirius whispered furiously. “You think you’re better than me, but you’re not better than me. Do not try to be Nice Guy James—I don’t want to talk to him.”

“I am not being Nice Guy James,” James said. Unkindly, for the record. “I’m being Good Friend James, who doesn’t want Remus to be expelled, or worse, killed!”

“I only care about four people in this whole school, and that’s me, you, Peter, and Remus,” he continued, the two of them avoiding the trick step that would send the staircase swinging in the wrong direction. “Which, if you’re counting, is still three more people than you’re acting like you care about right now.”

“That seems unfair to Lily,” Sirius said.

“Ya Allah,” James said, sounding for all the world exactly like his mother. Sirius hoped he never sounded exactly like his mother, which was why he never spoke Mandarin or called anyone a good-for-nothing Gryffindor blood traitor if he could help it.

“And Mary, and Marlene, and—”

“Have you ever heard of exaggeration? Have you ever heard of rhetoric?”

The two of them wiggled out of the castle through the hidden tunnel behind the empty suit of armor, a maneuver that required taking off the cloak, separate people once again. 

“This was easier when we were smaller,” James complained. 

“I kissed Remus,” Sirius said. And then, “I need you to get me out of my house. I was just—I don’t know how to—the whole time, they were in my head. They’re like poison, James.” 

“I know,” James said, in his easy way. He never could stay mad for very long. “First, we save Snivellus.” He reached out and grabbed Sirius’s hand. “Then we handle everything else,” he said. 

For some reason, that touch was what Sirius thought about more than anything else, twelve years in Azkaban. James Potter, young and beautiful, and always on his side. 

BELLATRIX LESTRANGE, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD

Bellatrix blamed this all on Andromeda, actually, except for the parts that she blamed on Narcissa. When they were children, Bellatrix wanted to be just like Andromeda, and then it turned out that Andromeda was a freak, and Narcissa had always been a goody-two-shoes who killed their mother, which meant that of the three Black sisters Bellatrix was the only one who was normal. Not to mention her cousins—Sirius was a bigger freak than Andromeda, could never be a blood traitor quietly, couldn’t even be Chinese properly, and Regulus was a lot like Narcissa but worse because he was also a coward and he went around calling Lucius Malfoy sir , which was funny because Lucius was just about the most useless man Bellatrix had ever met, excluding her father. 

Rodolphus Lestrange asked Bellatrix to marry her the day that she turned eighteen. He said that he had his eye on her for a few years at that point. He was an old man but a powerful one, and Bellatrix didn’t mind at all really, because it was one less thing for her father to worry about after Andromeda had run off with a Muggle. Rodolphus was a Death Eater, so naturally Bellatrix became a Death Eater, too, and everyone was impressed because Bellatrix really took to it. 

It was about time that the Blacks stood up for themselves. They had always been all talk, no action. All the other purebloods she knew had massive country estates. Only the Blacks lived in London, and worse, among Muggles, even though they had the purest blood of everyone, the real magic from the dawn of civilization, before Britain even existed, thousands of years of pure blood. They talked about how other people looked down on them because they weren’t really British, but it seemed like only Bellatrix ever figured out that the only way to earn respect was to become one of the strong, instead of complaining about being weak. 

Really, though, Bellatrix would have never even become a Death Eater if it wasn’t for Andromeda and Sirius, because someone had to rehabilitate the name of the noble and most ancient house of Black, and she didn’t trust Narcissa or Regulus to do the job well. Sure, all her friends were doing it too, but Bellatrix was an independent thinker.

“I’m not sure,” Narcissa said when Bellatrix asked if she would join up. “It seems rather extreme, doesn’t it?” But Lucius eagerly took the Mark, so Bellatrix knew it was only a matter of time, because Narcissa always went along with what Lucius did, even though he was a spineless coward and worse—blond.

Narcissa wasn’t an independent thinker, she just believed whatever everyone around her told her to believe, and so Narcissa believed that purebloods—the Blacks, especially—were losing their place in society, because that’s what Bellatrix said, but she also believed that she could solve all their family’s problems by having a son, because that’s what Aunt Walburga said. Narcissa never could do anything for herself. She only wanted other people’s approval. But look at Aunt Walburga’s sons! And besides, even if Narcissa did have a son, he would be a Malfoy, not a Black, and that was basically unacceptable. 

Bellatrix knew everyone was jealous of her. Rosier especially, he was always saying that she was fucking her way to the top, but she had a better Cruciatus than any of them combined. That was the thing about Unforgivables, you had to really mean them, and Bellatrix meant them more than anyone. Who was as hurt as her? None of the rest of them grew up around Muggles who cursed them in the street. None of the rest of them lost a sister and a cousin. None of the rest of their mothers had died when they still needed her.  

The Dark Lord had been hurt the way that she had been hurt. He trusted her more than he trusted any of the rest of them, so she knew that he had also been mistreated by Muggles. It didn’t seem that his family had been wealthy, but that was okay, because he had a real ambition, and that was rare in men these days. He had a vision for a pure, just world, where everyone got what they deserved. 

What Bellatrix deserved was to be at the top. That’s what her father and Aunt Walburga always told her. The Blacks had a foot in two worlds, but Britain and China were essentially the same. There was nothing more valuable than money and pure blood, and the Blacks had more of both than anyone else. 

In the new world, the Dark Lord would rule, and Bellatrix would be by his side. She would make sure Regulus and Narcissa were taken care of. And even if Andromeda and Sirius had decided they didn’t want any part of it, they were Blacks, the same as her, and she would take care of them, too. They thought they were so high and mighty because of their political beliefs. But they weren’t better than anyone else. At the end of the day, they would have to think about themselves, about the family. They would come around eventually. 

NARCISSA MALFOY, TWENTY-THREE YEARS OLD

It felt like Narcissa had been pregnant her whole life. No potion—not even the Chinese medicine she’d relied on her whole life—could ease the pain, or the sickness. 

She made an agreement with Lucius. If the baby was a boy, they’d never try to have another one. Narcissa would give up on her dream of a house full of daughters, a second chance at her childhood. It would be hard enough to raise this one. Andromeda and Sirius were still not talking to any of them. The war was in full swing, so Lucius and Bella were too busy to help. 

And ever since Regulus and Uncle Orion had died last year, Aunt Walburga had been inconsolable. She was wasting away. The house was falling apart around her, as if it could sense her pain. 

“Both my sons left me,” she said. “I have failed as a mother.” 

“Regulus gave his life in good service,” Narcissa said, even though she had no idea why or how Regulus died. It was the only thing she could think of that would make Walburga feel better. For the first time, she really hated Sirius. His mother was suffering and his brother was dead, and he was still running around with James Potter and that Order of the Phoenix, fighting his own family, thinking that life was a big adventure. 

Meanwhile, Narcissa had to take care of everything. Aunt Walburga was not her responsibility, and neither was Grimmauld Place, but she was somehow stuck with both. She had her father’s estate to manage, and now she was the lady of Malfoy Manor, with a baby on the way. 

“You must not fail,” Aunt Walburga said. 

Narcissa’s baby was born on the fifth day of June.

“Congratulations,” the Healer said. “It’s a boy.” She placed the baby in Narcissa’s arms. He was wrapped up in a thin white blanket and had hardly any hair. Narcissa loved him more than she had ever loved anything in her life. 

I did it , she thought, desperately. And now I must not fail .

“What would you like to name him?” the Healer asked.

Lucius thought that the baby should be named after his father, but Narcissa insisted that he be named after the stars, so he would always be certain that he was a Black. “I’d like to call him Draco,” she said. 

For the next month, Aunt Walburga kept Narcissa wrapped in quilts and fed her soups and teas and congee. She almost seemed like herself again, and Narcissa could have sobbed with relief. Even Bellatrix managed to get away long enough to visit her nephew, though she looked so uncomfortable holding the baby that Narcissa burst out laughing.

“I was not meant to be a mother,” Bella grumbled. 

“Every woman is meant to be a mother,” Aunt Walburga said. 

“You don’t have to,” Narcissa said. “You have your own destiny.” She was proud of Bellatrix, who worked so hard for the family. It couldn’t be easy for her to bear that burden. 

“He looks like his father,” Bella said, critically. 

“He’s only a baby,” Narcissa said. Like any mother, she wanted her baby to look like her, but she thought that it would probably be better if Draco looked as little like Sirius and Regulus as possible. Otherwise Aunt Walburga might actually go mad. “All babies have grey eyes. They’ll go brown eventually.” 

Everyone had told her that motherhood was hard work, but it seemed nearly too easy. For all the difficulties of her pregnancy, Draco was a perfect baby. He slept well, he ate well, and he rarely ever cried. Sometimes Narcissa would sit and just watch him sleep. He had such a round face, such soft, sweet-smelling dark hair.  

Draco was happy and healthy, but she still worried that she was doing everything all wrong. She wished Andromeda was there to tell her what to do, and then she was upset with herself for even thinking about it. She wished that her mother had lived, so she might have had an example. 

Lucius wasn’t around much—there was some secret new development that he was asked to attend to, something he couldn’t even tell her about—but Narcissa was secretly happy to have Draco to herself. He was her baby.  She spoke to him in Mandarin, sang him the lullaby Andromeda taught her, she bought him little things—tiny jade dragons that were charmed to play in the air, a toy sword and a toy broomstick, tiny clothes made with silks and linens. She took him to Suzhou and to Shanghai, where all the aunties fawned over what a lovely baby he was. She bought herself a solid gold bangle in the shape of a dragon that slept when Draco slept and nipped gently at the inside of her wrist when he was upset. 

Meanwhile the war went on, and Aunt Walburga got worse and worse, and Narcissa worried every day that Bellatrix would die and Lucius would die and Aunt Walburga would die and she and Draco would be all alone. What would she do? She hoped the war would be over soon so everything would go back to normal. 

DRACO MALFOY, ELEVEN YEARS OLD

Draco Malfoy couldn’t wait to go to Hogwarts. He loved his mother, but he wanted to see the world. Last week, she asked him if he wanted to dye his hair blond with a potion for the occasion, and Draco had said yes, because everyone always said he looked just like his mother and he wanted to try out looking just like his father, for a change. 

“Don’t bother coming home if you aren’t Sorted into Slytherin,” his father said, but he ruffled Draco’s (newly blond) hair so he knew that he was only kidding.

“Ravenclaw would be alright,” his mother said, diplomatically.

“Imagine being a Hufflepuff,” his father said. He laughed. “I think I’d leave.”

Anyway, Draco would certainly be Sorted into Slytherin, because that’s where all the Malfoys were Sorted, and all the Blacks. 

Being a Slytherin was his birthright, that’s what his father said. A birthright was something you deserved because you were a certain kind of person. Draco was a pureblood from two great Wizarding families, both in the Sacred Twenty-Eight, and that meant he had lots of birthrights. 

His mother said he had to be careful to associate with the right sort of people. That would be easy enough. Lots of pureblood families were sending their children to Hogwarts this year. They would likely be Slytherins, too: Greg Goyle and Vince Crabbe would be there, and Pansy Parkinson, and Theo Nott. All of them were his friends.

And of course Draco was quite curious about Harry Potter. They called him the Boy Who Lived, because he survived the Killing Curse when he was a baby. That probably meant that he had a lot of birthrights, too. It said in the Daily Prophet that he had been raised by Muggles, which was not his fault because his parents were dead but it meant that someone had to introduce him to Wizarding society. 

His father said that he shouldn’t talk about Harry Potter, but his mother said it was okay, because his grandmother was a Shafiq and therefore he had a connection to the Sacred Twenty-Eight. His mother said that he should not associate with any Weasleys, because they were blood traitors, or with Neville Longbottom, whose parents got Aunt Bellatrix thrown in Azkaban. His father said he should not associate with Mudbloods, which is what he called Muggleborns, but not in front of Draco’s mother. She thought that it was impolite. 

