March
tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock
Exactly six months after Lucius's attack, Draco prepared to return to that night and relive it with entirely different results. Not even Draco's most spiteful, furious impulses could relish the fact that his father would be in harm's way again. He couldn't seem to escape his eternal existence as a boy who wanted his father to live, to live in peace, and to live a life separate from him.
The same night Lucius was attacked, Draco had a portkey scheduled in the morning to whisk him and Hermione to Italy, a belated birthday celebration after missing their chance the month before because of James Potter's poorly-timed birth. Draco had planned to wine and dine her through the Italian countryside, to fuck her in the biggest, softest beds available in the most obscenely luxurious suites she would hate that he'd paid for, and propose marriage sometime between dinner and dessert. They'd celebrate with champagne and more sex.
It had been a good plan until fear for his father and concern for his mother had stolen it from him.
He knew Lucius would survive this time. And he knew what too much concern would look like months later. A creeping, tiny reintroduction of sympathy that grew from a seedling in his stomach to a newfound guilt he did not know how to uproot. Draco found he didn't so much care for that end result.
He didn't let Theo stay this time.
Theo apparated into Draco's flat two weeks to the day after his failed attempt at using the time turner to change the course of Christmas dinner. Or, he supposed, it couldn't really be termed a failed attempt; he achieved his primary goal by not letting Lucius walk all over him. He'd requested a disinheritance, which he'd since learned was already well underway, legally speaking. But he hadn't managed to simultaneously salvage his relationship with Hermione. His life was still—unravelled. Ragged, fraying threads pulled loose and left to unwind, undone.
Theo delivered the time turner with slightly less apprehension than he had the first time. But marginally settled nerves didn't stop his constant reminders about fractional turns—reverse spin .500 to get to September 2004—which included writing it on a piece of parchment and using a sticking charm to affix it to Draco's bedpost as a final reminder.
At least half a spin seemed easier to accomplish than the .166 of one he'd had to do the first time, even with indicators engraved on the golden frame.
Now, Draco stood staring at the parchment stuck to his bedpost, mere minutes from laying down on his half of the bed, using the time turner, and finding Hermione's side no longer so distractingly empty. She would be there, in the bed with him. He couldn't decide if it made him pathetic or romantic, recognizing how hard his heart beat in anticipation of that eventuality.
When he'd received the owl from his mother in the middle of the night, Hermione cast a tempus that told them it was half two in the morning. He'd decided to give himself a ten minute window beforehand, genuinely uncertain how much time he'd spent coming out of sleep, gathering his wits about him, and finally making it to the window.
He glanced at his pocket watch: almost time. He set it on his nightstand, unable to justify why he might be sleeping with a watch in his pajama bottoms. He didn't dare risk even a single complication, nothing to confuse continuity. He barely had a grasp on it to begin with.
Draco sat on the edge of the bed, shucked off his shirt, and laid down.
He'd grown accustomed to the stress, to the pounding in his chest and the ticking pulse in this throat. No longer quite as intrusive, he almost felt numb: sensations so regular in their irregularity that they had become a sort of norm. He preferred the hollow sort of buzz behind his ribs to the infernal thumping. At least it provided him with a facsimile of calm.
He lifted the turner, ensured it was set to the current date, and unlocked it. Then, careful enough to pass Theo's methodical standards, spun it exactly one half turn.
The dizzying sensation, the cotton, the blur: it felt different laying down. In some ways, more disorienting, a new angle to understand. Alternatively, the pillow beneath his head, the blankets covering his frame, the mattress beneath him: they offered a sense of stability.
When the traveling stopped, he noticed the darkness first. Without a lamp lit, the only light in his bedroom came from the moon's faint glow trickling in through the window. The same window where an owl would soon land.
He noticed the scent next. Just like last time, the stale sort of stagnation he'd grown accustomed to had transformed into something sweet, vaguely vanilla. He breathed deeply, preparing himself to find her next to him, and rolled to face her.
Gods, he'd forgotten how far her hair could travel. Especially with it kept longer. He nearly rolled onto an errant curl invading his side of the bed. She usually put it up when she slept, but if he remembered correctly, they'd stayed up late that night—this night—after they'd spent most of their evening with her reading and him brewing. They'd shared a bottle of wine, argued about something silly and academic, and fell into bed a little too tired and a little too tipsy to properly fuck, but tangled up together nevertheless.
