Part Four

"What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened."

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton

January

tick tock tick tock tock tick tock

Entering their flat felt like stepping into a nightmare. Draco found Hermione sitting on their sofa: very still, very quiet, very calm.

Eerily calm.

Suspiciously calm.

She didn't look at him, eyes trained instead on her copy of The Count of Monte Cristo sitting on the coffee table, more decoration than reading material these days. She picked idly at a loose thread from a tufting button, winding and rolling it between her fingers.

Heat surged, a column of fire climbing Draco's spine as he emerged from his Occlumency. He found his discarded pieces: shame, guilt, fear, avoidance. He fused them together, forcing out the cold, forcing away the fog.

"I didn't mean anything by it," he said, taking one cautious step towards her. "You know I didn't." He felt a swell of pride that his last statement hadn't sounded like a question. It could have. Once upon a time, it might have. But it didn't. Not now. Not when it counted.

"I know," she said. She picked her book up off the table, fingers grazing the cover in a reverent, longing sort of way.

"Then why?"

Why did she look so heartbroken?

Why did she leave?

Why wouldn't she look at him?

Crookshanks hopped onto the sofa, settling into her lap as she held the book in one hand.

"I don't—I can't talk about it right now."

"Hermione—"

"I'm going to bed." She croaked the words. Painful, strangled sounding.

She set the book aside, scooped Crookshanks into her arms, and left for the bedroom. She didn't look at him once. Draco watched her back as she disappeared down the hall, frustration boiling from the resurging heat in his blood.

He spent the next hour sitting on the sofa, welding back together every last shard he'd let shatter during dinner, every inconvenient emotion he'd hidden from. He let the heat consume him. And by the time he ambled into the bedroom, he felt worn and damp, slicked with a sheen of sweat from the physical effort of reassembling all the pieces he'd scattered in his attempt to survive Lucius's wrath.

He crawled into bed, careful not to disturb her, unable to decide if he hoped she was still awake or already sleeping. She didn't move or react when he finally settled against his pillow. His limbs felt stiff and foreign, his side of the bed a claustrophobic coffin keeping him contained.

He barely breathed, didn't move, willing himself to find sleep as he listened to her breathing, finding the answer to his earlier curiosity. She hadn't fallen asleep yet, either.

They spent the next several days in a cautious, quiet détente—Draco felt reasonably confident he used the term correctly. They orbited each other politely, never engaging in the conversation Hermione seemed as of yet incapable of having.

They spent New Year's with Theo and Blaise like they'd planned: an uncomfortable affair made awkward by the strained silence that seemed to hover around Draco and Hermione like a storm cloud, thunder poised to clap.

He still had a ring in his valet box.

The day after New Year's, the coldest start to a January Draco could remember, it finally came to a head over breakfast.

He passed a mug of tea across the table to Hermione, pulse in his throat the same way it had been for the last week of his quiet, subdued existence.

"I know you didn't mean anything by it," she said, taking the mug.

He swallowed, then remembered to breathe.

"Then why won't you talk to me? I shouldn't have used Occlumency; I realized almost as soon as I did it."

"It's not—that's not it. I don't love that you turned to it, but that's not—do you know what I saw? When you and your father were having it out?"

A muscle in Draco's back twinged, alerting him to the fact that he'd been standing partly bent over the kitchen table, not having moved a muscle since the moment she started speaking, still frozen part-way between handing off her tea and taking his seat.

He pulled out his chair, sensing a strange hollowness opening up in his stomach, anticipation of what she might say next. He didn't know what she saw, and from her tone, he wasn't sure he wanted to. He wrapped two fingers through the handle of his own mug, using it to ground him in the kitchen with her, in whatever came next. He swallowed.

"What did you see?"

"Your heart breaking. I could see it happening. I could see you imagining yourself losing them and then you chose to hide from it and it's—" She broke off, tapping the side of her mug, cheeks puffed out as she exhaled a big breath. She looked up at him. "It's okay that you sometimes use Occlumency to manage more difficult situations; I don't begrudge you for that. I know it's part of who you are and how you—cope. It was everything that came before that. I can't be responsible for that look." Her voice wavered, sticky and thick. "I didn't realize it was still this bad. I suppose I'd hoped…with time, that—things had softened."