Draco was in Madame Malkin’s getting fitted for new school robes when he met Harry Potter. He didn’t know he was Harry Potter then, obviously, he was just a boy with brown skin and green eyes, green as spring onions or his mother’s jade. 

“Hello,” Draco said. “Are you starting at Hogwarts this year?” 

“Hullo,” the boy said, nervously. “Er, yes.”

“Me too. But I’m here alone, because Mother is looking at wands.” Draco smiled encouragingly. “Do you have any idea what House you’ll be Sorted into? I’ll be in Slytherin, I imagine. All of my family has been in Slytherin.”

“Oh,” the boy said. 

“My father says it’s my birthright,” Draco said. “The Slytherin color is green. I wish I had green eyes, like yours.”

“Er—thanks?”

“Anyway, what House do you think you’ll be in? Gryffindor are supposed to be brave, but really they’re quite stupid. My mother said Ravenclaw is alright. But imagine being sorted into Hufflepuff! I think I’d leave, wouldn’t you?”

“Sorry,” the boy said, “what is a Hufflepuff?”

“It’s one of the four Houses,” Draco said. “You can read all about it in Hogwarts: A History.” Then Draco’s mother came and bought his robes and took him away. 

“Draco met the Potter boy,” his mother said, over dinner. 

“Is that so?” his father said. 

“He looks just like his father.” 

“Did you know Harry Potter’s father?”

“No,” his mother said, in Mandarin. “Eat your dinner.”

His parents exchanged a meaningful look. “Just remember to associate with the proper…sort of person, and you’ll be just fine,” his mother said eventually.

“And if you need anything at all, we’re only an owl away,” his father added. 

His father was on the Hogwarts school board. He was on lots of boards, because he was a powerful person. That’s what everyone was always telling him. Even the Minister of Magic said so, once. Being a powerful person was good, because when you wanted something you could make it happen, and no one could stop you. 

Draco wanted to be powerful, more than anything. 

On the Hogwarts express, Draco met Harry Potter again. His hair was still a mess, like he hadn’t brushed it all his life. “Hello again,” Draco said. “Would you like to sit in my compartment?” Vince and Greg were in there, but they were really all right once you got to know them. The three of them were talking about how they thought it might be neat if they called each other by their last names. That’s what all the Slytherins used to do, in the old days.

Harry Potter pointed at the boy next to him with his thumb. “No thanks,” he said. “I’m with Ron.”

“Red hair, freckles, and hand-me-down clothes,” Draco said. “You must be a Weasley.” My mother said not to associate with blood traitor Weasleys , he thought, but he didn’t say it because that would be impolite, and besides he didn’t want to sound like a baby who listened to everything his mother said. 

The Weasley boy got a dark look on his face. Draco glared back. “Anyway, Potter, I know you’re just starting out, so you have to learn to associate with the proper sort.” He stuck his hand out to shake. 

Harry Potter just looked at it and blinked. “I think I can tell the proper sort for myself, thanks,” he said, and then he walked away. 

It was humiliating and awful, and it made Draco want to cry or talk to his mother, but he couldn’t do either of those things on this horrible train. He wanted to go home. He wanted to be at school, so he could get Sorted and unpack his things and pretend it never happened. 

Hogwarts felt like it was a million miles away, but they finally made it. It was cold and damp. The castle was in the middle of a lake, and they crossed it in little boats, and then they got to put on their robes. Draco always felt a little better in new clothes. They made him feel like he could start over and be new, too. 

“Draco Malfoy,” Professor McGonagall said, and he walked forward with his shoulders back, the way his mother told him to. Please , he thought. Please let me be a Slytherin . 

Draco sat on the stool and put on the Hat. 

“Another Black,” the Hat said, inside Draco’s head. 

A Malfoy , Draco thought. 

The Hat made a little hm sound. “Either way,” it said, “I suppose it must be—”

“SLYTHERIN!” the Hat boomed. The Slytherin table stood up and cheered. Draco was so relieved and proud that he could have cried, again. 

Harry Potter was Sorted into Gryffindor, which was disappointing, even though Draco mostly expected it. Maybe it would work out, anyway. Red and gold were the colors of luck.

He tried to explain that to Harry Potter, later. He showed him his hongbao after the New Year. They were mostly decorated with tiny goats who chewed grass and locked horns, but some had dragons or plum blossoms. 

“What do you put in them?” Potter said, peering at them.

“Money,” Draco said, “and the more money you get, the more people love you.”

But that only made Potter laugh and walk away. 

So maybe he wasn’t the most…gracious to Potter and his friends. But he didn’t understand why Potter wanted to hang out with them , anyway, Weasley and that know-it-all Granger and Longbottom and his stupid toad. And Potter himself was awful, too, he thought just because he had nice hair and green eyes and a lightning bolt scar everyone else was beneath him.

Really, Draco was homesick. He loved Hogwarts, because he could go to classes and show off his magic and spend lots of time with his Slytherin friends. His mother went to Suzhou and sent him a steamer that shared magical space with a steamer that she had, so she could put in dumplings and sticky rice, but it didn’t taste as nice as it did at home. 

He wrote to his mother every day. He told her that Harry Potter didn’t like him much, but that everyone in Slytherin liked him a lot. He told her that Harry Potter made it on the Gryffindor Quidditch team even though first-years weren’t allowed. He told her that he missed haw flakes and tanghulu and milk candies, tiny dried fish and latiao, and his mother sent some of each in the mail. His friends didn’t care to share, but that just meant he got more to himself. 

At the end of the year, Gryffindor won the House Cup. It wasn’t fair. Slytherin should have won, except that Dumbledore gave a ton of points to Gryffindor right at the end, and all the green and silver banners turned red and gold, and that was when Draco knew that he really, really hated Harry Potter. Him and his stupid friends.

SIRIUS BLACK, THIRTY-THREE YEARS OLD 

“Fuck,” Remus said. He looked almost as old as Sirius felt. Sirius remembered Azkaban in his bones, every day, every minute. The war—the first war—was a war, but at least he’d felt alive. James and Lily were lucky, in a way, that they got to die young and in love. “How many times are you going to ruin my life?”

“I told James I wouldn’t be his Secret Keeper because of what happened,” Sirius said. “I told you that I was sorry. I did my time.”

“And that didn’t make anything right,” Remus said. “James and Lily are still dead.” 

“It certainly didn’t make Severus forget about me,” he continued.

“So he’s Severus, now?”

“You need to grow up,” Remus said. 

“I might have,” Sirius said. “If it wasn’t for all the dementors.”

“You're not the only one who suffered!”

“No,” Sirius said, but he was furious. He’d been furious for almost thirteen years now, he’d spent every night in Azkaban furious, he’d been innocent and James and Lily were dead, he had seen Harry, who looked so small in Hagrid’s arms, and all those Muggles were dead too, he couldn’t forget that, couldn’t forget the smell of it, and it was Peter who had given them all up, and Remus had believed Peter, he knew that Remus had, and it stung, it all hurt worse than Cruciatus. “But James was my best friend.”

Remus buried his hands in his hair. “You sound insane right now. What about me! What about Harry !”

“Harry is fine,” Sirius said. “He’s a good kid. He’s a good wizard.”

“He is a child ,” Remus said. “Who saw his parents die!”

“Fuck, I know! I get it, okay, it’s my fault, I’m the one who told James and Lily to choose Peter instead, don’t you think I’ve thought of it! Don’t you think I thought about that every. single. moment in that terrible place? I did my waiting. I did my grieving.”

“That’s no way to live,” Remus said.

“I’m just the same I was, baby. Just worse in every conceivable way.”

“Then we’re both the same,” Remus said. “You still think you’re the leading man, and I’m the coward who adores you.”

“I’m sorry,” Sirius said. “About the professorship. I know you loved it.”

“Ah, well. It’s hardly the first time.”

“That doesn’t make it fair.”

Remus reached out and ran his fingers through Sirius’s hair. Sirius leaned into the touch. “That’s what you always used to say, back then.”

“I had a strong sense of morals,” Sirius said. 

Remus laughed. “Come here, you fool.” He tugged on Sirius’s arm until Sirius was sort of tucked into his side, and then he resumed his touching. 

It was a familiar place. Sirius had lain there a hundred times, during a different war, when both of them had been young and full of hope. Now he had a broken body, a broken soul. 

“We’ve been apart longer than we were ever together,” Remus said. 

“Merlin,” Sirius said. “When you put it like that.”

“You don’t have to say that you love me,” Remus said. 

Sirius swallowed hard. “It’s complicated,” he said, eventually. 

“I know,” Remus said. He kissed the top of Sirius’s head. “I know.”

“Fuck,” Sirius said. He was thinking about how Remus was bitten as a child, how a prophecy foretold James and Lily’s deaths, how Sirius spent twelve years getting his soul eroded for a crime he didn’t commit, the youth that they’d all lost. The youth that Harry lost. “Fuck, it’s not fair.”

“I know,” Remus whispered. He was really a good man. He thought that he was a coward, but he was the best person that Sirius knew. He was glad, if there was one person in the world left to him, that it was Remus. 

“Come here and kiss me properly,” Sirius said, and Remus did. 

HARRY POTTER, FIFTEEN YEARS OLD

“Welcome to the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, Harry,” Tonks said cheerfully. “Your godfather’s childhood home. It’s really very gloomy now, but my mother tells me it was quite the mansion when she was a child.” It took a minute for Harry’s eyes to adjust to the persistent dark. He got the sense that there was some kind of fog or smoke hanging over everything, even though they were inside.

“Er,” Harry said.

“No pressure to say anything nice,” Tonks said. “But if Molly Weasley has anything to say about it, this place will be beautiful again by the end of the summer.”

Beautiful? “Tonks,” Harry said, “are those house elf heads on the wall?”

“They are,” Tonks said, wrinkling her nose, which was currently small and rather flat. “No one ever said that the Blacks were people of sophisticated taste. Shall we go upstairs?”

Tonks led the way to a staircase that seemed to lead to an even darker level. “Up we go,” she said. 

Immediately there was a tremendous clatter, and then a woman began shrieking. “Half-breeds and blood traitors in my house!” she said. “Mudbloods, Muggle lovers—” and then, suddenly, she was yelling in a language that Harry didn’t understand.

“Merlin’s sake, Dora,” Sirius shouted, pointing his wand at a portrait of a Chinese woman who looked a lot like him at the top of the steps. A pair of curtains slammed shut, and the house was quiet again.

“Umbrella stand,” Tonks said, pointing to what appeared to be a troll’s leg at the bottom of the stairs. “I have a nasty habit of knocking it over.” 

“Who was that?” Harry asked.

“Hello, Harry,” Sirius said. He looked much better than he had when Harry first met him—his dark hair was sleek and shiny, and he didn’t look quite like he was starving to death anymore. 

“My Great Aunt Walburga,” Tonks said.

“My mother,” Sirius clarified, his distaste clear. “She does this any time anyone makes any noise around here, which is why I told Dora—”

“Why don’t you take the portrait down?”

“Permanent Sticking Charm,” Sirius said. “My mother was a very nasty woman.”

“Harry!” Hermione said brightly, from the top of the stairs.

“Mudbloods,” the portrait of Sirius’s mother said, “in my house —” Sirius pointed his wand at the portrait, and the curtains closed again with a bang. 

“Sorry, Sirius,” Hermione whispered. “Hello, Harry! We’ve been so excited to see you!”

“You didn’t write all summer,” Harry hissed, looking at the curtain covering the portrait out of the corner of his eye. 

Hermione looked immediately crestfallen. “It wasn’t my idea,” she said. 

“Let’s go upstairs,” Tonks said, looking between them. Her hair was suddenly bubblegum pink.

Upstairs was even worse than downstairs, but it was thankfully devoid of house elf heads. “I’m sorry, Harry,” Hermione said, wringing her hands. “Dumbledore said—”

“Dumbledore said,” Harry said nastily. 

