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Malfoy Manor had grown quieter since the war. The gardens had been coaxed back from the edge of ruin, the hedges reshaped into something more dignified than threatening, and the worst of the Dark Lord’s lingering magic had been stripped from the stones. There were still rooms that remembered screams, and corridors where the air felt thin and watchful, but the house itself no longer strained in anticipation of a master who treated it as a weapon. It had settled, a little. So had Lucius.

Early summer light lay across the marble floors of the entrance hall, turning the veins in the stone a pale gold. The air smelled faintly of beeswax polish and the last of the spring roses drifting in through an open window. Lucius stood in the shadow of the grand staircase, one hand resting lightly on the serpent-headed rail, and watched the wards shift.

They did not flare. They did not bristle. They unfolded.

A pulse of recognition moved through the Manor’s protections, a quiet ripple like a curtain drawing aside. It was not the reaction the house had for Ministry officials, which involved a great deal more suspicion, nor the wary tolerance it had developed for Aurors. This was the seamless acceptance reserved for family and for those Lucius himself had keyed into the most private boundaries.

The crack of Apparition sounded on the gravel drive beyond the front doors. An instant later, the heavy handles turned of their own accord. The doors opened just wide enough for a slim, slightly stooped figure to appear on the threshold, his presence triggering another small, quiet adjustment in the wards. They did not weigh or measure him. They recognized him.

Tibby, the current chief house-elf, practically tripped over his own feet in his haste to reach the visitor. His ears were trembling. His large eyes shone with an anxious respect that had nothing to do with the simple words he used.

“Professor Pierson, sir,” Tibby said, bobbing a bow so low his nose nearly brushed the floor. “Master says to show you in at once. Master is waiting in the green salon.”

Lucius watched from the staircase as Adam Pierson stepped into the hall. The man who wore that name moved with the same loose, unhurried grace he always had, hands tucked into the pockets of a worn, dark coat that did not quite match the rest of him. At a glance he could have passed for an academic on sabbatical, the sort who haunted secondhand bookshops and forgot meals while arguing with old texts. Only someone who had seen him under lightning and swordlight would recognise the particular ease in his posture, or the way his gaze took in the room in a single, precise sweep.

“Thank you, Tibby,” Methos said. His voice wore the Pierson accent, mild and modern, with that faintly amused lilt that made most people underestimate him. “The green salon will do excellently.”

Tibby flushed, if an elf could be said to do so, and backed away with another bow. His fingers fidgeted with the edge of his tea towel, but he did not look afraid. Lucius noted that.

Old allegiances, it seemed, had travelled quietly through the house.

Lucius descended the last few steps of the staircase with the same care he had used at his first post war Wizengamot appearance. Every movement deliberate. Every line of his body composed. The cane was more affectation than necessity now, but he had never abandoned a useful prop in his life, and there were days when the old injury in his leg still protested. Today, however, he needed the familiar weight of it in his hand more than he needed the support.

“Pierson,” he said, voice carrying across the hall.

Methos turned toward him. For a moment, his expression flickered with something too old to belong to the name he used in public. Then it smoothed into the familiar half smile of the visiting professor.

“Malfoy,” he replied. “You look almost relaxed. It is unnerving.”

Lucius allowed himself the ghost of a smile. “We all strive to improve.”

Tibby, who had absolutely no intention of remaining anywhere near the edge of this conversation, vanished with a pop. Methos watched him go with a brief, fond glance, then turned back to Lucius.

“Shall I find my own way to the salon,” he asked, “or do we pretend for the sake of decorum that you occasionally escort your guests?”

Lucius inclined his head. “I find that some guests require a more personal reception than others. This way.”

He led the way down the corridor, past portraits that pretended to sleep and niches that had once held more sinister decorations. The Manor had been stripped of Dark artefacts under Auror supervision, and while Lucius had privately mourned certain losses of craftsmanship, he could not deny that the house breathed easier without them.

They were almost to the salon when the doors ahead opened from the other side.

Draco stepped into the corridor, flipping through a sheaf of parchment with more attention than was strictly safe when walking in Malfoy Manor. He was dressed in well cut but practical robes, his hair slightly disordered in a way that would once have horrified him. There was ink on his fingers. He looked up at the sound of their footsteps.

His gaze landed on Methos first.

“Oh,” Draco said. “So Hogwarts is still importing eccentric Muggle academics after all. I suppose that explains Potter’s department.”

The words were dry rather than venomous, but they held that familiar Malfoy bite. Methos’s mouth quirked. He adjusted his grip on the pockets of his coat, as if considering a range of replies.

Lucius did not give him the chance.

“Draco.”

His son’s name cracked across the corridor with a precision honed over decades. Draco froze. The parchments in his hand rustled faintly as his fingers tightened.

Lucius stepped forward, letting the full weight of his presence settle over the space. It was not the old theatrical menace he had used in Voldemort’s court, nor the brittle arrogance of his youth. This was simpler, colder, and infinitely more controlled.

“You will address our guest with respect,” Lucius said. His tone was not raised, but each word carried the weight of expectation. “Professor Pierson has earned it in ways you cannot yet begin to comprehend.”

Draco’s jaw worked once. He looked from his father to Methos and back again, the beginning of a retort sparking in his eyes before years of training and a war’s worth of hard lessons stamped it out.

“My apologies, Professor,” Draco said. The words sounded stiff, but not insincere. “I spoke out of turn.”

Methos’s eyes glimmered with faint amusement. “I am hard to offend, Mr. Malfoy. The job description requires it.”

“That may be true,” Lucius said, “but it is no excuse for rudeness. You have paperwork to attend to. I suggest you see to it.”

The dismissal was precise and unarguable.

Draco’s nostrils flared. For a heartbeat, something stubborn in him rose up, a flash of the boy who had once strutted through Hogwarts corridors with two hulking shadows at his back. Then he bowed, briefly, to Methos, and turned away.

He did not slam the nearby door. He did not roll his eyes. He did, however, walk with a sharper set to his shoulders than usual. Lucius watched him go, making a note to speak to him later.

It was pure chance, or so Draco would claim later, that the door of the small study adjoining the green salon did not quite latch when he pushed it. The gap was narrow, a sliver of shadow between door and jamb, but it was enough. Draco slipped inside, closed the door gently behind him, and then eased the salon door open just enough to see.

The green salon was one of the older receiving rooms in the Manor. Its high windows looked out over the side gardens, where hedges and low stone walls enclosed a more private corner of the estate. The walls were paneled in dark wood that had absorbed generations of candle smoke, the carved edges gleaming from recent polish. The furniture was elegant without being ostentatious, a post war compromise Narcissa had insisted upon.

Lucius stepped into the centre of the room and turned to face Methos. He felt the air shift again as the wards adjusted to enclose them more tightly, recognizing that this conversation required a different sort of privacy.

Draco, watching through the sliver of space, expected his father to summon a house elf, offer tea, perhaps settle into a chair and adopt his usual posture of controlled superiority. Instead, he saw something that made him forget how to breathe.

Lucius bowed his head.

It was not the shallow, ironic tilt he used on bureaucrats he disliked, nor the stiff inclination forced out of him during the Dark Lord’s reign. This was deeper, measured with care, a gesture that acknowledged not just power, but precedence. Draco had seen his father bend like that exactly once in his life, and it had been before a snake-eyed monster who called himself Lord.

“Thank you for coming,” Lucius said. “You honor me with your presence.”

Draco heard his father’s voice and felt something in it that he could not immediately name. Deference, yes. Respect, certainly. Underneath that, something like relief.

Methos stood very still just inside the doorway. For a few heartbeats he wore the familiar Adam Pierson expression, mild and faintly sardonic, the one he used to deflect curious students and underprepared Ministry officials.

Then, quite without fanfare, it changed.

The shift was not theatrical. There was no swirl of cloak or crack of magic. His shoulders straightened by a fraction. The lazy amusement drained from his eyes, leaving them clear and keen. The set of his mouth altered, losing the softness that suggested modern indulgences and acquiring a thinner, more austere line. Even the way he occupied the space around him adjusted, as if the room itself had just remembered an older name and was making room for it.

When he spoke again, the accent was still recognizably the one he had worn in this life, but something older threaded through it. The vowels carried a faint echo of other languages, other centuries.

“Lucius,” he said. “You keep the Manor standing. That is more than some have managed for their holdings in interesting times.”

The use of his given name without title was not disrespectful. It felt, to Lucius, like the opposite. An acknowledgement from someone who did not need titles in order to command loyalty.

Draco’s fingers tightened on the edge of the door.

Lucius straightened from his bow. He did not raise his eyes all the way at first, letting them rest at the level of Methos’s collar. It was an old habit, one he had not used in years, and he hated how natural it felt. He made himself look up fully.

“My Lord,” he said quietly.

The title tasted dangerous, even in his own sitting room. The wards hummed once and then settled again, as if in agreement.

Methos inclined his head in a gesture that was both acknowledgement and acceptance. “You have done well,” he said. “Better, in some cases, than I would have expected, given your former associations.”

Lucius’s mouth twisted. “Former associations have a way of compelling performance. Under other circumstances, I believe I might have been content to be merely competent.”

“You were more than competent.” Methos stepped farther into the room, letting his fingertips brush the back of a chair as he passed. “You chose survival over fanaticism. That is rarer than history likes to admit.”

Lucius felt the words land with the weight of judgement. Not condemnation. Assessment.

“I chose my family,” he said.

Methos nodded once. “You chose your son over your master. You chose strategy over fear. You turned your knowledge of a madman’s court into currency and fed it to those who could use it. Without your timely change of allegiance, several of my pieces would not have been where they needed to be when the board shifted.”

Lucius had heard thanks before, from politicians whose gratitude was as thin as the parchment their favours were written on, and from Death Eaters whose praise was simply another form of ownership. This felt different. Methos was not flattering him. He was placing him in a pattern that stretched beyond Lucius’s own lifetime, and acknowledging that he had become a necessary part of it.

“I did what was required,” Lucius said. The words came out more defensive than he intended. He corrected them. “I did what I could.”

Methos studied him, head tilted slightly. The eyes that had once belonged to Adam Pierson now held the kind of distance Draco had never seen in another human face. They looked like they had watched cities burn and rebuilt themselves from the ashes, not out of nobility, but out of sheer refusal to stop.

“You did more than most in your position would have managed,” Methos answered. “You adapted. You changed your allegiance when clinging to it would have destroyed everything you claimed to value. You learned.”