"That's—not what I was thinking at all. And regardless, just because losing them will hurt doesn't mean that I'm not willing to do that for you."

"I don't want you to do that for me." She looked down at her mug.

If he'd forgone the strainer, perhaps her tea leaves would give her a clue to whatever she sought inside her cup. Perhaps if she believed in divination, she would have taken its advice. But he had not left the tea leaves, and she wouldn't have read them if he did.

She looked back up, a tear escaping from the corner of her eye, a quick stream down her face, where it curled beneath her chin.

"What if I did anyway?" he asked.

He had a ring in his valet box.

Her jaw tensed. She shook her head, features collapsing into something more than sadness, more than agony. "It wouldn't make a difference. I think I'd be more upset if you disregarded my wishes."

"So then where does that leave us, Hermione? I don't—I don't really understand what's happening." The back of his throat felt tight, raw; he didn't know if he needed to swallow or scream.

She wiped the tear. Cleared her throat. Dragged a nail down her ceramic mug and tapped it on the table: three times.

Draco held his mug, lowered it to the tabletop, three slow taps.

They needed help, both of them, needed an escape from this conversation. Her eyes stuck on his mug; another tear rolled down her cheek. She tapped the table three more times and then immediately wiped her tears away.

She rolled her lips between her teeth, a slight tremble, before she met his eyes again.

"I—I'm going to find myself a flat, I think."

Draco heart jolted so suddenly, so violently, that he wondered if the world had stopped turning, if inertia had catapulted his insides against his skin and bones, obliteration on impact.

Rational, complex thought slipped from his ears, leaving only the stupidest of questions behind to voice: "Why?"

Redness crawled up the sides of her neck as several new tears made a waterfall of her face, a burst of grief spilling from her eyes.

"Please don't make me say it."

He'd never heard her voice pitch like that, so close to a plea, a whine: words forced through vocal cords that refused to open, as if they, too, resisted the words being breathed into existence.

"Well I'm not going to say it."

"We can't—I can't." Her voice caught.

"I give you permission. Destroy whatever of mine you want, Hermione. My family, my bank accounts, my legacy. Just not this. Hermione, not this."

He was halfway to standing before he even realized he'd moved. She stood just as abruptly.

"Hermione—"

She shook her head, face twisted in misery as she bent over, scooping Crookshanks into her arms. She looked at him again.

He'd studied her expressions for years, memorized the look of them, the feel of them, the meaning of every last configuration. But anguish distorted her. He could see her pain almost as clearly as he felt his own, but he couldn't see through it, to whatever lay underneath. She turned away.

Draco couldn't move as she walked out of the kitchen. It took several seconds of standing dumbly at the table for the events of the past minute to catch up to him. He leapt into action after her, following her path to the living room, finding her at the fireplace.

His heart, which might have stopped for several minutes there, thundered back to life, inundating his bloodstream with adrenaline, with anger.

"What the fuck, Hermione? You can't honestly—what are you doing? You can't really believe that this is for the best. Hermione—"

He blinked against the flash of green light, barely registering as she spoke the Potters' address and vanished with her cat—which had become something of his cat, too—in a swirl of Floo magic.

Draco took a single, deep breath through his nose. Realized he still held his mug of tea. Threw it. Smashed into thousands of tiny pieces against the brick fireplace. He took another breath, gathered himself, and grabbed a handful of powder to follow.

The Floo spat him back out. She'd locked the connection from theirs to the Potters'.

No matter.

Draco Floo'd to Theo's, didn't even bother announcing his arrival, and immediately turned around to Floo after her from this different point of origin.

The Floo spat him back out again.

Stupid fucking brilliant woman.

He Floo'd back to his. Then tried Weasley's in what he had to admit was a very, very low moment in his life.

The Floo spat him back out again. She must have locked it entirely, no options for entry.

"Are you kidding me?" he shouted, launching the Floo pot across the living room. Green sparkling powder rained down in the prettiest sort of dust storm he could imagine. He hated it.

Draco stood in his living room, shimmering powder settling around him, trying to control the cadence of his breathing, oscillating wildly between far too fast and dangerously slow.

He slammed his eyes shut, drawing upon every last happy memory he had, shoving away a cruel voice that told him his reserves now had a limit and that the memories he called upon wouldn't be replenished.