“It hasn’t been an adventure,” Hermione said. “We’ve mostly been cleaning, actually.”

Harry was caught off guard. “Cleaning?”

“The Chinese tend to be hoarders,” Sirius said.

“Sirius!” Tonks and Hermione exclaimed at the same time. 

“So this place is disgusting, and it’s also crawling with Dark magic,” Sirius continued, unbothered. “If it was up to me, I’d blast it off the map so I’d never have to set foot in it again, but now it’s headquarters and all, and Molly has taken it upon herself to make it habitable again. Not that it was ever really habitable to begin with.”

“Oh, hello, Harry, dear!” The woman herself came over from the dining room to give Harry a crushing hug. 

“Hello, Harry,” Professor Lupin said, which set off a chorus of hello, Harry s from around the table. Professor McGonagall was there, and seeing her outside of school was so strange that Harry instinctively turned to Hermione for comfort. 

“We’re not allowed at the Order meetings,” Hermione said under her breath.

“Hello, Harry,” Professor Dumbledore said. “I’m sure you have a number of questions, all of which will be answered in due time. For now, though, I’m afraid I have to ask that you head upstairs with Miss Granger.”

“How many stairs does this place have?” Harry asked Hermione, which made Sirius burst out laughing.

“Altogether too many,” Sirius said, and then he strode across the room to drop into the vacant seat next to Professor Lupin. 

Hermione steered Harry away by his shoulders. “You and Ron are together, naturally,” she said, showing him a dim bedroom, “and Ginny and I are just down the hall.” 

“They’re just leaving us out of the meetings?” Harry said. “Surely I should be allowed—”

“Keep your voice down,” Hermione said.

“Harry!” Harry spotted a cluster of Weasleys at the end of the hall. Fred and George were holding what appeared to be a long piece of string. “Extendable Ears!”

Ron clapped him on the shoulder, and Ginny grinned at him. “We’re doing covert operations,” she said.

Unfortunately, the covert operations didn’t last long. “Tomorrow is cleaning day,” Ginny said grimly. 

“Mum says every day is cleaning day,” Ron said. “It’s miserable, mate.” 

Cleaning was indeed miserable. On the bright side, Harry learned more charms than he would in a year at Hogwarts, but all of them were for cleaning up cobwebs and dusting hard-to-reach places. They sprayed doxies and pulled moldy curtains off the walls to let the light in , Mrs. Weasley said. It was freezing in the old house, even during the summer, but they were soon sweating thanks to the strenuous exercise. 

“I hope you remember what I taught you about boggarts,” Professor Lupin said, and accompanied them around the house as they banished not less than three of them. 

Best by far was the Dark artifacts. Harry had seen a few Dark objects before, but Grimmauld Place was something else entirely.

“It’s actually fascinating,” Hermione said, “how wizards around the world developed unique magic, taking into account the cultural conditions of the world around them, and really it makes you wonder whether wizarding culture shaped Chinese Muggle culture, for example, or the other way around.”

“My mother would say it was the former,” Sirius said. He was tasked with helping them, because he apparently knew more about Chinese magic than even any of the professors or Aurors. “Not that I know much about Chinese magic.” 

“It’s your house,” Professor Lupin told him.

“I haven’t lived here since I was about Harry’s age,” Sirius said. “Kreacher is more likely to know what to do about all this crap than I will.”

“And Kreacher is not helping you,” Professor Lupin said, “because you trashed the place and because you refuse to talk to him kindly.” 

“This is your fault?” Harry asked.

“Absolutely not,” Sirius said. “Unless you want to get into all the ways that everything in this family is sort of my fault, and even then it’s probably more Tonks’s mother’s fault than mine. But I did let Buckbeak live here for a while, which my mother’s portrait was not very happy about.”

“Also,” he continued, “I basically do not speak Mandarin, which is what Kreacher is not happy about.” 

“Your house elf speaks Chinese ?” Ron said. 

“You used to speak Mandarin?” Hermione asked.

Sirius shrugged. “Probably,” he said. “When I was a kid. My mother didn’t speak much English. Unfortunately, even after twelve years in Azkaban, I am still burdened by understanding it.” 

“Now,” he said. “Do not touch anything that I wouldn’t touch.”

Fred and George found a set of folding fans with blades along the top that Mrs. Weasley immediately confiscated. Ron found a set of purple Chinese-style robes that kept trying to strangle him. Hermione and Tonks found thousands of Galleons worth of gold jewelry and jade bracelets in all colors in a dresser, all of which was cursed, Sirius said, but technically safe to touch, because they were witches.

“Chinese magic doesn’t really differentiate by blood status,” Tonks said. “Their system is more…hierarchical than ours.”

“They might be cursed against men,” Sirius said, just as Ron reached for a pair of earrings. He retracted his hand quickly. 

“What do you mean, hierarchical?” Hermione asked. 

“The pureblood houses administer the region,” Tonks said. “The Muggleborns and the half-bloods work for them, in a sense, and the Muggles live almost entirely apart.”

“What do men have to do with that?”

“My mother was from Suzhou, but my father was from London,” Sirius said. “It would be an insurance policy, in case he tried to kill her in a foreign country. Why isn’t Dora in charge? Her mum was always the expert.”

“No less than yours,” Professor Lupin said firmly. 

Ginny found a set of dolls enchanted to play out folktales. “Not cursed,” Sirius said. “I believe these belonged to my cousin.”

“My mother?” Tonks asked.

“No,” Sirius said. 

There was blue and white china emblazoned with the Black family crest— throw it out , Sirius said—and a delicate tea kettle that could be used to pour poison only for those the pourer wanted to poison, tea for the rest. There were glass vials filled with strange herbs that were apparently as likely to have magical properties as to be completely harmless. There were jade talismans— not even magic , Sirius said, just superstition —and paper scrolls where the tiny people and boats actually moved. There were a set of rusty daggers, their handles inlaid with jade and mother of pearl, that Tonks commissioned on sight. There was a locket with a snake on the front that none of them could work out how to open.

“Harry,” Sirius said softly. “Come through here.”

One wall of the room was covered in a scroll with a sprawling black and red tree painted on it. 

“Plum blossoms,” Sirius said. “The Black family tree.” Looking closer, Harry realized that the center of each flower was actually a tiny portrait, labeled with what he assumed was a name in precise Chinese calligraphy. “It should be in English for you, if you think about it.”

Feeling foolish, Harry thought about it, and sure enough, the Chinese turned to English. “It’s like Parseltongue!” Harry said, surprised. 

Sirius laughed. “It is, I guess.”

“Where are you?” 

Sirius pointed at a black burn mark on the tree. “There’s me,” he said. “My dear old mother blasted me off when I ran away from home to live with your father’s family.”

“You have a brother,” Harry said. 

“Regulus,” Sirius said. “My mother called him xiao wang . Little king. She called me xiao gou . Little dog. You can see who her favorite was.”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s dead,” Sirius said, matter-of-factly.

“This one is Tonks’s mother,” he continued, pointing to another burn mark. “ She ran away from home and married a Muggle, which is clearly much cooler than whatever I did.”

Next to the mark was a beautiful, terrifying woman who was scowling in her portrait. “Bellatrix,” Sirius said. “My least favorite cousin. And next to her is Narcissa.”

Below Narcissa was a very, very familiar face. “ Draco Malfoy ?” he said, disbelieving. It didn’t make sense. Sure, Malfoy had the haughty features of the Blacks, but Harry had assumed that was a pureblood quality. He was blond .

“My cousin’s son. All purebloods are usually related.”

“Malfoy is blond,” Harry said. 

“Is he really? I wouldn’t put it past Narcissa to dye it. She was always…posh, in that way,” Sirius said, sounding incredibly posh.

“If all purebloods are related…”

Sirius shook his head. “Not us,” he said. “The Blacks kept our blood pure by marrying into Chinese pureblood families. Your father’s family…his mother was a Shafiq. One of the Sacred Twenty-Eight.”

Harry nodded, though he wasn’t sure what the Sacred Twenty-Eight was. 

“Your grandfather’s family was British by way of Kashmir,” Sirius continued. “Your great-grandfather on the Potter side invented Sleekeazy’s Hair Products. Sort of like mine, they picked up an English name. They weren’t Sacred Twenty-Eight, though, because they picked one that the Muggles use.”

“And racism, probably,” Sirius added. “The Blacks and the Shafiqs, we filled the Oriental quota.”

“So my father—well, I’m sorry,” Harry said. After a lifetime of knowing nothing about his family, it felt like drinking from a firehose. “I don’t even know what to ask.”

Sirius smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Your aunt didn’t tell you much about him.”

“She didn’t tell me much about either of them,” Harry said. “We don’t talk much.”

“I told Dumbledore—never mind,” Sirius said. “Listen, Harry. I know I can’t bring your dad back, but…he was my best friend. One of the best men I ever knew.” His eyes were shining even in the dim light. 

“If you think of your questions, you can always ask me. Or Remus. We’re happy to talk.”

“Thanks,” Harry said, with feeling. He hadn’t even thought a lot about the fact that he’d had grandparents, but of course he did. And of course Sirius knew about them, which made them real. “Thanks,” he said again. 

“Don’t mention it,” Sirius said, giving Harry a sort of strange half-hug. “You’re family.”

NARCISSA MALFOY, FORTY YEARS OLD

When Draco was born, Narcissa had thought endlessly about what she would be willing to do to make sure that he would live, that he would be happy and healthy, that he would have everything he wanted, and that he would never feel, as she had, that his dreams would be cut short by something outside of his control. 

In the literal sense she would have thrown herself in front of an Unforgivable. That was never in question. It was the more difficult decisions she had to make that kept her up at night. Joining up with the Dark Lord had been ideological, certainly, but not in the way it had been ideological for Bella, or for Lucius. More than that it had been strategic. She had wanted her son to grow up in the good graces of his family, his father, and pureblood society. Was that a crime? Look at Sirius. Dead. 

Although: look at her son. What kind of mother would allow her son to suffer the way she had allowed her son to suffer? He had inherited all of her neuroses, her anxieties, yes, her cowardice. Draco rarely slept through the night anymore. Narcissa knew that the Dark Lord was punishing her husband. But her son was only a child.

“Perhaps he is not cut out for it,” Bellatrix said. 

“The Dark Lord asked him to kill Dumbledore,” Narcissa said. “He was sixteen .”

“It was a great honor.”

“He is your nephew,” Narcissa said. “Please, Bella, there must be something you can do.”

“He took the Mark, same as anyone. Are you telling me that you cannot bring your own son in line?”

“You are mad,” Narcissa whispered. Because Bellatrix was mad, the way Aunt Walburga had been mad, at the end. Perhaps there was a madness in their blood. 

Narcissa feared her sister. Even when Bellatrix had been cruel, as a child, a teenager, an adult, Narcissa had never feared her, because she knew that her sister loved her. 

But now everything was different. Bellatrix hated Lucius, she knew, because Bellatrix had gone to Azkaban after the first war and had seen the things that she had seen and had nearly been Kissed and Lucius had not. Narcissa also had not gone to Azkaban, and she thought Bellatrix hated her for that, too. As a child, Bellatrix had been deeply concerned with fairness—equal rewards and equal punishments. She used to say that the family was more important than anything. 

But hadn’t Narcissa paid enough, in her own way? She had paid in her son’s blood and tears. Both her cousins were dead and she hadn’t spoken to her oldest sister in years. She let the Dark Lord live in her home, so he would forgive Draco for failing to kill Dumbledore. He murdered people in her dining room and turned her basement into a dungeon. His minions had broken her china and torn her silk curtains to shreds.

“They are only things,” Lucius said. He never tried to stop them, not even when Greyback smashed a jade bangle that belonged to Narcissa’s mother. He was her husband, but Narcissa hated him for that. 