Lucius swallowed. Somewhere just beyond his awareness, behind a barely open study door, his son held his breath.

“You told me,” Lucius said slowly, “that if I proved myself, if I stepped away from Voldemort’s service and stood with you, you would see me raised to power that was not simply a shadow of another man’s. I assumed, at the time, that it was a figure of speech.”

“That is because you are used to lords who promise much and deliver little,” Methos replied. “I am older than that particular habit.”

He stepped closer to the hearth, where the unlit logs waited in the grate. With a flick of his hand that did not bother with wands or spoken words, he coaxed flame into being. It climbed the wood without smoke, settling into a steady, even burn that cast moving light across the salon walls.

“The magical world is about to enter an interesting season,” Methos went on. “The war left cracks. Your Ministry tried to plaster over them with temporary measures and inefficient committees. The bumbling idiocies of ‘Minister’ Vance did not help. The Department of Eternal Affairs is working to keep the more esoteric threats from devouring you all in your sleep. The Wizengamot is tired and divided. Those who would grasp at power for their own sake are already circling.”

Lucius crossed to the mantel, the old instinct to stand at his lord’s right hand falling back into place before he could stop it. He rested his fingertips lightly on the carved stone, absorbing the warmth of the new fire.

“And where,” he asked, very quietly, “do you intend to place me in this season?”

Methos looked at him. The firelight picked out lines of age that did not belong to any single lifetime and reflected in eyes that had seen too many regimes to be impressed by any individual one.

“You made yourself useful to a false god once,” he said. “You let your fear and your craving for status bind you to him. I offered you a different path and you took it. You have proved, repeatedly, that you can navigate the currents of pure blood politics and modern reform with equal fluency. You understand the old families and the new order that insists on being born over their objections.”

Lucius felt his pulse pick up, just enough that he noticed it.

“I intend,” Methos said, “to see you placed where you can do the most good and the least damage. I intend to make good on my promise.”

He let the words settle, then continued.

“Harry Potter’s Department of Eternal Affairs will be the spine of your new world, whether your Ministry fully grasps that or not. It deals in secrets, in ancient magics, in threats that most of your colleagues would rather pretend do not exist. It cannot stand alone. It needs a public facing counterpart. A Minister who understands that the days of casual tyranny are, for now, no longer viable.”

Lucius considered the implications. “You are suggesting that I stand for election?”

“I am telling you that you will win it,” Methos said. “If you follow my counsel, if you allow Hermione Granger her carefully constructed narratives, if you let Harry use his reputation to smooth the edges of your own. The Wizengamot is fractured enough to be steered. The public is hungry for someone who looks like stability and speaks in the language of reform.”

Lucius thought of the faces that still watched him in the corridors of the Ministry, some with suspicion, some with hope they had no right to place in him. He thought of Draco, of Narcissa, of the long line of Malfoys staring down from their portraits and wondering what, exactly, he had done to their legacy.

“And if I refuse,” he asked.

Methos’s smile was faint and without cruelty. “Then someone less qualified will take the post, and I will do what I have always done. I will adapt. I am offering you an opportunity, not a chain.”

Lucius let out a slow breath he had not realized he was holding. For a few moments, he simply watched the fire. The heat on his face felt very real.

“You once told me,” he said, “that skulking in dark drawing rooms and whispering in the ear of monsters was a pathetic use of my talents.”

“I recall,” Methos answered. “You were terribly offended.”

“I was,” Lucius agreed. He turned to face him fully. “What, precisely, are you offering now, my Lord?”

Methos regarded him with a steady, assessing gaze. “I am here to make good on my promise, Lucius,” he said. “You will not skulk in dark drawing rooms any longer. You will rule them.”

The fire cracked softly between them.

From his narrow vantage point, Draco watched his father stand very still, the surface of his composure as smooth as ever. Only someone who knew him intimately would see the small tremor in his hand where it rested against the mantel, or the way his shoulders seemed, for the first time in years, to straighten under the weight of something other than shame.

Lucius understood, with a clarity that made the room feel larger, that this was not merely an invitation. It was a crossroads. His life had been defined for so long by the men he had chosen to follow. This was the first time he was being told, by someone who had seen entire civilizations rise and fall, that he could be more than an ornament to another man’s power.

He inclined his head once, a fraction deeper than politeness required.

“Very well,” he said. “Tell me where to begin.”

Methos moved to stand beside him at the hearth, their reflections flickering together in the glass of a nearby framed landscape. In the next hour, he outlined a path that wound through Wizengamot alliances, public sentiment, calculated contrition, and carefully timed revelations of old deeds performed in the shadows. Lucius listened, mind already slotting each piece into place.

Outside the door, Draco pressed his back against the wood, heart beating a little too fast.

Whoever Adam Pierson was, whatever name his father used when no one else could hear, Draco understood one thing with absolute certainty.

This was not another Dark Lord.

This was something older.

And Lucius Malfoy, for the first time in his life, looked as if he might stand beside that power without being consumed by it.

***

The news broke just after breakfast.

At the Burrow, the Daily Prophet thumped down in the middle of the kitchen table between a plate of toast and a half finished jumper pattern. The front page headline was still fresh enough that the ink shone slightly where the light caught it. A photograph of Lucius Malfoy occupied the centre column, his pale hair tied back, his expression composed in that infuriatingly effortless way that made him look as if he had been born wearing that level of authority.

“How in Merlin’s name did Malfoy win,” she demanded, looking from the paper to her assembled family as if one of them might have a sensible explanation hidden under their toast.

George, who had come by to borrow a saucepan for a product test and stayed for breakfast out of habit, leaned over her shoulder. His eyes widened. “Well. That is a face I did not expect to see above the words Minister of Magic.”

“George,” Molly said automatically. The scold lacked its usual force. Her gaze remained fixed on the moving photograph, which showed Lucius raising his hand to acknowledge an unseen crowd. His smile was small and controlled. The camera caught only hints of the noise in the background, banners waving, witches and wizards clapping or glaring depending on where the frame hit.

Arthur took the paper from her gently and read the headline twice before speaking. “It looks like a perfectly legitimate result,” he said eventually. “Recounted twice, according to this note. They are very keen for us to know that.”

“They would have to be,” Percy said from further down the table, pushing his glasses up his nose. “The last thing the Ministry needs is another scandal over election tampering.”

“They put Lucius Malfoy in charge of the entire institution,” Ginny said. “I feel the ship may already be somewhat off course.”

“The article mentions an unexpected coalition,” Arthur said, scanning the first few paragraphs. “Old families, some of the neutral blocs, a significant slice of the post war business vote, and a number of independents. Hm.”

“Harry knew,” Ginny said. Her eyes had narrowed, thoughtful rather than angry. “He wrote to me last week and said there might be a surprise in the results. He did not say this.”

Molly turned on her. “And you did not ask what he meant.”

“I did,” Ginny replied. “He said I would see soon enough and that he was not in the habit of writing state secrets in personal letters. Then he made a joke about parchment bites. I assumed it was something to do with his department, not Malfoy collecting a Minister’s salary.”

Arthur folded the paper carefully. “Perhaps we should give Harry the benefit of the doubt. If he and Hermione are not panicking, there is probably a reason.”

“If he and Hermione are not panicking, it is because they have already decided what to do about it,” Ginny said. “I am reserving judgement until I speak to him. And until I see whether Malfoy tries to reinstall those dreadful visitor badges that carved the letters into your skin.”

Molly shuddered. “He had better not. I will march down there myself if he does.”

There was a murmur of agreement around the table. None of them said the other thing that sat between them, heavy and unspoken. They had seen Lucius Malfoy at his worst. It would take more than a headline to make them forget that.

The Prophet spread its delivery wings across Britain and beyond. By midmorning, copies lay open in tea shops, on Ministry benches, on café tables in Diagon Alley. In the high, echoing corridors outside the Wizengamot chamber, three witches in deep purple robes stood close together, their heads bent over the leading article.

“Old families reclaiming their due,” one muttered, tapping the photograph with a gnarled finger. “It was only a matter of time before someone respectable took the post.”

“Respectable,” the second repeated, letting her skepticism show in the curl of her mouth. “Is that what we are calling war collaborators these days.”

“War collaborators who changed their allegiance when it mattered most,” the third said. She adjusted her shawl, which bore the faintest outline of a phoenix embroidered into the fabric. “We were all fools once. Some of us learned.”

“In my day,” the first witch sniffed, “one did not require a second chance in order to behave properly in the first place.”

“In your day,” the second replied, “no one alive had yet coined the phrase Death Eater.”

In a small wizarding pub off Knockturn Alley, the midday crowd spoke about nothing else. Younger witches and wizards, the post war generation who had grown up with stories of Harry Potter and Voldemort argued over firewhisky and chips.

“He will set muggle-born rights back twenty years,” someone insisted, slamming a glass on the table. “Look at him. His portrait is practically sneering.”

“He is literally not sneering in that photograph,” a friend replied. “He looks like someone swallowed something complicated and has decided to keep it down for political reasons.”

“That is worse.”

“I heard he has been working with Potter for years now,” another said. “There was a rumour that he fed information to Dumbledore during the whole mess with Minister Vance. My cousin in Records said the files are sealed, but the name Malfoy pops up in the redacted sections more often than you would think.”

“Your cousin in Records also once swore that Fudge faked his own death and is living as a goat on the Welsh coast,” someone else pointed out.

Theories flew. Some insisted it had been a fluke, a result of vote splitting among the more centrist candidates. Others whispered about imperius curses and quiet threats, though no one could explain how that would have gone unnoticed by the Auror Office. A few, mostly those who had been at Hogwarts in its worst years, said in low voices that Malfoy had changed after the war. He walked differently now. He spoke differently. He had been seen in conversation with Harry Potter, Severus Snape, and that strange foreign professor who seemed to belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

By midday, the Prophet’s editorial office was a hive of frantic activity. Rita Skeeter had already sent in a scathing column that described Lucius as “the fox entrusted with the henhouse keys,” heavy on metaphor and light on verifiable facts. The editor in chief, who had survived several Ministers and two coups by virtue of an almost supernatural instinct for public sentiment, decided that the front page needed something more careful to sit beside it.

Hermione Granger’s owl arrived not long after, as if in answer.

She had not planned to write the article. She had promised herself, after the war and the months that followed, that she would not make a habit of serving as the conscience of an entire nation through guest pieces. She had a career, a marriage, a life. She had, however, also just watched Lucius Malfoy walk out of the Ministry atrium to the subdued roar of a crowd, and the expression on his face would not leave her alone.

