In the aftermath of the war, when the air still feels thick with the weight of unspoken grief and the ruins of a broken world refuse to settle into anything resembling peace, when the ghosts of the past linger not only in the corners of his mind but in the very marrow of his bones, whispering, reminding, accusing.
Theodore finds himself standing before the rusted, vine-entangled wrought-iron gates of his family's ancestral estate, a house that was never truly a home but rather a monument to centuries of ambition, power, and carefully concealed corruption, a place where secrets were built into the very foundations, where shadows stretched long and history was written not in ink but in whispered bargains and silent betrayals, where magic—deep, old, and never entirely tamed—seeps through the cracks like ivy reclaiming stone, warping the very air around it so that even now, after years away, after losing everything he once thought unshakable, he can feel its pull, its slow, insidious gravity calling him back into the past, into the legacy his father left behind.
He cast his gaze over what once had been the meticulously cultivated grandeur of the Nott family gardens, a place that, in its prime, had stood as a testament to wealth, refinement, and an almost obsessive dedication to perfection, where peacocks once roamed with idle arrogance, where the clipped hedgerows had been shaped into elaborate labyrinths designed more for aesthetic indulgence than for any true sense of whimsy, where fountains had once gushed crystal-clear water and marble statues of long-dead ancestors had stood sentinel over a landscape so pristine that it had seemed untouched by time itself—but now, standing amidst the ruins of what had once been his childhood playground.
He found himself staring at a place that had succumbed not just to neglect but to an almost vengeful decay, the kind that took root when history was left to rot, when ghosts were abandoned to whisper their grievances into the wind, when a house as cursed as his own was left to devour itself from the inside out, leaving behind nothing but remnants of what had once been—a garden where the hedges had grown wild and unruly, where ivy strangled the life from the statues until their once-regal features crumbled into obscurity, where the fountains had long since dried up, leaving only cracked stone basins filled with stagnant rainwater, and where the pathways he had once raced along as a boy, breathless with laughter and untouched by the weight of legacy, were now barely visible beneath layers of dead leaves, creeping vines, and the slow, merciless march of time itself; and as he took it all in—the ruin, the neglect, the inescapable sense that even the land itself had given up—he could not help but think, with a quiet, bitter sort of amusement, that it all looked like absolute shite.
A sprawling and decaying mansion, its once-proud silhouette now little more than a skeletal remnant of bygone grandeur, looms at the heart of the estate like a ghost trapped between worlds, its towering gables and ivy-choked stonework standing as a grim monument to a past steeped not in honour or triumph, but in the kind of whispered dealings that left no paper trail.
No proof of their existence beyond the cold weight of consequence; its very foundations groaning beneath the crushing burden of centuries' worth of secrets, of bloodlines tainted by ambition, of fortunes amassed not through industry or honest labour but through the kind of quiet, insidious transactions that took place in candlelit chambers thick with cigar smoke, where words were spoken in hushed tones over tumblers of aged firewhisky, where alliances were brokered with nothing more than a nod and a knowing glance
Where power was not something earned but something taken, traded, wielded like a weapon by men who saw themselves as untouchable, their influence stretching far beyond the high stone walls of their ancestral holdings; and yet, for all its once-imposing splendour, for all the wealth and authority it had once represented, the house itself now seemed barely alive.
Not merely neglected but consumed by the very history that had built it, as though the ghosts of its past had turned against it, dragging it inch by inch into ruin, transforming it from a home into something far more lifeless, far more unsettling—a mausoleum masquerading as a manor, a tomb in which the remnants of a fading dynasty lay entombed, their names etched not in gravestones but in the dust-covered portraits that lined its vast, echoing corridors, staring out with hollow, unseeing eyes, as though bearing silent witness to the slow, inevitable collapse of everything they had once fought to preserve.
Every inch of the cavernous manor, from the dust-choked attics where forgotten things had been left to wither in silence, to the labyrinthine corridors lined with towering bookcases groaning beneath the weight of their ancient tomes, to the vast underground vaults sealed with wards so old they pulsed with an eerie, sentient energy, was filled to the absolute brim with the spoils of a lifetime spent in relentless, obsessive pursuit.
It was not a collection born of sentimentality, nor an appreciation for beauty or history, but something far more dangerous—an all-consuming hunger passed down like an unspoken curse through generations of men who had never been content with mere wealth, power, or land. They craved something greater, something more intoxicating, something absolute: knowledge.