She knew, though, that there was nothing he could do, just like there was nothing she could do. The Dark Lord would kill them all at the slightest dissent, and Bellatrix would probably volunteer to do it for him. She could only hope that he would win the war and that Draco would be safe. 

The night the Dark Lord killed Harry Potter Narcissa was, as usual, thinking only about her son. She had not seen him in hours, and the castle was on fire, and there were bodies everywhere. She did not think that Draco was dead. She would know it, as a mother, she would have felt the collapse of her soul. But she also did not know for sure that he was alive. 

This Avada Kedavra was so green, and Harry Potter was so young. He was only a child, the same age as her son. The Dark Lord and his followers hated Harry Potter because he was the enemy. Narcissa disliked Harry Potter because he had been unkind to her son, that first day on the train. 

“Mother,” Draco had said, plaintively, “he doesn’t like me.”

“Not everyone has to like you, Draco,” Narcissa said, because that was what Andromeda might have said, but secretly she was angry. “It is probably for the best, anyway.”

For the next four years, Narcissa heard incessantly about Harry Potter and his stupid hair and his stupid green eyes and his stupid glasses and his stupid Muggleborn friends, and then, as soon as it had begun, it ended. Narcissa never heard about Harry Potter again, until the day last year when she was called to Hogwarts. 

There had been an incident, Severus said, delicately. Her son had lost a lot of blood, but he would live. The scars would be permanent. Harry Potter would not be expelled, Narcissa had to understand.  

It was a war, and her son was a footsoldier. It was their birthright, wasn’t it, all those children in that castle fighting their parents’ battles. And this one, the Boy Who Lived, dead at last. Narcissa thought she would feel relieved. Instead, she only felt sick. 

“Narcissa,” the Dark Lord said. She was repulsed by the sound of her name in his voice, the name her sister had given her. God, what had she done? “Check that the boy is dead.”

As a child, Draco hated napping. Every time Narcissa checked on him he would be only pretending to sleep, a toy or a book not far from his hand. He was terrible at it, too, he always held himself too stiff, but Narcissa would always indulge him, act like she didn’t know. 

Harry Potter was pretending to be dead. He was holding himself too stiff. Narcissa did not know how he had survived a second Killing Curse, and she did not care. She bent over the boy as if she was checking his breathing, his pulse. 

“My son,” she said, urgently, so quietly she felt like she herself was barely breathing. “Is Draco alive? Is he in the castle?” 

“Yeah,” Harry Potter whispered back. 

Narcissa’s world narrowed to a single word. “He’s dead!” she called. 

Months later, at her trial, the Wizengamot would place her under Veritaserum and ask her to tell the world why she said it. “I don’t know,” Narcissa said. 

“Did you mean to turn against You-Know-Who?”

“I didn’t care,” Narcissa said. The words felt slimy and pathetic, crawling out of her mouth like that, the truth potion doing its magic. She shifted uncomfortably in the chair she was shackled to. “I wanted to save my son.” 

When Harry Potter stood up to testify, a hush fell over the crowd. “My mother was really the one who defeated Voldemort, the first time,” he said. “Because of, well, her love. Y’know. For me.”

“Mr. Potter, what are you saying?”

“Malfoy’s mum loves him. And she saved my life.”

“Do you think that Mrs. Malfoy should go to Azkaban, Mr. Potter?” Narcissa felt numb. Should she? She had certainly done wrong. But Narcissa did not want to go to Azkaban.

“Er,” Harry Potter said. “No,” he said, eventually. “No, I don’t think that she should.”

HARRY POTTER, TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD

If Harry could have lived anywhere, he probably wouldn’t have picked Grimmauld Place, but it was there and it was his, and after Ginny broke up with him, he thought that he may as well live there. Hermione and Ron came over, and the three of them used all the cleaning charms they’d learned from Mrs. Weasley. They opened heavy mildewed curtains to let the light in and Harry and Hermione swept the floors the Muggle way. But no matter what they did, the house stayed dark. Like the horrible things about it were in its bones. It seemed worse than it had, like a second layer of misery had settled over it now that Remus and Sirius and Tonks were dead.

And they still couldn’t figure out the Permanent Sticking Charm, so he was also stuck with Great Aunt Walburga, who had not changed at all in nearly a decade. 

It was like a Muggle haunted house. Doors were always slamming, even though no one was touching them, and when Harry woke up some mornings things were in a slightly different place than he’d left them the night before. 

“Kreacher,” Harry said, “did you move this?”

“No, Harry Potter, Kreacher is not moving things,” the old elf said. “Not at all.”

Worst of all was the feeling that Harry sometimes got that something else was in the house with him. Something big and awful, like a basilisk. Something that always seemed to be just outside his door. 

“No one would blame you if you sold the place, mate,” Ron said. 

Except that Harry would maybe blame himself. Even though Sirius hated the place, he wanted Harry to have it, and that was good enough for him.

He tried to spend as little time there as possible. He went to work, and tried to pretend he enjoyed Auroring as much as he thought he would’ve at Hogwarts. He had dinner at Ron and Hermione’s and learned charms to entertain baby Rose. He went to Muggle restaurants and ordered curries and musakhan and lo mein, fish and chips and Italian sandwiches. He took Luna to Muggle museums and went to the pub with Dean and Seamus.

And then, at the end of his days, he would go home to an empty house that he hated. 

“You could always—well,” Hermione said, wringing her hands the way she did when she had bad news for Harry. These days the bad news usually tended to be more I need you to put on dress robes for this event and less we’ll be camping in the Forest of Dean for the foreseeable future , which Harry was grateful for. “I’ve been doing some research.”

“Ron mentioned the Burrow’s magic, the other day,” Hermione continued. “Which I hadn’t even considered as an explanation, until he said it, and then it really made sense. I mean, doesn’t it?”

“Er, no,” Harry said. 

“I just mean that Grimmauld Place has its own magic,” Hermione said. “And, well, how shall I say this—”

“The family that lived here was a right piece of work,” Ron put in.

“It’s powerful magic,” Hermione said. “I’m sure it’s all the worse for the fact that we were all…upset, while we were here, in one way or another.”

Hermione was an excellent witch, and too diplomatic for her own good. “So, what?”

“Maybe if someone really understood the house,” Hermione said. 

“Andromeda?”

“I was—well, I was actually thinking of Draco,” Hermione said. Harry just stared at her. “Malfoy,” she said, after a long silence.

“No, I know who—he’s Draco, now?” 

“Well, it feels a bit strange to call him Malfoy, now that we’re adults, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Ron and Harry said in unison.

“He’s a Cursebreaker,” Hermione said, “and he’s really quite clever, and much more civil than he was.”

“Civil,” Harry said. 

“He’s got a blood claim to the house,” Ron said, grudgingly. “It might, y’know, like that.”

“I’m not asking Malfoy for help,” Harry said, and that was the end of it.

“I need your help,” Harry said. Malfoy looked up from his desk, and then went very, very still. “Er, hullo.”

“Hello,” Malfoy said, faintly. He looked different than he had at Hogwarts. His hair was brown, for one thing—Harry remembered Sirius saying he thought it might have been charmed blond. But his eyes were still grey. It was awful that Malfoy had grown up fit, Harry thought. But when he looked inside himself for the hatred he’d once felt for the man sitting in front of him, there was nothing. Just mild dislike, and maybe a little bit of pity. 

“Hello,” Harry said. “Maybe you don’t remember me. I’m, uh, Harry? Harry Potter.” He put out his hand to shake. 

“Don’t remember—what are you talking about?” Malfoy said. “You were—we were—that was—what?” He sounded more genuinely confused than annoyed. But he also didn’t shake Harry’s hand.  

“Sure,” Harry said. “My house hates me."

“Your house hates you,” Malfoy said. 

“And Hermione thinks you can help.”

“Granger thinks I can—what?”

“Help,” Harry said. Merlin, Hermione said that Malfoy was clever. At least he seemed civil. “Y’know, fix my house.”

“I live in Grimmauld Place,” Harry added.

“Oh,” Malfoy said. ”Is it cursed?”

“I don’t think so.” Malfoy looked at Harry. Harry looked at Malfoy. 

“Sorry,” Malfoy said. He turned back to the papers on his desk. “Then there’s nothing I can do.”

“And then he said there was nothing he could do!” Harry said. “After I asked very nicely!”

“People don’t really change, mate,” Ron said, nodding sympathetically. 

“You showed up out of nowhere and asked him for help?” Hermione asked.

“Yes,” Harry said. “It was my lunch break.” He hadn’t had any sleep the night before, because of the house.

“Honestly, Harry!” 

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” Harry said. He turned to Rose for support. “I didn’t do anything wrong, did I?” Rose blinked at him and smashed a handful of peas in her chubby fist.

“Have you considered that Draco’s past with you is just as complicated as yours is with him?”

“I got over it,” Harry said. “He can get over it, too.”

“And our past was his fault,” he added. 

“You sure sound over it,” Ron muttered, like a hypocrite.

When Harry got home from work and after-work curries the next day, Draco Malfoy was sitting on his front step. His skin was warm in the glow of the streetlights, which annoyed Harry. “Hello, Potter,” Malfoy said. “You’re late.” 

“I’m not late,” Harry said irritably. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I changed my mind. I’ll help you.” 

“I don’t need your help,” Harry said.

“Fine,” Malfoy said. He stood up and brushed off his trousers. He was quite a bit taller than Harry was. Taller than he’d been in school, anyway. “Goodbye, then.” Malfoy brushed past him with his chin high, the way he always had. 

“Wait,” Harry said. Malfoy stopped and turned around. “It’s like there’s a presence. In the house.”

“Is it hostile?” 

“I don’t know,” Harry said. “It’s…inconvenient.” 

Malfoy laughed. For once, it didn’t sound unkind, or mocking. “Potter, your idea of an inconvenience would cause the average person to run from a room screaming.” 

Harry grinned despite himself. “Was that a compliment, Malfoy?”

“No,” Malfoy said, haughtily. “It was an insult. You have no survival instinct.” 

But Harry didn’t feel very insulted at all. “I s’pose you should come in.”

“Well, if you suppose,” Malfoy drawled. 

Harry led Malfoy into the house. He felt the wards melt and let him through. Malfoy shuddered. “High security,” he said. He crouched down to remove his shoes and Transfigured them into house slippers. He was wearing thick white socks. 

“You get used to it,” Harry said. 

“Merlin,” Malfoy said. “Do you get used to—” he waved his hand generally at, well, everything about Grimmauld Place. “This?”

Harry rolled his eyes. “That’s why I asked for your help.” 

“Hm,” Malfoy said. “Have you got any tea? It’s freezing in here.” 

Harry did not particularly want to have tea with Malfoy. He supposed that Malfoy was doing him a favor, which he never would have done at Hogwarts, and besides it couldn’t be any worse than whatever walked his halls in the night. “Upstairs,” Harry said.

On the way up the stairs, Malfoy knocked over the umbrella stand. “Blood traitors and half-breeds!” Sirius’s mum shrieked. 

“Merlin,” Malfoy said. He really did curse an awful lot.

The portrait switched to shouting in Chinese. Harry thought he was probably fluent by now, but only in slurs and unkind words. He got out his wand to close the curtains, but Malfoy was faster. He spoke Mandarin loudly and quickly, but his voice was gentle and melodic compared to his great-aunt’s. Harry wondered whether he sounded as posh in Chinese as he did in English. It seemed like Malfoy was arguing with the portrait, which was absurd and wonderful. No one had ever argued with the portrait before, not even Sirius, who refused to engage with his mother.

Eventually the curtains banged shut and the house was silent. “Merlin,” Malfoy said again. “Is it always like this?” 

“Permanent Sticking Charm,” Harry said. “You speak Mandarin?”

“Obviously.” 