He had looked as if he were carrying something fragile and heavy at the same time.

By late afternoon, she sat at her desk in the small study she kept off the sitting room at home, surrounded by parchment and notes. The window was open to let in the mild summer air. Somewhere in the distance a bus hissed to a stop on the Muggle street outside. Her quill hovered over the page.

She had already spent the morning doing what she did best, which was gather information. An interview with Harry had taken place in his office, between three cups of tea and a discussion about an unrelated immortal incident in Ireland.

“He is not my favourite person,” Harry had said frankly, fingers wrapped around his mug. “He was a complete nightmare when we were at school. He made choices during the war that hurt a lot of people. That is the truth. The other truth is that, when it counted, he stepped away from Voldemort and stood with us. He did not simply slink away to save his own skin. He used what he knew. That matters.”

Hermione had written the words down, as Harry had known she would. McGonagall had followed, upright behind her desk at Hogwarts, her tartan cloak draped over the back of her chair like a watchful cat.

“Mr. Malfoy has been a trial and a challenge for most of his adult life,” McGonagall had said, with the dry precision of someone delivering a carefully graded remark. “However, he has also demonstrated that he can learn. He has made a concerted effort in recent years to support educational reforms and to keep certain more regressive elements of the Wizengamot from gaining a foothold. I do not forget what he once was. I also refuse to pretend that he has not changed.”

Kingsley Shacklebolt, now retired and enjoying what he called “strategic semi idleness,” had met Hermione for a late lunch and offered his opinion.

“The office is bigger than any individual,” he had said, folding his napkin. “But the man who sits in that chair shapes it for a generation. Lucius Malfoy has spent his life understanding power. The question is whether he intends to use that understanding for something other than self preservation. This election tells me he is at least willing to try. That is more than can be said for some of his predecessors.”

Now, quill in hand, Hermione read through her notes again.

The temptation, for a younger version of herself, would have been to write an excoriation of pure blood privilege and the dangers of letting anyone with Lucius Malfoy’s history near real power. She still felt the remnants of that instinct. She could see, very clearly, the ways this could go wrong. She could already imagine the letters she would receive from those who had suffered under Death Eater raids, who would never forgive the sight of that pale hair and that cane, no matter what reforms he passed.

She took a breath and set the quill to the page.

The first line mattered.

“Lucius Malfoy’s election as Minister of Magic is, to many, an unpleasant surprise,” she wrote. “To others, it is a bitter joke. To some, it is a sign that the old families have finally reclaimed the office they consider their right. All of these reactions contain fragments of truth. None of them tell the entire story.”

She paused, considered, and continued.

“We cannot and should not forget who Lucius Malfoy was during the first and second rises of Voldemort. He wore the Mark. He used his influence to support policies and acts that harmed Muggleborns, half bloods, and those who opposed the Dark Lord. These facts are not erased by an election. They are part of the man who has just taken office.”

Her handwriting stayed neat and controlled, but her throat tightened slightly as she moved on to the next section.

“However, there is another set of facts that also belongs in the record. Lucius Malfoy turned away from Voldemort long before the end. He provided information to those working against the Dark Lord, at great personal risk. He assisted in operations that resulted in the destruction of key assets of the so called Department of Eternity. He has, since the fall of Voldemort, contributed quietly but consistently to legislative efforts that protect the rights of Muggleborns and regulate the misuse of dark artefacts. He has not asked for public praise for these actions. That does not mean they did not occur.”

She wove the interviews into the piece without naming all her sources. Harry’s words appeared as “one of the war’s most prominent veterans.” McGonagall and Kingsley were noted more directly, their reputations serving as a stabilizing frame. She acknowledged the fears of those who had every reason to distrust the name Malfoy and refused to scold them for it. She acknowledged the practical reality that someone would occupy the Minister’s office and that, in this instance, the wizard who had walked into it understood better than most exactly what happened when power went unchecked.

She wrote of accountability, not absolution. Of second chances as tools, not gifts. Of the necessity of watching those in authority closely, regardless of their past, but also of the danger of insisting that anyone who had once served the wrong side could never serve the right one.

Finally, she arrived at the line that had been hovering at the back of her mind since she had first seen the election tally.

“Perhaps the true test of our post war society is not whether we can punish those who supported tyranny. We have done that. Perhaps the test that matters now is whether we can build structures that allow former collaborators to be held accountable for their past while still permitting them to do better in the present. Lucius Malfoy’s tenure as Minister of Magic will show us whether such a balance is possible. In that sense, his election is less a triumph than a trial, not only for him, but for all of us.”

She read the closing paragraph twice, fixed a phrase, and then sealed the article with the neatness of long practice. The owl to the Prophet carried more than words. It carried a sort of permission.

By the next morning, the piece sat on the front page beside Rita’s more melodramatic column. Readers who had braced themselves for a festival of outrage found, instead, Hermione Granger’s uneasy, thoughtful analysis staring back at them. Some threw the paper onto the table in disgust and muttered that she had gone soft. Others read the article all the way through, folded it carefully, and admitted to themselves, in the privacy of their own kitchens or offices, that perhaps the situation was complicated.

Letters arrived at the Prophet in droves. Some accused Hermione of betrayal, of cozying up to pure blood interests. Others thanked her for articulating their own conflicted feelings. A surprising number came from younger witches and wizards who wrote that they had grown up on stories of heroes and villains and did not quite know what to do with someone who had been both.

At Malfoy Manor, a copy of the paper lay on a small table in one of the more modest sitting rooms. The evening lamps were lit. The curtains were half drawn against the darkening sky. Lucius sat in a high backed chair upholstered in dark green fabric, his posture immaculate, his cane leaning against the arm within easy reach. The Prophet lay open on his lap, Hermione’s article folded at the centre.

He had read it three times.

He had expected, if he were honest with himself, an entirely different treatment. Skeeter’s column had been exactly what he anticipated, full of sharp phrases about vipers in velvet and serpents in silk suits. He could have ignored that. He had spent a lifetime learning to wear other people’s venom like a tailored cloak.

Hermione’s piece, however, had unsettled him.

She had laid out his sins with the clarity of a barrister preparing a case, and then, instead of driving the knife in, she had turned the blade and pointed it at something larger. She had not forgiven him, not entirely. She had not asked anyone else to do so. She had simply written the truth, as she saw it, in a way that allowed for the possibility that he might be more than the sum of his worst acts.

He found, to his considerable surprise, that the fairness of it hurt.

“You look thoughtful,” Methos said from the window seat.

He was out of place in this room in the same way a modern painting would have been out of place on a wall full of ancestral portraits. He wore Muggle jeans that had seen better days and an oversized grey sweater that hung from his shoulders in casual folds. His bare feet rested on the cushion, one knee drawn up, as if he were in a student flat rather than an ancient manor. The pose did not reach his eyes. They were as watchful as ever.

Lucius glanced up at him. “I am reading Miss Granger’s editorial contribution.”

“I assumed as much.” Methos gestured with his chin at the paper. “I read it an hour ago. I approve. She has an efficient mind and a commendable disrespect for simple narratives.”

“That is one way of putting it.” Lucius closed the Prophet and set it aside. “I had anticipated a more condemnatory tone.”

“You thought she would call for your head,” Methos said. “Or at least for your immediate resignation in favour of someone more palatable.”

“The thought had occurred,” Lucius admitted. He leaned back in the chair, letting his shoulders rest against the support. “It seems I have misjudged her.”

“You have known for years that you misjudged her,” Methos said. “You simply have not fully adjusted to the implications.”

Lucius allowed that. Silence settled between them for a moment, filled with the soft tick of the clock on the mantel and the distant murmur of the household winding down for the night.

“I do not understand her generous restraint,” he said finally. “She suffered under the policies I supported. She has every reason to distrust me, yet she has written an article that invites the public to consider trusting me. I do not know what to do with that.”

Methos shifted, stretching his legs out along the seat. “You could accept it as an honest assessment and behave in a manner that does not make her regret it.”

Lucius drew in a breath, held it, and released it slowly. The words that pressed against the back of his teeth tasted unfamiliar. He had spent so long cultivating poise that admitting to weakness felt like stepping onto a surface without knowing whether it would hold his weight.

“I am afraid,” he said.

He did not raise his voice. He did not let his hands shake. The admission sat in the air with the same careful precision he used when presenting a motion to the Wizengamot.

Methos went very still. “Of what.”

Lucius kept his gaze on the dark window, where the faint reflection of his own face looked back at him, pale in the glass. “Of failing. Of proving every skeptic correct. Of confirming that a man who once served a monster cannot be trusted with anything except his own vanity. Of undoing, with one spectacular misstep, all the work Narcissa and Draco have done to drag this family back from disgrace.” He swallowed. “Of discovering that I am only capable of being the worst version of myself, no matter what title I hold.”

The admission left a strange emptiness in its wake, as if he had set down a heavy object and his muscles had not yet realised they were allowed to relax.

Methos watched him with an expression Lucius had seen only rarely, when the immortal allowed the weight of his own history to show. “You have carried worse burdens than public opinion,” he said quietly. “You survived the service of a creature who delighted in breaking his followers for sport. You have sat in rooms where one wrong word could have meant your son’s death. You endured that and still found a way to step aside and work against him. Do not pretend that this, as terrifying as it feels, is heavier than that.”

“Fear does not answer to logic,” Lucius said. “It rarely has in my experience.”

“No,” Methos agreed. “But it can be reasoned with.”

He slid off the window seat with the unhurried grace of someone for whom time had become a flexible concept. Crossing the room, he pulled one of the side chairs closer to Lucius’s and sat, folding his hands loosely over one knee.

“You will make mistakes,” Methos said. “Ministers always do. Some of them will be small and irritating. Some will be larger and will haunt your sleep. That is inevitable. The questions that matter are these. Do you learn from them, or do you hide them behind other people’s bodies? Do you correct your course, or do you double down and insist that you were always right?”

Lucius turned his head to meet his eyes. “You speak as if you have watched this play out before.”

“I have watched entire empires collapse under the weight of leaders who could not say they were wrong,” Methos replied. “I have also seen governments survive because someone in the top chair understood that power is a tool, not a costume. You are not perfect for this job. No one is. You are, however, suited to it in ways that matter.”

“In what ways, precisely,” Lucius asked. The question was sharper, more defensive than he intended, but he did not withdraw it.

