Chapter Text
(London, 2006)
By eight o’clock, the Ministry of Magic was already vibrating with a sort of bureaucratic fever: quills hovering mid-sentence, memos darting through corridors like metallic dragonflies, the faint electric hiss of enchantments tuned for efficiency and not mercy. Reconstruction had made the Ministry look cleaner, but not kinder. The glass floors gleamed, the brass was re-polished, and the air carried the sterile confidence of a government convinced that transparency and truth were interchangeable.
Ginny Weasley had long stopped confusing the two.
Her office was a rectangular aquarium of light—transparent walls, charmed to mute sound but not scrutiny. Files rose in delicate spires on her desk: preliminary motions, affidavits, and a three-inch binder labeled MORGANS et al. v. MINISTRY OF MAGIC. Every sheet had been cross-referenced until the parchment itself seemed ready to plead exhaustion. Behind her, a single clock ticked in twelve-second intervals—an experimental timepiece installed during the Time-Turner reform act, meant to symbolize precision. It mostly symbolized anxiety.
She read the same statute again, lips barely moving.
Section III, Subsection A, Clause Four: consent presumed where recollection serves demonstrable public safety.
It was the kind of sentence that sounded as though it had been written underwater. Legal fiction pretending to be principle. She marked the margin with a terse annotation—consent ≠ comprehension—and set the quill down before it could start bleeding sarcasm.
A copy of The Daily Prophet sprawled across the windowsill, today’s headline inked in triumphant italics:
THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY: CAN MEMORY BE OWNED?
Sub-header: Weasley v. Ministry opens today; implications seismic.
She laughed under her breath, the sound small in the sterile air. The press had taken to calling her the conscience of the post-war generation—a title that made her want to drink. She was no one’s conscience. She was a solicitor with a caffeine dependency and a moral allergy to euphemism.
The Department of Magical Equality—Hermione’s proud experiment in “ethical governance”—occupied the Ministry’s newest wing, all transparent walls and self-congratulatory architecture. From here she could see nearly the entire floor: rows of clerks collating evidence scrolls, interns murmuring over precedents, the faint blue shimmer of confidentiality wards. The building looked like a cathedral designed by someone who had lost faith but kept the aesthetic.
Her reflection ghosted in the glass—hair still red but subdued into a utilitarian knot, face sharpened by sleep deprivation and conviction. The last decade had trimmed away the girl who once swung hexes in basements and left behind a woman fluent in statute and silence. Emotion had become unprofessional; hope, naive; outrage, useful only if properly cited.
A soft knock. “Still arguing with the clauses?”
Hermione stood at the door, immaculate in judicial black, the faintest streak of silver in her curls. She carried a folder thick enough to be dangerous.
“Trying to decide if intent or negligence makes the better opening,” Ginny said, not looking up. “Or if I should just quote Cicero and be done with it.”
Hermione smiled—the weary kind reserved for former revolutionaries turned administrators. “You’ll do fine. Just remember who’s on the other side.”
“I remember.”
“Zabini’s not the enemy,” Hermione said carefully. “He’s what happens when intelligence is severed from accountability.”
Ginny closed the binder with the decisive snap of someone holstering a weapon. “Then let’s see how well intellect bleeds.”
Hermione’s expression flickered—amusement, worry, pride. “The Wizengamot will be watching. International observers too. This case isn’t just precedent, it’s architecture. The law we write here will outlive us.”
“Then I’ll make sure it has good bones,” Ginny said, gathering her notes.
When the door shut behind Hermione, the quiet expanded, weighty and humming. For a moment, Ginny allowed herself stillness. The plaintiffs’ faces crowded her thoughts: a middle-aged witch who could no longer recall her daughter’s birth, a half-blood clerk who’d discovered entire years missing from his mind. The Ministry had called it memory preservation—a euphemism so polished it almost gleamed. The extractions had been ordered during the war under the Emergency Ethics Directive, justified by security, authorized by people she’d once trusted.
She slid a single photograph from the case file: a Pensieve vial labeled Subject 17-B. The contents shimmered a dull, exhausted silver. Memory as evidence. Evidence as grief. She returned it to the folder and sealed the clasp with a muttered charm.
Outside, the atrium clock struck half past eight. Time to perform belief.