“Your mother taught you,” Harry realized. Wasn’t that why Malfoy was here? Because his mother was Sirius’s cousin, and because she had probably been in this house. Unlike Sirius, she might have even liked it. Malfoy nodded. 

Kreacher was waiting for them in the sitting room. “Kreacher is hearing Mistress’s language,” he said. Harry thought he had perhaps never seen the old elf look so relieved. “Kreacher is thinking that Chinese has returned to Grimmauld Place.” 

“Master Potter is having a guest,” Kreacher said, looking at Malfoy. 

“Hello,” Malfoy said. 

Harry took off his robes and his cloak and handed them to the elf. “Would you mind bringing us some tea?” Kreacher nodded, still looking at Malfoy, and disappeared with a sharp crack. 

“You have a house elf,” Malfoy said. 

“Er, yes,” Harry said. “I’ve tried to free him, or, y’know, pay him a wage. But he sticks around, and never spends the money. I think he likes the house.” 

“Of course he likes the house,” Malfoy said. “It’s his home.” Harry felt very stupid. Of course Kreacher liked the house. He had lived here a long time, even when no one else had. 

Kreacher reappeared with a full tea service—pots and china, platters of finger sandwiches, a stack of bamboo steamers that Harry had never seen before. “Thanks, Kreacher,” Harry said, pouring them both a cup of tea. “Cream or sugar?”

Malfoy stared at him. “You put cream and sugar into pu-erh?”

“I put cream and sugar into all tea,” Harry said. 

“Potter,” Malfoy said. “This tea was grown on thousand-year-old wild trees in a very specific region of China and fermented for longer than you’ve been alive.” 

“Don’t be a snob, Malfoy,” Harry said. 

“Cream and sugar,” Malfoy said, shaking his head. He opened one of the bamboo steamers, which was filled with round white buns. Malfoy broke one open and handed half to Harry almost absently. “Cream!” 

Harry squinted at the bun’s filling. “What is this?”

“Salted egg custard,” Malfoy said. 

Harry tried it. The bun was soft, and the filling was rich and a bit gritty. “It’s good,” Harry said. 

Malfoy didn’t seem to hear him. He was already opening another one of the steamers. He pulled out what looked like a little twisted hand. “Chicken feet,” he said, which Harry supposed made sense. He never in his life imagined that he would see Malfoy eat with his hands, but he did, sucking on the chicken’s…toes, and spitting the tiny bones out neatly. 

“Er—” Harry said. 

“No one asked you to try them,” Malfoy said defensively. 

“No one said I wouldn’t,” Harry said, equally defensively, and set about eating one of the chicken feet. It was a little spicy, and eating it seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. 

When he looked up Malfoy was staring at him. Harry shrugged. “It’s good.”

It was strange to think that he’d never actually had a meal with Malfoy. He must have watched him eat a hundred meals across the Great Hall, convinced that he was eating his oatmeal suspiciously, but he’d never eaten with Malfoy. He never even considered it a potential outcome.

And now they were having chicken feet at half-ten.

“The first thing that has got to go is the portrait,” Malfoy said, after a while. “I don’t know how you live with that.”

“You get used to it,” Harry said.

“And besides,” he added. “Can’t you, just, talk to her? Y’know. Convince her. She shouldn’t have to…go away.”

Malfoy stared. Harry had always thought he looked like a younger version of Lucius, because of his blond hair and grey eyes. Now, though, all Harry could see was Narcissa, and Bellatrix, and the horrible portrait of Great-Aunt Walburga, and maybe Sirius, too. “Convince her,” Malfoy said. “Potter, it’s a portrait.”

“I know,” Harry said, annoyed. “But portraits have personalities. They’re alive, in a way.”

“You really believe it,” Malfoy said. “All that—the Savior—and everything you said.” 

“What?”

“You can’t convince a portrait to do anything.” Malfoy spoke slowly, like he was explaining something to a first-year. “And if Great-Aunt Walburga was alive, I wouldn’t have been able to convince her, either.” Which didn’t really answer Harry’s question.

“Anyone can change,” Harry said. “You just need the right message.”

Malfoy stared at him some more. But wasn’t he sitting across from Harry now, even though he had been a Death Eater and called Hermione a Mudblood? They were drinking tea and being civil. Harry’s head hurt. It was strange to say these things to Malfoy. It felt like getting too close to things he didn’t want to talk about at all, and he was sure Malfoy didn’t want to talk about them either. “I can pay you,” he said. 

“Is that my message?” Malfoy didn’t sound offended, only bored. His grey eyes were unreadable. 

“I was just thinking,” Harry said. “It wasn’t related. Unless you want to talk about it.” It being the war. It being the times before the war, at Hogwarts. 

“Why did you ask me for help?”

Harry counted on his fingers. “You have a blood claim to the house. You’re a Cursebreaker. And Hermione seems to think you’re all right.”

Malfoy looked scandalized. “You can’t possibly make all your character assessments based on what Granger thinks.”

Harry shrugged. “You were awful to her.”

“I was awful to you . I let Death Eaters into Hogwarts. I tried to kill Dumbledore and turn you over to Voldemort.”

“But you didn’t,” Harry pointed out. 

“I shouldn’t get credit for failing,” Malfoy said. 

After his trial, Malfoy had read a statement off a piece of paper. He said that he was very sorry for everything that he had done. He said that he knew that his apology wouldn’t bring back anyone who had died, and he was sorry to all of their families. He said that he looked forward to participating fully in the reparations efforts.

“If he meant it, he wouldn’t have to write it down,” Harry said at the time. 

“He probably didn’t want to forget anything, or say something wrong,” Hermione said, frowning. Back then Hermione was always trying to moderate. She said that she had to be Harry and Ron’s moral voice. She thought that if she was angry—about the year she spent with a price on her head, the Forest of Dean, the Wandless, about having to Obliviate her own parents—it would undermine her credibility.

She wanted the world to be a better place, and to her that meant figuring out a way to move forward. Harry guessed he must have thought that, too, otherwise he wouldn’t have testified for Malfoy and his mum. 

But Harry never wanted to believe that Malfoy was a decent person. He didn’t want Malfoy to drink his tea and tell him that he was sorry. He just wanted Malfoy to fix his house, and then they would never have to see each other again except in passing. And maybe Harry could keep eating those custard buns. 

“Don’t apologize,” Harry said, preemptively.

“I wasn’t going to,” Malfoy said.

Malfoy didn’t apologize that time, or the next time, or the time after that. He didn’t apologize when he broke the Permanent Sticking Charm and disenchanted Great-Aunt Walburga’s portrait, or when they took the house elf heads off the walls (“Merlin,” Malfoy said), or when they found a locked box of cursed jewelry in the floorboards.

“Half of this could kill someone,” Malfoy said, quietly, but he didn’t apologize. 

At Hogwarts, Malfoy believed that he was better than everyone else because he was rich and a pureblood. Now, Malfoy seemed to believe most strongly in the rituals of tea. He was always rinsing teacups in hot water and pouring the tea over tiny clay figures they found in the attic, lecturing Harry the entire time about cream and sugar. Harry ate custard buns and watched him. 

They talked about Quidditch, and sometimes football. Malfoy was for Spurs, which made sense because Harry was for Arsenal. He said that he went to a Muggle university to study cultural anthropology, and that’s how he got interested in football and Far Eastern magic.

“ You? ” 

“It was awful,” Malfoy said, wrinkling his nose. “I had to pretend I knew how to use a computer. And everyone called me Dave.”

Harry laughed so hard that he spilled tea everywhere. He tried to imagine Malfoy in a Muggle university, calling himself Dave, and he couldn’t. He thought that maybe he didn’t know Malfoy as well as he thought he did.  It was hard to reconcile the Malfoy sitting in front of him with the Malfoy he knew at Hogwarts. Maybe it was his hair. 

“But I liked it,” Malfoy said. 

Harry spelled away the tea and wiped the tears from his eyes. “Why’d you go?” 

“I wanted to go somewhere no one knew me,” Malfoy said. Harry’s cup was empty. He raised it and clinked it against Malfoy’s anyway. 

The only reason Malfoy even saw the ghost was because he was spending more evenings at Grimmauld Place than not, and the only reason Malfoy was always at Grimmauld Place was because Harry kept asking him over, and Harry didn’t know why he kept asking him over or why Malfoy kept saying yes.  Most days they didn’t even work on the house, which was much cleaner and brighter than Harry had ever seen it anyway. They had takeaway, or sometimes Malfoy would ask Kreacher to cook. They ate white fish and scallion pancakes and soup that Malfoy said was made of bird nests. They talked about everything that wasn’t the war. Sometimes Malfoy asked after Hermione, and he made the appropriate noises when Harry told stories about Rose. 

That night, Harry told Malfoy about the cupboard under the stairs. They were drinking Chinese white liquor. He didn’t know how it came up, but once he said it, he couldn’t take it back.

Malfoy was silent for a long time. “You lived in a cupboard.”

“Under the stairs, yes.”

“Merlin,” Malfoy said. 

Harry didn’t really know how to talk about the cupboard. He didn’t know how to explain that he preferred Dark wizards trying to kill him over summers with the Dursleys, whose cruelty was so banal. It was easier to talk to Malfoy about it, somehow, because he knew that Malfoy wouldn’t pity him. 

“Hermione thinks I should speak to a professional,” Harry said. 

“I’m inclined to agree,” Malfoy said. He poured Harry another glass and pushed it across the table. “I’m sorry that your relatives kept you in a cupboard,” he said. 

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“You won’t let me apologize for the things that were my fault.” 

“I’m sorry I almost killed you that time in the bathroom,” Harry said. “I’m sorry I laughed when Mad Eye turned you into a ferret. I’m sorry I stole your wand in the middle of a war. I’m sorry that I thought you were the Heir of Slytherin and spied on you using Polyjuice Potion.”

Malfoy made a strangled sound. “I didn’t even know about the last thing,” he said. It was almost funny, now, remembering Malfoy’s tiny pinched face, his too-blond hair. “Then I’m sorry about the time I broke your nose on the train. I’m sorry that I nearly killed Katie Bell and Ronald Weasley. I’m sorry that I allied myself with Voldemort and Umbridge and the Carrows, and I’m sorry that I used Cruciatus on Neville Longbottom. I’m sorry that I was cruel to Hermione.”

“Malfoy, stop.”

“One more thing,” Malfoy said. “I’m sorry that I still love my parents.”

“My father bullied Snape,” Harry said. “Sirius tried to get him killed.” 

“That’s not the same, and you know it.”

“They’re still your parents,” Harry said. 

“I’m sorry about the Potter stinks badges,” Malfoy said. 

Harry snorted. “At least those were funny.” 

The hand materialized slowly. Grimmauld Place did that, sometimes. It created blind spots. So Harry barely noticed it, and then it curled its grey, shriveled fingers over Malfoy’s shoulder. “Potter,” Malfoy said, softly, urgently. He looked down at the hand. “What the fuck is touching me?”

Harry didn’t answer, he just threw a Stupefy into the dark past Malfoy’s ear. The hand fell away. “Run,” Harry said.

But Malfoy didn’t run. He turned and pulled out his wand. Whatever he was facing, Harry’s Stupefy had only surprised it. It was…it was a woman, maybe, only it was seven feet tall even hunched over and had grey skin stretched over protruding bones. Its thin wrists jangled with gold jewelry, its clothes torn and dirty. 

In seven years, Harry had never quite gotten used to feeling like his life was constantly in danger. It surprised him, then, that in the seven years since he had gotten so used to feeling mostly safe. 

But it wasn’t moving. It was just looking at Malfoy, and Malfoy was looking at it.

“Hello,” Malfoy said, cautiously. He added something in Mandarin. Whatever it was, the thing hated it. It lunged at Malfoy, who threw up a frantic Protego. “Okay,” he said, “run.”

“I told you so,” Harry said, and then he grabbed Malfoy’s hand and dragged him up the stairs into his bedroom. 

