The thing about time is that it's not just one straight path, Kingsley realised, it's like a great tree that branches off depending on the different decisions you make, twisting and turning away into unseen situations and experiences that intertwine with each other before branching off again; some great huge celestial railway system with ten billion four hundred and forty two thousand and six continually changing routes that must make sense to someone much higher up in the divine hierarchy than he is.

He's seen it first hand; watched the paths unfold and cross over and twist up and then run out into nothingness. He's travelled throughout his own lifespan and beyond, seen the sun rise and armies swell and the world turn into a blaze of fire as it sinks below the horizon again. He watched the world go to hell and then went back to try and save it, clutching the fine gold chain around his neck and turning the small glass vial back over and over, watching the tiny grains of sand falling back from where they came to fill up the empty space as the fire and screams faded away around him…

He went back to blinding sunshine, where the sky wasn't choked with dust and he could see the blue through the clouds. The sunshine burned at his eyes and his heart when he saw them all standing, safe under the shade of the platform, their laughter and joking sounding achingly foreign and familiar to his ears. He saw Dorcas walking down the side, skirting past some younger kids, grin wide as she almost bowled them over. He couldn't stay, he reminded himself. He had work to do.

He saw Dorcas again later. But that time it was a closed casket and the hymn was heavy in the air as the small crowd of people bowed their heads in the light of the candles, faces empty, like shadows in the dark.

He tried again. He had all the time in the world. Irony, Kingsley realised, was a constant companion throughout the years. He retraced his own footsteps across the cobbled streets of London in the rain, heart leaping wildly with something he thought was hope every time he saw a face he recognised. There were so many of them. Dorcas, Fabian, Frank and Alice. He thought he could save them all. And he tried, God, he tried.

All the time in the world just never seemed enough.

He saw the Death Eaters coming for Gideon and Fabian before they did. He tripped their wards before the hooded figures had a chance, giving the twins the time to escape and something loosened a little in his chest. It felt a lot like relief.

He didn't think to stop the attack in Hogsmeade the day after. The one that killed Gideon and Fabian Prewett and at least ten other innocents and left a steaming crater in the middle of the street that went all the way down to the sewers below. He didn't think because he didn't know it was going to happen.

He went further back, the years streaming past him like the strong current of a river. Find the source. Stop the problem; find the source. The only problem was that every time he managed to stop the source and mend a particular incident, another leak sprang up in the gaping shitheap of a plumbing system that was fate.

He tried going forward again, the grains in the time turner flowing as freely as the blood in his veins and he span through the lifetimes and broke apart what he could, tearing at the roots of fate's path before they could take hold, splintering the threads of time and tieing them together again in knots that continually fell apart.

He saw the beginning, the middle, and the end. He saw them in the wrong order. He flipped through the chapters of all the stories, re writing the endings in clumsy handwriting and hoping the ink stuck.

And Kingsley wondered, when he skirted around the edges of decades, exactly how much he managed to change things. The chain around his neck was like a weight, pulling him onwards, but it just got too heavy. He tore it off on the day he watched Dorcas' funeral for the seventh time, smashing the glass against the brick wall of the church, feeling the rush of magic as the grains of sand flew past him through the wind and he wished on every damn one of them that this wasn't it . This wasn't supposed to be it.

But no matter how many times he went back, no matter how many tiny adjustments he made, nothing changed.

Because Kingsley realised that every single one of the paths lead to the same place in the end.

Thanks for reading.

: D