The lift groaned as it descended to Level Three, each floor humming with a different frequency of fear. The lower they went, the more the air thickened with bureaucracy—paper dust, wand-oil, nerves. Through the lattice of the elevator gate, she glimpsed a cross-section of government: interns running with sealed evidence boxes; old-guard clerks still wearing Order badges like relics; new-blood solicitors rehearsing rhetoric under their breath.
When the doors opened onto the Hall of Justice, the world smelled of rain and ambition.
The courtroom was enormous—marble rebuilt over the bones of the old Wizengamot chamber, domed ceiling charmed to mimic the sky above London. The benches gleamed, the runes on the floor re-inscribed after the war to read Veritas in Memoria—truth in memory. Irony, Ginny thought, as she stepped onto the emblem and felt it thrum faintly beneath her boots.
Reporters clustered near the entrance, the new Prophet cameras flashing like miniature storms. She ignored them. Her robes, black and sharply tailored, felt like armor; the wand holster at her wrist, a comfort. Years ago she had fought for survival. Now she fought for definition. Both required aim.
“Counsel for the plaintiffs,” called the bailiff.
She lifted her chin. “Present.”
Across the aisle, a figure rose—tall, precise, motionless until the moment demanded movement. Blaise Zabini. The defense. The name alone was a whisper in every corridor: the pure-blood prodigy turned barrister, famous for winning impossible cases with terrifying grace.
He inclined his head once, almost courteously, before returning his attention to the stack of briefs in front of him. His posture was impeccable; his indifference, calculated.
Ginny took her seat. The parchment in front of her vibrated faintly as if bracing itself. Outside, thunder rolled over the city, echoed a second later through the enchanted dome above them.
The bailiff’s wand flared. “Court is now in session.”
Ginny inhaled once, slow and measured. Somewhere deep within her chest, every lesson she’d ever learned about restraint, about logic, about anger sharpened into purpose. She rose, voice clear, diction immaculate.
“My Lords and Ladies of the Court—”
And the trial began.
The bailiff’s wand flared once, sealing the courtroom. The charm muted every external sound until only the soft rasp of parchment and the faint, rhythmic tick of the judicial clock remained.
The air itself seemed to contract. A trial, Ginny had learned, was nothing more than choreography—belief rehearsed until it looked like truth.
The trick was pretending that logic and morality were the same thing.
She stood.
“My Lords and Ladies of the Court—”
Her voice sliced cleanly through the hush. It was lower than it used to be—years of speaking through noise had worn the girlish brightness out of it—and steady in the way that made stenographers breathe easier.
“The case before you is not about theft,” she said. “It is about authorship.”
A pause. The silence turned taut, expectant.
“During the war, the Ministry of Magic enacted the Emergency Ethics Directive—legislation meant to protect state intelligence at all costs. Under that law, Obliviators and Unspeakables were authorized to extract selective memories from witches and wizards deemed ‘informationally valuable.’ These recollections were stored, catalogued, and, years later, sold to private contractors for use in magical security systems. The victims—my clients—were never informed, compensated, or even told what had been taken from them.”
She stopped, letting the words settle like dust.
“We are not here to debate intent. We are here to ask what remains of personhood when consent is presumed. To question whether the Ministry has the right to own the mind of its citizens. Whether survival justified a theft that went deeper than property—into identity itself.”
Her wand flicked toward the evidence dais. A thin shimmer of silver unfurled, resolving into a Pensieve projection. From it, a memory spilled across the courtroom: a woman in her forties sitting in a kitchen that smelled of tea and disinfectant, staring at a child she could no longer name.
Her voice—recorded years earlier—trembled through the chamber.
I know she’s mine. I just don’t remember why.
The gallery inhaled audibly. One of the junior clerks looked away.
Ginny held her ground.
“This is not theoretical,” she said quietly. “It is loss measured in absences. You will hear testimony from eleven plaintiffs who can no longer recall their own weddings, their childhood homes, or the precise moment the war ended for them. You will hear how those memories were taken under a law that still bears the Ministry’s seal. You will be asked to decide whether that law is justice—or a monument to fear.”
She closed her folder. “The plaintiffs rest for now, my Lord.”
Justice Peregrine inclined his head, spectacles glinting under the floating lights. “Counsel for the defense, Mr. Zabini.”
