Silence.
An absolute, dense, and sepulchral silence plummeted over my position and spread like a plague to every corner of the Atrium.
The decapitated body of Lucius Malfoy collided heavily against the floor tiles, laying inert. Around him, the remnants of what seconds before had shaped the face of the most influential nobleman in Great Britain scattered in a grotesque rain; bone fragments, bloodied platinum hair, and gray matter splattered the floor of the arena, mixing with the spilled blood.
I stood static, pinning a look of absolute bewilderment, horror, and confusion onto the corpse, perfectly mimicking the stupor that froze the Ministry stands. My hands began to experience a violent, spasmodic trembling—so much so that I was not even able to hold onto the Jarjacha wands, which rolled across the floor with a sharp clink.
Instantly, my knees gave out, and I collapsed onto the stone, pale as a ghost and with my eyes wide from the feigned trauma.
*Blargh!*
A violent spasm racked my stomach and I vomited onto the asphalt in the middle of the puddle, shaking uncontrollably, offering the world the living image of a boy broken by the involuntary weight of a homicide. The game was over.
The farce was perfect. I stayed on my knees over the warm tiles, my body hunched and my gaze vacant, pretending that a sharp, deafening ringing completely isolated me from my surroundings. I didn't react to anything; not to the disordered clamor of the crowd packing the stands, nor to the first muffled shriek of the new widow, nor to the desperate calls of my parents. Nothing penetrated my armor of fictional shock.
At some point during that confusion, the dome shielding the arena dissipated, vanishing into the air as if it had never existed. Even so, I remained motionless. Even when several hands grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me with physical roughness in an attempt to make me react, I merely offered the rigidity of a corpse. It was then that a pair of familiar arms wrapped around me with heartbreaking desperation: it was my mother, who clung to me between sobs in an instinctive attempt to provide protection and comfort.
I barely raised my eyes from my state of supposed catatonia. In front of us, the decapitated body of Lucius Malfoy still lay over the scarlet puddle. Several Aurors approached the pit, executing a belated and useless protocol to confirm the death—an almost insulting pantomime considering the man completely lacked a head, but one could not expect greater lucidity from the current institutional guard. Beyond the officers, Narcissa Malfoy broke through until she collapsed beside her husband's remains, her aristocratic silhouette immediately illuminated by the relentless and heartless flashes of the press photographers. Those same correspondents who seconds ago had vomited in horror at the raw nature of the execution had already stood up, wiping their mouths to capture the scoop with a frightening professional cynicism.
I was dragged outside while the Atrium threatened to dissolve into a riot of murmurs and panic. Cornelius Fudge, his face distorted and his voice amplified by a Sonorus charm, bellowed sterile directives in a desperate attempt to maintain order. The Minister did not know how to proceed either; no one at the pinnacle of power had foreseen an outcome of this nature. Lucius Malfoy, the great benefactor of the Ministry, supreme head of one of the wealthiest, most influential, and prosperous houses in magical Great Britain, had just been executed in a legal pit by a Hogwarts student. The political vacuum and the media earthquake that this would unleash was something no one in that room had the slightest capacity to predict or contain. The entire board had spilled outside the projected margins.
And Albus Dumbledore, motionless in the middle of the chaos dragging down the rest of the dignitaries, limited his existence to watching me. In a normal scenario, the Headmaster's authority would have been the perfect balm to calm the waters and guide Fudge, but he chose not to move a single finger. It wasn't indifference; it was fixation. There was a single element in the entire Atrium that monopolized his attention and triggered his alarms: me, and only me. The only thing the old man did, with a subtle movement of his wand, was lift the restrictive enchantment from my father; with Elise's divine barrier dissipated, Arthur was able to regain the flow of his magical core without the risk of falling into artificial lethargy.
My parents escorted me, pushing through toward the exits, transforming themselves into a human shield to protect me from the journalists and onlookers who crowded around, eager to rip away a statement or to "meet the victor" of the duel of the century. It would have been impossible for the couple to hold back the tide on their own if not for the intervention of the Aurors, who found themselves forced to split into two fronts: one cordon to keep the vultures away from my path and another to rope off Malfoy's corpse.
I sustained the performance with military discipline, letting my body be moved by my parents' momentum, following them like an automaton. In this manner, they took me out of the Atrium, leading me away from the roar of the crowd through a heavy oak door that led to the Ministry's internal arteries. After walking through several deserted corridors, we ended up in a spacious institutional waiting room. It was an oppressive enclosure, with walls stained a time-worn yellow, no windows to the outside, and barely a few official booths lined up along one side. In the center of the room stretched long, backless benches; they sat me on one of them and I immediately bent my spine, burying my head between my knees and interlacing my arms over the back of my neck. I did not show the slightest hint of wanting to abandon the character of the broken boy.
