They arrived in a heavily wooded area, surrounded by trees and overgrown brush. It was dark here, darker than it had been when they left the teashop. Draco cast his eyes upward but found only speckles of sky through the dense foliage. The trees grew so close their branches were nearly entwined, reaching ever skyward to find a scrap of sun amid the rest. The ground was soft, squishy beneath Draco's feet, the earth well watered. The scent of peat, wet earth, and living wood flooded Draco's senses. The air was close around them, so thick and humid Draco could barely breathe, though he thought having apparated out of an intense snogging session might've had something to do with it.

"You all right?" Potter asked, his wand out but unlit.

It took him a moment, his hand seeking out Potter's, but something struck him as wrong about the forest. But it wasn't the trees that gave it away. It was the hedges.

"This isn't a forest," he said in a whisper. "Not a natural one, anyway. It's a garden."

Potter looked about them, searching out Draco's reasoning. The hedges were overgrown, untended, but there was still a clear line where once they had been trimmed into neat lines. The trees and plants had been left to grow wild, unrestrained by aesthetic, and left the surrounding with an oppressive quality. As though the abandoned place had become feral, angry.

"The grounds of an estate?" Potter asked in an undertone. "Why would your mother come here? Do you recognize anything?" Draco shook his head and pulled out his wand, making to light it. The darkness crept ever inward and a chill ran up his spine. Potter shook his head and tightened his grip on Draco for a moment. "Lumos would be noticed."

Draco fell silent, keeping closer to Potter as they made through the plants toward what seemed like a clearing. Beyond the edge of trees and bushes, they found themselves standing on the lawn of a massive and aging manor house. Built in the Victorian style, it drew a crooked line against the horizon, as though an aging courtier bowed and broken by the weight of the sky. None of the lines were clean, none held up to the scrutiny of time, and the colour that once painted the outer walls of the manor flaked and peeled. Several windows stood broken, half-open eyes gazing sightless outward at the world.

As he stared up at the ruined home, he was struck by a lashing of his grief, imagining Malfoy Manor in a similar state. Standing empty, hollowed out of family and meaning and all the symbols of its life, how soon would the Manor turn into this? A portrait of a dying home, a ruined family, broken history.

"Draco?" Potter asked, his hand moving to the small of Draco's back. The heat of it, pressed there and radiating through the fabric of his robes, brought Draco back. "Do you know this place?"

Eyes narrowed, he tried to see the setting as it once might have been. "I'm not certain. I don't know I've ever been here, but something about it does feel...familiar."

Potter cast a wordless spell and a rush of magic drew itself around the manor, like a great serpent, then flowed back toward his wand. A miniature model of the home drew itself on the air in front of him, with three tiny pinpricks of light in one room toward the back.

"Three people in that room," Potter said, swiped away the image with a simple motion. "Your mother and two others. Do you have any idea whose house this is?" Potter looked deep into Draco's eyes, searching for answers Draco didn't have. He shook his head, and Potter nodded once. He trusted Draco, and that thought nearly knocked Draco off his feet.

"Stay close to me, behind me, and keep your wand out," he said. Draco followed after him as Potter crouched low to pass one of the windows.

"I can defend myself, Potter. Perhaps you remember Dueling Club?" he said, more out of defense for his pride than anything else. Potter smiled, but it wasn't as unreserved as it had been.

"You mean you haven't advanced at all since second year?" he shot, and Draco flicked his ear when they paused by a door. "However fearsome your talent at conjuring snakes may be, I am an auror, as you so enjoy pointing out, and you are not. Let me do the fighting, if it comes to that."

Potter swung around a corner, through a door, checking for an ambush, and found nothing. He pressed his back to the wall of the hall and motioned for Draco to join him. Draco slipped up against Potter, and they stood in silence, for a moment, trying to hear over the sound of their breathing.

When Potter gestured they keep going, toward the distant murmur of voices, Draco pondered a question.

