Lysander Parkinson finally took a deep breath as he left the Wizengamot Records Office, the transfer paperwork still warm in his hands.
A few days ago, his father had retired from his position as Head of the House of Parkinson after forty years. Forty years! The stubborn mule had spent the better part of those four decades making pointed observations about Lysander's decisions, his politics, his choice of wife, and most recently his approach to raising Pansy, whom the old man considered dangerously indulged, and Lysander considered perfectly and appropriately cherished. He had genuinely begun to wonder if Evander Parkinson intended to die in that chair out of sheer bloody stubbornness.
As it turned out, the catalyst had been embarrassment.
The rumor was that his father had slept through the last session. This was not remarkable. Evander had been known to doze through particularly tedious agenda items for the better part of a decade, and the Wizengamot had long since learned to work around it. He wasn't the only one who do this either so why should it be a problem?
The problem was what happened last session.
He had slept through the morning Arcturus Black came back.
The head of the Most Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, returning to active presence in the Wizengamot for the first time in nearly a decade, and Evander Parkinson had been unconscious for the entirety of it. By the time someone had nudged him awake, Lord Black had already left.
His father had not spoken of it directly. He didn't need to. The retirement papers had been filed within the week.
Lysander had said nothing. He had signed the transfer documents with appropriate solemnity and seen his father off with appropriate respect.
He had then gone into his study, closed the door, and allowed himself exactly five minutes of undignified relief.
That had been three weeks ago. He was still, if he was honest, slightly giddy about it.
Lysander had two sons, both sensible and adequately behaved and entirely capable of occupying themselves without his supervision. He was going home to Pansy.
He was thinking about this — about whether she had terrorized her governess again, about whether the new hair ribbons he'd ordered from Paris had arrived — when he stepped into the main corridor and stopped.
A man was stepping out of the lift.
Lysander had never met Arcturus Black in person. He had seen photographs, the kind that appeared in old editions of the Prophet and in the formal portraiture that circulated among families of a certain standing. But photographs did not fully prepare you for the reality of the man — the bearing, the quality of presence that certain people carried without effort, the kind that announced itself before the face did.
He knew immediately.
Lysander kept walking. Same pace. Eyes forward. The corridor was busy enough that stopping would have been conspicuous, and the last thing a newly minted head of house needed was to be caught staring at Arcturus Black on his first week holding the seat.
But this was an opportunity.
And every Slytherin worth the name knew what you did with an opportunity.
He turned.
"Lord Black."
The man stopped. Turned with the unhurried deliberateness of someone who was not accustomed to being addressed in corridors and had not yet decided whether this address warranted his attention.
Lysander inclined his head. "Lysander Parkinson. I have just this morning finalized the headship transfer from my father." He said it plainly, without embellishment. An introduction, not a petition. "I won't keep you. I only wanted to offer my regards in person."
Arcturus looked at him for a moment with the specific quality of attention that felt less like being seen and more like being assessed.
"Lord Parkinson," he said. Not unwelcoming. Simply precise. "Your father retired?"
"He did."
A beat.
"Walk with me," Arcturus said.
That surprised Lysander but he followed. They fell into step together through the corridor, Arcturus setting the pace, which was unhurried and entirely deliberate.
"I find myself," Arcturus said, after a moment, "in need of house elves. Preferably already weaned and trained, with no conflicting obligations. For a property that has been without them for some time." He did not elaborate on which property or why. He did not appear to feel that elaboration was necessary. "I am told the process of acquiring them through the Ministry's placement system is unreliable."
"It is," Lysander said. "The elves placed through the Ministry have often had difficult histories. They can be unsettled. The bonding takes longer and the loyalty is — inconsistent." He paused, choosing his next words with the care of a man who understood that what he said next would be heard and remembered. "Our elves have reproduced twice in the last generation. We have more than the household requires. They are well-trained, healthy, and fully bonded to our line — the transfer of obligation can be handled cleanly."
Arcturus looked at him briefly. "You are not concerned about appearances?"
