A/N This was going to be a one-shot, but people started to favorite it and such, and then I had an idea for how to keep it going, so I decided to add to it. Hope you enjoy.

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Chapter 2: A Brief Mystery of Time

"Of course!" shouted Neville, leaping from the fine maple desk he had been sitting at. Books and papers flew everywhere. Tonks was sitting on a divan across from him and was startled enough by the outburst to look up at him. The babe sucking at her left breast was not the least bit concerned and continued feeding.

"What is it Nev?" Tonks asked in a worried voice. Neville paced back and forth from behind the desk and then threw himself down next to her. She was totally nude, but he wore the tradtional student robes of Hogwarts – not even his tie was out of place. His hair was as it always was, but hers was long and blonde today.

"The way out! It's our minds!" His eyes were as large as the first time he had seen her naked and there was an energy in his voice that Tonks had not heard in some time. She found herself smiling, and a little flushed as she switched the infant to her right breast.

They were sitting in the great library, twice as large as the library at Hogwarts. Despite its size they had both read every book in it. Neville had been through the Herbology section many, many times, and even had one or two texts completely memorized. They had both grown very bored, even with two children and ample space for more. So to hear excitement from her husband filled Tonks with her own, and even the urge to try for that third child.

"Our minds? Do you mean a spell or - ?" She trailed off and removed tiny Andromica who was now in need of a burping. Once that task was done, she fixed a curious look on Neville.

"Well, that's one way of looking at it." He waved his hands and the fallen books and papers returned to their place on the desk. "We've been frozen here in time, but there's one thing that's been free to change - our minds!"

There was no exaggeration to this. Neither he, nor Tonks had aged a day, as far as they could tell. In fact they had not aged a second. Neville had discovered this one long night in the library. After he had first appeared in the castle Harry had created for him, he would eat and sleep in the regular patterns he had kept in his normal life. But this particular night he found that he suffered not from hunger, nor from fatigue. He went for a run from one end of the castle to the other and was not exhausted by the time he got back to the library. In fact, he wasn't even sweating. When he revealed his finding to Tonks they put it to the test with a marathon sex session that lasted many days by the temporal standards of earth. It also resulted in their first child, Alexander, after the typical contraceptoin spells they used had expired without either knowing.

As Tonk's body changed during the pregnancy, she began to feel both tired and hungry, while Neville continued to feel neither. This bothered him greatly, for it dashed his understanding of their situation. He began to wonder if Harry's spell, or whatever it was, was simply temporary, and that soon his body would return to the way it had been. For all his theorizing, his answer did not come until his son was born. Tonks was in extreme agony, her body was covered in sweat, and there was more blood then Neville had ever seen before. Fortunately the house elves knew what they were doing and were excellent midwives. As soon as the umbilical cord was cut, Tonks' body reverted to where it had been the moment Harry had placed her in the castle. Although there was plenty of blood on the floor for the house elves to clean, Tonks was no longer bleeding. In fact there was no afterbirth at all, she was no longer covered in sweat, and she felt no pain. It was as though she had never been pregnant. This caused a bit of trouble, for she was unable to nurse the baby. Neville was also disappointed that her bust size returned to wench it came, but said nothing, and was pleased that they were able to make love that night after the baby had gone to sleep.

In regards to the lack of breast milk, the couple found a number of books on magical child raising in the library and Tonks found a spell that allowed filled her mammories and allowed her to simulate breastfeeding.

Although the wonders of having a child were an initial distraction, Neville soon returned to the question of why Tonks had had the familiar feelings they had shared when there were part of the normal time continuum. He realized shortly that when life was created within the world Harry Potter had given them it was under the influence of normal time. The hunger Tonks had experienced was the growing infant's manifesting itself through her. Neville smacked himself on the forehead when he realized this. It had always been right in front of him - all the plants he had grown in the expansive greenhouse through seeds Harry had left could not have grown had they not been affected by time.

With that understanding of the circumstances, Alexander became a convenient timepiece. He was now about the right development for a five year old. Their daughter was two or three months. Having children was a joy, and a break from monotony, but it came with new worries. Their son and daughter would know nothing of the 'real' world, if the place even still existed. In addition to that, since the children were regulated by the relentless march of time, they would eventually grow old and die in front of their eternally youthful parents.