A chair shifted across the aisle. Blaise Zabini rose.
It was astonishing how the temperature seemed to change when he moved—like the room remembered what composure looked like and tried to imitate it.
He was tall; not imposing in the way of soldiers, but in the deliberate economy of movement that comes from knowing one never needs to rush.
The black of his robes had a faint sheen—Italian tailoring, definitely—cut close at the waist and sharp at the shoulders. The collar of his shirt was stiff, perfectly white against his skin. His hair was close-cropped, dark as ink; his expression unreadable but for the suggestion of curiosity at the corner of his mouth.
If most lawyers hid their nerves behind bravado, Zabini hid something else entirely: certainty. Not arrogance, precisely—arrogance required an audience—but the cool conviction of someone who trusted his own mind more than he trusted gravity.
He adjusted one cufflink—silver, monogrammed—and unbuttoned his robes with a gesture that bordered on theatrical restraint.
When he spoke, his voice came low and measured, each syllable resting exactly where he placed it.
“The prosecution would have you believe this is a question of theft,” he began, “but the law recognizes no ownership over memory. We cannot claim as property that which alters with recollection.”
The cadence was effortless—neither hurried nor hesitant. Every clause balanced perfectly on its predicate. Ginny recognized the technique: start with philosophy, then descend into statute so the moral blow lands twice. It was almost beautiful, in the way architecture is beautiful before you notice the cracks in the foundation.
“My clients acted under statute and necessity,” he continued. “The Emergency Ethics Directive was lawful. It was ratified by the Wizengamot. It was reviewed by the International Confederation of Wizards. What Ms. Weasley calls theft was, at the time, survival. War demands triage—ethical, magical, and human.”
He glanced toward the gallery, allowing the phrasing to settle into the air like incense.
“To prosecute the Ministry now for its methods of preservation,” he concluded, “is to punish a body for surviving its own disease.”
The silence that followed wasn’t admiration—it was calculation. Everyone was re-writing his words into opinion pieces already.
Ginny’s throat felt tight. She wanted to despise the eloquence, the deliberate detachment—but a part of her, the part trained to appreciate symmetry, recognized genius when she heard it.
Up close, he was distractingly precise. The lines of his face looked carved rather than grown—fine jaw, narrow nose, eyes that hovered somewhere between gray and green depending on the light. They gave nothing away, but they saw everything. When he looked up from his parchment, the glance found her immediately, like he had mapped the distance between their tables in advance.
The judge cleared his throat. “Thank you, Mr. Zabini. We will hear witnesses tomorrow morning. Court is adjourned for recess.”
Chairs scraped, papers rustled, voices returned in cautious waves. Reporters began whispering dictation into their Quick-Quote Quills. Ginny stayed where she was, her hands flat on the table, pulse still echoing against her ribs.
Across the aisle, Blaise gathered his notes with surgical calm. He spoke briefly to Draco Malfoy—his co-counsel, blond and faintly bored—then snapped his briefcase shut. The movement drew every line of attention back to him.
Before turning to leave, he looked her way once more. The expression wasn’t triumph or mockery—it was civility polished to a shine. A micro-gesture that said, simply, Well argued.
Ginny inclined her head a fraction, professional, unsmiling. Not badly yourself, it meant.
The sky outside the Ministry had bruised to violet by the time Ginny reached her flat. London was all reflection and residue—the kind of wet dusk that blurred lamplight into watercolor. She lived in Bloomsbury now, on the third floor of a narrow Georgian walk-up, a neighborhood where the Muggle and magical bled together in quiet, bureaucratic peace. Her window overlooked a square of iron railings and sycamores that refused to die no matter how poisoned the rain became.
The flat smelled faintly of paper and ozone. Case files were stacked along the wall in precarious columns; the kettle, older than she was, hummed faintly whenever she passed it. She loosened her robes, kicked her shoes beneath the desk, and exhaled the kind of breath one only takes when alone.
Law had changed her posture. She used to walk like she was ready to fight; now she walked like she was waiting for cross-examination. Her mirror, half-obscured by pinned notes, caught her reflection—a young woman rendered prematurely historical. The dark under her eyes looked like annotation.