When she only had the energy to brush her teeth before bed, her hair got free reign of their pillows.
As if pulled in by a summoning charm, he crossed the boundary from his half of the bed to hers. She lay on her side, back to him, a perfect position for him to steal a selfish moment of comfort, face buried in her hair, arm wrapped around her midsection. She settled against him in her sleep, adjusting to his presence in the sort of subconscious way one did when sharing a bed.
Draco closed his eyes. Breathed against her curls. Felt the numb fear inside his chest throb: an announcement and a reminder.
Too soon, there came a tapping, a gentle rapping, at his darkened window frame.
He didn't move at first, uncertain how quickly he should react. The first time he felt like he'd startled awake the moment he heard the noise.
The bird tapped on the glass again. This time, Hermione rolled in his arms, first to her back, then fully facing him. She opened bleary, sleep-addled eyes.
He thought she might say something, mouth dropping open, but her eyes closed again, not fully awake, as it were. The tapping came again and, this time, a tiny line formed between her brows.
Cold toes found his shins, pushing him towards the sound. She frowned with her eyes still closed. Draco smiled. Seized by muscle memory, he leaned forward and dropped a kiss against her forehead, wrangling curls over her shoulder and away from her face.
"I'll get it, love."
That seemed to rouse her more, coming to as he rose from the bed and opened the window, prepared to receive the bad news he already knew would come.
"What is it?" Hermione sounded curious, though not concerned, not as she had the last time when he'd leapt out of bed, heart beating wildly in his chest. She rolled out of bed slowly, a small stretch, that right elbow of hers cracking in the funny way it did if she leaned on the bed just right. She walked up behind him, hands wrapping around his torso. The striking intimacy of it all nearly buckled him at his knees, a feast to sate a starving man.
He let her cast a lumos for him again, reading the letter he'd memorized in his stress-ridden haze following this event the first time.
"My father," Draco said. He forced a calmness in his voice, unconcerned. "He's in the hospital."
He felt her tense against his back, grip tightening before it loosened, lumos dropping away as she lowered her wand, stepping around him to get a better look at the letter.
"Is he—what does it say?"
"My mother is with him."
"Let's get dressed," she said.
Last time, they did. Now:
"Wait."
Hermione had already spun away, halfway through casting a tempus, her other hand on the dresser drawer.
"Wait? Why?"
"He'll be fine. He doesn't need me there."
Her hand slipped from the drawer. Her wand eventually fell, too. Without her lumos, only the pale moon illuminated the room as it had when he'd first arrived. He couldn't see much, but he saw her disappointment. He could recognize it anywhere, seared into his memory from the conversation they'd had nearly two months ago before, the last time he'd seen her at the end of January.
"Draco, he's your father."
He took a step towards her.
"I know. But my mother is with him and there's nothing I can do."
"You can go there. Be there for support."
She reached out, taking the letter and casting more light so that she could read.
"I could, but I would just sit there and do nothing. We're not—we're hardly on excellent terms and—" he broke off. All his plans for how he wanted to say this had twisted around each other in his head, fragments and iterations and branching paths all fighting for attention as several different versions of how this conversation might have gone seemed to pop in and out of existence every second. "Hermione, he's not the most important person in my life anymore. I have a surprise for you, in the morning. I don't want to miss that."
Her disappointment twitched in the space between her brows, fighting off what he hoped was affection, or warmth, or a rush of love. But when she met his gaze, her stare crushed his hopes of ever seeing Italy. She would think badly of him for abandoning his family in a time of crisis. He should have known, might have known if he'd stopped to think about it instead of barrelling forward, trapped in his own momentum, propelled by an overwhelming need to fix, fix, fix.
"It sounds serious," she said, holding the letter between them. "Your mother will need you."
"She'll be okay without me." A gulp of air, more panicked than he would have liked. "I won't be okay without you."
"What? Draco, I'll come with you. I'll just wait outside."
She turned back to the dresser, already pulling the drawer open and retrieving a shirt for him. When she held it out between them, Draco saw two options coalescing from the thousands of variants that might-have-could-have-should-have existed, neither of them what he wanted.