"If we're dividing up responsibilities, and you're to do the fighting," he said, "does that mean I'm to do the talking?"

Potter paused, a smile pulling at the corners of his lips. "Well, you do have a talented tongue..."

The comment struck Draco speechless, but his stunned silence was broken by a crash like toppled furniture. Potter paused, pressing a hand flat to Draco's chest to check the next corner. He glanced at Draco, and their shared look spoke of sharp-edged fear-alert and tense.

Another crash and they rushed toward the sound, stopping just short of the door standing ajar. Potter and Draco stood flat to the wall, peering sidelong into the room. Narcissa stood barely in view, half-turned from the door. To an untrained eye, she might appear calm in her stance, but Draco recognize the radiating anxiety, the cold chisel of her shoulders, the pin-straightness of her spine; she'd had this same posture when Voldemort occupied their home. She was terrified.

"Cygnus, please," she said, her tone distant, almost bored. "Tantrums are for children. You were raised to display more decorum."

A shuffling sound preceded the entrance of a House-Elf. Adorned in a quilted patchwork garment, Kertsy crossed their line of sight, offering something to Narcissa. She refused with a gesture, never looking down, and the House-Elf passed out of sight to the other side of the room.

"My apologies for the outburst," a man's voice said. There was little about the voice that bore any kind of distinction. It sounded average in almost every way, except that the expression didn't fit. It was as though the man was unaccustomed to speaking courteously, or speaking at all. As though the words were an awkward fit for his tongue. "You know this time of year is difficult for me, what with the anniversary approaching..."

Narcissa's posture shifted slightly, and Draco felt torn between the urge to rush in and help her and to run away and hide. The shift was subtle but spoke volumes to his younger self. It was the posture he'd always feared the moment he did something wrong. It meant Mother was angry, and between her and Lucius, Draco always feared his mother's anger more than his father's. Lucius was harsh, stern. But if Narcissa was angry, it meant Draco had done something near unforgiveable.

"You need to tell me the truth," she said, every word punctuated by her coldness. "Where did you get the ring?"

Draco felt his mouth drop slightly. He glanced at Potter, whose hand splayed down Draco's front in an effort to calm him. Potter's attention was focused on the conversation.

"I don't know what you-"

"Do not lie to me, Cygnus," she said, and the frigid words drenched him in a cold sweat. Who was she talking to? Who was Cygnus? The only man by that name Draco had ever known had been his grandfather-"You spent years reading and rereading all the family history books you could get your hands on. You would know that ring by sight in an instant, and you would know all the history attached to it. Where did you get it?"

There was a silence, broken only by the shuffling of Kertsy as she moved about the room, and Cygnus answered, "I bought it off a thief. Some fool name of Mundungus Fletcher. He had the nerve to claim he'd found the ring and other things he was selling in an estate sale, but I knew the truth. He'd stolen it all-only way he could have gotten his hands on so many Black family artifacts. I had to reclaim them." There was a haughtiness to his voice, then, that sounded unfounded. "I have the rest of the items here," he added, a tinge of desperation in his words. He wanted nothing more than to please her. Draco felt bile rising in his throat.

Narcissa was quiet a moment, and Draco felt the confusion swirling into crystals in his mind. He was on the cusp of clarity but couldn't push through.

"But you sent the ring to Harry Potter," she said. "You didn't return it to me, to the family. You handed it over to one who has already claimed ownership of my family's birthright. Why would you do that to me, Cygnus? What have I done to warrant that kind of betrayal?" Narcissa's voice took on a wounded, pained quality, which Draco was also familiar with. It cut to the core in order to elicit shame. It was the worst punishment his mother had to offer-the knowledge that he had disappointed, betrayed her.

"No! Don't you see?" Cygnus said, and Potter's hand held his wand as a trap ready to be triggered. A hair's touch could snap him into action. "I did this because Potter has stolen so much from you! The ring is cursed, and if Potter put it on, he would be cursed too!"