“Have you got any biscuits?” Malfoy said. His hand was cold. 

“Biscuits? Malfoy, are you hungry —”

“Any food, really,” Malfoy said, dropping Harry’s hand and opening the door. “Quickly, we don’t have time.” The thing was moving up the stairs almost leisurely, and Harry recognized the cold, sinister feeling he’d felt so many times. 

“You’re a wizard,” Harry said. “Accio Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans!”

Malfoy glared at him and snatched the bag of Every Flavor Beans out of the air. The thing was just outside now. “Stand back,” Malfoy said, opening the bag. 

He said something else in Mandarin, and then dumped the candy out on the floor in the hall. The thing stopped in its tracks and started shoveling beans into its mouth. 

“Wha—Expecto Patronum!” Harry said, and the stag thundered out of his wand. The thing just looked up curiously and went back to its food. 

Malfoy pulled a sort of folded book out of his pocket and started scanning it. “It’s running out of beans,” Harry said, nonsensically. 

“She,” Malfoy said. The thing straightened itself—herself—up, as much as she seemed to be able to, and then stumbled through the doorway. Malfoy shoved Harry, hard, sending him sprawling. 

“Ow,” Harry said. Malfoy pointed his wand at the thing and said something that must have been a spell, and it retreated back into a shadow. 

“Sorry,” Malfoy said, not sounding very sorry at all. He laid on the floor next to Harry. 

Harry’s heart was still beating very fast. His elbow hurt where it had hit the floor. He looked at the ceiling. Malfoy didn’t say anything, so he looked at the ceiling more. He tried to think about things other than the being that had just maybe tried to kill them. He wanted to ask Malfoy if he was alright, but he wasn’t sure what Malloy would think of that. “Is the Chinese Fireball actually Chinese?” he said instead. 

“ That’s what you’re thinking about right now?” Harry slid his hand across the floor so their pinky fingers were touching. It was nice to know that he and Malfoy were both still alive. “Sort of,” Malfoy said. “It’s a hybrid species. I believe a wizard named Zhang Mo from Sichuan created the original Fireball in the mid-15th century, and then he was ostracized from Chinese Wizarding society.”

“Why?”

“Chinese dragons are water beasts who control the rain,” Malfoy said. “They must have seen it as a desecration, to force it to breathe fire.”

So that anecdote didn’t improve Harry’s mood at all. “What was that thing?”

“It’s a hungry ghost. Like a dementor, if it actually ate people.”

“What is it doing here?”

“Chinese magic tends toward…resentment.” 

Harry thought about Great Aunt Walburga. He thought about Sirius. He thought about Malfoy himself, sixth year, when he was so, so pale. “You think the house is holding a grudge,” Harry said.

“I think it’s holding the grudges of everyone who has ever lived here,” Malfoy corrected. 

“Shit,” Harry said. 

“Shit,” Malfoy agreed.

“So how do we get rid of it?”

“You can’t.”

Harry sat up. “What do you mean, you can’t?”

“You don’t get rid of hungry ghosts,” Malfoy said. “You feed them.”

Harry stared at him. It was a strange angle, Malfoy’s hair fanned out like a halo, his fair skin bright against the dark wood. His eyes were closed. “You feed them? Malfoy, you said they eat people .”

Malfoy opened his eyes. Harry looked at a spot on the floor. “They don’t only eat people. And you only really have to feed them once a year.”

“Even then,” he said, “you don’t have to see them. I’ve never seen one before. My mother would have never allowed it. ”

Harry thought about Narcissa, who had certainly allowed far worse.

“She kept an altar,” Malfoy said. His eyes were closed again. “She had all of the family’s memorial tablets. And we celebrated the Hungry Ghost Festival.”

“You’ve known it could be a hungry ghost the whole time?”

“Yes,” Malfoy said. “But it also could have been a hanged ghost, or a drowned ghost, or a wandering ghost, or not a ghost at all.”

“The ghosts at Hogwarts were nice,” Harry said.

“It’s what we believe that creates reality,” Malfoy said, “not the other way around. Chinese wizards believe that the dead must be satiated, and so—”

“So you feed them,” Harry said. 

Harry spent the night at Hermione and Ron’s, because after Malfoy went home he couldn’t stand to be alone in the house, and because he couldn't think of a way to ask Malfoy to stay. Hermione was fascinated by the hungry ghost, as he expected. 

“It eats Every Flavor Beans?” Ron said, which was also what Harry expected.

“Why was Draco over, anyway?” Hermione said. “It’s a Thursday.”

Harry tried to sound nonchalant. “Oh, you know. Having tea.”

“You have tea with Malfoy?” Ron said. 

“Er,” Harry said. “Yes?”

Hermione nudged Ron in a way Harry was sure she thought was very subtle. “That’s lovely,” she said. 

“He’s different,” Harry said, “than he was. He likes Muggle football.”

“He’s for Spurs,” he added. Ron was for Everton. 

“You should have us over,” Hermione said. Harry almost missed the days it had been the three of them, solving mysteries. But he liked this, too. They were happy, Ron and Hermione. They had a great baby. Hermione loved her job. They never had to wear cursed lockets anymore. “I’d like to meet him.”

“You’ve met him,” Ron pointed out. “You punched him in the face.”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” Hermione said. 

Malfoy sat in front of the Black family tree, gently charming the scarred parts back to life. “Do you think Sirius would’ve wanted me to do this?” he asked. 

“No,” Harry said, lowering himself to the floor next to him. “But he was a stubborn person. It’s my house now, and I want him there.”

“You can’t choose your family,” Malfoy said, softly. 

“We could sit here and trade stories about our horrible aunts.”

“Fuck,” Malfoy said. “We really could.” Malfoy was wearing Muggle clothes and saying Muggle swears. He was painting in the name characters by hand. There was a smudge of black ink on his cheek. 

“Your name,” Harry said, tracing the characters on the scroll. “What does it mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Malfoy said. “ Tianlong . It means Draco. Sky dragon, if you want to be literal.”

”And Sirius?”

“ Tianlang ,” Malfoy said. “Sky wolf. Properly I suppose I should be tianlongzuo , the dragon constellation, and he should be tianlangxing , the wolf star, but it would be absurd to call a child that.”

Harry grinned. It was just like Malfoy, to have changed so much, to spend his Saturday morning painstakingly charming Harry’s godfather back onto a scroll that must have been a thousand years old, and to still be so absently posh. “You’re ridiculous,” Harry told him. “Your name is Draco .”

Malfoy turned up his nose at that, but there was a flush high on his cheeks. “Call me that again,” he said, not quite meeting Harry’s eyes. 

“Draco,” Harry said. Just to make him blush a little more. It felt nice to say. Like starting over.

“You’re a distraction,” Malfoy—Draco—said. “I hope your house is haunted forever.”

Sometimes being with Malfoy felt like standing on the edge of a high cliff. Harry didn’t know if Malfoy was flirting. He didn’t even know if he was flirting. 

“What was he like?” Malfoy said suddenly. “Your godfather.”

“He cared about me a lot,” Harry said. “He liked Muggle things and he was an Animagus, like my dad. A dog. He hated this house. He was a good person, but he was in a lot of pain, I think.” Harry had never talked about Sirius like this. No one had ever asked. “Professor Lupin said that he was reckless.”

“Was it true, then?”

“Was what true?”

“My mother always said that he never had any restraint. She said it just like that. Restraint. My mother…values decorum.”

Seven years ago—hell, two months ago—Harry would’ve hit Malfoy for saying that. “Sirius certainly didn’t value decorum,” he said instead. “He had a Muggle motorcycle.”

That made Malfoy smile, but only for a second. “I wish I’d met him.”

“My mother also says that there are things more important than what I want,” Malfoy said, sounding miserable again. “That’s why I asked.”

Harry never knew how to comfort anyone. Hermione said it was because no one had ever comforted him. That was something else she thought he should speak to a professional about. She said that sometimes people liked to be touched, and sometimes they liked to hear that someone was listening to them. Harry reached out and took Malfoy’s hand. He was doing it wrong, but he couldn’t take it back now that he had committed. “It’s okay to want things,” he said. Ginny used to say that to him all the time.

“Look what wanting things got my Aunt Andromeda,” Malfoy said. His eyes were very shiny. “Or your godfather.”

So it had been Narcissa all along. Harry had assumed it would have been Lucius. “Not all ancestors are good ancestors,” Harry said. 

Malfoy looked at him. “That’s surprisingly astute, Potter,” he said.

“I think you should call me Harry.”

Chapter Text

If your parents made mistakes, and their parents made worse mistakes, and their parents made even worse mistakes, you can’t live your life thinking that nobody has to pay for those mistakes, can you?

Alexandra Chang

Poor kid. Even when he becomes a grown-up, a success of sorts, he won’t ever be able to run away from his childhood. 

Benson Yu

HARRY POTTER, TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD

Draco was always preparing for some festival or another. There was the Tomb-Sweeping Festival and the Ghost Festival, which he said would keep the hungry ghost at bay. There was the Dragon Boat Festival, which came with sticky rice stuffed with pork and water chestnuts, and the Mid-Autumn Festival, which came with mooncakes. 

“I’d like to see it,” Luna said. They were at the Natural History Museum, which Luna loved. She said that she was fascinated by Muggle culture. By Muggle culture she meant the dinosaur exhibits, which she thought were “fundamentally misguided but ultimately quite illuminating.” She thought it was admirable how Muggles made sense of a world without magic. She was also partial to the gemstones. 

“You’d like to see what?”

“The tomb sweeping,” Luna said. “Are you actually going to sweep a tomb?”

“Er, no,” Harry said. Though Draco might have him sweep a tomb, he wasn’t sure. “I think you just set things on fire?”

So Harry went home and told Draco that Luna would like to come to the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, and Draco fretted, and had Harry send Luna an owl asking if there was anything in particular that she would like to burn. He took a Portkey to China to buy some things for the festival and Harry didn’t hear from him for two whole days.

When he came back he cleaned every inch of the house, behavior that Kreacher not only enabled but encouraged. “If Master Harry is to be having guests, the guests must be feeling welcome,” the elf said, gleefully scrubbing the baseboards. Kreacher was always taking Draco’s side, which Harry found that he didn’t mind at all. He would rather come home to the old elf admonishing him to take off his shoes than to Great Aunt Walburga, and besides, it kept the floors cleaner. It delighted Kreacher that Draco spoke Mandarin, and sometimes Harry came downstairs in the morning to them having animated conversations over congee and buttered toast.

On the day of the festival Draco fretted even more. Harry couldn’t get him to sit down for anything. “She was a prisoner,” Draco said, “in my basement.”

“If Luna didn’t want to see you, she wouldn’t have asked to come,” Harry said, but Draco had been like this with Hermione, too, and Molly, and even Teddy. He had learned that there was no way out but through. 

When the doorbell rang, Draco went down the stairs like there was a ghost after him. 

“Good morning,” Luna said. She was wearing a powder-blue coat and holding a box of satsumas, for some reason. 

“Hello,” Draco said. “I’m sorry that you were a prisoner in my basement.” 

“Oh,” Luna said. “Do you have any prisoners in your basement right now?”

“Er, no,” Draco said.

“That’s good,” Luna said. “That means you learned from the experience. I like your hair.” 

Draco was a lot of things, but he was rarely speechless. “Thank you,” he said, faintly. Harry stifled a laugh.

“I brought satsumas,” Luna said. “I read on the Internet that they were traditional.”

“Thank you,” Draco said again. He looked shell shocked. 

“You’re welcome,” Luna said. “Shall we burn some things?”

Luna had a photo of her parents, who looked young and happy. Harry had a photo of his own parents on their wedding day and a photo of Sirius and Remus with their arms thrown around each other, laughing. Draco had the Black family tree because he said that someone had to do it. He said that you burned things for people you liked so that they could live comfortably in the afterlife, and you burned things for people you didn’t like so that they would leave you alone. 