He could push: refuse to go to the hospital and in doing so, prove himself as someone too cold, too callous for Hermione to understand. If she agreed to go to Italy with him, he suspected there would be no successful proposal.
Or he could let her pull: go to the hospital and likely live the scene and the following events just as they transpired the first time around.
The reality that he'd just failed settled in the dark spaces in their bedroom. He couldn't bear to disappoint her again, in a different way.
He reached for her, took the shirt, and tossed it onto the bed. Instead, he pulled her into a hug: a selfish last stand in the face of defeat.
"Just—give me a minute," he said to her curls. All his hopes for an Italian adventure with her, expensive sheets, even more expensive wines, disintegrating. Little sparks of light, hope he'd clung to in this endeavor: he watched the darkness swallow them up, meals for failure.
He breathed, in and out. Tiny pinpricks erupted in waves beneath his skin: in anticipation, in relief, or in fear, he couldn't tell. When the world blurred again, he held her tighter, preemptively mourning the future ahead for the version of himself he'd leave behind, standing with a woman in his arms and precious little time left to do so.
Draco breathed deeply, disoriented to find himself horizontal once again, back in his bed as one typically was in the middle of the night. Vanilla haunted him, memory of her scent still lingering. He might have imagined it, and if he had, he couldn't bring himself to care.
He let his head sink deeper against his pillow, crushed by exhaustion above all else.
She wouldn't be there; he knew she wouldn't. He tortured himself anyway, stretching his arm across the surface of the bed, crossing the boundary between his side to hers. Fingers flexed, palm skating across the sheets, finding coldness, emptiness.
Even knowing she wouldn't be there didn't stop the sharp sting behind his sinuses, the swelling high in the back of his throat. He swallowed, trying to force it down, force it away. Crying felt like confirmation; it felt like defeat, acceptance of a version of his life he had no intention of accepting.
He closed his hand into a fist, forcing himself to sleep.
What difference did it make to the nightmare if he greeted it waking or sleeping?
—
Waking with the sting of failure still lingering in his skull, Draco didn't move at first, oppressed once again by the overwhelming silence surrounding him. He allowed himself a moment more to wallow, but he'd already done months of it; a man could only survive so much of his own misery.
When he rose, he dressed quickly and—despite insisting to himself he wouldn't do it—immediately sought out the empty space where a tufted sofa once sat in his living room. Still missing from his life. He hovered between the kitchen and the living room. Hunger pulled him towards the kitchen, but the need to know what version of his life he'd woken in overrode the hollowed out sensation deep in his gut. He felt a bit dizzy looking at the Floo, and opted to apparate to Nott Manor instead.
He found Theo having a lounge, or perhaps a nap, or perhaps a whole night's worth of sleep, in the gardens. Draco sat on the edge of a fountain—the same fountain he'd failed to maneuver his broom around when he broke his wrist as a child—and kicked the heel of Theo's shoe.
Theo bolted awake, taking in his surroundings with wide, rapidly blinking eyes, before his panic dissipated upon spotting Draco.
"Explain," Draco said.
"I realize I'm normally quite in tune with your moods, but I do think I'll need more to go on than that."
"I've just used the time turner—for the second time. What reality am I in?"
Theo tilted his head to the side. Massaged his temple. Flopped back into a lying position.
"So—this is the sort of friendship we have now, is it? I'm your designated debriefer when you fuck with the fabric of the universe?"
"Who else would it be?" Draco snapped, stomach gurgling as he suppressed annoyance. Draco knew that his exhaustion and hunger and general sense of failure had nothing to do with Theo.
Theo stared at the sky above. Draco hadn't even bothered to check the time after he woke, but if he had to guess, it looked somewhere around early afternoon, with the sun heavy and ascending in its path from one horizon to another.
"What an interesting series of events," Theo mused. "I wonder if Blaise Saw any of this. He'd probably be livid we've fucked with time."
"Yes, I suspect so."
Theo released a beleaguered sort of sigh.
"What do you need to know?"
Draco hadn't thought that far. Driven purely by the instinct to orient himself, he hadn't considered many—or any—of the specifics required to achieve that.
"When Lucius was attacked last year—I went to the hospital, not Italy, right?"