“You have a mind made for structures and systems,” Methos said. “You understand bureaucracy not only as a way to protect your own interests, but as a mechanism that can either grind people down or shield them. You know the old blood families and how they think, you know the new generation and what they will not tolerate, and you occupy an uncomfortable space between them. You have seen, from the inside, exactly what you must not become. That experience is not something you can teach in a training course.”

Lucius absorbed the assessment in silence.

“You are not a safe choice,” Methos continued. “Safe choices gave you Fudge. Safe choices give you placid men who will sign anything if it keeps the machine running and the public quiet. You are a risk. So is any meaningful change. The fact that Hermione Granger has decided you are worth that risk should tell you something.”

“I did not expect to owe my political survival to a woman whose cat I once called a hairball,” Lucius said. The faint twist of his mouth was the only sign of humour.

“Life is full of surprises,” Methos replied. “The important thing is what you do with them.”

Lucius looked back at the folded newspaper. The headline still sat above the crease, proclaiming his new title to anyone who cared to read it. He imagined the eyes that had scanned those words today, the hands that had held the page, the conversations that had followed. Some had cursed him by name. Some had laughed bitterly. Some, astonishingly, had chosen to say, “Let us see.”

“I do not know if I can be what they need me to be,” he said.

Methos’s gaze softened, although his voice remained steady. “You do not need to know that now. You need to get up tomorrow, go into that office, and make the best decisions you can with the information you have. You need to listen when someone like Hermione tells you that you have misjudged a situation. You need to remember that you are answerable, not to a Dark Lord, but to an entire world that has already survived one. That is all.”

Lucius let out a breath that felt, for the first time that evening, a fraction easier. “You make it sound almost simple.”

“It is not simple,” Methos said. “It is merely possible. There is a difference.”

He reached out and tapped the edge of the Prophet with one finger. “You are not perfect for the job, Lucius. No one is. You are, however, the right person for it at this moment in history. That is rarer than you might think.”

Lucius sat very still, the words settling into him like a pattern he had not yet recognized on paper but trusted to reveal itself in time. Outside, the wind shifted in the Manor’s old chimneys. Somewhere down the corridor, a clock chimed the hour.

He picked up the newspaper again and folded Hermione’s article so that the final paragraph showed at the top.

“A trial for all of us,” he murmured, reading her words once more.

Methos leaned back in his chair, stretching his legs out toward the hearth. “Then let us ensure, Minister, that we acquit ourselves acceptably.”

***

Lucius arrived before the sun had properly decided what kind of day it intended to be.

The corridors of the Ministry were still half asleep, the enchanted torches along the walls burning lower than usual, their light a muted gold instead of the harsh brightness they adopted during office hours. His footsteps sounded clear on the polished floor as he made his way toward the Minister’s wing, accompanied only by the occasional rustle of parchment and the distant clank of some maintenance charm doing its work.

The guards at the entrance to the Minister’s private corridor straightened when they saw him. One of them, a young witch with a badge that still shone too brightly to have seen much use, gave a slightly nervous salute. Lucius acknowledged them with a precise inclination of his head, noted their names almost without thinking, and stepped past the warded archway.

The door to the office recognized him. That was the first thing he felt. The wards that had been keyed to his magical signature after the ceremony tasted his presence and shifted, their subtle weight reconfiguring around a new centre. It was like walking through a curtain of warm water. The sensation settled into his bones and stayed there.

He paused with his hand on the doorknob for a moment longer than necessary, listening to his own breath, then turned the handle and went inside.

The office of the Minister of Magic had never quite decided whether it wanted to be a study, a throne room, or a museum. The result was a space that carried too many expectations and not enough air.

High windows arched along one wall, their enchanted glass showing a view of London that mixed reality and artistry. He could see the faint outline of Muggle buildings in the early light, but they were softened and overlaid with the glimmer of magical wards, as if someone had painted power over the city in translucent ink. The opposite wall was dominated by portraits, some sleeping, some pretending to sleep, some watching him openly. The carved frames were heavy with gilding, curls of gold leaf catching what light there was.

The desk sat at the far end of the room, positioned so that whoever occupied the chair would have the window at their back and the portraits at their side. It was large enough to be an altar. The surface gleamed from regular polishing, but close inspection revealed a web of scratches and scars. A deep groove near the right-hand edge, where a previous Minister had evidently slammed something sharp and heavy in a fit of temper. A cluster of fine, intersecting lines that suggested someone had once used the corner as a temporary cutting board for parchment. An ink stain along the left side, half vanished, half clinging on, in the shape of a small continent.

The rest of the décor had accumulated around it for decades. Dark wood paneling climbed the walls, carved with patterns that had seemed grand to the men who chose them and oppressive to everyone who had to sit under their gaze. Heavy curtains in deep burgundy flanked the windows, lined with fabric thick enough to keep out both drafts and dissent. The mantelpiece above the fireplace held a row of small magical artefacts that previous occupants of the office had considered tasteful tokens of civilization; Lucius saw only clutter.

His eyes landed on a particular portrait near the centre of the wall. A round-faced wizard with a reassuring smile and clever, empty eyes regarded him from behind a silver frame. Lucius knew the man’s record by heart. The policies he had signed without reading. The laws he had pushed through that had reduced Muggleborns to second-class status under the pretext of security. The signature on the decree that had carved words into children’s hands.

Lucius held his gaze for a moment, then looked away.

The gold trim along the paneling would have to go. The curtains could be changed for something that did not make the room feel like the inside of a coffin. The artefacts could be relocated to a museum where their history would be explained instead of used as decoration. The portrait in the silver frame should remain, but not in pride of place. Perhaps it could be moved a little lower on the wall, to eye level with visiting clerks who needed the reminder.

He walked the perimeter of the room slowly, fingertips brushing the back of the Ministerial chair, the smooth stone of the mantel, the frame of one of the windows. The glass was cool beneath his hand. Beyond it, London was beginning to stir. Cars crawled along a distant street. A bus lumbered past. The faint suggestion of a flock of owls crossed his view, their silhouettes small and dark against the brightening sky.

His thoughts flickered, unbidden, to Narcissa. She had stood in the crowd at the ceremony, her posture perfect, her expression controlled, a subtle light in her eyes that only he would notice. Draco had been there as well, a little apart from the rest, arms folded across his chest, gaze sharp and assessing. Lucius could still feel their presence at his back, as real to his memory as the weight of the wards.

He glanced down at his left forearm. The fabric of his cuff covered the skin, but he could feel the faint, twisted echo of the Mark beneath it. The Dark Lord’s brand had faded with his fall, the ink of it drawn out by rituals and potions and time, yet it remained a scar, textured and pale. Some days he forgot about it until his sleeve brushed just so, or until an Auror’s eyes lingered a fraction too long on his wrist. Today he felt it consider the room with him.

Not here, he told it silently. Not again.

Another gaze brushed his thoughts, older and far less intrusive. Methos had not been at the ceremony in any official capacity. That would have been too noticeable, too much for a wizarding world already on edge about immortals and the Department of Eternal Affairs. Lucius had seen him, though, standing near a column in the atrium, blended into the group of observers with the ease of someone who had attended more installations of authority than most people had lived years. Their eyes had met, briefly. There had been no nod, no spoken word. Only that ancient weighing, and the quiet certainty behind it.

Lucius let out a breath. The air in the office smelled of wax polish, old parchment, and a trace of the perfume of the witch who had held the post before him. He could almost see her sitting at the desk, signing papers with brisk efficiency, unaware of how quickly her tenure would end. He wondered if his successor would stand in the same place one day and look at the chair with equal skepticism.

Enough. Reverence had its place, but so did practicality.

He crossed to the desk and laid his hand on the back of the chair. The wood was smooth under his palm, worn by an uncountable number of hands. For a moment he stood with his fingers resting there, feeling the weight of expectation that clung to the seat like a second set of wards.

Then he pulled the chair back and sat.

He did it slowly, not because he wished to savour the moment, but because it seemed wrong to simply drop into the seat as if it were any other. His body knew how to occupy positions of authority. His spine lengthened, his shoulders settled, his hands found natural places on the armrests. Physically, it felt almost ordinary. Mentally, it was like stepping out onto a narrow bridge and knowing that the view on either side of it ran for miles.

The desk was already covered in stacks of parchment. Someone from the Permanent Undersecretary’s office had arranged them in neat piles: urgent, requires signature, for review, informational. Each pile had a coloured marker charm hovering above it, gently glowing in different hues.

He started with the urgent stack. There were budget reports for departments that had survived the war by the skin of their teeth and were now starving for funds. Emergency measures that had been enacted during the conflict and never formally rescinded. Temporary decrees that had become de facto permanent simply because no one had bothered to review them. A request for clarification on the status of a regulation that limited the import of certain potions ingredients, originally justified as a security precaution and now serving primarily to enrich three pure blood-owned companies.

His bureaucratic instincts woke up fully.

He began to sort. Items that could be delegated went into a mental category and then onto a separate pile. Papers that required immediate attention stayed in front of him. He made notes in the margins as he read, elegant, tight script that asked questions previous Ministers had not thought to raise. Why was this emergency measure still in effect when the emergency had ended years ago. Why had no one updated this regulation to account for changes in Muggle technology that made the original justification obsolete. Which department had quietly used its wartime authority to seize control of a revenue stream and then never relinquished it.

Patterns emerged as he worked. He could see the paths of influence and neglect traced in ink. Someone had used the chaos of the war to expand their remit. Someone else had hidden incompetence behind a flurry of meaningless paperwork. A third had done nothing at all and trusted that the machinery would run itself until it broke.

He marked the names. Not with malice, but with intent.

When he moved on to the budgets, the picture sharpened. Education was still underfunded, its requests for additional staff and infrastructure consigned to the same limbo year after year. Departments dealing with Muggle relations and magical creature rights had been given just enough to claim progress and not enough to achieve it. The Auror Office had secured a robust allocation, as expected, but the line item for post traumatic care and mental health support was laughably small.

Lucius drew a circle around that entry and underlined it.

He did not deny the Aurors their resources. He had watched too many of them work themselves into early graves while the rest of the Ministry stood around and congratulated itself on having heroes. Kingsley had spoken to him at length about the need to stop treating those who enforced the law as expendable assets. Lucius had listened. He had agreed, quietly, in the way of someone who had once considered other people’s lives a reasonable price to pay for his own comfort and now found that thought intolerable.

