Sirius had been one of Tom's steadier customers for some time now. Restorative potions for body and mind, an unbroken supply since they had first come to an arrangement, totalling upward of ten thousand Galleons across the months.
But more than a decade in Azkaban was not something you simply recovered from, and Sirius had spent those years eating himself alive from the inside. Guilt, regret, the kind of sustained internal punishment that left marks on a person's spirit that potions could only partially reach. In the wizarding world, wounds to the mind and soul were considerably harder to mend than anything that happened to the body.
There had been improvement. Sirius could feel it himself. But he could also feel the places that hadn't healed, the brittleness that was still there when he pushed too hard or moved too fast. Living alone, that would have been manageable. But Harry was here now, and one day there might be more people who needed him to be steady, and Sirius did not want to discover some morning that he'd become a danger to them.
Tom turned the problem over for a moment. Psychological damage came down, in the end, to smoothing the creases out of memory and correcting the patterns thought had worn into itself. There were approaches. Nothing he needed to implement tonight.
"I have some ideas. Give me a little more time."
"Take as long as you need." Sirius said it with more feeling than the words required. "How much? And is there anything I should source in advance?"
"Twenty thousand Galleons. The materials are on me."
Tom named the figure the way other people mentioned the weather. Sirius agreed without blinking, and immediately offered to pay upfront. Tom declined. The trial task had its own logic: the exchange counted as complete only when both sides had delivered, which was why Grindelwald's one and a half million Galleons were already sitting in Tom's vault while the trial counter hadn't moved a single point. He hadn't sent the goods. The transaction wasn't finished.
Sirius opened the library door and made no move to follow Tom inside, leaning against the frame instead. "Take your time. Look at whatever you like. You staying for dinner?"
"I'll pass, thanks. Try not to poison Harry."
Sirius laughed, the slightly sheepish kind, and pulled the door shut.
The Black family library was large, roughly a third the size of Hogwarts's own, which for a single family was genuinely impressive. One of the oldest pure-blood lines in Britain, and it showed. The shelves went back further than Tom could see from the entrance.
He would need to filter first. A fair number of these titles almost certainly duplicated things he already owned.
...
Meanwhile, Robert had returned to North America.
The Graves family had been waiting. They had wanted good news, something to set against everything they had lost, and instead Robert came back carrying nothing, the hearing dissolved without consequence, Riddle walking out of it clean as he had walked in.
The messages started arriving in the family's communication journal almost immediately.
"Robert. You have become a stain on this family."
"Uncle, why did you provoke that monster in the first place? The entire family is a laughing stock now."
"It's your fault. You got my father killed."
"Uncle, what were you thinking? The family elevated you. This is how you repay us? If you can't drive that creature out of the estate, I will go to great-grandfather and have you removed from the family entirely."
Every message landed on the page in sequence, one after another, a continuous record of everything that had been building since the incident. The Graves family's patience, never deep to begin with, had reached its end.
From their point of view, this had nothing to do with them. Robert had picked a fight with Riddle. They were the ones living with the consequences.
Robert read each line. He breathed slowly and steadily. His eyes had begun to redden at the edges, and somewhere in the depths of them, a red light flickered briefly, there and gone before anyone could have named it.
They were blaming him.
Everything he had done for this family. The position he had built, the influence he had cultivated and turned toward their benefit, the risks he had taken on their behalf. The moment it went wrong they had arranged themselves into a chorus pointing at his name.
When things were easy, every one of them had been warm and deferential. Uncle Robert. The head of the family. Now, the first real difficulty, and suddenly all of that was gone.
Robert did not notice it happening, but his grip on his own thinking had been slipping for weeks. Something had been pushing his thoughts steadily toward the extremes, eroding the space between impulse and action, making the measured response feel like weakness. He had been moving toward it without realising, the way water finds the lowest point without choosing to.
The messages in the journal were the last weight on a structure that had already been failing.
He snapped the journal shut.
He crossed the room and threw it into the fireplace, then stepped into the flames himself, taking the Floo to the nearest public grate and Apparating the remaining distance to the Graves estate.
High above the cloud layer, Usagi cracked one eye open. She watched Robert slip through the gap in the outer wards that they had taken to calling the dog door, decided he was not worth her immediate attention, and went back to sleep.
"Uncle?"
One of the Graves cousins had been drifting aimlessly around the estate grounds when Robert appeared. The cousin flinched back, visibly startled, and then remembered that he had been among those who had sent messages, and for a moment calculated whether Robert was here on his account specifically.
Then another thought arrived, and his expression changed entirely.
"How did you get in? Is the monster gone? Has it left?"
"I came through the dog door," Robert said. The flatness in his voice did more to kill the cousin's hope than any direct answer could have.
The cousin stared at him. "Uncle, how could you submit to Riddle like that?"
"Antagonising him for the sake of dead weight like you was never going to be worth it."
Robert's hand moved to his wand without any visible decision being made.
"If you think I've failed you," he said, "then perhaps you shouldn't carry the Graves name any further."
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