Theo lifted himself up on his elbows, head cocked once again as he watched Draco.
"Hospital," he said. "What did you—"
"Christmas dinner, last year. With my parents. Did I blow up the glassware?"
Theo's brows lifted, deep horizontal lines carved into his forehead. He sounded less certain, or perhaps less confident in his understanding of what Draco needed, when he answered.
"Yes."
"And Hermione still left?"
A grimace.
"Yes."
"And I came to you for the time turner?"
"In January." Theo nodded as he spoke, fully sitting back up. "And then there was some weirdness last month. You went back to try and propose but came back after the dinner. We're—we were, no, still are, I think—misaligned."
Draco exhaled. Tension released some of its death grip on his spine. He remembered that, too.
"I modified the turner—gave it to you a few days ago." An arched brow. "And now you've used it?"
On the tail end of his relief that nothing had changed from the version of events Draco knew, the implications of that fact sunk in. Nothing had changed, not the big things at least, despite the fact that he'd very intentionally tried to do just that. Even though he'd failed, shouldn't something have shifted by virtue of his meddling? Wasn't that the perennial cautionary tale tied up with time travel? Every breath, every step, every blink: they all bore far-reaching consequences one couldn't possibly predict?
Draco dropped his head to his hands, gripping at his hair, scratching at his scalp.
"I don't—" he started, staring at the pebbled ground beneath his feet. "What did any of it do? My head hurts."
"Best not think too hard about it. Time is a bit like magic, I think. There are parts we can understand and parts we can't. And the way I'm combining time and magic with the turner? Honestly, we're asking for trouble. It's a good thing we're two responsible adults."
Draco wanted to vomit. But he had nothing in his stomach but bile and regret.
"Stop," he croaked, finding himself incapable of lifting his head. "You've—said that before." Which meant things hadn't happened exactly as Draco remembered, but certainly close enough that the major events that brought him here all still converged on this very moment.
"Oh. You're really in the thick of it, then, aren't you?"
"You brought me the modified time turner a few days ago." Not a question, just a repetition. There was a lot of that going around.
"Right."
He looked up. "I was going to use it? To propose earlier?"
"I don't think you'd decided exactly when. Kept going back and forth about the best time to do it; September or December."
"December?"
"The shop opening." Theo dragged a hand down his face, skewering Draco with a look that said he didn't know everything about his life.
"It was a good night," Draco said.
Theo made a retching noise. Perhaps the look had been meant to convey that perhaps he knew too much. They tended to tread back and forth over that particular line at random.
Draco rose, shaking out his limbs, shaking off his lingering hunger and frustration and the disquiet that perched so heavily on his shoulders.
"December," he said again, trying to hobble together another plan, another route he might take in search of the destination he sought. "December could work. September wasn't right but—December maybe." His skin buzzed, nerve endings zapping and humming with a kind of frantic energy that bordered too close to unhinged for comfort, but that he knew of no way to corral or control.
"Draco?" Theo asked.
Draco turned. He hadn't even noticed he'd been staring into the fountain. Agitation shot to the surface of his skin, a kind of unreasonable annoyance he couldn't place. He bit back a bark. "What?"
"Would she"—Theo shifted on his lounge chair—"would she want this?"
Agitation became guilt in the way it crashed, once ascending, now soundly battered into the ground. He fell back onto the fountain ledge again, stone serving as a rigid, uncomfortable seat. He sucked in a breath, distantly aware of his inability to tear his gaze from Theo's look of ever-increasing concern. He burned: his face, the back of his neck, the center of his chest. Gods, it ached.
He dropped his head in his hands again: lashed by guilt and shame and want and need and all the inextricable ways those things wound themselves together. Impossible to sort, even with all the time in the world, it seemed.
"I miss her so much." He spoke to the pebbles beneath his feet.
He heard Theo clear his throat.
"I know. But that's not what I asked."
Draco closed his eyes, too tired and drawn to muster the indignation required to fight Theo's inability to let him get away with a non-answer.
Holding Hermione for those few minutes, having her in his arms again, he almost wished he hadn't. It had resuscitated his hope, brought it back from the dead.
Theo spoke, granting Draco more time to think. "In the version of events you've lived, did I already ask you that? I've already asked it in mine."