Lysander understood the question precisely. A noble house offering house elves invited two assumptions, neither of them flattering — that the family was struggling to maintain them financially, or that the elves being offered carried some flaw that made them undesirable to keep. Most families in his position would have found a more oblique method. A trusted intermediary. An anonymous arrangement through Gringotts. Something that kept the transaction at a comfortable distance from their name.
"I am concerned about being useful," Lysander said. "The two are not always the same thing."
The corner of Arcturus's mouth moved. Barely. "No," he agreed. "They are not."
They reached the doors.
"Parkinson!"
Two men were coming toward them from the side corridor, Rosier and Selwyn, both deep in conversation, looking at Lysander with the easy familiarity of old acquaintances. Then, their eyes drifted to the man walking beside him.
They stopped dead in their tracks.
Aurelius Rosier and Garrick Selwyn had come today as friends, fellow heirs intending to offer their casual congratulations on Lysander's newly acquired headship. What they had not anticipated was finding him in the company of Arcturus Black himself. To see Lysander not merely in the patriarch's presence, but actively engaging him in conversation, struck both young men with a sudden, paralyzing breathlessness. It was the sort of proximity that redefined a man's standing in an instant.
Lysander caught their eyes, giving a micro-nod and a subtle, cutting glance that warned them explicitly not to interrupt.
Message received, Rosier and Selwyn subtly stepped back against the stone wall, entirely willing to play the part of silent statues. As the older Lord and Lysander passed by, a profound, envious realization settled over the two heirs. Parkinson hadn't just secured his family's seat today—he had managed to catch the eye of the House of Black! The lucky bastard!
"Two isn't enough," Arcturus said, completely ignoring the frozen tension between the three younger men.
Lysander turned his full attention back to the patriarch, forcing his voice to remain level. "We only have two readily available. How many do you require, Lord Black?"
"Twenty."
Lysander nearly balked. Twenty? Twenty?! Had the man slaughtered his entire existing staff in a fit of rage? No—wait. Arcturus had specifically mentioned an acquired estate. Just how gargantuan was this property to require twenty house-elves to run it?
"Still think it's not enough," Arcturus mused aloud, entirely untroubled. "But twenty will do for a start."
The sheer, casual audacity of it nearly stripped Lysander of his speech. The word what almost escaped his throat, choked back at the absolute last second. He could only stare, his perfectly practiced composure fracturing under the weight of the old man's demands, a desperate curiosity flaring in his mind as to what kind of monstrous estate could possibly require such a force.
"How much would the two house-elves be?" Arcturus asked casually.
Lysander, whose mind was still entirely derailed by the prospect of twenty elves, blinked. Before his filtering mechanism could catch up, he blurted out the first number that came to mind. "Three hundred galleons."
Behind him, Rosier and Selwyn stiffened in synchronized shock.
It took an agonizing half-second for Lysander to realize what he had just said. Three hundred galleons for two house-elves was an utterly exorbitant sum; a single hundred would have been more than sufficient. Merlin's beard, what a catastrophic blunder.
He looked up at Arcturus, his stomach dropping. He was terrified he had just ruined everything—that he would appear avaricious and small-minded in the patriarch's eyes, like a cheap merchant trying to swindle a grand lord.
Arcturus merely raised a slow, unimpressed eyebrow. "Just three hundred galleons? Very well."
Lysander nearly balked a second time. Just? JUST?!
No wonder society whispered of the unfathomable depths of the Black vaults. Three hundred galleons to this man were mere pin money—a trifling sum barely worth the effort of counting.
Arcturus withdrew a heavy silver card case from his robes and pulled out a crisp piece of vellum, presenting it to Lysander. It bore only a raised, ink-black imprint of the Black family crest and the seal of a prestigious Diagon Alley law firm.
"I shall take the two you have readily available," Arcturus stated, his voice ringing clearly down the quiet corridor. "You will find the owl-post direction for my solicitor on that card. See to it that the contracts are drawn up and delivered by Friday."
He paused, his sharp grey eyes fixing Lysander with a look that made the young lord feel entirely transparent. It was framed as a request, but the sheer gravity behind it turned it into an absolute command.
