April
tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock
Theo never gave a timeline on what making it so neither of them needed or wanted the time turner again entailed, which left Draco in a strange sort of stasis, lingering in the in-between. He'd been left without a plan for the first time since January, stuck waiting for a nebulous something.
He finally dragged himself into the shop, brewing from the back room instead of constantly holing himself up in his flat. He brewed entire days away, producing enough stock to last months, experimenting, too. Anything to occupy his mind: pulling him out of his fixation on the past, living in his unfortunate present, accepting an uncertain future.
"Mr. Malfoy?"
He looked up, finding one of the shop clerks poking her head through the door. He'd barely exchanged a full sentence with the girl since hiring her at the beginning of the year.
"Yes?"
She tapped on the door, a nervous noise he could identify through the wood. She let out a ridiculous giggle before she spoke.
"Harry Potter—the Harry Potter. He's here. To speak to you."
"Fuck."
She choked on her giggle.
"I mean—fuck. Just"—he waved a stasis charm over his cauldrons—"send him back here if you don't mind. I'd rather not be murdered where customers can see."
She giggled again, probably thinking it a joke. But Draco had difficulty imagining a scenario where Harry Potter came to speak to him and didn't have murderous intentions in mind, at least not after the last few months.
Seconds after the clerk disappeared, Harry Potter walked through the door in all his infuriatingly bespectacled glory.
"Malfoy."
"Potter."
"Shop doing well?"
"Oh, fuck off, Potter. Why are you here?"
Potter dragged a hand through his already-wild hair, mussing it further. "I don't know, honestly. I'm supposed to be following a lead in Knockturn right now but—I saw the shop and…"
"Felt like dropping in on an old pal?" Draco arched a brow, crossing his arms. Whatever this was, he had no interest in a moral lambasting from the likes of Harry Potter.
Potter puffed out a breath, shaking his head. "I suppose that's not far off. Maybe a bit of curiosity."
"Curiosity? Come to witness what's left of my life?"
"No—Merlin." He lifted his hands. "Defensive much? Gods. She—she won't really tell us anything. She's been—"
"Stop, Potter. I swear if you tell me she's been unhappy, I'll curse you. I don't care how many megalomaniacs you've saved us all from."
"She has been."
"What did I just say, Potter?" Draco relieved himself of his wand, letting it roll across his workbench. His fingers twitched, begging him to hex or jinx or curse the boy-who-wouldn't-shut-his-fucking-mouth. "So what, are you here to make sure we're even? That I'm as least as miserable as she is?"
Potter made an incredulous sort of sound, shoulders rising and falling and an exasperated motion.
"You know I'd just gotten used to the idea of you," Potter said, sounding a bit like an accusation. "I'd finally accepted I was probably going to be stuck with you. Hell, I almost even liked you well enough."
"And now?" Because that set up certainly felt like it had a caveat lying in wait.
"I don't know if I'm supposed to be mad at you for breaking her heart. You and I did have that talk once."
"We almost had that talk. Furthermore—" he broke off. A righteous indignation flooded him, far too Gryffindor-ish for his liking. Nevertheless, the audacity of Potter's suggestion that he'd been the one to break her heart astonished him. But as quickly as it flashed, hot magma bubbling inside his chest, it cooled and hardened. Draco blamed Hermione. He blamed himself, too. After all this time, with tiredness weighing him down, neither option seemed exactly right.
"We broke each other's hearts, Potter. It's no one's fault."
—
In the end, Draco didn't hex Potter and Potter didn't hex him. Draco barely resisted the insistent throb behind his ribs begging that he ask more about Hermione. It seemed like Potter barely resisted asking several questions of his own, mouth opening and closing soundlessly as he presumably tried to form a thought. Potter ultimately left with very little else being said, nothing of consequence at least.
Waiting for Theo to reappear had started driving Draco a bit mad. Every time he Floo'd or apparated to Nott Estate, Draco was met with a frantic series of not yets and soons and fuck offs and be patient, Dracos. Lacking anything else to do, Draco spent most of his idle time reconsidering his choices over the last few months. Brewing had lost its efficacy in distracting him; he had no choice but to face the things he'd done.
He came upon his first conclusion in the days following Potter's surprise visit.
Draco didn't want the point of his life—and the thing he regretted the most—to be that he should have cut his parents out sooner. The more he thought about the last several months, and the several years before that, that inevitability seemed more and more like the only logical conclusion one could draw.