She made tea, more out of ritual than desire, and set her case file open across the kitchen table. The pages glowed softly with charm-ink, the columns of citations like veins of light. She reread her own transcript from the day, line by line. Each sentence appeared foreign now, as if someone else had said it. The courtroom always turned words into strangers.
Her handwriting, sharp and slanted, covered the margins with observations: Need to cite consent doctrine—ask Hermione about precedent. Zabini too calm—anticipating personal angle. Cross-exam tomorrow: memory degradation clause.
His name on the page caught her attention in a way she hated.
Zabini.
She hadn’t known what to expect when she heard he’d taken the defense—some stiff bureaucrat, perhaps, or another of the Ministry’s polished mouthpieces. She hadn’t expected that.
He’d been infuriatingly composed, every movement rehearsed but not performative. A man who had long ago learned that silence was the most intimidating sound. She thought of his voice—low, deliberate, that strange faint warmth under the precision, like light behind frosted glass. A rhetorical weapon designed to disarm without bleeding.
She rubbed her temples, annoyed with herself for noticing.
He’d looked, she admitted, exactly like the sort of person who could convince the world morality was a luxury item. His robes cut to perfection, his posture like punctuation. But it was the stillness that unsettled her most. Stillness like his always belonged to people who’d learned to survive storms by becoming weather themselves.
Her teacup cooled. She set it down among the notes, steam curling upward like smoke.
At half past nine, an owl tapped against the window—Hermione’s handwriting on the envelope, neat, urgent.
We’ll need to meet before the morning hearing. Zabini’s firm submitted new evidence—revised witness list. Confidential. My office, seven sharp. Don’t bring the press.
Ginny folded the note once, twice, and left it beside the lamp. The city outside murmured—carriages, footsteps, laughter from a nearby pub. The kind of noise that made other people feel alive. She only felt awake.
When she finally turned off the light, the window caught her reflection again: hair unbound, shoulders slightly bowed, eyes still sharp. She looked like a woman who believed in justice the way other people believed in ghosts—fully, foolishly, and without proof.
Δ
Blaise Zabini’s office occupied the top floor of the Greengrass, Malfoy & Zabini building on Fleet Street, a narrow edifice of black stone and blue wards. It was nearly midnight when he finished dictating notes into the floating quill. The quill blinked, requested clarification of a Latin term, then hovered still when he waved it silent.
The floor-to-ceiling windows framed London like evidence. The Thames below looked metallic, ancient, indifferent. He stood there for a while, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the single lamplight gilding the edges of his hands. His desk was immaculate—three files aligned perfectly parallel to the grain, a crystal decanter half-full of Firewhisky, untouched.
Draco had left hours ago, muttering something about dinner and headlines. Blaise preferred quiet.
He reread the day’s transcript, pausing over her name where it appeared in print for the first time: Weasley, G. — Opening Statement.
He remembered the timbre of her voice as she spoke—the precise control, the deliberate tremor she allowed herself once at the end of a sentence, perfectly timed to catch sympathy without appearing manipulative. It was good law. Brutally good.
He had not expected her to be that sharp, nor that articulate. Most prosecutors relied on sentiment; she built her case like an engineer, each premise locking cleanly into the next until one almost admired the machinery of it. Almost.
He poured a glass of whisky, didn’t drink it.
In her cross-examination notes, she had asked whether survival could justify theft. It was a line of questioning he would have used himself, years ago, before experience taught him that justification was irrelevant. The law did not care about conscience; it cared about definition. His job was to shape the latter until the former fit.
He thought of her standing at the dais, back straight, eyes bright, every gesture disciplined. The kind of focus that came from having been underestimated too many times. It reminded him of his mother. It made him uneasy.
Outside, the rain deepened to a steady percussion. He loosened his tie, leaned against the desk, and let the quiet settle back in. The city’s glow reflected faintly in the window, turning his own reflection into something spectral.
“She’s dangerous,” he said aloud, to no one.
The quill twitched as if waiting for a dictation command. He ignored it, shut the file, and extinguished the lamp.
Across the city, Ginny dreamt of silver light spilling from a Pensieve, of voices whispering Latin statutes she half-recognized, of hands she couldn’t see turning pages in the dark.
When she woke before dawn, her tea had gone cold, her case files had rearranged themselves into careful stacks, and her heart was still beating too fast.