"Furthermore, you are to quietly reach out to other respectable houses on my behalf. I require twenty elves in total, and you are aware of my standards. You are not, under any circumstances, to contact the House of Burke, Borgin, or Malfoy."
"O-of course, Lord Black," Lysander said, quickly taking the card and bowing his head slightly to mask the sudden spike of adrenaline. "I shall send the missives to trusted houses only."
"Hmm."
Arcturus offered a single, noncommittal hum. Without another word, the patriarch turned on his heel, his heavy robes billowing behind him as he swept down the corridor, leaving Lysander, Rosier, and Selwyn staring frozen in his wake.
"You lucky bastard," Garrick breathed, his eyes still fixed on the corner where the old man had disappeared. "Direct business with the Lord Black? Do you have any idea what this does for your family's standing? It's a blood-reigning miracle."
"I don't even care that our house isn't in the trade of selling elves," Aurelius put in, staring at the card in Lysander's hand with naked envy. "My father would happily liquidate our entire domestic staff if it meant securing a direct line to Arcturus Black." He reached out a hand, his fingers twitching. "Can I hold the vellum?"
"No," Lysander said flatly, instantly pocketing the card out of reach.
"You do realize what you've just been handed, don't you?" Garrick pressed, stepping closer. "You are currently the only man in our entire circle who has a direct audience with him. You're his gatekeeper."
"Lucky bastard," Aurelius muttered.
"You literally have the power to decide which families get a piece of this transaction and which ones get frozen out," Garrick continued, a sharp, calculating glint in his eye.
"Lucky bastard."
"Will you stop saying that?" Lysander snapped, turning a glare on Aurelius.
"Still," Garrick muttered, crossing his arms as his mind worked through the puzzle. "I understand why the Burkes and the Borgins are frozen out. They're notorious for ruining their elves with those foul dark arts experiments, but the Malfoys? I wonder what Abraxas or Lucius did to offend him."
"Perhaps a falling out over Ministry seats," Lysander speculated, adjusting his cuffs to give himself a moment to think. "Or a disagreement over investments."
"I don't think so," Aurelius said, his voice dropping an octave as he looked up and down the corridor. "Think about it. Has anyone seen or heard from Lord Malfoy lately?"
*****
Dumbledore stared at Dorothy over the rim of his half-moon spectacles, the ambient whirring of the silver instruments in his office suddenly feeling very distant.
"And you are certain, Dorothy? You saw Lord Black ascending from Level Nine?"
Dorothy Higgins, a quiet clerk from the Ministry's Department of Magical Logistics, nodded fervently. She was entirely unremarkable—the sort of woman who carried a stack of parchment so naturally that she became invisible in the corridors. But today, her hands trembled slightly against her robes.
"He stepped straight out of the Department of Mysteries lift, Dumbledore. He didn't speak to anyone. He just... walked right through the Atrium like he owned the stone beneath his feet."
Ever since Arcturus Black had abruptly broken his decade-long hiatus to attend a routine Wizengamot session, Albus Dumbledore had been quietly rebuilding his eyes and ears within the Ministry. A man like Arcturus did not simply emerge from the shadows of his manor after ten years of isolation without a catastrophic reason.
For Dumbledore, this was a matter of gravest concern. The House of Black possessed a terrifying, inherent quality. When they spoke, the wizarding world listened, compelled by the sheer, suffocating weight of their personal presence. It was a genetic trait, an inescapable magnetism, something earned through generations for just being born as a Black. Even Sirius, despite breaking tradition to wear Gryffindor scarlet, had possessed that same effortless, commanding gravity back in his school days, though he seemed unaware of it.
But it wasn't merely a matter of presence. It was the terrifying tapestry of the family as a whole: the centuries of bloody history, the unyielding reputation, the unfathomable wealth, and a raw, volatile talent for magic that bordered on the miraculous. Most concerning of all to Dumbledore, however, was the dark current that ran through their veins. The House of Black had always possessed an innate, terrifying aptitude for the Dark Arts—a natural inclination to push past the boundaries of acceptable magic.
So why, after ten years of absolute silence, would Arcturus Black descend into the depths of the Department of Mysteries?
"Do you have any inkling as to what he sought down there, Dorothy?" Dumbledore asked softly, his fingers interlacing over his chest.