As he read, his Slytherin instincts, honed in the snake-coiled shadows of school corridors and later in the darker corners of the Ministry, turned themselves toward something new. Instead of seeking ways to protect his own position, they sought pressure points in the system itself. A bloated committee here, a redundant oversight board there, two offices that did the same work under different names and never spoke to each other. Each represented an opportunity. Each was a place where reform could be introduced without tearing the entire structure down.

By the time he set down the last of the urgent papers, the room felt less alien. The chair no longer seemed to be waiting to eject him for incompetence. It simply supported his weight.

He drew a clean sheet of parchment toward him and reached for a fresh bottle of ink. The inaugural address waited in the back of his mind, a necessary ordeal. There would be a formal occasion in the atrium, or perhaps in the larger chamber upstairs, with the press gathered and the Wizengamot and foreign observers all listening to see whether Lucius Malfoy would snarl, grovel, or attempt to brazen his way into their good graces.

He had no intention of doing any of those things.

He dipped the quill, shook off the excess ink with a flick of his fingers, and wrote the first line.

“Witches and wizards of Britain.”

He frowned at it almost immediately. It was traditional. It was neutral. It was also hopelessly bland. He crossed it out and tried again.

“We have survived a war that tested every belief we held about ourselves.”

Better. Still heavy, but the situation did not call for lightness.

He made a note in the margin to acknowledge the losses, not as a perfunctory list, but as a recognition that the Ministry had failed many of its citizens and that his presence in this office did not erase that. He wrote a phrase about responsibility and underlined it. He wrote “second chance” and sat looking at the words for a long time, the tip of his quill held in the air.

To speak openly of his own redemption would be unseemly. To ignore it entirely would be dishonest. He needed to acknowledge that he was a man who had served a tyrant and had then turned away, not because he had suddenly become virtuous, but because he had realized, too late, what that service had cost. He needed to speak of accountability without turning the moment into a public self flagellation that would satisfy those who hated him and reassure no one.

He wrote “I do not ask for your forgiveness.” Then he crossed out “ask” and replaced it with “expect.”

He wrote of reform without chaos. Of the need to rebuild trust in institutions without pretending that those institutions had never been corrupted. He wrote “future for our children” and thought of Draco’s face when he had handed him the election results, a careful expression that looked too much like his own reflection. He wrote “burden of power” and heard Methos’s voice in his memory, telling him that power was a tool, not a costume.

The words did not flow. They came in careful segments, each weighed and adjusted. He filled half a page, then went back and tightened the structure, removing anything that sounded like rhetoric and leaving only what sounded like truth, or as close to it as he could manage in a public address.

He had just paused to consider whether the phrase “we will be judged by what we do now, not only by what we have done” was intolerably earnest when he felt it. A shift in the air behind him. Not the wards reacting to an intruder; they remained steady. Something else.

He looked up.

Methos stood near the bookcase that lined the wall to his left, one hand resting on the edge of a shelf, his head bent as he examined a leather bound volume whose spine had seen better decades. He wore the same jeans and sweater he had had on at the Manor, as if he had stopped nowhere between there and here. 

Lucius’s fingers jerked. The quill blotted a small explosion of ink in the margin.

“I should have expected that,” he said, more calmly than he felt.

Methos glanced up from the book. “Magic and politicians both favour the dramatic entrance. I am simply respecting local traditions.”

He closed the volume with care and slid it back into place. The portraits along the opposite wall, who had been pretending to doze, were now all very awake. One of the older frames held a witch whose powdered hair and high collar marked her as two centuries out of date. She squinted at Methos with visible suspicion. Methos ignored her.

Lucius reached for a cloth and blotted the ink spill before it could seep through. “I was under the impression that Ministerial offices are warded against casual ingress.”

“They are,” Methos said. “Those wards have had a great deal of practice keeping out the wrong sort of people. Unfortunately for them, I am an old problem, not a new one.”

He crossed the room at an unhurried pace, eyes flicking over the desk. His gaze lingered briefly on the budget notes, the circled entries, the tidy piles of sorted parchment. Then he focused on the speech draft.

Lucius covered it with his hand, the gesture instinctive.

Methos’s mouth curved. “Careful,” he said. “Try not to destroy anything I care about, Minister.”

The word settled into the room with a different weight when he said it. Lucius could not decide whether it felt like a joke or a title.

“I was not aware that you had developed a sentimental attachment to my handwriting,” Lucius said.

“It is not the handwriting that interests me,” Methos replied. “It is the choices it will outline for several thousand people who would prefer to be led by someone boring and predictable. They did not get what they wanted. They rarely do. That is why I am here.”

Lucius released the parchment. “You have opinions on my speech.”

“I have opinions on your tenure.” Methos pulled a chair a little away from the wall and sat, straddling it with the ease of someone unconcerned with the furniture’s dignity. “The speech is simply the opening gambit. May I?”

Lucius considered resisting, then decided that it was pointless. He slid the page across the desk. Methos took it between long fingers that still bore the faintest shadow of calluses.

The immortal read quickly, eyes moving in a smooth, unbroken line. He did not pause to reread any section, but Lucius saw the minute changes in his expression as he absorbed the content. A slight tilt of the head at “do not expect your forgiveness.” A narrowing of the eyes at “test of our institutions.” A fleeting glimmer of approval at “we will be judged by what we do now.”

“You are resisting the urge to apologize for existing,” Methos said. “Good. Apologies are like sweets. Give too many and people either grow sick or expect them on demand.”

“I have no intention of begging the mercy of those who would prefer me in chains,” Lucius replied. “Nor do I intend to pretend that their reasons are baseless.”

“Pragmatic,” Methos said. “You are also attempting to reassure everyone at once. That is less useful. Those who will never trust you will not change their minds because you say the right word with the right expression. Those who are willing to try will be watching your actions more closely than your phrasing. Say what is true. What you can stand by in five years when some reporter drags it out of the archive and waves it at you.”

Lucius accepted the critique with a small nod. “You have seen many of these performances.”

“I have watched kings and councils and assemblies announce themselves to their people,” Methos said. “Some spoke like gods and governed like frightened children. Some stumbled through their speeches and ruled with unexpected competence. One of them fainted halfway through his oath because the coronation crown was too heavy and no one had thought to adjust the fit. That was an awkward afternoon.”

Lucius imagined it and found, to his surprise, that the mental picture eased some of the tightness in his chest. “You have a sample size I will never match.”

“That is rather the point,” Methos said. He set the parchment back on the desk. “You are occupying a chair that has held tyrants, cowards, opportunists, and, on rare occasions, people who attempted to do something useful with it. The chair is not cursed, despite rumours to the contrary. It reflects. It amplifies whatever is already sitting in it.”

Lucius glanced at the portraits. A few of them looked away quickly, feigning absorption in their own painted books or conversations. One, a thin wizard with a hawk nose and a stiff collar, met his eyes with a defiant tilt of the chin that said he resented being included in any category other than “visionary.”

“And what do you see when you look at me,” Lucius asked.

Methos considered the question. “I see a man who has worn too many masks and is finally wondering what his own face looks like,” he said. “I see someone who has been very good at surviving and is about to discover whether he is equally good at governing. I see a Slytherin…a true Slytherin,” he allowed the words a moment to sink in, “who has learned, the hard way, that ambition without responsibility is simply vanity with a better tailor.”

Lucius almost smiled. “You are remarkably blunt for an advisor.”

“I am not in your life for flattery,” Methos said. “You had that in abundance from less useful sources.”

Lucius inclined his head in acknowledgement. “Very well. Since you are in a generous mood, do you have suggestions for the speech that do not involve fainting or setting the atrium on fire.”

“Fire is overrated as a rhetorical device,” Methos said. “Keep the structure you have. Remove half of the phrases that sound like you wrote them to reassure the sort of people who write angry letters to the Prophet before breakfast. They will be angry regardless. Emphasize what you intend to do, not what you intend to regret. And when you speak of the future, do not make it sound as if you believe you are the only one who can deliver it. No one sane wants another self declared saviour.”

Lucius made notes as he listened, adjusting wording, crossing out an entire sentence that had suddenly begun to sound pompous even to his own ear. Methos watched, then turned his attention to the piles of parchment again.

“You are already cutting into the dead wood,” he observed. “That will alarm certain comfortable men who have grown fond of hiding behind bureaucratic fog.”

“If they are alarmed, they may do something interesting for the first time in years,” Lucius said. “I intend to give them opportunities to show their true allegiances in daylight.”

Methos’s eyes glinted. “Spoken like a man who has finally realized that the serpent on his family crest does not have to coil only around his own throat.”

The work waiting on the desk, the scar on his arm, the weight of the portraits, all seemed to align for a moment. Lucius felt the shape of what lay ahead of him, not in detail, but in outline. Difficult days. Long nights. Decisions that would please no one entirely. The knowledge that every choice he made would be judged not only on its outcome, but on the history he carried with him into the room.

He found that he did not flinch from that as much as he might have expected.

Methos rose, setting the chair back in its place with a small lift of his hand. “I will not hover,” he said. “I am not your keeper. If I appear from time to time, it will be because something in the air convinces me that my experience is temporarily useful.”

“Your restraint is appreciated,” Lucius said.

“Do not become too comfortable,” Methos replied. “Comfort is where most governments go to die.”

He moved toward the far side of the room. The wards did not flare or ripple. One moment he was there, solid and breathing; the next he was simply not.

The office felt larger in his absence and, paradoxically, a little less empty.

Lucius looked at the desk, at the speech, at the scratches in the wood. The portraits on the wall shifted in their frames, settling into new positions, whispering among themselves about the strange visitor and the stranger Minister.

He picked up his quill again.

As he bent over the parchment, Methos’s last words lingered in his thoughts, hanging in the air like the echo of a spell.

History is watching, Lucius. For once, it is prepared to be surprised.

***

Harry had grown used to the peculiar acoustics of the Ministry, the way sound carried in certain corridors and vanished in others. Today the place felt even more like a mouth that had not quite decided whether to swallow or speak. Conversations dipped as he passed, then resumed with a forced brightness that fooled no one.

He adjusted the strap of his satchel on his shoulder and kept walking toward the Minister’s wing. The junior clerk who had been sent to collect him looked like she had drawn the short straw and knew it. She kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, as if half expecting him to trip some invisible alarm simply by existing.

“Here you are, Mr. Potter,” she said, stopping before a pair of heavy doors inlaid with the Ministry seal. Her voice tried very hard for professionalism and nearly made it. “The Minister is expecting you.”

“Thank you,” Harry said. He watched her hurry away and resisted the urge to tell her she could call him Harry. At this point the title was probably the least absurd thing about his life.