Magic unfurled from his chest, tendrils of happiness, of hope, seeking his extremities.

"Expecto Patronum."

Light fluttered, stuttered, and died.

He tried again; he could do this now—had been able to do it for a whole year—one fight wouldn't take it from him.

He let the magic uncoil itself for longer, pouring memory after memory into the curling wisps beneath his skin until they pushed against his fingertips, demanding release.

He cast the spell again, momentarily shocked to see his Patronus bursting from his wand.

In his rush to conjure the thing, he hadn't thought of what he'd say. What could he? Hermione didn't seem interested in talking, had said everything she wanted to say. Now, staring eye to eye with his chimaera, a cobbled together creature for his cobbled together life, all he could think to say to the woman ripping him to shreds was: "Please. Come home."

Hermione did not come home.

Draco stopped trying to follow. His owls went unanswered. His Patronuses grew weaker by the day. The Floo mocked him.

She wouldn't even answer to Theo, who'd tried to step in and redeem some of his goodwill as her friend, trying to make sense of the madness between them.

It took several days for Draco to accept that sitting in his living room and staring at the Floo wouldn't yield him any results. As much as every twitch and flex of his muscles demanded that he bolt out his door and traverse muggle London straight to Harry Potter's house on foot, he employed the last bit of his withering self-control to respect that if she wanted space, she would not appreciate his presence.

Respecting it didn't preclude him from being driven slightly mad by it.

He started brewing to occupy his mind, lest he allow the madness to fester by wondering what it would take to bring her back, how much time she might need, what he could do to set things right. His shop needed stock and he needed something to do.

He nearly upended an entire cauldron when he heard a rush of flames from the fireplace. He might have been embarrassed by the speed with which he rushed into the living room if not for the fact that he'd moved so quickly he couldn't spare even a second to consider such things.

Nor could he bring himself to feel embarrassment for the way his face must have fallen, so enormously, so tragically, upon finding the Weaslette standing in his living room.

"I'm not happy to be here, either," she said as a greeting.

"Then why are you here?"

He still had a vial of newt's liver in his hands. He'd left his wand on the brewer's bench.

"I have a list." She tucked several strands of her ginger hair behind her ear before holding up a piece of parchment. "Her things I'm supposed to collect."

"Not brave enough to come do it herself?" he snapped, fury fluttering in his chest, drowning out the disappointment, the debilitating pain.

"Couldn't stop crying long enough."

Draco's stomach sank, a terrible chill blooming behind his ribs. He stared at Ginny, unspeaking, unmoving, trying to process what she'd just said.

A muscle in his jaw twitched and he realized he'd been clenching it, yet he made no move to release the pressure. Instead he turned, teeth ground together, chest absolutely aching, and excused himself to the bedroom. He slammed the door behind him with enough force that it jostled Hermione's tray of jewelry atop the dresser, just next to his valet box.

He held his breath, listening, and when he heard the Weaslette start charming things down to a more manageable size for moving, he took several heavy steps to the bed and sat on the side of it: her side, the right side.

Draco tried to hold himself together, but something inside his chest had started ascending, winding its way around his esophagus, his trachea, choking him. Higher still, into his sinuses, stinging, into his temples, throbbing. He folded, dropping his head into his hands, hovering between his knees as he sat on the side of the bed.

What would imminently be the side of the bed formerly belonging to Hermione, it would seem.

Despite the sensation of being battered by waves, crushing him against a rocky shore, a strange sort of laugh forced its way through his tight throat.

Because of course Hermione would itemize her breakup with a list of her possessions. Of course.

He'd been stuck forcing that strangled laugh back down his throat when he heard the knock at his door, and then it opened anyway.

"I have a list for in here, too," Weaslette said, looking grim and determined and like her limbs might lock in place if she stood any straighter.

Draco lifted a hand, gave a short wave that said do what you must and let it fall again, unfolding himself so that he sat straight. He might as well preserve whatever modicum of dignity he had left after being found with his head in his hands.

Ginny worked efficiently, which he appreciated, making liberal use of accio to summon the things from Hermione's list. He watched, helplessly, throat threatening to close up, as the little bits of life she'd left in their room, from books to clothes to jewelry, all found their way into the series of shrunken boxes.