Not the kind that was shared or studied in dusty academic halls, but the kind that reshaped civilisations, that rewrote the very foundations of magic itself, that was never meant to be held in the hands of a single man. And yet, it had been gathered here, hoarded within these crumbling walls by a patriarch who believed, with the unshakable arrogance of men who had never been denied anything, that knowledge was not something to be respected, nor feared, nor even used wisely—but something to be owned, locked away, and wielded as a weapon when the time was right.
Among the many objects littering the estate were things no sane man would have dared to possess. Artefacts imbued with enchantments so dark that even time had failed to dull their power. Relics pried from the hands of the long-dead, still humming with the echoes of their former wielders, whispering curses into the stale air. Tattered tomes inked in substances too thick and too dark to be mere ink, their pages filled with spells and incantations that had been deliberately erased from history for reasons too terrible to consider.
It was a treasure trove, but not in the way most would imagine. These were not priceless heirlooms or cherished artefacts of a long-lost golden age. These were the remnants of something foul, something forbidden, gathered together under one roof by a man who had believed, to his very last breath, that true power did not come from status or influence or even magic itself. True power, in his eyes, was control—the ability to hold something so potent, so dangerous, that the rest of the world could only tremble at the thought of it.
As he ascended the grand, creaking staircase that led to the upper floors of the manor, the air grew heavier, thick with dust, aged wood, and something else—something less tangible, an almost suffocating sense of memory clinging to the very walls. He hadn't been up here in years, not since he'd left for Hogwarts, not since he'd stopped thinking of this place as home, and yet, as his fingers brushed the intricately carved banister—a detail he had once traced absentmindedly as a child—the sensation was eerily familiar, as though the house itself had been waiting for his return, undisturbed, unchanged, untouched by the passing of time.
And then, there it was. His childhood bedroom.
The door groaned as he pushed it open, revealing a space so startlingly frozen in time that, for a moment, he wondered if he had stepped into some cruel, enchanted replication of the past rather than the real thing. The same heavy, four-poster bed with its dark green drapes stood against the far wall, the same mahogany desk sat beneath the grand, arched window, still littered with old parchment and quills long since dried out. The bookshelves, packed to the brim with volumes he once pored over as a boy, stood untouched, their spines gathering dust, their secrets waiting for hands that no longer needed them. Even the air smelled the same—faintly of ink, polished wood, and the ghost of something warmer, something that no longer belonged to him.
It was as if time had never passed, as if the house had stubbornly refused to acknowledge the years that had stretched between then and now, as if his absence had been nothing more than a brief moment rather than the irreversible severing of childhood from adulthood. He sat down on the edge of his old bed, letting his gaze roam across the room, sifting through the memories that surfaced with every glance. Hours spent here, locked away from the world, nose buried in books that had once been his entire existence. Late nights scrawling essays by candlelight, the glow flickering across the walls. The scent of rain drifting through the open window in spring. The quiet, unremarkable moments that had once seemed so insignificant, yet now carried the weight of a lifetime.
It was only when he reached for the drawer of his desk—half out of habit, half out of an inexplicable urge to touch something, to prove to himself that this place was real—that his fingers brushed against something small, folded, tucked away as if it had been left for him to find. He pulled it out, unfolding the delicate, yellowed parchment with the care of a man uncovering a relic of another life.
A heart.
A simple, childish heart, drawn in ink now faded with age.
T + L.
Pathetic.
The sheer naivety of it made his stomach twist with something uncomfortably close to embarrassment. He had barely been thirteen when he'd scrawled that ridiculous little thing, lost in the throes of a schoolboy fantasy, caught up in the delusions of what love was supposed to be, what life was supposed to become. Marriage. Family. A future shaped by idle daydreams and the kind of unguarded hope that had been stripped from him long before he was old enough to understand its cost.
Awkward, reckless, adolescent yearning.
Longing for something just out of reach, something he'd never been foolish enough to voice aloud, but which had manifested in stolen glances, in clumsy, desperate daydreams, in the kinds of restless thoughts that had driven him into the sanctuary of hot showers and clenched fists.
One girl.
Always one girl.
And Merlin, wasn't that the worst of it? The memory of it, the sheer, humiliating transparency of it all—because he'd spent years pretending he hadn't been that boy, that he had never been so hopelessly, ridiculously enthralled, that he had been above it, above her.
But this stupid, faded scrap of parchment, this relic of a time when his biggest concerns had been Quidditch scores and whether she would look at him twice in the corridor—this was proof.
Proof that, for all his attempts to erase it, to outgrow it, to pretend that boy had never existed—he had.
And he hated him for it.