They set up the photos on the altar in front of the family tree and lit incense. Draco set up a little magic brazier and they burned folded sheets of silver paper that he said was money for the dead. They burned paper houses and books and wands, and Kreacher insisted that they burn a paper version of him so his mistress would have an elf to look after her. They put some of Luna’s satsumas on the altar, and plain white buns, and slices of roast pork. They poured tea—no cream, no sugar—over the ashes of the burned-up things, and then it was over.

“Thank you,” Luna said. “That was nice.” 

Harry agreed. It was cathartic. He liked the feeling that he was doing something to honor his family, even if it wasn’t what they would have done. And he liked thinking that it would keep the hungry ghost at bay. 

“Draco, you should come to one of our museum days,” Luna continued. “We’re going to the Victoria and Albert next month, aren’t we, Harry?”

“Er, yes,” Harry said. Luna liked the hats at the V&A, and the wallpapers. Draco would probably like it there, too. Like Luna, he liked looking at things that were pretty or old or interesting or all three.

Draco looked at Harry a little helplessly. “Sure,” he said. “I would love to.”

“That wasn’t so bad,” Draco said, once Luna had gone. 

“It never is as bad as you think it’s going to be,” Harry said. 

“Except for the times that have been just as bad as I thought they were going to be,” Draco said. “Get dressed. We have one more thing to do.”

Draco did end up making him sweep a tomb. Harry hadn’t come back to his parents’ grave since that time during the war. He felt that he had nothing to do there. It belonged to everyone more than it belonged to Harry. Other people brought flowers; other people left photos and notes of gratitude. 

“They’re your parents,” Draco said firmly. So the two of them swept the tomb. They pulled weeds and brushed away leaves and dirt. They cleared away flowers that had long died. They tidied the piles of offerings. Dear James and Lily, some of the notes read. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Potter. There were photos of waving families, of chubby, smiling babies. Thank you, the notes said. For your bravery, for your sacrifice, for protecting my right to love, for a new world, from Muggleborns and Squibs, from the pureblood spouses of Muggles, from people who lost someone during either war. 

Harry’s eyes stung. 

NARCISSA MALFOY, FORTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD

Narcissa had not seen her sister in over thirty years. She must have owled her a hundred times at the beginning. She had begged her sister to come home, had pleaded and threatened, and Andromeda had not answered.

Sisterhood was complicated. It always had been, for the three of them, thorny and fraught. As children Bellatrix was always making Narcissa cry. Andromeda and Bella had been even worse. Narcissa could still remember them screaming, grabbing fistfuls of each other’s hair, landing real punches. Over what, Narcissa couldn’t imagine. Even when they were teenagers, the three of them had never spoken much about their feelings. But they loved each other. It was the only thing Narcissa had been certain of. 

And now, everything that could have possibly changed had changed. Narcissa had seen Andromeda’s daughter in the Great Hall, dead, ash and blood smeared across her face. She knew that the girl was a Metamorphagus, that she should not have recognized her, except that in death she looked just like her mother. For a second Narcissa just stood there, stunned, and then she realized that her sister was not twenty-two any longer. 

She knelt over the girl, brushed her dark hair out of her face. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and set about cleaning her face gently, like she could still feel hurt. Had Andromeda felt the loss? Or was she going about her day, unaware of what had happened to her child? “Hey,” someone barked. “Get away from her.”

Narcissa paid them no mind. She had never met the girl. She couldn’t recall her name, not when everything was so loud, so fresh. But she was one of them. Andromeda was not here, and so it was Narcissa who should clean the girl’s body, who should wash her hands, who should watch over her until someone could bring incense and joss paper. 

“I said get away from her,” the same voice said, and Narcissa was dragged bodily away. “You have your own dead.”

“What happened to her?” Narcissa said. The speaker was a large man she didn’t recognize. “Please.”

The man’s face twisted in rage. “Your sister,” he spat. 

Narcissa felt the horror spread from her chest, to her fingertips, to her toes. “My sister,” she repeated, faintly. Aunt Walburga always told her that all she had was her pride, but her pride had abandoned her. She collapsed at the man’s feet, reached for the hems of his robes. “No,” she said. 

The man kicked her hand away. “There,” he said, pointing. “Pathetic.”

There was no rest in Bella’s body. Her eyes were open, wild, her muscles clenched and twisted. It was horrible to look at. Narcissa squeezed her eyes shut. But she could still see Bella’s face, displacing all her memories of her sister when she had been young and beautiful. She was just dead. She wanted to scream, the way the funeral criers had when she was a child, wild, tearing at her hair and her robes. She wanted to grab Bella’s body and shake. She took out her handkerchief again, started scrubbing at Bella’s cheeks, her forehead, but she was only getting blood everywhere. Merlin and Morgana both, there was Black blood on her hands, and she had just lost Andromeda and Bella forever.

Her son appeared in her Floo on a Thursday in January and changed everything all over again. It wasn’t raining, or snowing, but there was a permanent chill in the air, a grey which meant the weather was waiting for something. “Hello, Mother,” he said.

Draco visited her, dutifully, twice a month. He usually arrived on Sunday afternoons and stayed for dinner. They made polite, formal small talk. Draco’s Mandarin had been steadily improving. He seemed more confident speaking about everyday things, not just his work with the Chinese Cursebreaking Delegation. Narcissa very badly wanted to know what had changed, but she was a Black. She didn’t ask.

“I’m seeing Harry Potter,” Draco said, still wearing his coat and his shoes. He dusted the ash off his sleeves and Vanished it.

“Say it again,” Narcissa demanded. “In English.” She needed to be sure. She needed to hear that he was sure.

Her son straightened up to his full height. He was wonderfully tall, the way none of the Blacks had ever been. “I’m seeing Harry Potter,” he said. “We are living together.”

Narcissa had always thought—well. He was her son. She knew him. She had hoped not, she had tried to encourage him otherwise, and then they had not spoken about it for many years. But now Lucius was in Azkaban and all the Blacks were dead, and there was nothing in it, anyway, a pure bloodline or a legacy. Still. Narcissa had wanted grandchildren.

Harry Potter, though. The man—the boy, really—who saved the Wizarding World, and who had twice saved her son. She had rather expected him to be self-righteous, as her cousin had been, to act as if Draco owed him something. Perhaps he did. 

“Fine,” Narcissa said. 

“Fine,” Draco said. 

They looked at each other. It hadn’t been like this before the war. Draco had chattered endlessly to Narcissa as a child. She had done her best to treat him warmly, and he had rewarded her with an effusive, spirited personality. And then the war. And then the silence. 

“We will be hosting the Spring Festival at Grimmauld Place this year,” Draco said. 

Every year for twenty-five years the two of them had spent the Spring Festival together. She had to get special permission from Dumbledore for it, but she always brought her son home. For seven years the only time Narcissa had felt like she was truly alive was when she was wrapping dumplings, cooking whole fish, making yi mein and sweet and savory nian gao. And now her son was leaving her. “Fine,” Narcissa said, controlled. 

Draco raised an eyebrow. “I came to extend an invitation.” 

Something in Narcissa unwound. She was not losing her son. “I will cook,” she said.  

“There will be…more guests than usual,” Draco said. “Harry has many people who love him.” 

What went unsaid: Draco felt that he had no one who loved him but Narcissa. He had never found a replacement for his rotten family. “Fine,” Narcissa said. “I will still cook.” She knew she was the last to know about this gathering. Her son had gotten permission from every other guest before actually inviting her, and he had likely reminded them of her transgressions against them first. 

He had also, undoubtedly, reminded them of his own. 

“Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood will be there,” Draco said. “Voldemort kept them in our basement.”

He thought he was the only one who felt shame. She would let him believe that. “Fine,” Narcissa said.

“Aunt Andromeda,” Draco said, “and Teddy.”

Andromeda. Her name sent a thrill through Narcissa. She believed that she would never spend another Spring Festival with her sister as long as she lived. She would have to make shizitou; it had always been Andromeda’s favorite. She wanted to scream, to bite hard enough to draw blood, to kick her feet in a tantrum. I hate you, she said, as a child, whenever Andromeda had enforced bedtimes and toothbrushing and drinking herbal medicine. “No,” she said. “I won’t spend the new year with that woman.”

“She is willing to spend it with you,” Draco said, confirming Narcissa’s suspicions.  

“Andromeda always enjoyed a sense of moral superiority over all of us,” Narcissa said. Meaning, me. The baby sister she left in a den of snakes. Who was, in the end, a snake herself. 

Draco flinched. “She is a good woman.”

“And your mother is not.”

“That is not what I said.”

Narcissa had been angry enough to speak her mind to her child. Now she was only tired. “You should leave.”

“Fine,” Draco said. “I hope you will reconsider.”

I love you, Narcissa thought. In spite of your choices. She watched as Draco walked out, the door of her cottage clicking shut behind him.

DRACO MALFOY, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD

Hermione Granger was the reason that Draco was in therapy. She had requested it as a condition of his release. It was just his luck, really, that he had managed to imprison both Luna Lovegood and Granger, the only two seventeen-year-old witches concerned even with the welfare of house elves. Draco was not a house elf. But he was a person, and as such did not manage to escape Granger’s sympathies, which was, in some ways, a fate worse than Azkaban.

He wanted to go to Azkaban, then. His father was in Azkaban. Draco was disillusioned of the whole Dark Lord thing, but he still thought rather highly of his father. He didn’t want to be treated like a child. He wanted to be treated like a man. 

Draco spoke to a woman named Georgie twice monthly on Friday mornings. He asked Georgie if she could just use Legilimency. Georgie said no. He asked Georgie if he could put his memories into a Pensieve for her to watch. Georgie said no. He sat, for several sessions, in stony silence, and Georgie had carried on asking him questions and writing things down in her notebook. 

“Are you a Muggle therapist?” Draco asked. Georgie used a biro. 

“No,” Georgie said. “But I think wizards have bypassed some things that we really shouldn’t, don’t you?”

“My father says that Muggles are inefficient,” Draco said. His father was in Azkaban and he hadn’t spoken to him in months. 

Georgie only shrugged. “Efficiency isn’t the be-all, end-all.”

“It is, if you want to be successful.”

“And are you successful?”

Which meant Draco had to admit that no, he wasn’t particularly successful. Was he angry about it? He wasn’t sure. He had nearly been successful when he was sixteen. By the time he had started seeing Georgie, two years later, he already felt much older. “No,” Draco said.

Georgie was also half-Chinese, which Draco found comforting. He’d never met another half-Chinese person, other than Teddy, and Teddy was seven. Sometimes he said things like, “it’s a Chinese thing,” and Georgie would ask, “is it a Chinese thing, or is it your mother,” and Draco would realize that yes, it was his mother, and her strange terrible wonderful family. 

“Wonderful?” Georgie asked. 

Wasn’t his childhood wonderful? Hadn’t he loved his Aunt Walburga, who had certainly been off her nut but who had also always made the best dumplings? Hadn't he loved his mother and the stories she had told him about her sisters over slices of white peaches? Hadn’t he loved Shanghai, and Grimmauld Place, and his mother’s dressing room? Harry had lived in a cupboard.

“Harry lived in a cupboard,” Draco said.

Harry. He was still getting used to it—both the name and the man. Fourth year he’d started having these horrible fantasies that Harry would snap and shove him up against a wall, snogging him breathless. Cedric Diggory and Krum had been more stunning, cut more imposing, daydream-worthy figures, but it was Harry Potter, sullen and egotistical and inevitable, that Draco wanted most. He hated Harry because he hated himself. 

Georgie said that this was called projection, and was completely normal in young boys. He had complained endlessly to his mother about slights both real and perceived, but he secretly relished the fact that at least Potter noticed him. 

“Draco,” Georgie asked, early on. “Do you feel that it's important that people like you?” 