In what could have been no time, or perhaps all the time in the world, holes appeared where Hermione's belongings used to live as Ginny sent the remaining boxes floating into the corridor.

He had to force his words, dry and croaking.

"Will you just—ask her to speak with me?" The unpleasant sensation behind his ribs, the lacking, the hole not unlike the ones left by Hermione's belongings, flushed as he spoke, buoyed by finally saying something after sitting in silence and watching his home be stripped of every last reminder of her life there.

He flushed hot, angry, furious that Hermione sent Ginny fucking Potter to scrub his life of her presence. "She won't speak to me," he ground out when he realized that Ginny hadn't moved. "We're adults, we can—we just need to talk."

All of the Weaslette's stiff tension seemed to disintegrate, limbs falling limp beside her. Her eyes softened: pity. That was worse.

"I'll tell her you'd like to talk."

He swallowed his impulse to shout. He needed her to leave; he'd reached his limit on how long he could stomach a conversation about Hermione with someone who has not her.

"Perhaps leave out the part where you found me wallowing in the bedroom."

"I'm definitely leaving that part out."

Draco couldn't decide if she intended to say something else, just standing in the threshold to his bedroom, watching him. Perhaps she didn't know if he intended to say anything else, either, both stuck waiting.

Finally, she gave him a brief nod and stepped towards the door.

A Malfoy eagle owl rapped on the window. Draco flinched but didn't move. The Weaslette paused, looking towards the source of the sound. The bird rapped again and Draco did nothing.

"Are you going to get that?"

"It's from my parents."

She crossed her arms, lifting a brow as if to show him exactly how unsatisfying she found his response. "The question remains."

"I have nothing to say to them."

Ginny looked at him for several more raps at the window before she finally turned to leave. Draco heard the sound of the Floo, let out a rushing breath at almost the same volume, and dropped his head into his hands again, unwilling to look too closely at the gaps in his flat left by Hermione's departure.

The rush of anger that overtook Draco while talking to Ginny festered. It spread. It grew legs and ran away with his rational thinking, leaving only a blind sort of rage in its wake wherein Draco literally could not believe that Hermione had done this to him.

He grew impatient as he grew angry. He deserved something more than the flimsy excuse of a conversation they'd had at their breakfast table before she vanished. Two more weeks had passed and nothing.

He tried sending another Patronus, focusing on the good memories, not letting the bad ones, the imperfect ones, the fear that he was quickly gobbling up the last of his happiness get in the way. His happiness felt weak, shredded and dry and unwilling—or perhaps incapable—of unfurling from the center of his chest. It stuck stubbornly to his bones, clinging.

He failed to produce a Patronus. He did not try again. As much as she might have hated it, so much of happiness had been tied to her. He hadn't gone this long without speaking to her in years. Even before they were together, during that tentative, strange year they spent working side by side while he'd been betrothed to Astoria, she'd still been a regular part of his life.

In her absence, the emptiness—the quietness—genuinely astonished him.

He almost started reorganizing his books on several occasions, but stopped just as he started. He found himself unwilling to fill up the spaces left behind by her missing contributions to what had so recently been their collection.

He thought about fully moving his potions set-up to the shop, but couldn't shake the memory of Hermione telling him how much she liked watching him brew.

He found every last one of their tea strainers left in a kitchen drawer; she hadn't taken a single one, even though he'd purchased at least two specifically for her.

He couldn't escape the ghost of her, haunting the spaces she took up in a former life.

Mostly, he spent his time between tasks living in a sort of angry limbo wherein he kept expecting her to come to her senses and return home. He'd been marinating on that particular thought as he tried to blur the finer edges of his pain with a bottle of scotch, when someone yet again stepped through his Floo unannounced.

But not just anyone: Hermione.

Of course she would decide to show up on an evening he was already several drinks deep into his attempt to forget her face and her curls and the way she flushed bright pink from her chest to her cheeks when she came.

His posture straightened in the black leather wingback next to the fireplace. For a moment, his presence went unseen, seated just outside her periphery. He felt peculiar, uneasy, seeing her and not being seen by her. Something about it made his skin crawl.

He cleared his throat, almost guilty over the way she jumped and spun, finding him behind her.

"Hi," he said, still sitting. Still holding his drink. Still desperate to reach for her and resisting every impulse to do so.