"The Unspeakables don't talk, Dumbledore, you know that" Dorothy whispered, looking nervously at the whirring silver instruments on the shelves. "And it's a nearly impossible department to slip into undetected, let alone overhear a conversation—"
"I know," Dumbledore interrupted gently, offering her a reassuring, albeit grave, smile. "I am not asking for a transcript of the meeting. I was merely wondering if you had heard anything else. A stray word in the Ministry corridors, perhaps? A whisper among the senior clerks?"
"Well—I did hear something," Dorothy admitted, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper.
Dumbledore did not press her. He merely leaned forward a fraction, his brilliant blue eyes radiating an absolute, undivided attention that was entirely disarming. He offered a slow, encouraging nod, creating a quiet space that gently beckoned her to fill it.
Spurred by his silent reassurance, Dorothy leaned in closer. "I heard from one of the maintenance wizards who unclogged a chute down there. He said Lord Black didn't visit the Time Room, or the Hall of Prophecies. He was granted access to the Death Chamber."
Dumbledore's hands remained perfectly still, but the warmth in his eyes instantly cooled, replaced by a sharp, calculating focus.
The Death Chamber.
Dumbledore was quiet for a long moment after Dorothy left. The silver instruments whirred on their shelves, indifferent and precise, and he looked at them without seeing them.
The Veil had been in the Department of Mysteries since before the Ministry existed in its current form. The Unspeakables had studied it for centuries and understood it no better than they had at the beginning — only what it was not, never what it was. A threshold. A boundary. The place where something ended and whatever came after it began.
Why would Arcturus Black go there?
The succession crisis was the obvious answer, and Dumbledore did not trust obvious answers. A man did not survive eighty years in wizarding politics by accepting the first explanation that presented itself. He turned the question over carefully, the way he turned all things that mattered.
Sirius was missing. Regulus was dead — or was presumed so, which was not quite the same thing, a distinction Dumbledore had been sitting with for some years now without resolution. The House of Black faced extinction. An old man, watching his legacy dissolve, might seek many things in a place where the boundary between the living and the dead grew thin.
He might seek confirmation of an heir's death. He might seek communication with those already gone. He might seek something considerably darker — the kind of knowledge the Department of Mysteries kept locked away precisely because certain questions, once answered, could not be unanswered. Or he might seek something Dumbledore had not yet thought of, which was the possibility that concerned him most.
He rose from his chair and moved to the window. The grounds of Hogwarts stretched below him, quiet in the November grey skies.
Arcturus Black had not attended the Wizengamot in a decade. He had not, as far as Dumbledore's considerable network of eyes and ears could determine, left Blackwood Castle with any frequency or purpose. And then, within the span of a few weeks, he had appeared at a routine session, sat in his seat, written in his notebook, and said nothing. And now this.
Two moves. Deliberate ones.
A man who made deliberate moves had a destination in mind.
The question — the one that had been sitting quietly at the back of Dumbledore's thoughts since that Tuesday morning and had now moved considerably closer to the front — was not what Arcturus Black had done.
It was what he had already set in motion before he did it.
Dumbledore looked at the grounds for a moment longer. Then he returned to his desk, drew a fresh sheet of parchment toward him, and began to write. Not to Dorothy. Not to anyone in the Ministry.
To someone considerably closer to the House of Black than any clerk in the Department of Magical Logistics had ever been.
*****
Sirius looked at his new creation proudly. He had finally done it.
For weeks he had been working on it — designing, scrapping, redesigning, sourcing the right moonstone quality, arguing with himself about proportions. The existing catalogue of spellcrafted furniture was, to put it plainly, an embarrassment. Most of it dated from periods when the primary concern had been durability and status rather than comfort or innovation. The nobles who could afford custom pieces had them made to order, which solved the problem for them individually and did nothing for anyone else. And most wizarding families simply repaired what they already had, because the idea of creating something new when something old still technically functioned had never struck them as necessary.
Sirius found this baffling. What was the point of having magic if you used it only to preserve the past?