The staging was bearing fruit. My parents, far from harboring the slightest suspicion or questioning the brutality of the outcome, devoted themselves entirely to pouring out trembling caresses and words of encouragement. My mother kept holding me, her tears soaking my blood-and-sweat-stained robes, completely convinced that her youngest son had just lost his innocence under the weight of an involuntary tragedy.
Several officials and intermediaries tried to force their way into the room, but the only ones who managed to cross the threshold were members of the Ministry's administrative staff, eager to extract my preliminary statements or to finalize the mandatory bureaucratic paperwork following a Duel of Honor. However, all of them collided head-on against the wall that my father had become. Arthur was genuinely infuriated; to him, I was nothing more than his youngest son, a teenager traumatized by a fatal accident that had forced him to take a life, and seeing his own department colleagues or the Minister's secretaries pestering me was intolerable. Even Cornelius Fudge himself had to take my father's scoldings and harsh, unhinged shouting. The Minister had no room to maneuver: as long as Arthur did not cross the line into physical aggression, Fudge could not threaten him with termination or impose a disciplinary sanction at such a delicate time; punishing the father of the winner would have looked like an act of intolerable pettiness and corruption, ruining the reputation he had just gained.
It was in the middle of that dispute when Albus Dumbledore crossed the threshold. He advanced with slow steps and a grave expression, though devoid of the piercing sharpness with which he had been scrutinizing me. To the eyes of the rest, he looked like the same benevolent headmaster as always; only I was aware of the intricate and dangerous web of conjectures churning in his mind.
The old man immediately mediated the discussion between my father and the Ministry entourage. True to his habit, his intervention was timely and his premises impeccably reasonable, aimed at weaving a peaceful resolution to the bureaucratic conflict. Or so he intended to appear. Subdued by Dumbledore's massive authority, and despite resisting with every fiber of his being the thought of leaving my side, Arthur ended up yielding. He followed the Minister and the secretaries toward the upper offices to complete the litigation protocols on my behalf, also prepared to face the media to shield my image and prevent the press from labeling me a murderer when, in his honest belief, "everything had been a tragic accident."
In this way, the waiting room was reduced to the presence of Dumbledore, my mother, and me, while the muffled echo of the external chaos continued to filter in. But this did not last long. The Headmaster approached my mother, who was still stroking my hair, and spoke to her in a soft, pastoral tone. He gently suggested that she grant me a little space to breathe, urging her to go find a warm drink for me and to offer support to Arthur, where the press would undoubtedly try to tear him apart. He assured her that it was best to leave him alone with me; that he would speak with me and manage to stabilize me.
I doubt his arguments would have sufficed on their own; in the state of crisis I was in, my mother would have never voluntarily moved away from my bench. But Dumbledore did not rely solely on rhetoric: he slipped a subtle and silent pulse of magic, an arcane "persuasion" that bent Molly's emotional resistance. It wasn't a noble maneuver, of course, but it reflected that the old man was losing his patience and that isolating me via the slow route was the most generous concession he was willing to make me this morning.
When my mother's footsteps faded away, we were left completely alone. I maintained my strict posture, my torso sunk between my legs and my pupils pinned to the worn wood between my feet, sustaining the farce of psychological shock before the large window of the door which, although blocked by a paper curtain, remained a visual risk.
Silence took ownership of the yellowish walls. I cut off the fictional sobbing, reducing my performance to a rhythmic, spasmodic shivering of my shoulders, as if the cold of the pit were still running down my spine. Neither of us rushed to take the floor during a few dense and calculated seconds. The air grew heavy, charged with the static of two colossal wills measuring each other in the gloom.
Until, finally, the Headmaster broke the truce. He did so with a voice stripped of his habitual academic warmth—a gray, indifferent, and deeply ancient tone that echoed against the ceiling of the room like a judge's verdict.
"Is this what you were seeking?" Dumbledore asked. His voice was nothing more than a dry whisper, cutting like ice. "To become a killer?"
The coldness his words distilled far surpassed the hostility of our last meeting in his office. In his eyes, there no longer remained the slightest trace of the academic compassion or tolerance he usually dispensed to the strayed; to Albus Dumbledore, I had descended one more step into an irreversible darkness. I had fallen too low.
"Do you truly believe you are the first person I've killed?" I replied, discarding any trace of vulnerability. I kept my hunched position, but I imbued my tone with a cold, almost professional confidence. "I thought you were aware of my record as Tenebrius the quasi-auror. Accidents occurred there on a very regular basis."
"Taking a life in the middle of crossfire and planning a homicide under the canopy of the law are radically different concepts..." the old man countered, while his fingers closed with a dangerous and implacable firmness around the Elder Wand. "But I fear your hands carry far more blood than you care to admit."