"Hi." She took a small step away, maintaining a minimum amount of space between them, it would seem. "How are you?"

The liquor made him laugh, and it came out far crueler than he intended. But he couldn't take it back, not even as he saw her recoiling from the way it struck her skin.

"Okay," she said. "I know. Not a good question." Her voice wobbled, strained.

Draco didn't know if he was meant to say something. Didn't know what to say, if he was.

He said nothing.

"Are you going to be okay?" she asked.

"Are you going to come back home?"

She took another step away, a small stagger. The back of her calf hit the coffee table, she jolted slightly from the impact. Too skittish, easily startled. She had nerves of her own.

"Draco—I can't. No."

"I've cut them out. I haven't even spoken to them since Christmas, and the thing I'm upset about is you, not them." He stood, gauging her reaction, watching as her legs pressed against the table behind her, a silent plea for more space. She didn't want him anywhere near her. His stomach twisted.

He stayed by his chair.

"They're never going to accept me," she said, and he could hear the way the words cracked inside her throat. That strange, uncomfortable, instantly sympathetic sound of something trying to speak through an impending urge to cry.

"They don't have to."

"I don't want you to lose them—"

"Fuck—Hermione—that's a shit excuse and you know it." He couldn't help himself, powered by a rush of bravery bound to the liquor in his blood, Draco stepped right up into her personal space. So close, he could practically taste her intake of breath. "I've had nearly a month to try and make sense of that pathetic logic. I understand you don't want me to lose my family, but that's not enough. It's just not enough to walk away from me. To move out of our flat. To barely even speak to me."

She didn't look at him, staring instead at his shirt, clenched jaw warring with the watery look in her eyes. She didn't speak.

Draco forced himself to take a small step back, so that he could really look at her, force her to look at him. His scowl pulled his brows together so tightly that the muscles bunching above the bridge of his nose ached from the sustained tension.

"I deserve a real fucking answer, Hermione. I want to marry you. I want to have a family with you. I want to spend every fucking day of my life with you and you won't even talk to me."

"Because it's selfish." She lifted her gaze from his shirt to his eyes. Her impending tears looked more angry than sad.

"Can't be more selfish than not telling me at all."

"I can't come in second to Lucius Malfoy."

She looked away again when she said it.

"What?" His throat felt thick again. All the things he might say, choking him.

"I saw it. In your eyes. Whether you know it or not. You crave his approval and I'm afraid you always will."

"You can't know that—I told you, I don't even want them in my life if they can't accept—"

"I can't come in second to Lucius Malfoy," she said again. More resolved this time. He almost expected her to stomp her foot as proof of just how serious she intended to be. "You are the most important person in my life, Draco. But I'm not the most important person in yours."

That should have hurt more than it did. Instead, it flooded Draco with fury. How dare she. How could she?

"You cannot possibly mean that."

"Your actions are what count, Draco. I've watched you drag your feet for years on anything resembling conflict with him, and I—I understand; he's your father. I don't want you to lose him. But I think you don't want to lose him more. And I—it's selfish, but I wanted to be the most important person in your life, even if I had to share you with them. And the fact that I'm not, that I haven't been—" she broke off, a sob tearing from her throat.

His anger tasted like scotch. Like lingering Floo cinders in the air. Like bile.

He had to take another step back. Not for her this time, but for him. She was an idiot. Possibly the smartest idiot he'd ever met if she honestly believed all that.

"How can I convince you that everything you just said is complete shit?"

"It's selfish, I told you. But it's not shit. Do you have any idea how hard it's been to watch you pine for a man who hates me? Who once very literally wanted me dead? Where do you draw the line between what hatred you're willing to tolerate and what you aren't? I worry, Draco, that you never will. It's been years."

She barely gave her tears a breath to fall before she wiped them away with furious swipes beneath her lids, as if she wouldn't dare allow herself to cry over this.

She spoke again before he'd even had the chance to fully register what she'd said.

"I went to the bookstore today." A pause. "I got to Eliot."

Draco's heart sank, fully sank. Through the floorboards. Through the dirt. Straight to the center of the earth where molten rock might melt him down and make him something new, something with no recollection of this moment.