And that—well, that was just sad. And it felt like failure. But perhaps this was a situation that could be neither won nor lost, only weathered.
Where was one meant to draw the line, amputate the limb, staunch the bleeding? He couldn't separate his want to fix things with Hermione from his want to figure out a solution to his complicated relationship with his parents. He was never supposed to hang all his happiness on her. That was what she wanted, what she'd told him. But what if that was incidental? What if the thing he needed for himself, to excise the toxic pieces of his family, had the unintended but very welcome side effect of returning Hermione to his life?
Days later, after combing through that thinking with a methodical precision even Hermione Granger would have found impressive, he came to the conclusion that he was a horrible fucking person.
He sank into a kitchen chair, quest to brew a pot of tea abandoned. He closed his eyes, chest collapsing, shoulders sinking.
Regardless of his motives, or his wants, or his needs, or how he logicked his way around guilt and responsibility and shame for his choices, it all boiled down to one simple fact, one Theo had been trying to help him see for months:
Draco was an egotistical bastard.
Who the fuck did he think he was? Acting as if he had the right, the fucking right to change anything? He made his choices once. He should have had to live with them.
He'd debated how he would tell Blaise that he couldn't stomach coming into work, disgusted with himself and the choices he'd tried to take away from Hermione by fucking with time. He felt vile, embarrassed that it took him so long to see it, revolted by the decisions he'd already made. Decisions that set into motion an entire series of events that may or may not have ever even happened without his interference. He wanted to do little else than sit at his kitchen table while considering when and if and how it would ever be possible to repent. He came to one single conclusion each and every time.
Then Theo walked through the Floo.
"I made a modification," he announced, pulling the time turner from his pocket almost as soon as he spotted Draco.
Draco's laugh came out hollow, tired. "Did you now? Does more, does it? The several modifications you already made weren't enough?"
"You're in a mood, I see."
"Existential crisis, I'm allowed."
Theo rolled his eyes.
"I need you to be impressed." He swung the turner with an almost careless ease between them. "If not for the fact that this thing is several sentences in Azkaban sort of illegal, I'd say I deserve an Order of Merlin in magical innovation. But, all things considered." Theo shrugged.
"What did you do?"
"I added a memory charm."
Draco sat forward in his chair, staggered for a moment by an echo of this very scene. Had Theo found him in his kitchen like this once before? Or did it only feel familiar?
"You added a memory charm—to a time turner?"
Theo nodded, a perfectly vertical motion at first, then skewing towards the diagonal as if fighting off the urge to shake to the negative.
"To be honest, it's a hack job. I only worked on it for a month. I pulled it together as best I can but if we use it—and I'd have to use it, too—we won't remember using it at all. But we'll still get the new timeline, and the new version of ourselves will be blissfully unaware. Solves your problem, right? Use it, try to fix things, and if it doesn't work, well, at least you're freed from wondering, yeah?"
Draco's brain cut straight to the end result of such an absurd, absolutely ridiculous thing. "And when we land back here, time turner in hand? You don't think we'd use it again anyway? Should we write ourselves a suspicious note that says, 'please don't use this time turner you don't remember having?'" Draco swallowed against a deluge of what ifs drowning him.
"Can I have a little bit of credit? I'm capable of thinking through more than one problem at a time. I charmed it. A sort of self delivering portkey—they are my specialty, after all. It'll go straight back to the drawer in my father's study where I found it years ago. I won't even know it's there, beauty of a memory charm."
"And if you find it again?"
Theo laughed, smile stretching across his face as if he'd been waiting to put all Draco's potential challenges to rest with his superior problem solving skills.
"I never intended on doing anything with it the first time I found it. I didn't start messing with it until your father asked me if it was possible. In a different version of events—when Lucius asks me if I know anything about time turners in 2001 I imagine I'll just say no—because I won't have it yet…or anymore, I suppose."
"And us? You don't think we'll notice something—strange?"
"Kind of counting on paradox avoidance for that one."
"Are they even paradoxes if we're starting entirely new timelines?"
"Oh, for the love of—complication avoidance, then. Sure. We might be confused. Or maybe we won't because complication avoidance magic will do it's thing. My point is, this all hinges on whether or not we use it for something very specific."
Draco sighed. Not for the first time in his life, he couldn't decide if he felt impressed or concerned that he and Theo had somehow found their way to the exact same conclusion in very different ways.
