On the banks of the Thames, as Big Ben's hour hand settled on eight o'clock, a persistent fog still clung to the newly awakened city.
With a soft crack, two slender, hooded figures appeared in the narrow square. They moved quickly, crossing the dim pavement toward the row of gloomy townhouses ahead.
"Little Dragon — watch your step." A woman's voice came from beneath the taller hood.
The other figure vaulted nimbly over a pile of rubbish left on the front steps of a neighbouring house. "It's fine, Mum. I saw it."
They stopped before an ordinary-looking door. The woman checked the number above it and said quietly, "Number Twelve. This is it."
Draco followed his mother up the broken stone steps. The black paint on the door was cracked and scratched, the silver knocker shaped like a coiled serpent. Narcissa lifted it and knocked three times.
A few seconds passed. Then the door opened a crack, and a face appeared — gaunt, dark-haired, the hair falling loosely over cautious eyes. The man who peered out at them was thin to the point of looking fragile, but the bone structure beneath his hollowed face was undeniably fine. He had been handsome, once. Perhaps still was, in the right light.
Narcissa drew back her hood. Her hair was golden and carefully arranged, her lips painted in the season's particular shade of fuchsia — she looked as though she were attending a Ministry function rather than visiting a house in Islington.
"Narcissa—" Sirius Black's wariness shifted into something more complex. He glanced at the boy behind her, taking in the platinum-blond hair under the hood. "And Draco." He opened the door wider. "Rare guests indeed."
"Sirius." Narcissa stepped past him without ceremony.
The smell hit Draco immediately — damp, stale, with something underneath it that was closer to sweet rot. He made a note not to touch anything until he'd assessed the situation.
"Don't touch anything, Little Dragon," Narcissa said, as though she'd read his mind, wrinkling her nose against the dust that swirled up from every surface.
"That's gracious of you," Sirius said from behind them, with a light note of irony. "You always did know how to make yourself at home here."
Narcissa gave no answer.
The long entrance hall was lit by old gas lamps that flickered to life at the sound of their footsteps, throwing uncertain light across the walls. In its glow, Draco could make out a row of portraits hanging at odd angles — he resolved to look at them more carefully later, and to watch his expression when he did. One particular portrait concerned him. He knew which curtain to avoid.
"Harry!" Sirius called ahead into the dark. "Come and see who's here."
Rapid footsteps, and Harry appeared from a door at the end of the hall.
"Draco!" He looked genuinely pleased. "It's really good to see you." Then he noticed Narcissa, and his natural composure surfaced. "Mrs. Malfoy. It's a pleasure."
Narcissa did not produce the cool hauteur she wore at most social occasions. She offered Harry something approaching a warm expression, and gestured at the package her son was carrying. "I heard your birthday was a few days ago. This is for you."
"You really didn't have to—" Harry began.
"It's nothing," Narcissa said, in the tone that ends that sort of conversation. She looked at Sirius with a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Go on, take Draco upstairs with you."
Sirius returned the smile with equal precision. He had his own questions about what Narcissa Malfoy was doing at his door, but he knew better than to ask them yet.
"Go on, then," he said to Harry, with a nod.
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Harry led Draco under the long velvet curtains — Draco gave them a careful sidelong look as they passed — and up the staircase. They went by the troll-leg umbrella stand in the hall, and past the grim mounted row of house-elf heads on the landing, which Draco examined without comment.
"I heard," Draco said, as they climbed, "that the day Sirius came to collect you, you'd inflated a Muggle woman."
"She's not exactly my aunt — she's Dudley's aunt on the other side," Harry said, looking simultaneously sheepish and not at all regretful. "It was her own fault, technically."
"Creative," Draco said.
"Sirius said the same thing. He told me 'well done,' apparently."
"Even so." Draco glanced at him. "They sent you a warning, I assume. You can't do that twice without being expelled."
"I know. And I don't think I'll be going back to Privet Drive next summer anyway, judging by how my aunt and uncle reacted." Harry said this with the straightforward cheerfulness of someone who had already worked through any complicated feelings about it.