Draco shifted the toe of his shoe, feeling the pebbles give way beneath it. He kept his eyes closed, head in his hands, one deep breath—or perhaps one scream—away from losing it.
"You've asked a variant of it, yes," he replied in the calmest tone he could manage. "I said I was doing it for me, too. So that Lucius didn't win again."
"That has nothing to do with Hermione."
"But it does."
"And what does letting Lucius win even mean, Draco?"
Pebbles crunched, and Draco imagined Theo must have risen. Several steps later, a shadow cooled the back of Draco's head.
"You wanted to propose to Hermione before Christmas dinner so he wouldn't win—"
"Before that I had to change the dinner so he didn't—"
"Too complicated," Theo said, cutting him off. "I'm—trying to help."
The shadow disappeared. When Draco looked up, he found Theo taking a seat next to him on the fountain. "Ignoring the fact that time travel is a fucking nightmare to wrap my head around, I don't—understand what you're trying to achieve. Because you've said it's so Lucius doesn't win but—what does that mean?"
"I don't know." It rushed from Draco, part declaration, part confession. "It's—I don't know. More of a feeling than anything else. Maybe it's not even about winning. But—more that I always feel like I lose."
Theo's knee knocked the side of Draco's leg, a silent show of solidarity.
Draco tried to make sense of the bog inside his brain that trapped all his thoughts and feelings about his father. Difficult terrain, and he often opted not to traverse for fear of getting lost, of sinking, of becoming trapped.
"You remember when we were little and you used to tell me how badly you wanted to go home, even when we were here, at your Estate?" Draco asked.
Theo's bouncing stilled. He hummed a noise of acknowledgement.
"I think it's like that. You wanted that feeling of a home, not the actual one."
"Are you searching for a feeling of home or of winning?"
Draco fought back the inexplicable urge to sob.
"Both."
"And is Hermione the answer to both?"
"Yes."
"Should she be?"
Silence ate the seconds between Theo's question and Draco's complete inability to answer.
"I can't—not try," Draco finally said. "If I have a choice? I can't just—" he heaved a breath, worryingly close to crying in a lovely garden in the middle of the day, with his best friend present to bear witness. "If I know there's even the smallest chance I can fix it—any of it, all of it, even just some of it—I don't think I have the willpower not to."
His lungs hurt. His chest hurt. The ever growing lump in the back of his throat hurt.
"Theo," he said, sneaking broken words through a throat rapidly losing the ability to carry speech. "I've only done it twice but—I can see myself going mad. Trying to fix things, trying to control all the uncontrollable things that have—will have, haven't—happened to me. Or the things I've done." He hissed, wincing in pain as he realized he'd been dragging his nails against the stone fountain: catching one, ripping it, drawing blood. He watched red bead on the edge of his finger. "We never should have used it in the first place," he concluded, smearing his blood onto the stone.
"No. I don't think we should have."
"Then why did we?"
"Fun? We were stupid. What was I saying earlier about us being responsible adults now?"
"It wasn't that long ago."
This conversation felt more like banter, more familiar, more manageable. Some of the tension seizing Draco's core softened.
"Long enough that you blew up Lucius Malfoy's dining table over Christmas dinner. You'd have never done that then."
"And you?"
"Me? Well, I'm preaching temperance, aren't I? It's a sign of the end times, honestly."
A grotesque laugh bubbled up Draco's throat, a thin, worn out sound.
"Is it possible to obliviate one specific detail from over three years of someone's life?" Draco asked, grappling for the absurd since everything else had failed him.
"I don't deal in mind magic, only trinkets." A telltale pause, the kind in which Draco could hear his heart beating. "Although."
"Although what?"
Theo jumped to his feet, spinning on the pebbles as he animated as quickly as his thoughts likely ran.
"You have the time turner?"
Draco hesitated. He did. He'd pocketed it before he came over. His pause, evidently, had been answer enough.
"Give it to me."
Draco almost didn't. For a moment, he didn't move.
"Draco, give it to me."
"Right, yes. But—you'll give it back? If I need it again?"
Theo's frantic, excited energy faltered, a look of pity overtaking everything else. Draco resisted the intense urge to hit him.
"I'm going to make it so that neither of us needs or wants it again."