"I know," Draco said. "I've been thinking a lot about the last few years. About—how I got here. About my choices." He cleared his throat, forcing himself to continue, to confess to his crimes, out loud, at least once. "I regret being so arrogant as to think I had the right to change time in order to fix the things I regret—to take away Hermione's choices in the present, more so."
Theo's wild excitement cooled. He nodded, taking the seat across from Draco.
"But I also regret so much with Lucius. And I've been thinking about big things this whole time and how—well, I'm not sure they're the important bits. Maybe it's the little things. Tiny bits of momentum, you know? Small moments with him that"—he struggled for the right word—"ingratiated me, just enough, just a bit more than I might have been otherwise. When I came home from Sarajevo I was hopeful we could have a normal relationship, did I ever tell you that? I thought a little time apart might have made things easier."
Theo shook his head, time turner resting in his lap, hands limp.
"He dropped a betrothal in my lap. I think that was when I first realized I would have to cut him out. I would have done it then, I wanted to, I just didn't have the—ability, not yet. And once I'd worked up the courage, I'd lost some of my resolve. I've been using the time turner to try and fix my mistakes with my parents and with Hermione which is so—Theo, I think I'm a terrible person." He had to suck in a breath, control his lungs, swallow down the rising pressure in the back of his throat. "The only thing I should have ever used it for—and even then, I can't keep straight which decisions I should have to live with—" he cut himself off, another gulp of air. He could feel himself spiralling, sinking into a paradoxical pit that hid its escape routes in impossible questions and unknowable answers. He steadied himself. "I think I know what you want to use it for, and I agree. We should go back and make it so we never used it at all."
Theo didn't speak for several seconds, eyes fixed on the time turner in his lap.
"That's far back, much farther than a few months," he said. Perhaps he needed convincing, too.
"It is. And that terrifies me. What if I never end up working with Hermione? What if I—what if we never—she never? What if I lose ever having had a relationship with her at all?"
"Or what if," Theo started, slipping into an antagonistic tone, the one he used to argue a point to death, which usually meant his victory. "Maybe the future or the past or the way things happen isn't all enormous changes with huge branching paths based on whether or not we got bit by a mosquito on the elbow in one timeline or on the knee in another. Maybe we're sturdier than that, built on foundations that take longer than five or thirty minutes worth of time to unsettle. I don't know if I want to believe that one single moment can entirely change who I am." Theo offered him a generous look, thinned lips forced into a hopeful smile. "Or who you end up with."
"But things—they cascade, Theo. That's how time works."
Theo narrowed his eyes, leaning forward in his chair, lifting his hands onto the tabletop. His fingers drummed against the wood before he launched into another rebuttal.
"Okay, things cascade, but from where? How do we know the starting point? From the top of a mountain or the bottom of a hill? Different levels of scale, I'd say. Wouldn't you say your relationship with Lucius had already gone significantly downhill?"
Theo waggled a brow and despite the brain-melting severity of their conversation, Draco couldn't help but groan over the—frankly, inappropriately timed—play on words.
"Think about it," Theo said, voice tipping towards excitement again as he scooted to the edge of his seat, practically slipping out of it altogether. "I know I'm not smart enough to think through all the possibilities, but, I feel like it's safe to say that if Lucius never invited you to be in that room when he received Hermione after we used the turner the first time, something about your relationship would look different than it does now."
"Something good or something bad? We can't know." Despite that terrifying conclusion, Draco laughed silently, a kind of shaking in his chest and stomach that ached in his muscles. He could hope that maybe he'd pull away from Lucius sooner, even blow up all that glassware on his own, too—an organic explosion. But he could never know, not with certainty. There would be risk involved, significant risk he would have to accept.
"Would you risk it, Theo? Everything that's ever really mattered to you? To fix a mistake? To give yourself the opportunity to do things the way they should have happened years ago?"
Theo answered immediately, and honestly, and in the only way Draco really expected.
"I don't know."
Oddly, that was enough.
—
Draco and Theo stepped through the Floo and into Malfoy Manor shortly after breakfast on the day they would use the time turner to go back in time and—not use the time turner. Draco had no intentions of announcing their arrival to anyone in the household. He had requested a disinheritance, after all. He presumed that removed unannounced visits from the list of acceptable liberties he could take.
His intentions flew out the nearest window upon finding Topsy working in the parlor.
The elf blinked up at them, a single moment of confusion in her enormous eyes, before joy overtook her.