Two Aurors stood guard at the entrance to the Minister’s corridor. He recognized one of them from the war, a witch who had once stubbornly held a stairwell against three Death Eaters until backup arrived. Her gaze flicked from his face to his scar to his badge. Something like reassurance smoothed the lines at the corners of her eyes. The other guard was younger, the set of his shoulders betraying both nerves and pride. Both moved aside as he approached.

Walking into Lucius Malfoy’s office as Head of the Department of Eternal Affairs would never stop being surreal.

The inner doors opened at his touch, acknowledging the credentials woven into his magic. The familiar combination of parchment, polish, and enchantment met him, along with the deeper sense of the place itself. The wards in this room had been muddled and strained at the end of Kingsley’s tenure, clinging to old patterns while trying to adapt to new ones. Now they felt alert, slightly wary, and faintly curious, like a creature sniffing at a visitor whose scent did not fit its usual categories.

Lucius stood behind the desk when Harry entered. He did not sit back and make Harry approach as if he were a subordinate. He came around the desk instead and crossed the room with the unhurried grace of someone who knew exactly how much space he could command without having to say anything.

“Mr. Potter,” Lucius said. “Thank you for coming.”

The voice was still the same in timbre, still carrying that aristocratic drawl, but some of the sharpness had been filed down. It was like hearing an old piece of music played in a different key.

“Minister,” Harry replied. Saying the word with Lucius’s name attached to it felt like testing a bridge built by someone else, but it held.

They shook hands. Lucius’s grip was firm, dry, and carefully measured. Harry could feel the faint rasp of scar tissue under his palm, a reminder that Mark removal rituals left their own traces.

“Please, have a seat,” Lucius said, gesturing to one of the chairs in front of the desk.

Harry took it, noting the changes in the office since he had last been here several Ministers ago. The gold trim on the paneling had been quietly reduced, the worst of the gilt removed so that the wood itself could breathe. The curtains were still heavy, but they were now a cooler green instead of suffocating burgundy. Several of the smaller artefacts that had cluttered the mantel were gone. In their place sat a single, unadorned hourglass, its sand flowing at a slow, steady pace that did not match any ordinary measure of time.

The portraits watched the exchange with varying degrees of interest. A few of the older frames still looked at Harry with something like pity, as if he were a tragic figure from a previous age who had wandered into their view. One or two newer additions, acquired after the war, regarded him with curiosity. Several eyes slid toward Lucius and back again, taking in the tableau.

Lucius resumed his place behind the desk. The stacks of parchment had been rearranged since the last time Harry had visited the office. The piles were smaller, more distinct, each with a note attached in tidy, familiar script.

“I imagine your schedule is not forgiving,” Lucius said. “I will try to keep this as efficient as possible.”

“That would be appreciated,” Harry said. “Immortals have terrible manners about scheduling incidents. They never wait for a gap in the calendar.”

It was meant as a joke. Lucius’s mouth twitched, which Harry decided to count as a success.

“Very inconsiderate of them,” Lucius said. “Let us address the practical matters first. I believe your department has proposed an expanded budget.”

He lifted a folder from the desk and opened it. Harry recognized the cover sheet. Hermione’s handwriting was visible in three separate annotations along the margin. The sight was oddly comforting.

“Yes,” Harry said. “We are requesting an increase in staff and resources. At the moment, the Department of Eternal Affairs has six full time personnel, two of whom are part time Watcher liaisons, one of whom is Joe, who refuses to fill out his own time sheets, and one part time healer who also works for St Mungo’s. The global immortal population has not been kind enough to limit itself to our current staffing.”

“Quite inconsiderate all around,” Lucius said. His eyes scanned the proposal with swift, efficient movements. “You are asking for additional field teams, an expanded research division, and a dedicated unit for archival collaboration with the Watchers’ Council.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “Also safer holding facilities in case we need to temporarily contain immortals who are causing problems. The old Department of Mysteries cells are not appropriate. They were designed for experimentation and interrogation, not for stabilizing Quickening events.”

Lucius’s expression did not shift, but Harry saw his fingers tighten slightly on the edge of the folder. “The previous use of those facilities is noted,” Lucius said. “They will not be used for that purpose again.”

“Good,” Harry said. The word came out flat. He let it sit that way.

Lucius continued, turning a page. “Your funding requests are extensive but not unreasonable. I believe with some reallocation from certain less efficient committees, we can meet most of these numbers. You will, of course, be subject to standard financial oversight.”

“I have no problem being audited,” Harry said. “As long as the people doing the auditing are not also running secret immortality projects on the side.”

Lucius’s eyes lifted from the parchment. For a moment their gazes locked, wizard to wizard, veteran to veteran, former student to former foe. The room seemed to narrow its attention.

“Which brings us to the question of oversight more generally,” Lucius said.

“Yes,” Harry replied. He set his satchel on the floor beside his chair and leaned forward, folding his hands together. “It does.”

They spent the next half hour outlining the framework. Harry laid out the protocols his department had developed over the past few months. Every immortal incident was logged in triplicate and cross referenced with Watcher records when available. Operations that required intervention were approved by at least two senior staff members and, when possible, cleared with the local magical authority. Safety procedures for Quickening proximity were drilled into every field operative.

Lucius listened without interruption, asking questions only when he needed specific clarifications. He took notes in the margins of the paperwork, his script precise and controlled. Harry had once thought of that handwriting as inherently untrustworthy. Today he found it reassuring to see it marking the pages with the same care he had seen in Snape’s lesson plans.

“Very well,” Lucius said at last. “In terms of oversight, I propose the following. Your department will report quarterly to the Wizengamot on general trends in immortal activity, stripped of identifying details where necessary. Sensitive operations will be reviewed by a small, cross departmental panel including a representative from my office, an Auror, and an independent legal advisor. Any use of containment facilities will be documented and subject to external review.”

Harry considered it. It was more oversight than he would have chosen if left entirely to his own devices, but the days of running around ignoring the Ministry could not continue forever. He also heard something important in Lucius’s wording. The panel would not be composed entirely of people who answered directly to the Minister.

“That seems workable,” Harry said. “There are a few things I need to be completely clear about before we put any signatures on it.”

“Go on,” Lucius said.

Harry drew a breath. “First. There will be no more secret immortal experiments. No departments tucked under Sublevel Forty Seven or hidden behind meaningless names like Eternal Security. No more Muggleborns or immortals vanishing into black sites because someone at a desk decided they were an interesting puzzle.”

The portraits shifted. A few looked away, guilty or defensive. One or two, whose owners had outlived those particular scandals, leaned forward, interested.

Lucius’s expression remained composed. “Agreed,” he said.

“Second,” Harry continued, “if anyone attempts to create a new Project Phoenix, by any name, in any corridor of this building, I will find it. When I do, I will burn it down, and I will bring the people responsible to your desk in person. I would like to know, ahead of time, whether you intend to stand in my way when that happens.”

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The words settled into the air like stones dropping into water.

Lucius’s jaw tightened a fraction. For a heartbeat the veneer of calm shifted, and Harry saw the flash of anger underneath. It was not aimed at him.

“I will not stand in your way,” Lucius said. “I will stand beside you. The sins of this Ministry are not secrets to me, Potter. I have been party to some of them. Others I have learned since the war, and they keep me awake more effectively than any nightmare.”

He reached for another document, this one marked in blue ink. “I have already begun the process of opening certain sealed archives for review. There are limits to how much we can release without causing more harm, but sunlight is, in some cases, a useful disinfectant.”

Harry nodded slowly. “Good. Third. The Department of Eternal Affairs does not exist to make you look good. If there is a conflict between what is politically convenient and what keeps people alive, I will choose the latter. I want that understood.”

Lucius’s mouth twitched again, this time with something that might almost have been amusement. “There are Ministers who would consider that a threat,” he said. “I consider it a relief.”

He reached for a quill and drew a clean sheet of parchment toward him. “Let us incorporate these understandings into the formal mandate.”

Together they drafted the oversight clauses. Harry dictated, Lucius refined the language, replacing any phrase that could be abused by a future Minister with something more precise. The quills scratched in counterpoint. At one point Harry suggested the wording “no operations involving immortals shall be conducted without the knowledge of the Department of Eternal Affairs.” Lucius amended it to “shall be unlawful,” and added a line specifying penalties.

When they were done, Lucius signed first, the ink dark on the thick parchment. Harry signed second, adding the title he still did not entirely believe in. Head of the Department of Eternal Affairs. The words looked far too formal to belong to the boy who had once lived in a cupboard.

“There,” Lucius said. “No more shadow departments. No more experiments hidden in the foundations.”

Harry felt something inside him loosen, a tension he had been carrying since the day he had watched a Quickening flare in a London alley while someone with a wand observed from the shadows.

“Thank you,” he said.

The formal part of the meeting could have ended there. They could have moved on to scheduling, to routine reporting structures, to the minutiae of office space allocations and staff appointments. They did address some of those points, because they were necessary. At some quiet, inevitable moment, however, the tone shifted.

Harry was the one who nudged it.

“Kingsley told me,” he said, resting his hands lightly on his knees, “that you supported some of the reforms before you ever thought about running for office. That you did it quietly. That you did not ask for your name on any plaques.”

Lucius remained still. “Kingsley was generous,” he said. “I spoke in favour of certain measures in the Wizengamot. I did not organize marches in the streets. My risk was limited. Others bore more.”

Harry shrugged one shoulder. “Risk is not a competition. You had more to lose than some of the people cheering from the sidelines. You did the right thing eventually. That is worth something.”

“It is also very late,” Lucius said. His gaze went briefly to the window, where London stretched out in a complicated sprawl of lights and lives. “There are people who will never forgive the time it took me to come to my senses. They are correct not to forgive. Forgiveness is not a civic obligation.”

“Maybe not,” Harry said. “But it is also not the only way forward.”

He let the silence draw out for a few beats. “Draco made different choices at Hogwarts,” he added. “In the end. At the Manor. At the Room of Requirement. He was terrified and he still… chose. That did not happen in a vacuum.”

The mention of his son’s name caused a visible ripple in Lucius’s composure. It was small, but unmistakable. “Draco chose,” Lucius said quietly. “Narcissa chose. I simply followed, for once.”

“That is not how Snape tells it,” Harry said.

Lucius’s eyes sharpened. “Severus has been discussing my moral development with you?”

“Not in those words,” Harry said. “He just occasionally mutters that some Slytherins took longer than others to pull their heads out of their traditions. Methos usually supplies brandy at that point and the conversation moves on.”