He had spent years abroad. He had seen how other wizarding cultures approached their homes — the French sensibility Esme had grown up with, the clean lines he'd observed in Muggle design magazines that Marius kept in his sitting room, ideas from a dozen countries that had never made it into the standard British wizarding catalogue because nobody had bothered to bring them across.
So, he had bothered.
His first successful project was a beanbag chair.
Esme had looked at it for a long moment when he'd shown her. Then she had looked at him. Then back at the chair.
"You spent three weeks on this?" she asked
"Four, actually."
She had returned to her reading without further comment, which from Esme constituted a verdict of baffling but harmless.
She had never had strong opinions about furnishings. It simply wasn't where her attention lived, and Sirius had long since stopped expecting it to be.
He didn't mind. He understood, in the way he understood most things about himself that he hadn't always been able to name, why this mattered to him when it didn't matter to most people.
He had grown up in a house where nothing was his. The furniture at Grimmauld Place had been chosen generations before he was born to communicate something about the family — its age, its power, its values — and it had communicated all of those things very effectively and none of them had anything to do with comfort or joy or the preferences of the people actually living there. Every object in that house had been fixed and immovable and correct, and he had had no say in any of it.
The posters on his bedroom wall had been an act of defiance. Muggle bands and Muggle motorcycles stuck permanently to the wallpaper, because they were the one thing in that house that was his and not the families, and he had put a permanent sticking charm on every single one of them out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
Now he had a castle. And magic. And time.
He looked at the beanbag chair with the satisfaction of a man who had earned the right to find this satisfying.
Alphard toddled over, regarded it with the focused assessment he brought to all new objects, and sat down in it.
The chair swallowed him almost entirely. Two small feet stuck out from the top.
Sirius stared at them for a moment.
Then he started laughing. Properly, the kind that bent him forward slightly, the kind he couldn't have stopped if he'd tried. He crossed the room and scooped Alphard out of the depths of the chair, and Alphard emerged looking thoroughly unbothered, his orange hair slightly flattened, his expression suggesting that he had assessed the situation and found it acceptable.
He immediately reached back toward the chair.
"No, Alphie."
Alphard made his opinion of this known.
Sirius set him down, still smiling, and looked back at the beanbag chair. It sat in the middle of the room exactly as he'd designed it — the right dimensions, the right density, the spell work holding perfectly.
He decided the project was a complete success.
"Papa?"
"Yes, pup?" Sirius turned to Rigel while keeping one hand loosely extended toward Alphard, who had been eyeing the beanbag chair with the focused intention of someone planning a second attempt.
"Maman wants you at the main entrance."
"The main entrance? What for?"
Rigel shrugged. His attention had drifted to the chair with the careful, sideways interest of someone who wanted to look at something without appearing to look at it.
Sirius watched this for a moment. "Do you want to give it a try?"
Rigel looked at the chair. Then at his father. Then at the chair again, with the expression of someone conducting a risk assessment.
He sat down in it.
The chair received him with the same enthusiasm it had shown Alphard. Rigel sank into it slowly, his eyes going slightly wide as it settled around him — and then he laughed. Not the small, careful sounds he usually made, but a real laugh, sudden and unguarded, the kind that surprised even him.
Sirius went still for just a second.
He had heard Rigel laugh before. Small things, quiet things, the laugh of a boy who had learned somewhere along the way to keep the volume of his joy at a level that wouldn't attract attention. This was different. This was just a boy in a ridiculous chair finding something funny, with no calculation in it at all.
Sirius smiled, and said nothing about it, because saying something about it would ruin it entirely.
"Right," he said instead, ruffling Rigel's hair as he passed. "Mind your brother doesn't follow you in. I'll go see what your mother wants."
*****
"Your grandfather gave us a gift," Esme said the moment Sirius reached the entrance, her face a mixture of utter bewilderment and faint awe.
"Wh-what?" Sirius blinked, looking at her in surprise. "Arcturus sent a gift?"
When Sirius stepped through the main doors of the castle and looked out onto the grounds, his jaw nearly dropped. Standing there in perfect, silent military formation were—are those house-elves?!