"Nonsense," Narcissa said. "The curse is superstition. Perseus and Helena were murdered by a werewolf, not a curse."

Draco nearly breathed a sigh of relief, hearing the notion dismissed so easily, but Cygnus wasn't finished yet.

"But it is cursed! Just not the way everyone thinks!" Potter tightened his grip on his wand and looked back at Draco, barely breathing. Draco swallowed hard and inched closer, wand ready. "The rune magic inlaid into the ring demands that it only be used on a couple whose union is true love. If any enter into the bonding who do not meet that criteria, the ring dooms them to violent deaths. It was a detail the Malfoys and Peverells insisted upon. To ensure the union was as pure as Perseus and Helena claimed. They still didn't trust each other." He paused, sounding more desperate than ever. "That's why I sent it to Potter. I knew he'd have to investigate an anonymous package like that, and he'd take it to some jeweler to get information and if either of them put it on, it would seal him into a bond destined to destroy him! Everyone knows his true love was the blood-traitor Weasley girl. When she left him for someone else, he dissolved into meaningless relationships with whoever crossed his path. It was a perfect plan!"

Potter's jaw tightened, the muscle twitching. Draco let his eyes draw the line of Potter's face and neck, wondering how this man, this Cygnus, knew so much about him.

"Potter didn't take the ring to any jeweler," Narcissa said, counting her words. "He took it to the only jeweler on whom the magic would have worked-my son. He took the ring to Draco. But given how much you seem to know about Potter and the ring, you must have known he would." A pregnant silence followed, then, "After all I've done for you-after all I've given-you intended to kill Draco."

"Mother, please!" Cygnus cried, and Draco's entire body froze, his muscles contracting until he felt as though he was stone. He saw nothing at all before his eyes, nothing but the word Mother and wondered at its meaning.

Perhaps there is another Black, older than you, still out there.

Perseus's words echoed in Draco's mind, but there was no sense to them. Not really, not even now.

"I've told you not to call me that," Narcissa said. "I am not your mother."

Draco felt cold.

"More a mother to me than mine ever was," Cygnus said, and the man suddenly came into view, grasping at Narcissa's hands, on his knees in supplication. "You raised me, named me for your father; you gave me life when she would take it away."

"You will not speak of my sister that way," Narcissa snapped, and everything became clear. The Victorian Manor, rendered in all its original glory, painted itself in Draco's mind. He had seen it before, but very young and only once.

"The Lestrange Estate," Draco murmured, but he'd spoken too loud.

"Who's there?" Cygnus snapped, and suddenly he spun Narcissa into his grasp, using her as a shield, a knife to her throat.

Potter surged through the doorway, wand out, and Draco followed him. The man holding his mother captive was the same man in the image at Draco's shop. He hadn't noticed it before, but he could see it now-the resemblance to his Aunt Bella. The heavily lidded eyes, the wild, dark hair. Even the strange madness that lingered behind every expression was the same.

"Let her go," Potter said, his wand trained on Cygnus. The room had long since been a kitchen of sorts. Gutted of most of its contents, rough-edged piping protruded from the walls in one area, where there once had been a sink. On the other side, a fire blazed in a cracked and broken hearth. The stone and bricks and wood were jagged in places, like the gruesome teeth of a misshapen monster. The floor was littered with glass and broken china.

"You brought them here?" Cygnus said, ignoring Potter. "Why would you bring them here, Mother?"

"Draco is my only son," she said, still affecting a look of controlled calm. But the knife at her neck nicked skin, and beads of red appeared on her pale skin.

"Mistress!" Kertsy cried, frozen without orders and unsure of how to proceed.

"No! He is a disgrace to the Malfoy name!" Cygnus said. "Yes, I wanted him dead. He and Potter both. They stole my inheritance, my birthright as the eldest Black child! I should have Grimmauld Place; I should have the Malfoy fortune. I'm a more devoted son than he ever was. Why else would you have given me your father's name?"