"Congratulations," Draco said simply.
Harry's room was on the right side of the third-floor landing. He opened the door and stepped back.
Draco entered.
The room was dark. The window was thick with grime, admitting very little of the morning outside. The wallpaper was peeling in long strips, the mattress looked as though it had been through a war, and the general impression was of a space that had not been aired in some years.
On the bedside table — the one relatively clean surface in the room — a photograph sat in a silver frame: a young couple smiling and waving in the way of wizarding photographs. Harry's parents. Draco had sent the frame as a birthday gift, and was quietly glad to see it placed there.
On the table by the grimy window, several newspapers were strewn about. Draco could make out a headline through the smudges: Ministry Confirms Pettigrew Remains Imprisoned — and then tea stains blurred the rest.
"What do you think?" Harry asked, with the careful brightness of someone who suspects the answer but is hoping for generosity.
Draco looked around the room once more. "How are you settling in?"
"Better than anywhere I've ever lived," Harry said, with complete sincerity.
Draco studied him for a moment. He believed it, which was perhaps the most uncomfortable part.
"And you and Black get on well?" he asked.
"Really well." The genuine happiness in Harry's face was difficult to observe neutrally. "He's been telling me things about my parents. Things I never knew."
Draco felt something quietly turn over in his chest. He dropped the observation before it could become anything more, and tossed Harry the package.
"My mother's gift. Open it."
Harry unwrapped it. His face lit up in a way that made the dim room feel, briefly, brighter.
"Gobstones! The gold set — I've wanted to buy this for ages." He turned it over in his hands, already working out how the mechanism functioned. "How did she know?"
"She didn't," Draco said. "I told her."
The admission was brief, and Draco moved past it immediately. He cast a careful ward on the door — enough to discourage casual entry and muffle the room from the corridor — and returned to the matter he'd actually come to discuss.
"Have you asked Sirius about Azkaban?"
Harry's expression shifted. "I've tried. He always changes the subject. I didn't want to push."
"That's understandable." Draco leaned against the wall and looked at him directly. "Azkaban is a prison on a remote island in the North Sea, guarded by Dementors. Do you know what a Dementor is?"
"I've heard the name," Harry said slowly. "That's all."
"They're creatures that feed on positive emotion. Hope, happiness, the capacity to feel that things can improve — all of that, stripped away. The longer a prisoner is held near them, the more they lose. Their worst memories replay constantly. Most prisoners break within weeks. Your godfather survived eleven years."
Harry was very still.
"He must have found some way to resist them," Draco said. "And if he did — I want to know what it was. Because if Peter Pettigrew ever encounters Dementors again, he'll need to resist them too."
"I'll ask him again," Harry said quietly. There was something different in his voice now — not just curiosity, but a kind of careful, protective gravity. "I want to know. I want to know all of it."
Draco nodded.
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Their conversation was cut short by an eruption of noise from the floor below — sharp, outraged shouting, interspersed with shrill protests.
They looked at each other and went downstairs.
The second-floor sitting room was, as Draco had suspected it might be, a scene of some disorder. Two house-elves were wrestling in the dust — one in neat pressed tea-towels, the other in a filthy rag.
"Thief!" the second one was shrieking, one hand twisted in Dobby's ear. "Scum! You took the young master's things!"
"Kreacher, enough." Sirius appeared in the doorway looking worn and irritable. The ancient elf released Dobby and flung itself into a deep bow, enormous nose nearly touching the floorboards.
"Stand up properly when you speak," Sirius said. "What is this about?"
"Kreacher caught the thief!" Kreacher's voice was a hoarse rasp of genuine fury. "He stole from the young master's house!"
Draco looked the elf over with distaste. It was extremely old, naked except for a filthy rag, its large bat-like ears matted with tufts of white fur. Its bloodshot eyes fixed on Dobby with unalloyed hatred.
