The common room of the Slytherin House had always been a cathedral of stone and shadow, a place that swallowed the noise of the castle and replaced it with a more deliberate quiet. The fire in the grate burned low, the orange light flickering against emerald hangings and glinting faintly off silver filigree. Abraxas sat with his long frame draped elegantly in one of the high-backed chairs, his posture perfectly measured, as though even idleness were a performance of lineage.

He had grown up surrounded by names that carried weight like iron: Lestrange, Rosier, Avery—each a family that could trace its veins back to the earliest wizarding blood. But none had ever been closer to the Malfoys than the Blacks. There had never been a time in his memory when he had not known Pollux Black’s children, had not passed long afternoons at Grimmauld Place or Wiltshire in the orbit of Walburga’s sharp tongue, Alphard’s arrogance, Cygnus’s youthful ambition. And you—always in their midst, though he had never thought of you as his.

Until this winter.

Marriage had been an inevitability; he had been raised on the word as though it were a spell, carved into him by his father’s hand and his mother’s silences. An arrangement between families was not something to resist—duty did not permit refusal. And yet, when the decision had been made, when Cassius Malfoy had told him that his bride would be you, he had found himself not resentful but… intrigued. You were not unpleasant. You were not beneath him. More than that: he had known you always, and in knowing you there was a peculiar kind of inevitability he had not foreseen.

The wedding—he remembered it as though it had been etched in silver. Grand even by the impossible standards of old blood, the union of the youngest Black daughter and the Malfoy heir had been spectacle, a theatre of chandeliers and vows, ancestral vaults emptied of their treasures to gild the ceremony. More lavish than Walburga’s match to Orion, though that had been celebrated as dynastic perfection. You had looked like winter incarnate—ivory silk and jewels at your throat, firelight bending in your hair. He had expected to feel trapped; instead, he had felt sharpened, weighted with a new sense of power, as though the world had shifted beneath him to acknowledge what he had become.

Now, back within the stone walls of Hogwarts, the ritual of marriage clung to him as palpably as the ring he wore on his right hand. He was seventeen, and yet a husband—a fact he carried with a quiet relish, letting the Malfoy crest at his finger catch the light when he gestured, ensuring that those who looked would remember. And more satisfying still was when your hand bore its twin. You did not think much of it, he knew, but he saw. He always saw.

Like now.

You were seated beside him, the delicate weight of your teacup balanced against pale fingers. The fire caught in the band of gold at your hand, casting a faint reflection upon the dark surface of your drink. Abraxas let his gaze linger, detached in appearance, though beneath the stillness was the faintest curl of satisfaction. The smile that ghosted his mouth was subtle, calculated, never more than an impression at the edges of his sculpted features. It was not for you, nor for the room—it was for himself, a silent acknowledgment of possession and continuity.

Around you, the common room hummed faintly with other students, but they were background noise, shadows on the wall of his theatre. In that moment, all he truly registered was the sight of your ring glinting in the firelight and the steady pulse of knowledge: that you were his, and that his bloodline, his legacy, was secure.

For Abraxas Malfoy, that was more than enough to warrant a smile.