The lead elf stepped forward, bowing deeply from the waist. "Greetings, Master Sirius. We is the servants of the Noble House of Black. We is ready for your commands."
Approximately twenty of them stood on the lawn. Unlike the raggedly dressed elves Sirius had grown up with, every single one of these was meticulously groomed, wearing matching, tailored black tunics with the silver House of Black crest proudly embedded on the chest. They looked younger—energetic and robust—but already old enough to handle a massive workload.
Esme silently handed him the heavy, crisp piece of parchment that had accompanied them. Sirius unfolded it and read his grandfather's sharp, elegant cursive:
Sirius,
A Lord cannot properly command an estate while living like a common squatter. Consider this your wedding gift. I have spent the last few days personally rectifying your lack of domestic staff.
These twenty elves have been thoroughly vetted, disciplined, and cleared of any unsavory magical afflictions. Their magic is bound exclusively to the bloodline of the House of Black. They answer to your voice, and your voice alone. See to it that you use them to bring some semblance of aristocratic dignity to your halls.
Do not write back to thank me. It is beneath us both.
— Arcturus Black III
"That damn old man," Sirius hissed, though a faint, reluctant smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"At least you do not have to handle all the heavy labor around the estate anymore," Esme murmured, her eyes tracing the perfectly straight line of small, black-clad figures on the lawn.
Sirius turned to her, raising an eyebrow with a playful glint in his eye. "You do realize I am going to assign at least two of these elves to keep a permanent eye on you in your laboratory, right?"
Esme gave him an incredulous look, her posture straightening. "On me? And why, pray tell, would I need such monitoring?"
"Because, whenever you lock yourself away in that laboratory of yours, you entirely forget that humans require sustenance. You ignore your meals, you forget to drink water... if anyone needs a keeper, it's you."
"I have incredibly important research to conduct," she defended smoothly, her French cadence lengthening the vowels just enough to sound thoroughly unimpressed.
"Research that becomes entirely useless if you starve yourself to death."
"I do not think my habits are quite that severe."
"They are exactly that severe," Sirius countered, folding his arms triumphantly. "I didn't realize it was that bad when you started researching the Dragonpox, but the number of times I had to come into that laboratory just to check if you were still alive is outstanding. How can we convince our children to eat on time for their health if their mother, who is also a healer, isn't following those exact standards?"
Esme opened her mouth to argue, but stopped, her lips twitching as she realized she had been thoroughly outmaneuvered. She looked back toward the immaculate rows of servants before offering a small, defeated sigh. "Fine."
"Yes!" Sirius grinned, thoroughly pleased with his victory.
"Do not celebrate just yet," Esme said, a sudden, mischievous smile gracing her lips. "That is not the only gift your grandfather left on our doorstep."
Sirius blinked. "What do you mean? There's more?"
Esme turned and motioned for him to follow her past the courtyard. Positioned just to the side of the entrance gates were several massive, reinforced iron crates that he had completely overlooked in his initial shock over the army of elves.
"What on earth are those?" Sirius asked, stepping closer to inspect the heavy iron grates.
"Moonstones," Esme said softly, a note of genuine reverence in her voice.
"Moonstones?!"
"S-grade, flawless cut ones, too. The crates are practically brimming with them."
"What?!"
Sirius stared down at the glittering, raw magical stones beneath the iron bars, utterly flabbergasted. Had his grandfather literally raided the deepest, most restricted ancestral vaults just to supply the materials for their estate? High-grade moonstones of that caliber were the premium standard for high-end magical craftsmanship—the exact type of material used in exchange to forge enchanted fixtures, fortify structures, and manifest elite pure-blood furniture. They didn't just cost a fortune; they were heavily controlled and nearly impossible to acquire in bulk on the open market.
That was the moment it truly sank in. Sirius had spent so many years living entirely outside the shadow of his family's influence, proudly surviving on his own merits, that he had genuinely forgotten what the House of Black was capable of. This wasn't just a generous gesture. To Arcturus Black, a small army of vetted servants and a mountain of priceless Moonstones were practically loose change.
Sirius let out a long, defeated sigh, running a hand through his dark hair. "Merlin help us. We're going to need a bigger storeroom."