"Dobby is not a thief!" Dobby drew himself up with all the dignity available to a house-elf in a tea-towel. "Dobby was cleaning the living room for the great Harry Potter, as instructed by his master. Dobby has taken nothing. Dobby put away dangerous items from the cabinet, as instructed!"
He produced a large bag from behind him and shook it open. Inside: a silver snuff bottle, an unpleasant tweezer-shaped silver instrument, a music box, a bundle of antique stamps, and a tarnished keepsake box.
"He's telling the truth," Harry confirmed to his godfather. "I asked him to clear the room."
Draco looked at Dobby. The house-elf's eyes were indignant and slightly watery. "You did well," Draco said briefly.
It was enough. Dobby straightened slightly, mollified.
Sirius turned back to Kreacher with the tiredness of someone who has had this argument before. "Back to your room. Don't come out into the main rooms without my direct instruction."
Kreacher bowed with poisonous compliance. On his way out, he muttered without particular attempt at concealment: "The young master isn't worthy to clean the Mistress's shoes. The noble Mistress — what will she say, to see Kreacher serving such a master? He'll throw everything away, the heartless blood-traitor — Kreacher must stop him, Kreacher must—" The voice faded around the corner.
Draco watched him leave. He was fairly certain, though he couldn't prove it, that Kreacher's hand had been closed around something small and gold when he'd bowed — something that had been sitting on the mantle. A ring, by the look of it.
He stored the observation and said nothing.
"He's been like that since I moved in," Sirius said. "Going on like that constantly. I think the years have done something to him." He looked at the two boys without great conviction. "Your mother had to step out briefly, Draco. She'll come back for you. She said not to touch anything suspicious."
Draco raised an eyebrow. "And if I do?"
Sirius's expression managed, briefly, to look like a smile. "Then I suppose that's between you and the object." He glanced around the room. "I have been meaning to go through this lot."
He picked up the bag Dobby had assembled and peered inside. Further cleaning had deposited additional items on the floor: rusty knives, a coiled snakeskin, a cut-crystal bottle of unnamed liquid, and a collection of tarnished silver boxes of various sizes.
"Can I give these to someone?" Draco asked. "A few friends of mine who enjoy working with unusual materials."
"Take whatever you like." Sirius was clearly thinking about something else. He prodded the nearest object experimentally.
They spent the next hour working through the bag. Draco and Harry played several rounds of Gobstones while Dobby cleaned around them — both ending up with considerably more foul-smelling liquid on their faces than they'd intended — and Sirius examined the objects with the practised ease of someone who had grown up surrounded by Dark artefacts and learned early what each one could do.
The ugly silver instrument crawled up Harry's arm like a jointed spider before Sirius snatched it away and flattened it with the collected weight of a wizarding genealogy tome. The silver snuff bottle bit Sirius firmly on the hand, producing a shell-like growth across his knuckles within seconds; he tapped it with his wand and it subsided, and he examined his hand with interest rather than alarm. "Encrusting powder in the mechanism," he said. "Old trick."
Draco watched him.
He was beginning to understand what Harry meant when he said his godfather was good to be around. Sirius didn't forbid them from examining things; he didn't produce the careful, managing caution of an adult who has decided what children should and shouldn't know. He simply showed them how things worked. "Look at how it's triggered," he'd say, or "Here's what you do when it goes for your hand." He treated them as people who would one day need to know these things, and that made all the difference.
Lucius had never done that. Lucius kept his Dark artefact collection locked away, handled only by himself, and Draco had grown up knowing it existed but not what it contained.
He found he preferred Sirius's approach, which surprised him slightly.
"All of it?" Draco asked, holding up the bag once they'd worked through the obvious pieces.
"All of it," Sirius said, already turning to go back to his room. "I'll deal with anything that's left."
Draco closed the bag and slung it over his shoulder.
He settled into a chair to wait for Narcissa, turning over in his mind the ring he thought he'd seen Kreacher pocket — a ring with what looked like the Black family crest — and wondering whether it was worth mentioning to Sirius, and if so, how.