A breath of something that might almost have been laughter passed through Lucius’s nose. He folded his hands together on the desk, pale fingers interlacing.

“I do not expect your forgiveness,” he said. The phrase was familiar. Harry had seen it in the draft of the inaugural address Hermione had shown him at the kitchen table, her quill tapping irritably against the word “expect” until he convinced her to leave it. Hearing it now, spoken directly to him, carried a different weight.

“I also do not intend to pretend that my actions during the war did not harm you and your friends,” Lucius continued. “They did. My presence at certain meetings, my silence in certain corridors, my complicity in policies that made it easier for monsters to behave as they did. These things shaped the world in which you fought. I know that. I have known it for some time.”

Harry watched his face. There was no dramatic remorse there, no theatrical self loathing. Just a tired clarity.

“I cannot give you your childhood back,” Lucius said. “I cannot erase the way my son used your fear as a shield for his own. What I can do is spend the remainder of my political life ensuring that this Ministry does not create more children like you by negligence or malice.”

The quiet of the room thickened. Even the portraits seemed to hold their breath.

“That,” Harry said, “sounds like a reasonable start.”

He surprised himself by meaning it.

He could feel Methos’s influence in the room even when the immortal was nowhere to be seen. This was too clean, too deliberate, too aware of history to be accidental. Lucius did not arrive at this kind of articulation of responsibility on his own, not after a lifetime of being told that his choices were the inevitable expression of his blood. Someone had taken him by the metaphorical shoulders and made him look back at what he had done with open eyes.

Harry decided to be glad it had been Methos. There were far worse tutors available in the world.

“You have changed,” Harry said. “Or you are trying to. Which is more than I would have predicted when I was sixteen.”

“I had no idea what to make of you when you were sixteen,” Lucius said frankly. “You were an inconvenience that refused to die in the prescribed manner. You are now an immortal with a department and a very irritating conviction that your moral compass is more important than other people’s comfort. The world has become stranger than either of us expected.”

Harry leaned back in his chair, feeling a strange, reluctant amusement uncoil in his chest. “You realize the world’s gone mad when I am relieved that you are the Minister.”

Lucius’s eyebrows lifted. “Believe me, Mr Potter,” he said, “there are many days already when I share that sentiment.”

The moment of dark humour washed through the room like a small, cleansing tide. It did not erase anything. It made it possible to breathe around it.

They spent the remaining time establishing the practical details. Regular briefings every fortnight between the Minister and the Department of Eternal Affairs. Immediate consultations in the event of any immortal related crisis. Joint authority, written into law, for operations that involved both Ministry resources and Watcher assets. Harry insisted on the right to appear before the Wizengamot if he believed the Ministry was obstructing necessary action. Lucius agreed, noting that it would give him leverage over colleagues who might prefer to hide behind procedural delays.

Eventually there were no more clauses to write, no more appointments to schedule. The sand in the hourglass on the mantel had shifted entirely from upper bulb to lower and had begun, subtly, to reverse its flow, measuring some inscrutable cycle only the office understood.

Harry rose from his chair. Lucius did the same.

“Thank you for your time, Minister,” Harry said. “I imagine you have a long queue of people waiting to ask you for favours.”

“Most of them want assurances that I will not dismantle their cozy empires,” Lucius said. “They will be disappointed. Or reassured, depending on the empires in question.”

Harry picked up his satchel. At the door he paused and glanced back. Lucius stood behind the desk again, one hand resting on the wood, the stacks of parchment flanking him like small, stubborn mountains. He looked composed, slightly tired, and more present in the room than any Minister Harry had seen in years.

This might actually work, Harry thought. It would not be simple and it would not be clean, but then nothing worth doing ever had been in his experience.

And if it did not work, if the worst parts of Lucius’s character somehow clawed their way back to the surface, if hidden corridors began to hum with forbidden experiments again, Harry would know exactly whose office to storm first.

He left the room with the sense that history had just shifted its weight a little and was waiting, interested, to see which way they would tip it.

***

The week had left a particular kind of tiredness in its wake. Not the bone deep exhaustion of war, with its constant low thrum of imminent disaster, but the quieter, more intricate fatigue that came from decisions, meetings, and the endless negotiation of fragile peace.

Methos lay along the length of the sofa in their quarters, one leg stretched out, the other bent just enough to let Severus fit against him comfortably. The room was mostly lit by the fire, which had settled into a steady, companionable burn. A single lamp on the table near Severus’s elbow added a softer pool of light. Outside, Hogwarts had retreated into its nocturnal self, corridors humming gently, portraits dozing, the castle’s wards resting in slow, deep rhythms.

Severus had his back pressed against Methos’s chest, a book held open in his hands. He was not reading it. The page had not turned in ten minutes. Methos could tell by the way his fingers had gone still along the margin.

“You are thinking loudly,” Methos said. “Again.”

Severus made a soft, irritated sound that did not carry much heat. “You say that as if there are decibel levels for introspection.”

“There are,” Methos replied. “You are currently at the conversational level of a brass band.”

“That is an absurd metaphor.”

“It is also accurate. You have been staring at the same sentence since I finished my drink.”

Severus closed the book with a quiet, decisive snap and set it aside on the small table. His hand lingered on the cover, fingers smoothing across the worn leather as if he needed something solid to occupy them.

“Fine,” he said. “If you must know, I was considering the fact that no one has attempted to hex the new Minister in public this week. I find the restraint almost disconcerting.”

“That, and the fact that your favourite Slytherin peacock successfully shepherded a controversial reform bill through the Wizengamot without starting a duel in the corridor,” Methos said. “You did not think he had it in him.”

“I thought he had the capacity for competence,” Severus said. “I did not foresee him applying it to anything more useful than hair care and elaborate walking sticks.”

Methos laughed quietly, the sound rumbling through Severus. “You are almost impressed.”

“I am cautious,” Severus said. “The two sentiments are distant cousins.”

They fell into a comfortable silence for a moment. The fire shifted, casting new light across the shelves. The room smelled of tea, parchment, and the faint spice of the soap Severus had finally allowed himself to prefer without consulting the price.

“Today’s crisis averted neatly enough,” Methos said. “No riots on the Atrium floor. No surprise resurrection of Sublevel Forty Seven. Only a minor tantrum from a committee that discovered its funding had been reallocated to something that actually accomplishes work.”

“Lucius’s speech to that committee was almost elegant,” Severus said. He tilted his head back slightly, eyes half closed as he recalled it. “The way he suggested that they had, of course, been expecting this reorganization for months, and that any competent chair would already have a transition plan prepared. I could feel the humiliation from here.”

“He has finally found something productive to do with his vanity,” Methos said. “And with his obsession with appearances. It turns out that when you direct those instincts toward institutional reform rather than personal power, they are surprisingly effective.”

Severus’s mouth curved. “He does enjoy being seen as the one who tidies up other people’s messes. Particularly when those people are his former allies.”

“Compared to some rulers I have watched, he is practically a gift from the Fates,” Methos said. “You have never seen true mismanagement until you have watched a hereditary monarch attempt to legislate while believing he is literally a god.” Methos paused for a moment, his thoughts suddenly turning down a path he had not thought of in quite some time. A wicked smile tugged at the corner of his mouth as he filed away the thought that had just come into his mind, and he was glad that Severus could not see his face from his current position. “I would take one reformed Malfoy over five divine emperors.”

Severus shifted, settling more firmly against him, as if the absurdity of that statement were nonetheless comforting. His hand came to rest on Methos’s thigh, fingers idly tracing the fabric of his jeans.

“I did not see this particular future coming,” Severus said quietly. “Lucius Malfoy in the Minister’s chair, attempting to repair what he helped break, with Hermione Granger and Harry Potter acting as his conscience.”

“And with Salazar Slytherin acting as his exasperated patron,” Methos added. “Do not forget that detail. It will look very good in the eventual historians’ notes.”

Severus snorted softly. “You enjoy this too much.”

“I enjoy promises kept,” Methos said. His tone shifted, just enough to carry a different kind of weight. “When I told him I could raise him to real power if he changed sides, I did not know whether he would survive long enough to test that claim. It pleases me that this is one of the times my interference produced something other than another corpse.”

Severus was quiet for a moment. His thumb made a small, absent-minded arc on Methos’s leg. “You are pleased you did not simply manipulate him into a new form of useful servitude.”

Methos did not pretend not to understand. “Yes. It has happened before. I have seen men climb out of one tyrant’s shadow only to end up standing under mine. This time, he stands beside me when I bother to attend, not beneath.”

Severus’s voice softened. “Growth.”

“I am trying to set a good example for the man,” Methos said. “It would be embarrassing if you learned from someone who never improved.”

Severus turned his head just enough to press his lips against Methos’s chest. The contact was brief, but it carried more than any spoken reply.

For a while they let the quiet deepen. The shared blanket pulled up across both their legs, the shared space held by the steady pressure of Severus’s body against Methos’s and the warmth of the fire. Small domestic sounds filled the gaps, the occasional crack of wood, the faint hiss of the kettle in the adjoining room, the rustle of pages when a draft nudged the book on the table.

Eventually, Methos reached for the watch on the table near his hand and checked the time.

“I have an idea,” he said.

“I am already suspicious,” Severus replied without opening his eyes.

“Reasonable,” Methos said. “Nevertheless. I propose we go and interrupt the Minister in his natural habitat.”

“At this hour,” Severus said. “He will be working.”

“Exactly,” Methos replied. “Which is why this is the perfect moment. I have something in my vault that is overdue for an airing.”

Severus opened his eyes and regarded him with narrow suspicion. “If you intend to present him with another cursed artefact in the name of character building, I will decline to accompany you.”

“No curses,” Methos said. “Only wine.”

Severus’s expression shifted from suspicion to interest with disarming speed. “Wine is acceptable.”

“Good,” Methos said. “Gather your dignity. We are going visiting.”

They disentangled themselves from the blanket with the reluctant care of people who had no particular desire to leave the comfort of the sofa but recognized that sometimes narrative symmetry demanded it. Severus shrugged into his outer robes, smoothing the fabric automatically. Methos took a moment to locate his boots, which had somehow migrated under the desk, and his wand, which had fallen behind a chair during a previous evening’s debate about the relative merits of conjured versus purchased tea.

They took the Floo from the small hearth in their sitting room that connected to Gringotts in Diagon Alley. Green flames flared around them, and a moment later they stepped out into the modest receiving room for clients.

