human again / hp.

Chapter 109

There was a kind of silence in Malfoy Manor that didn't exist anywhere else in the world.

It wasn't peace. It wasn't calm.

It was the heavy, suffocating kind of silence that pressed against your skin and slid into your lungs like smoke. Like grief that had learned how to walk on marble floors.

The moment I stepped through the great doors, I felt it.

The house looked the same — pristine, cold, towering with its endless ceilings and gleaming silver fixtures — but it felt entirely different. The air was wrong. Too still. As if it were holding its breath.

As if it were afraid.

And perhaps it was right to be.

Some of the Death Eaters had already taken residence in the East Wing. I wasn't supposed to see them. No one said as much, but I knew. I wasn't invited. But their presence lingered in the walls — their voices echoing in the drawing room at night, their laughter sharp like glass, their footsteps thudding like warnings.

They never said my name.

Not out loud.

But I knew they knew who I was. What I was.

Lucius Malfoy's daughter.

The one who lived in Gryffindor tower. The one who walked beside the enemy. The one the Dark Lord hadn't quite decided about yet.

Not yet.

I'd been in my room for hours. Maybe longer. Time didn't move here. The windows were too tall, the light too dim. The drapes hadn't been drawn back since before Father was sent to Azkaban.

My trunk still sat unopened at the foot of the bed. I didn't have the energy to unpack. My robes smelled like train steam and cold stone.

I just sat there.

Back against the carved headboard. Legs pulled up to my chest. Wand tucked between my fingers like a lifeline.

I don't know what I was waiting for. Maybe some sign that it was all a nightmare. That I would hear Father's voice echoing from downstairs — confident, commanding — and everything would fall back into place. The illusion would return. The normalcy. The old rules.

My O.W.L. results were sitting in a crisp Ministry envelope on my desk. Straight Os. A perfect slate. I hadn't even opened it fully when the owl delivered it. I knew what it said. I should've felt something — pride, maybe. Validation. But I felt nothing. Not even the numbness could dull the awareness that it meant nothing anymore.

What use was academic success when the rest of my life was slipping between my fingers?

I hadn't eaten properly in days. Just tea. Some toast. A few bites of fruit. My reflection in the mirror looked paler than usual, and the bruised circles beneath my eyes had gone unmasked by glamour charms. There was no one I needed to impress anymore. Not here.

Draco had retreated into his own storm of bitterness and resentment since our return. We hadn't spoken more than a few words. I'd passed him once in the corridor, and his glare had been as sharp as a blade. I wasn't sure who he was angrier at — Harry Potter for humiliating him, or me for... everything else.

Harry.

His name alone still made something twist deep inside me. That moment at the station — the way he looked at me, or didn't — was carved into my thoughts like stone. I kept going back to it, reliving it like a scene I couldn't change.