“Of course not,” he scoffed. “I want to be respected.”

“I want to be liked by my mother,” he said. “And my father.” And because he sounded friendless, he added, “and my friends.”

“But you want others to respect you.”

“Inferiors,” Draco said, only half-believing it. The war had made him tired. 

“Who are inferiors?”

Draco looked at the tiles on the floor. “Muggles,” he said. “And—their Wizarding children. Blood traitors.”

“The poor?”

“No,” Draco said. “Only…people who are not. Well. I suppose I would have said the poor, only that’s rather crass, isn’t it? I mean those who don’t know how to interact with proper society, and who don’t care to.” He said all of this in a rush. It was good to get it out. 

“And Harry Potter?”

Draco froze. “I don’t think about him at all,” he said, finally.

He completed his mandatory therapy, but he asked Georgie if he could keep coming. She said yes. He completed his probation period and was cleared to continue all non-essential practice of magic by the Wizengamot. He became a Cursebreaker. He tried his best to be liked. 

And then Harry Potter showed up at Draco’s cubicle, where he worked, carelessly handsome as ever, and asked for a favor as if they were the sort of people who did favors for one another. Just when Draco was putting the pieces of his life back together.

Fixing up Grimmauld Place was a boon for Georgie. Draco was confronting his family’s history and culture and his own history with Harry Potter, the savior of the Wizarding World, Draco being the sort of thing he was called to save the world from. Georgie said that he was learning to be around Harry—she insisted on calling him Harry—and around himself.

“I don’t want a redemption arc,” he said. 

“You don’t want one, or you don’t think you deserve one?”

“Not everything is about him,” Draco said, as if he hadn’t spent the entire previous Saturday trying not to look at the man’s bright green eyes, the clear, even brown of his skin. He had freckles, for Merlin’s sake, and just one dimple that made his smile look lopsided. And Potter smiled more at him, these days. Laughed, even.

Draco didn’t want his forgiveness. He wanted him to shove Draco up against some wall or another, just so he could get it out of his system. This thing that had been in his system, on and off, for over a decade. 

After the incident with the hungry ghost Harry made the first move. He’d closed the distance between them as if they were the sort of people who snogged one another. 

“Potter,” Draco had gasped out, in bed, on instinct. 

“Harry,” the man had corrected gently, leaning down to kiss him again.

Far from getting anything out of Draco’s system, that shag had led to Draco inviting his mother to Harry Potter’s home for the bloody Spring Festival. “And that’s what I’m worried about,” he told Georgie. 

“Maybe I don’t want you to meet my mother,” he’d told Harry. 

“I’ve met your mother,” Harry said, wryly. He had figured out how to laugh about the war. Draco thought that was admirable. He also thought it was funny when Draco had the sort of ordinary anxieties that non-Gryffindors tragically suffered. 

Except that Draco couldn’t say that, could he, because they could have had a playful house rivalry except that Draco ruined it by trying to get everyone killed.  

“And anyway,” Georgie said, “isn’t Spring Festival for starting over?”

HARRY POTTER, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD

When Harry was at Hogwarts, he thought that Slytherin cunning was something innately evil. Like the basilisk that had nearly killed Ginny, or Draco fixing the Vanishing Cabinet. 

Now, as he watched Ron play Wizarding mahjong with Narcissa Malfoy, he understood that it was something else entirely. 

For the past five months, Draco had been teaching Ron Wizarding mahjong. “You’re the only person I know who could manage it,” Draco had said. “Hermione has no patience and Harry has no sense of strategy.” 

Ron played Draco in Wizarding chess a few times, but he said that Draco wasn’t very interesting to play against. Even though Draco almost always beat Harry at chess, and Ron liked to play with Harry. “Sorry, mate,” Ron said. “You just aren’t very good.”

Draco had turned up his nose at that. “I think you’ll find that my real strength is in Wizarding mahjong,” he said, sounding for all the world exactly how he always had at Hogwarts. And Ron hadn’t been able to resist the challenge. 

“A real game of mahjong needs four,” Draco said. Draco. Andromeda. Narcissa. Ron made four. 

“Amazing,” Hermione said. She shook her head. “He can’t have known.” 

Harry felt a surge of fondness. For Draco, who had certainly known, and who had shamelessly manipulated Harry’s best friend to avoid social awkwardness. And for Ron, who was facing the circumstances with what could only be described as Gryffindor bravery. The tiles clicked cheerfully together in the corner of the room. Occasionally Ron made noises of celebration. Once, Narcissa even laughed.

Harry wasn’t much for holidays except for Christmas at Hogwarts and Halloween at Hogwarts and Christmas and the Burrow, which was lovely but always left him feeling tired. But there was something about having everyone he loved under his own roof that made him feel nice. Was this how Molly felt every Sunday? Had this been how Aunt Petunia felt, when she was setting out the puddings and the cakes and the roasts, Harry locked in the cupboard?

It has been eight years from the war and the nightmares have mostly subsided. Harry knows that the Weasleys worried about him, and Hermione and Luna and Neville, and so did Andromeda. Draco worries about him, even though he has nightmares of his own. Even though they all do. It’s nice, then, to show them a house with no ghosts, a life with more happiness than sadness in it. 

“And now what is this?” Molly asked Kreacher. 

“This is nian gao, ma’am,” Kreacher said, importantly. “For having a tall year.”

“And the fish?” There were several fish with their heads and tails still on. Harry had never looked a fish in the eye while eating it before. It had taken some getting used to. 

“For extras,” Kreacher said. 

“Extras of what?” Ginny said. She was still exceptionally beautiful. 

Kreacher shrugged. “Extras.”

There was a sweet soup. Harry had also never had a sweet soup before Draco. Draco loved sweet soups. There were little balls of sticky dough in it, and jujubes. “Round things are for family,” Kreacher said. “The shizitou is Miss Andromeda’s most favorite food. And noodles is to live long.”

“Kreacher eats many noodles,” he continued. “That is why Kreacher lives so long.”

“Don’t all house elves live forever?” George shouted from across the room. 

“No,” Kreacher said, gravely. “Many house elves is dying.”

Teddy showed Luna and baby Rose his firecrackers while Angelina looked on anxiously, curly-haired Fred perched on her hip. “Seriously,” Angelina said, “why am I the only responsible adult?” 

“They’re burn-proof, honey,” George assured her.

“Children are not burn-proof,” Angelina said. Harry distinctly remembered Angelina jumping fifty feet off her broom once and doing a backflip just to prove that she could. 

“The firecrackers are safe,” Draco said, frowning down at his tiles. 

“I can’t believe I trust Draco Malfoy with my children’s safety more than my own husband,” Angelina grumbled.

“Your husband isn’t very trustworthy,” Ginny said. “Hey, Luna, pass me that big one.”

“Please don’t burn my godfather’s house down,” Harry said. 

“They’re burn-proof,” George said. “It’s like no one listens to me around here.”

“You’ve conditioned us to not listen to you,” Bill told him. 

“This is nice,” Fleur said, inspecting a dumpling before popping it in her mouth. “I am happy for you, Harry. It cannot have been easy.”

Harry swallowed around the lump in his throat. “No,” he agreed. It hadn’t been easy. They had been young, and they had suffered. They had lost people. But now Grimmauld Place was buzzing with young children, all of them clutching red and gold envelopes, none of whom would ever grow up alone and unloved.

(“Indoctrination,” Draco said, even though he was the one who insisted they had to be red and gold. 

“You still ended up in Slytherin,” Harry reminded him.

“And how did that work out for me?”

“Alright, in the end,” Harry said, kissing him on the cheek. “Go buy your hongbao, Uncle Draco.”)

ANDROMEDA TONKS, FIFTY-FOUR YEARS OLD

Andromeda had never done Spring Festival properly. Sometimes she would go to Muggle Chinatown and buy candied nuts and vegetables or a nian gao. But she never had a sense for cooking, and she had no family to speak of. Who would have given Dora hongbao? Bellatrix? Aunt Walburga? It was out of the question. 

Had Dora cared? Andromeda didn’t think to ask her, and now she was dead. She knew that Dora was interested in the Blacks and their oddities. Andromeda had known them too well to be interested and so she had kept them from her daughter. She also tried to keep her daughter from the Order, because she herself could not have raised a hand against her sisters, no matter the evil they had done. Did that make her a coward? Perhaps. 

When Harry Potter began seeing Cissy’s son Andromeda tried to talk him out of it. “Harry,” she said, “that family is not…loving. Or kind.”

“The Malfoys?”

“The Blacks.”

“You’re a Black,” Harry said stubbornly. “And Sirius was.”

Andromeda sighed. “Just be careful,” she said. 

When these things happened her first thought was to tell Dora. Can you believe that? Harry Potter, and my crazy sister’s son? Then she realized that Dora was dead. And then she wanted to tell Bellatrix, but Bellatrix was also dead, and before that Bellatrix hated her and was cruel to her husband and child and who knows who else. And in the end the sister Andromeda could not bear to fight killed her baby. They only had each other, her and Ted and Dora, and then she only had Ted. 

And Dora’s baby. Andromeda was too old to raise another baby. Too sad. But there was no time for grieving. Harry tried to help but Harry was too young, only seventeen, and besides he never had any parents at all and wouldn’t know what to do with a child.

Harry had grown up to be a good young man, parents or no. Angry, sometimes, but who could blame him? 

Before the war Andromeda never met Cissy’s son. She knew that he was called Draco and that he resembled his father. She saw him for the first time the day of his trial, shackles to the chair. She took a seat in the back row of the Wizengamot, Teddy asleep and strapped to her chest. 

The rumors were not true. The boy was the spitting image of his mother. At the trial he didn’t cry, but his voice shook just like Cissy’s always had when she was in trouble, and Andromeda felt a certain sympathy for him. Only she couldn’t afford sympathy. Not anymore. She went home right away to where Ted was waiting. She did not attend her sister’s trial. 

“I was wrong,” she told Harry, now. She transferred a piece of nian gao to her mouth and didn’t make eye contact. She had never been good at admitting she was wrong. It was a piece of her family she could never quite shake, even decades later. 

“Er, about what?” Harry said. He was making bubbles appear from the end of his wand for Hermione and Ron’s baby to play with and eating candied sugar cane with his other hand. She thought of Sirius, who always  ate all the sugar cane to keep them from Bella but pretended to hate water chestnuts because they were Regulus’s favorite. 

“I’ve never seen this house happy.”

“Oh,” Harry said. “Draco fed the ghost.”

“Aunt Walburga used to feed the ghosts,” Andromeda said. “But this was still no place for children.”

“You know this, Harry,” she continued, “but sometimes the things that hurt us most have nothing to do with magic at all.”

“He’s a good man,” Harry said. “He’s trying.”

“I haven’t seen my sister since before even the first war started,” Andromeda said. The two of them played Wizarding mahjong together, with Draco and Ron Weasley, of all people. Narcissa made shizitou. Even Andromeda had forgotten how much she loved it. After all this time, Narcissa remembered. “Her son is not what I would have expected.”

“He was,” Harry said. “But now I don’t think he is. To second chances?” He raised the chubby baby like he was making a toast. 

“To second chances.”

“Happy New Year, dajie,” Cissy said, as she stood to leave. She looked so old. She looked just like the child Andromeda loved. Andromeda reached for the old resentment that had grown inside of her like a pearl, and found that she couldn’t feel it. Just for that day, the taste of shizitou and good luck in her mouth. 

“Happy New Year, xiaomei,” Andromeda said, the once-familiar word coming instinctively. 

“Are you happy?”

Andromeda looked around a house she had hated, that she never thought she’d see again. It was filled with laughing children who had never known war and the adults that loved them. Her blood, and those she had chosen to love like her blood. Her grandchild, who favored the same bizarre hair colors as the mother he never knew. 

“More often than not,” Andromeda said, which was the truth.