After a short while, Methos emerged from the corridor which he had been led by a rather grim-looking Goblin, carrying a small red velvet satchel and a rather mischievous smile that automatically put Severus in mind of a Veela about to ensnare her prey. And then they were off again.

The Ministry after hours felt different. The usual churn of footsteps and murmured conversations had faded to a distant murmur, like a city heard through thick glass. The corridor outside the Minister’s office was lit by fewer torches, their light softer. The air smelled of stone cooled after a long day and lingering ink.

The Auror on duty at the door blinked when she saw them turn the corner of the hallway. Her hand twitched toward her wand on reflex before she recognized them. Severus, tall and severe, his presence still capable of making junior staff stand up straighter. Methos, hands in his coat pockets, looking like trouble and history had decided to take a walk together.

“Professor. Sir. Mr. Pierson.”

“I collect titles in multiple departments,” Methos said. “They keep me warm in winter. Is the Minister receiving unannounced nuisances this evening?”

The guard hesitated for barely a heartbeat, then nodded. “He is still in his office. I imagine he could use the interruption, sir.”

“Excellent,” Methos said. “If anyone asks, this is an official morale inspection.”

Severus inclined his head to the guard in a gesture that was both acknowledgment and thanks. The door opened for them when he set his hand against it, the wards recognizing his updated permissions as someone the Minister had decided to trust.

Lucius was not behind his desk when they entered. He was standing near one of the windows, looking out over the enchanted view of London. The city’s lights glittered below, threaded through with the subtle glow of magical wards. The office itself was lit by a few lamps and the fire in the hearth, casting the space into warmer relief than during the day.

His tie was loosened, the top button of his shirt undone. A strand of pale hair had escaped its careful binding at the nape of his neck. There was a faint smudge of ink on the side of his index finger. A stack of parchment on the desk bore the scars of recent attention, several pages marked with neat, ruthless red corrections.

He turned at the sound of the door and stilled for a fraction of a second, surprise flickering across his face before it settled into something more composed. The next expression was not quite formality and not quite relief. It hovered somewhere between.

“Methos. Severus,” he said. “To what do I owe this honour. Has Hogwarts expelled another Minister’s nephew already.”

“We considered bringing you disciplinary reports as a treat,” Methos said. “Instead, I decided to bring something more palatable.”

He stepped farther into the room and reached inside his coat. When his hand came out again, it held the small satchel he had retrieved from his vault in Gringotts. From it, he produced a bottle about the size of his forearm, dark glass chased with faint, ancient etching. A seal of worn wax clung stubbornly to the cork, impressed with a symbol that had not been in common use for nearly two thousand years.

Lucius’s eyes narrowed with interest. Severus moved closer, curiosity brightening the lines of his face.

“What have you stolen now,” Severus asked.

“This,” Methos said, holding the bottle up so that the light caught the glass, “was liberated from the private stock of a Roman consul who was very offended to learn that mortality applied to him like anyone else. He thought himself a god. He also thought this vintage would last as long as he did. In one respect, he was correct.”

Severus accepted the bottle when Methos offered it, tilting it so that he could read the faint Latin script along the side. His lips moved silently for a moment as he traced the inscriptions.

“This seal,” he said, tapping the wax lightly, “names the estate. This line identifies the owner.” His brow arched. “Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus.”

Lucius’s expression shifted. “You stole wine from Commodus?”

“He was very rude about it,” Methos said. “Also, his taste in self portraiture was atrocious. I considered it a public service.”

“You brought a bottle taken from an emperor who believed he was divine to share with a man who spent half his life serving a wizard who believed much the same…and even shared a praenomina with our dear Minister?” Severus said. There was a note in his voice that suggested he appreciated the symmetry, even as it made him uncomfortable.

“Exactly,” Methos replied. “Symbolism is wasted on most people. I trust the two of you to keep up.”

Lucius reached for three glasses from a sideboard, the good crystal, not the generic Ministry set. He set them on the desk and watched as Methos produced a small, precise knife. With a care that suggested both practice and respect, Methos scored the wax, peeled it back, and eased the cork free. A faint, rich scent drifted into the room, deep and layered, without the vinegary sharpness that sometimes afflicted old bottles past their proper time.

Severus inhaled cautiously. “This may actually be drinkable,” he said. “I am, against my better judgement, impressed.”

“I had it stored in stasis,” Methos said. “I may be sentimental about certain things, but I do know how to care for my indulgences. And for my teaching aids.”

Lucius poured, the liquid catching the lamplight in a dark, autumnal gleam. He handed one glass to Severus, one to Methos, and kept the third for himself. For a moment they all simply stood in a loose triangle near the hearth, the city glowing silently beyond the windows.

“I presume there is an occasion,” Lucius said. “Or do you appear at all hours bearing absurdly ancient wine without pretext.”

“One week,” Methos said. “One week without public scandal, catastrophic missteps, or the resurrection of the Department of Eternity. I consider that worth noting.”

Severus added, “And one week in which you have managed to redirect funding from three useless committees, push through preliminary reforms in Auror aftercare, and send a very pointed memo to a certain pure blood bloc reminding them that you are not their puppet.”

Lucius’s mouth curved in a shape that was not quite a smile, but close. “It has been a productive introduction,” he said. “I expect the balance of fortune to correct itself soon.”

“Enjoy the interval,” Methos said. He lifted his glass slightly. “You are doing well, Lucius. You may as well allow yourself the luxury of acknowledging it before the next disaster wanders in.”

Lucius looked down into his glass. For a heartbeat, the reflected lights in the wine made his face harder to read. Then he raised his eyes again.

“Very well,” he said. “If my resident immortal and my resident problem solver insist, I will humour them.”

Methos cleared his throat, not loudly, but enough to gather their attention. He lifted his glass a little higher, fingers steady around the stem. “To second chances,” he said. “The ones we are given and the ones we take by force from the jaws of our own worst instincts.” He let the words sit for a moment, then continued. “To better choices, made later than they should have been, but made nonetheless. To the stubbornness required to keep making them when it would be easier to fall back into familiar ruin.”

He glanced briefly at Severus, then at Lucius. “And to not becoming the monsters we once were or once served, no matter how many opportunities the world gives us to repeat the pattern.”

Severus’s mouth twisted, sharp and fond in equal measure. He lifted his glass. “To Ministers,” he said, “who understand that survival is not the same as victory, and who are disinclined to confuse the two.”

Lucius held his glass as if weighing it, then gave a quiet, almost incredulous huff that might have been a laugh. “To the idiots,” he said, “who dragged me into competence and refused to let me sink back into decorative villainy. May they never learn when to give up.”

They touched their glasses together, crystal chiming lightly, the sound bright and precise in the warm room. The wine, when they drank, was rich and dark on the tongue, carrying flavours from a vineyard that had long since crumbled and a house that no longer existed except in ruins and footnotes.

“Acceptable,” Severus said after a moment, which from him was almost rapture.

Lucius inclined his head. “I have had worse,” he said. “Usually at functions where I was expected to smile at people I despised. This is an improvement.”

They moved to the seating area near the hearth, drawn by unspoken agreement toward comfort rather than formality. Severus chose the arm of a low chair and then slid down into it with careful grace, his robes arranging themselves around him. Methos took the corner of the sofa, one arm draped along the back. Lucius sat opposite them, the firelight touching the planes of his face and softening the angles.

Conversation turned instinctively to the week. The crisis with the misfiled dragon permit that had nearly resulted in a diplomatic incident with Romania. The quietly intense meeting with the Auror Office about trauma support, where a young witch had spoken with shaking hands about nightmares and been genuinely listened to. The stiff reception with the old blood bloc, where Lucius had smiled and promised them stability while mentally drafting a law that would reduce their ability to interfere in education policy.

Severus listened, adding the occasional acerbic observation. Methos prodded gently when Lucius skimmed too quickly over the moments that had clearly cost him effort. Each time, Lucius gave a little more detail, the edges of his formality wearing thinner in the presence of people who had seen him at his absolute worst and still chosen to sit in his office at night with wine older than their entire country.

“How does it feel,” Methos asked at one point, “to be in a position where your vanity makes you useful.”

Lucius considered his glass. “Novel,” he said. “Uncomfortable. Occasionally gratifying. I find that I do not miss the part where my reflection depended on the approval of a madman.”

“Progress,” Severus murmured.

Lucius looked at him. “I have always respected your mind,” he said. “Even when I despised your choices. It is disorienting to find myself wanting your approval.”

“You will survive the disorientation,” Severus said. “You survived worse teachers.”

Methos watched them, the already old amusement in his eyes touched by something quieter. These were the moments he stayed for, the small gatherings after the battles, when people he had nudged and irritated and dragged into new shapes sat together and realized they were no longer quite the people they had been.

Outside the tall windows, London’s lights burned steadily. The magical wards that shielded the Ministry glimmered faintly, a net of pale force stretched across the night sky. Somewhere far below, trains slid in and out of stations, people went home, arguments flared and cooled, deals were made, lives ticked forward.

In the office, three men sat with glasses of wine that had outlived empires and talked about oversight committees.

At some point, the level in the bottle reached a sensible stopping point. Severus gathered the empty glasses with the efficient grace of someone who had spent a lifetime tidying up after other people’s choices. Lucius rose and set them carefully on the sideboard, as if acknowledging that some duties were better shared than delegated.

Methos remained standing near the window for a moment, looking out at the city. His reflection hovered on the glass beside Lucius’s, Severus’s a little farther back, three silhouettes overlaid on the faint image of buildings and wards.

“This is a very strange pantheon,” Lucius said quietly, joining him. “An immortal, a professor, and a reformed aristocrat attempting to steer a world that insists on inventing new disasters faster than we can catalogue the old ones.”

“You should see some of the line ups I have worked with before,” Methos replied. “You are an improvement.”

Severus came to stand on Lucius’s other side, the three of them forming a loose line at the window. For a few breaths they simply watched the city. The wards shimmered, almost imperceptibly, at the edge of vision.

“Your first week did not end in catastrophe,” Severus said. “Try not to let it go to your head.”

“I shall attempt modesty,” Lucius replied. “Within reason.”

Methos took in the scene, the tired determination in Lucius’s posture, the wary support in Severus’s, the shared understanding that none of this was guaranteed.

“History is watching,” he said softly. “For once, I think it might approve.”

Lucius did not answer immediately. He looked out over the lights of the world he was now partly responsible for, then at the faint reflections of the two men standing beside him.

“I intend to give it something worth recording,” he said.

For the moment, that was enough.