Harry Potter, for all his amazing power and good intentions, had condemned both of his friends to a fate worse than death. Unlike widow, or orphan, there is no word to describe the horror of being a parent who has lost her child.

They had decided that they must escape. Though the library was vast, it contained nothing that touched on the situation they were in. Time magic was a strange subset of normal, everyday magic, and one that was not well studied nor documented. When the discovery of the time-turner had been made, it seemed that wizards had grown bored with the subject and no other significant achievement had been added to the field since. If Harry Potter ever decided to detail exactly how he had gained the power that he had, he would be hailed as the greatest wizard since Merlin, and would have created a revolution in the magical world that would make Binn's History of Magic classes interesting. But instead, he had decided to use that power to ruin the timestream, much to Neville's annoyance.

Tonks had told her love all about Harry's conversation with her prior to her arrival in this place. It was his devotion to madness that had convinced her to take this position as Neville's lover. She had been reluctant at first, she hardly knew Neville, and thought him a bit of a nerd, and the idea of being a concubine was not in the least bit appealing. Nevertheless, when Harry said he suspected that his plan would in effect destroy the universe, she took the chance that Neville wouldn't take advantage of her. And much to her pleasure, Neville had been a gentleman, and it had taken sometime before they began to have a romantic relationship. It was impossible to note just how long it took the courtship to commence, since time had no meaning, and there was not so much as a clock in the entire castle. Tonks and Neville came to truly love each other, and Tonks honestly thought that spending eternity with Neville would be enjoyable. But there was no reason to remain confined in one place. So they had combed every centimeter of the castle, touched every nook and cranny, executed every spell they knew, and found nothing. The castle was completely impervious, and even asking the house elves to get them out only resulted in the house elves bashing their heads against walls for failing their masters. Luckily for the elves they were in the same state of time as Tonks and Neville and thus whatever harm they inflicted on themselves was gone instantly.

The couple seemed to realize they had drifted off for several minutes. Neville shook it off and said again, "It's our minds! What I was saying is that it must be the key! It's the gap in this time prison we're in. Our bodies don't age, but our minds do. We remember when we got here, we've learned new spells, gained wisdom."

"But what can we do with that? We're still stuck here." Tonks took Andromica from her shoulder and held the babe in the crook of her arm and waggled a finger for the child's amusement. Andromica cooed and gurgled.

"Oh our bodies are, our physical selves certainly are, but I think our minds are free. There's little out written on changing time, but wizards have mastered the ability to change space. That's what apparating is, not to mention Flooing and portkeys. Those forms of travel are all about pending space to move a body from one spot to another. The particular difference between those three and say, the Hogwart's Express is that they're all instantaneous. We simply think of them as being faster than walking, or riding a train. But what if it's not about speed? What if, say apparating, was not about moving from one spot to another, but about stopping time, or rather, changing it so that you appear somewhere else only an instant after you left another. What does apparating feel like for you?"

Tonks thought about it for a moment. She hadn't put much thought into apparating since she learned it all those years ago in school. "Well, it's like this tug on my navel, and like I'm being pulled inside out, and then squeezed through a tube."

"You probably didn't know this, but apparating feels different for each person. For me, it's like my nose is being pinched and then I'm pulled through a tube. We treat apparating like it's a physical process, there's the warnings against losing hands and feet, but if it were physical, it ought to feel the same for everyone. And besides that, say someone were to lose an arm in a duel. Would that person need to relearn how to apparate to take into account that lost arm? The answer, according to everything I read is no. There have been no reported cases of such a thing. But let's put this to the test. Tonks, I would like you to grow an extra limb and then apparate to the far side of the room."

Tonks handed the babe to Neville. Andromica gave her daddy a huge smile and cooed. Then Tonks stood, and a third arm extended itself from her side, just below her left arm. Given the extensive free time she had, Tonks had been able to extend the abilities of her metamorph talents. She then apparated to the far side of the room. She popped back over to the divan. "You were right! I didn't even have to think about having an extra arm," she exclaimed. Her new limb removed itself, and in the process she went ahead and created a set of robes with her powers.

