Disclaimer: I am not JKR, thus I don't own Harry Potter or its related works.

I also don't own Dalton, he was created by pottermommy1118 and has been borrowed with permission.

Author's Note: This is part one of three and the shortest by far (the total word count is just under 10500). The other parts are written, but have not been edited to my satisfaction (that is not to say this one is without errors, if you find any let me know!) and I intend to post them once they've been edited, most likely in a week (for part 2) and in two weeks (for part 3).

As always a huge thank you to everyone that helped me with this!

WARNING: CHARACTER DEATH.

Unstuck

*.*.*

Part I

*.*.*

This is a fact: Dorcas Meadowes has come unstuck in time. This is also a fact: She neither knows how it happened nor can she control it. And this is an opinion: It makes her a danger to the Dark Lord's plans.

*.*.*

The world lurches around her, caves and crumbles and then reassembles itself into something both familiar and strange. Hogwarts is Hogwarts and will forever remain such, but it changes with each new generation that passes through its halls and this is not the same school she attended. Still, she stands in the very same hallway where she once rushed past Narcissa Black and knocked the books out of her hands. The very same hallway that started Dalton down a heartbreaking path.

There are footsteps behind her, and she turns. Professor Dumbledore looks old, withered in a way she had never associated with him. For a moment, she catches a glimpse of a blackened hand, but then he shakes his sleeve down to cover it. "Professor," she begins, questions burning on her tongue, but before she can say another word, the world rights itself.

Dalton looks up from his books. "You alright there, Dorrie?"

She nods, because she doesn't know how to explain what happened, even to him.

*.*.*

Some days, she loses track of what's real. She'll sit staring at her hands and wonder if Professor Dumbledore will round the corner looking too old (or, perhaps, too young, she isn't sure when it comes to that), wonder if Emmeline's laughter lines will still be there, wonder if Sylvia will cry or smile when she sees her. The problem, she thinks, is that she doesn't know what time is the true one or if there even is a true one in the first place. Time is a complicated thing, a volatile thing. It is also cruel.

*.*.*

When the McKinnons die, when Dalton dies, she is standing at their graves. Narcissa Black kneels in the dirt before Dalton's grave, sobbing desperately. She looks old. The headstones look withered, aged by wind and weather. Still, she can make out the death date and it turns her stomach because it's the same one she saw on the calendar just this morning. It can't be, she tells herself. It can't. Not Dalton.

"I wish it were so," Narcissa says and she realizes she must have spoken aloud.

"I can still save them," she insists. "It hasn't happened yet, I can save him."

Narcissa closes her eyes. "It has happened. He's gone."

"No!" A cold rage rises in her chest and she glares at Narcissa, fierce and furious. "How can you… how can you not fight? How can you accept…"

Narcissa lifts her head and looks at her. "It's been twenty years." There is something unbelievably broken in her eyes. It is harsh and desperate and lonely, but the worst part of it all is that it is resigned. Narcissa Black (Narcissa Malfoy, a part of her brain corrects, but to her she will always be Narcissa Black, the girl with the books, the one that broke Dalton. For the first time in her life she feels sorry for her, too.) has given up.

"Not for me," she says, more gently now. "For me, it hasn't happened. I can still…" The look in Narcissa's eyes stops her.

"You can't erase twenty years of history," the other woman tells her. "It doesn't work that way."

"How do you know? How can you possibly know that?"

"It's all happened already." A pause. "However much I wish it hadn't."