He'd forgotten to order more stock. He'd been so wrapped up in waiting for her to come back that he'd forgotten about everything else outside of brewing for his shop.

She pulled a book from her bag: the one.

"I didn't want to get to it," she said, looking mournfully at the thing in her hands. "And now that I have…"

"Looks like you finally won, Granger."

Behind her, the tufted green velvet sofa popped out of existence. Hermione turned at the sound.

"Where—"

"Gone to your place of residence, I assume. We made a magically binding wager, after all."

"I'll give it back."

"Don't—you won." He didn't have anything left in him to fight with her about a bloody sofa, too. He didn't care, couldn't bring himself to.

"I can't keep it."

"Well, you can't bring it back here. Not unless you're coming with it and don't intend to leave again."

Predictably, painfully, she had no response to that.

When she left, Draco sank into his armchair under the weight of an overwhelming, terrible suspicion that he might never see her or that sofa again.

Draco didn't sleep for over two days. He alternated between a semi-catatonic impression of a statue, sitting at his kitchen table and staring into a persistently lukewarm cup of tea, and manically brewing as many potions as he could to stock the shop.

He spent far too many hours dwelling exclusively on his last conversation with Hermione—playing it over and over and over again in his head. And far more hours still, focused on diverting his thoughts from coming to the same horrible conclusion; she wasn't coming home.

He couldn't understand how they'd ended up here. He knew she didn't want this. He certainly didn't want it. And somehow, it had happened anyway. She spoke so confidently about seeing it in his eyes. Well, he'd seen it in hers, too. She hurt just as badly. She thought she was protecting him from something, and in turn, protecting herself from him. He hadn't yet decided which component of that terrible quagmire devastated him the most.

When he ran out of ingredients for his potions, ran out of willpower to remain awake and avoid the nightmares he knew would plague him, Draco downed a Dreamless Sleep and fell into bed. He didn't rejoin the land of the living for so long that when he finally woke, his bones ached, stiff from such prolonged time spent unmoving, dead to the world.

Draco stared at the ceiling. Blue light trickled in through the drawn curtains, a suggestion of early morning. He'd always thought the room sounded so quiet in the mornings, nothing but soft breathing, a rustle of sheets, and if he was very lucky, tiny whimpers pressed against his lips.

Those fleeting memories had been so loud by comparison, a cacophony. This new quiet threatened to swallow him whole.

A year ago, they were having a party, celebrating a coming together, welcoming Hermione into his home, which became their home. It had been a loud, vibrant, exciting endeavor. Now, with enough focus, he could hear the subtle hum of his wards—her wards—and the flat's warming charms, things he'd never been able to hear before.

He forced himself out of bed and trudged a well-worn path to the kettle, still thinking about the party that had officially welcomed Hermione into his day-to-day. He glanced at the balcony as he passed it, thoughts catching on another memory from that night: a conversation with Theo—slightly unhinged, definitely drunk—about a time turner, and change, and how Draco might feel if something ever happened that he wanted to change.

Draco had something he wanted to change.

Needed to change.

Had no idea if he could change.

What would it be? The dinner?

He realized he'd stopped moving, standing beneath the archway that divided the kitchen from the living room, eyes locked on a closed balcony door.

The dinner.

If he just had five minutes—no, he would need longer than that to get in, unseen, to do something different. He barely paused to consider his actions, marching straight to the Floo, grabbing a handful of powder, and spinning away to the Nott Estate. He realized upon landing that he wore only pajama bottoms and a robe. Theo would never let him live it down.

Draco spent almost ten minutes trying to conjure a Patronus to get Theo's attention inside his workshop. Eventually, he gave up and started banging on the door, shouting at the top of his lungs. He considered blowing the corridor windows out just for effect, wondering if that might finally pull Theo from his family vault-turned-workshop where he was undoubtedly toiling away making portkeys to any number of places.

"Are you drunk?" Theo asked in greeting, finally emerging from the same passageway that had once tried to suffocate Draco.

"It's"—Draco cast a tempus—"7:45 in the morning."

"Oh—it's the morning, then? But still, not an unreasonable question—it's been a rough month."

"I'm not drunk, Theo."

"Did you need to get drunk?"

"Merlin, Theo. It's 7:45 in the morning—"

"Just trying to gauge where your head is." Theo lifted his hands in defense, holding very still as if to convey he meant no harm. With a casual flick of his wand, he spelled the door and hinged painting leading to his workshop shut.