Neville was disappointed when she covered herself, but was still very excited about what had just transpired. "I've postulated two things here. One, teleportation is not a matter of just space, but also time. Two, apparating is not dependent on a physical body."

"But I still don't see how this will allow us to escape." Tonks eyed her husband curiously. He began to playfully toss Andromica into the air. "We've tried apparating from here, and it doesn't work."

"The castle we are in isn't a place outside of time. If it was, things wouldn't grow and change. You and I are simply outside of time. Or, rather, we almost are. Our minds are still ruled by time. If our minds are ruled by time, and apparating is not about space, but about time, I believe that we will be able to apparate out of here, not by imaging a place, but by imaging a time."

"How do we do that, though? Shouldn't our other attempts at apparating worked then?" Tonks, though elated that there was a possibility of escape, was still skeptical.

"They might have, but I think we were apparating the wrong way. We were leading with our physical bodies, your navel and my nose, rather than apparating our minds first and sending our bodies after. Let me try explaining it a different way. Imagine that there's a tiny hole in one of the walls here that lets time in. Time is like a stream, it's moving in and out of this hole. It's too small for almost anything to fit through, so say if we tried to apparate our body through the hole, it wouldn't fit. However, our minds are working on this stream. That's why they keep changing. I think our minds will fit through that hole. And since our minds and bodies are attached to each other, if we send our minds through first, our bodies will squeeze after us." Neville gave Andromica one last toss, and then hugged her tight. He summoned a blanket for her and set her down on the ground. He then caused a number of glowing balls to appear which circled over her. Andromica gurgled again and followed the lights with her eyes.

Tonks tilted her head and chewed on the inside of he cheek as she looked at Neville. It all seemed to make sense to her, but something made her wonder about this whole scheme. "If we escape, what are we going to do about Harry? Will we be able to stop him? He was going back in time to kill his parents, there's no way to tell where or when he'd go."

Neville nodded his head gravely. "His plan is completely insane. He's going to create a causality loop. If he goes back in time to kill his parents, then he will never have been born to go back in time to kill his parents. Which would then prevent them from being killed, so they could give birth to him and he would then be able to go back in time and kill them. I'm not really sure what that may have done."

"But if he went back in time and kept himself from being born, then that means that as a teenager he wasn't able to stick us in here," said Tonks.

"I think we can assume that his plan has already happened, and we've been unaffected by it. The castle may be protecting us."

"Time is permeating the castle though. The kids, your plants- " on cue, Andromica gave out a happy cry as a yellow ball of light touched her nose. Tonks smiled down at her daughter.

"Perhaps the castle is like a filter. Harry created it to be outside of the timestream so that what he did wouldn't affect it, and us. But, obviously there was a flaw in it, and time is still getting through." He paused and rubbed his chin. "Or maybe it wasn't a flaw. If no time got in, then we wouldn't be able to do anything, not even move, since it would take even a small amount of time to move a hand or take a step. There's just enough for us to exist, and apparently for things to grow old."

"Except for us," said Tonks.

"Right. But he may have wanted that as well. He told me in the letter that I would live forever, and that I might be able to find a way to escape." Neville started to tremble a little, and he grinned from ear to ear. "This is it! This has to be!" He embraced Tonks and kissed her passionately.

"Ok, ok," she said, pulling away from the kiss and Neville's wandering hands. Her hair turned short, spikey, and red to match her flushed cheeks. "So we think we can get out, but how will we find Harry?"

"It's easy, we'll go back to just before I got the letter and stop him there."

Tonks ran a hand through Neville's hair and kissed him softly. "I hope this works. I don't want our kids to be stuck here. Let's try it after supper."

Neville nodded and picked up Andromica. His daughter smiled at him and then gave a long yawn. Neville placed the infant on his shoulder, and as he and Tonks left the library, he whispered, "Someone's sleepy."

"It's been a long day for her, we'll put her down, and then see what the house elves are preparing." They paced down the hall towards the nursery, full of its summoned baby furniture. Tonks took the sleeping babe from Neville and placed her in a crib shaped like a unicorn. The crib was enchanted to play soft lullabies when it was occupied, and a soothing tune began to issue from it when Tonks let go.

"We'll eat well tonight," said Neville. "For tomorrow we'll dine in Hogwarts!"