She is very much about to argue that this time is entirely free of war and fear and tyranny, as is the government's official stance, and she even keeps the friendly-ministry-employee voice for her attempt – and then he tells what she knows is a blatant lie. Tom Marvolo Riddle, dead? Impossible. Terrifying and impossible and making it impossibly difficult to resign herself to being obliviated for the sake of not handing him any proof for his entirely true torture-murder-claims.


He is gone before she comes to again, and when she does, it takes her a moment of abject confusion in the face of the muggle sweets in her hands before she recognises this particular sense of disorientation not as part of the drug haze, but as a sign of having been obliviated. Lucius is there – she remembers drinking with him, remembers one of them mentioning Rodolphus and chocolate and – blank.

"Did you obliviate me?" She takes a staggering step towards him, incredulous and trying to work around the sudden gap in her memory, while having trouble holding onto more than one piece of the puzzle at a time thanks to their previous escalations.