"Put down the knife," Potter said, cutting Cygnus off. Draco itched to cast a spell, to use Potter's favourite disarming charm, but it was too risky. This close, the knife could easily cut Narcissa's throat before flying away. "You haven't done any real damage yet. You can still walk away from this, Cygnus. No one needs to get hurt."

Draco wanted to argue using his mother as a human shield and ransacking his place of business should definitely count as 'real damage,' but he decided, for once, he'd best leave the talking to Potter.

"Master Cygnus must let Mistress go!" Kertsy demanded, and Draco was nearly stunned out of focus. A House-Elf never spoke that way to someone they considered a Master. Except, on occasion, when dealing with misbehaving children.

So she didn't dismiss Kertsy. She sent her to raise Aunt Bella's son. Thoughts spun in Draco's mind as he hovered in the stand-off between all different kinds of family.

"You think your aim is that good, Potter?" Cygnus taunted, but Potter showed no sign of swaying. "You think since the Dark Lord's fall you can rule the wizarding world. But you can't. You're just a dirty half-blood."

"Do you really want to hurt her, Cygnus?" Potter asked, trying to negotiate with a lunatic. "You said it yourself. She's your mother. Why would you want to harm your mother? She named you for her father. That's an important mantle. Why would she do that if she didn't love you?"

"I don't want to hurt her," he said with a snarl. "But I will if you don't lower your wands. Mother understands. I must do whatever it takes to fight half-bloods and blood traitors." Then, he pulled out the dragonstone from somewhere behind him. "I'll prove it

"I'll tell you why I named you Cygnus," Narcissa interrupted, eyes wide as she stared at Draco. Draco fought hard not to curse him where he stood, knowing his mother's life was at stake. But the sliver of betrayal in his heart slowly grew. How could she have lied to him his whole life? "When I saw you, you were just a little thing. So small and helpless. I was already pregnant with Draco then. And then my sister cast her spell and decided to kill you, but I couldn't. I just couldn't let you die. I thought, the magic was still new, still unproven. Perhaps it was wrong. I thought maybe you'd grow from that weak little baby into a beautiful swan." One tear fell down Narcissa's cheek, and she shut her eyes before she added, "I was wrong."

Narcissa tried to jab at Cygnus with her wand, but he caught her hand and held the blade closer to her throat. He took the wand from her hand, and Draco lunged, but Potter stopped him. In the struggle, a chain glinted around Cygnus's neck, and the dragonstone slipped out of his shirt, inexpertly strung like a pendant. Everything crystallized for Draco-the drangonstone, the tapestry, aunt Bella-he understood.

"You don't mean that, Mother," he said, fury shining in his eyes. "I know you don't."

"Of course she does," Draco said, affecting the sneer that drove Potter mad in school. "It was a naïve mistake of her youth, when she took you in. But this is the reality. After all, how could any respectable pureblood ever love a squib?"

Potter sought out Draco with his body, his eyes never leaving Cygnus. Draco pressed his shoulder to Potter's to reassure him he knew what he was doing.

"I am not a squib!" he barked. "Do you know what makes a squib? Total lack of magical ability. Do you know what counts as a squib to the magical assessments done by places like Hogwarts, or like the spell Bellatrix did when I was born? Minimal magical ability. I just barely failed the test, and she tried to murder me. Her own flesh and blood!"

Draco pulled a face and looked down his nose at Cygnus. "Some magic but not enough to use a wand?" Draco snorted and added in a sing-song voice. "Squib."

"Laugh all you want, cousin." He spat the word as though it was dung. "But not for long. Admiring my drangonstone were you?"

"My dragonstone, you mean," Draco said. His eyes met his mother's for a moment, then he smiled placidly. "So you think that'll amplify your abilities enough to use a wand and make you a real wizard." Draco clapped slowly, derisively. "Why then the knife? No real pureblood would ever stoop to using a blade when they had magic at their disposal." With feigned surprise, Draco tilted his head. "Other than dear aunt Bella, anyway. I suppose I'm beginning to see the resemblance now. She was a nutter as well. No regard for family at all. Like mother like son."