"My head is—Theo—you asked me once. If I ever thought about using it. Theo, I need it."

"Do you see why I asked if you were drunk? I can see your pectorals and you're not making any sense."

Draco wrapped his robe more tightly around his torso, not having realized the belt had come undone. Theo started walking down the corridor without so much as a backward glance to confirm that Draco followed.

"If you're not drunk, what are you exactly?" Theo asked, lifting his voice and projecting it over his shoulder to where Draco hurried to catch up. "Can't say I expected to end my day like this."

"End your day? Theo, no"—he fell into stride beside him—"I'm desperate. That's what I am. I fucked up and I kept—I keep—trying to maintain the peace and didn't do anything. I need the time turner."

Theo didn't immediately respond, a slight twitch to his step as he kept walking—towards the East Wing kitchens, Draco assumed—until he finally stopped just shy of their destination. Theo turned, brows furrowed. He took a breath and opened his mouth to speak.

Draco cut him off.

"I just don't know how to make it work. It gives us five minutes, yeah? And then paradox avoidance? Theo how can I fix five minutes of a dinner that lasted nearly an hour without…breaking the laws of the universe?"

Theo closed his mouth and tilted his head. Just when Draco thought he might provide an answer, he gave his head a small shake and stepped into the kitchens, summoning Milly for a meal. He turned, leaning against the island with his arms crossed.

"You can't."

"That's—not what—Theo, I need to."

"It's not that precise, Draco. I modified it so that it can travel in either years or hours, and I suppose we could use fractional turns to pinpoint as best we can but—"

"So it can be done?"

Theo dropped his arms, accepting the tea Milly delivered to him.

"Draco, you can't just drop into the middle of a meal where you—already are. Paradox avoidance can only go so far."

Milly offered Draco an apple he didn't have the heart to decline. He held it loosely in one hand, fighting off a sudden urge to launch it across the room just to watch it explode against the wall.

"And what if I just marched into that dining room anyway? What if I just went in and told her I've used a time turner to fix an error and—"

"And you think I'm going to let you use it if that's your plan? Draco. We used it once and I still can't"—he set his tea down, rubbed the back of his neck—"I still wonder."

"And look where that one use got us," Draco urged, trying to force Theo into understanding.

Theo sighed. "Did you—was there a time that you left the table at all?"

"I need more than five minutes."

Theo pursed his lips, drew a breath through flared nostrils, looked very near shaking Draco by the shoulders, and then finally unscrewed his features.

"Draco," he began. In a world where Theodore Nott used a patient, almost exasperated tone with Draco, he knew he'd probably pushed too far. "I'm not—I know I'm good, but—I've already modified it to operate in years instead of just hours. I've modified it to operate outside a clean loop of time, to start new timelines. I've modified it to bring the user back to their starting point after five minutes have elapsed. And now you want me to extend that?"

"Give me thirty. I can use it right at my fireplace, right before we leave. Hermione came out of the bedroom after me—she kept fussing with her hair. Paradox avoidance will—it will take care of the issue of the other me. It did so the first time we used it. Remember? I was meant to be in the parlor already, but when my father opened the door for us that version of me just—well, I wasn't there anymore."

Theo lifted a brow. But he hadn't officially, entirely, or exactly said no. Not yet.

"You know exactly what time that was?"

Draco laughed, surprising himself with its force.

"Of course. She writes down all her engagements. She has a planner. She made me check it several times before we left."

Theo sighed again and it sounded so remarkably like victory that Draco couldn't resist the bout of fresh hope that swelled. He tossed the apple from one hand to the other several times, burning off anxious energy.

"This is what I get for inventing a new type of time turner," Theo finally said.

"Please. I'm willing to beg. I have to fix this."

"Would she want you to?"

Draco fumbled catching the apple, surprised by Theo's question; it landed on the tiles with a thud, rolling away.

"I—it's not just for her." He could feel the defensive creep pitching in his tone. "I mean, it is for her. But it's for me too, you know. I let my father win again. I always let him win. And look what it's cost me."

Draco wasn't sure that he breathed as he waited for Theo to respond.

"Give me some time. I'll see what I can do."