"She's not my mother!" he snapped, his words edged in hysteria.

"Then drop the knife and face me like a wizard!" Draco said, jerking forward in taunt. "But you won't. You're nothing but a cowardly squib!"

"No!" he screamed, and threw Narcissa aside, holding her wand aloft. The dragonstone glowed at his neck, and for a split second, they all watched, wondering if it would work. Then everything happened at once.

Potter disarmed Cygnus's knife hand. Kertsy rushed to Narcissa's aid as Draco cast a stunning charm at Cygnus, accidentally taking the full-force of the spell. The House-Elf fell limp on the ground, but by now Cygnus had maximized his use of the dragonstone. It glowed more brightly than anything Draco had ever seen, blinding them all for a moment-just long enough for Cygnus to unleash the magic.

But he wasn't trained, had no experience with spells, and the dragonstone was unpredictable. It rocked his body with the force of all the meager magic Cygnus possessed and cast it out in one massive, targeted wave.

Directly at Potter.

Without time to cast anything, Draco threw himself at Potter, pushing him out of the line of the spell, and catching the bulk of the unrestrained magic to the chest. Without a specific purpose or spell, the magic collided with Draco like ten bludgers at once, knocking him violently back. He was swept off his feet and straight into the jagged hearth to one side. The wind knocked out of him, Draco struggled to breathe.

Potter cast a stunning charm at Cygnus, but it hit the centre of the pulsing dragonstone. The gem shattered, expelling all the power of an amplified stunner into Cygnus's chest. Instead of falling unconscious, he fell down dead.

Narcissa and Potter both looked over to Draco. Blood drained from Potter's face.

"Draco!" Narcissa cried, and Potter rushed to his side. Draco struggled to breathe, air still not filling his lungs despite his efforts. Instead he felt fluid in his throat, warm with a metal tang.

He coughed once, liquid spilling from his mouth. Pulling himself off the wall, he felt as though his body were not his own-too heavy, too slow, and full of pain. Draco brought a hand to his mouth and found the liquid at his lips was blood. He choked on it and collapsed, his eyes seeking out Potter's.

"Draco, stay with me," Potter said, casting charm after charm to little avail. "Fuck, I don't know the right one, Draco, talk to me!" Potter gripped his shoulders and pulled Draco toward him. He cradled Draco's head, trying every spell he had in his arsenal. None of the magic seemed to reach Draco. He didn't feel the usual wave of warm, or the soft cushioning that eased pain. He felt only cold, suddenly. Cold along with the stark and acute sensation of every grain of dust beneath him, all the pricks of glass and china, the slickness of the blood on his fingers, the roughness of Potter's hands against his face, the warmth of Potter's tears. "Why did you do that? I told you to let me do the fighting."

"Had to," Draco said, barely managing to push out the words. Narcissa was at his side now too, trying her own spells but still failing. She held Draco's hand and whispered constant apologies, but he could barely hear them. He only heard Potter. "Bond demands I do-whatever I can-to protect you..."

"I need to get you to St Mungo's; you've got to stay with me," Potter said, shaking his head and smoothing away the hair from Draco's face. "You'll be fine. You're too stubborn to die on me here, so steel yourself. I'm going to take you."

But Draco could barely feel anything below his waist, and there was a set of rolling clouds along the edges of his vision.

"Can't apparate," he coughed. "Not as stubborn as you, apparently." Potter laughed, despite himself, and cradled Draco tighter.

"Don't be stupid," he said, "I need you to stay with me. I need you..."

He pressed his lips to Draco's forehead, tears splashing against Draco's face.

"S'okay, Harry," Draco said, and Potter shook slightly. "You-heard Cygnus. Bond is for-true-love only. Just-wasn't-meant to be..."

The clouds swirled in closer as Potter rocked Draco back and forth. His mother sobbed to one side, but the last thing Draco heard were Potter's words.

"But Draco... it is."