"Master Draco," she squeaked, sinking into a curtsey. "How is Topsy of service to the young master today?"
Theo interjected before Draco had the chance to implore that she not alert his parents of his arrival. Theo bowed: theatrically, ridiculously, and as he always did.
"Topsy, a pleasure to see you as always. Mopsy has wished you a pleasant Vernal Equinox. My apologies for the late delivery."
Topsy's ears flushed a deep maroon as she grabbed at them, twisting the droopy ends in her embarrassment.
"Shall I send Mopsy your regards the next time I see her?" he asked. Draco didn't know if he wanted to laugh or not. They'd allotted fifteen minutes to prepare, lest they miss their opportunity and have to wait another month for the correct day and time to come around again, and Theo had chosen to spend some of that precious time conducting a terribly serious conversation about house elf well-wish correspondence.
Topsy nodded in a vibrating sort of way, either assent or an inability to control the overwhelming buzz from Theo's attention.
"Excellent," Theo said with a deep breath, shifting to a grin. "And what is it you're up to today, Topsy? This is quite a lot of measuring tape."
Quite a lot barely scratched the surface. Measuring tapes floated in various stages of activity all about the room.
"Remodeling, Master Theo." She glanced at Draco. "Replacing furniture."
Several of the measuring tapes hovered where the green tufted sofa used to sit. Even at the manor, Draco couldn't escape its absence.
"Well, Topsy. It's lovely work you're doing but Draco and I have some business to attend to and we'd prefer if that Master and Mistress of the house are not informed of our arrival. Could you be so kind as to take a thirty minute respite? Perhaps take a stroll through the gardens at your leisure." When that particular suggestion seemed to spark panic in Topsy's eyes, Theo pivoted. "Or perhaps iron some linens."
Topsy smiled. "Of course Master Theo." She disappeared with a crack, taking the assortment of measuring tapes with her.
Theo turned, an enormous grin splitting his face.
"I realize we have several other priorities to consider and—well, fuck we won't remember this, will we?—but you know what just happened, don't you?"
Draco massaged his temple, long past trying to follow Theo's logic.
"And what just happened, Theo?"
"A Malfoy elf just took orders from me. I've finally done it—charmed my way around elf magic"—he made a grand sweeping wave with his hand as if to announce the requisite flourish such a statement required—"and soon we won't remember it."
Draco shrugged. "Maybe we will. I'm not convinced you have any idea how paradox—sorry, complication—avoidance even works."
"Oh, I most certainly don't," Theo agreed, pulling open the parlor door.
Draco followed, stopping just beyond the threshold, silent as Theo closed the doors again.
The surface of his skin hummed, prickling and crawling and buzzing with an uncomfortable energy that somehow managed to run hot and cold at the same time. An unusual feeling: off-kilter, perhaps foreboding, if he allowed himself to think in such terms. He'd tried not to think too hard about the finality, the irreversibility, of volunteering his mind to be altered, of going back so far that he would shift whole years' worth of his life.
If he thought too long or too hard about it, he nearly talked himself out of it every time. His brain would stick on images of Hermione smiling up at him with pride or lust or love, preemptively mourning a possible version of his life where he would never know—or know to miss—the way those things altered the gravity governing his bones. In those moments, he felt like he could float, soar, fly without the aid of a broomstick. He couldn't imagine, and certainly did not want to imagine, what his life without those feelings would look like.
Instead, he focused on the path that using the time turner had put him on: an invitation into a room where once there had been a dismissal. A persistent spark somewhere inside his chest that perhaps, maybe, he could earn his father's pride again. Somehow. Some way. And later, a spiral wherein he knew, and couldn't ignore, the ability to change the things he regretted. Having the option haunted him. It nagged at Theo, too.
Beyond those things, he chose not to speculate. Trying to control the consequences of his actions had been a spectacular failure the first two times he tried. He'd finally learned to accept his limits when he saw them.
He only hoped that at some point he had-has-will have a ring in his valet box.
Draco jumped when Theo clapped a hand on his shoulder.
"You ready?" Theo asked, question communicated more by eye contact than by words.
Draco pulled out his pocket watch, checked it, and nodded. Theo blew out a breath and held the time turner between them, looping the gold chain over Draco's head and then his own.
"Reverse spin, 3.166." Almost a question.
"Yes, Theo. We've both quadruple-checked it, at least."
Theo nodded, exhaling another shaky breath, and unlocked the turner from its resting position.
"And you have the date set, right?" Draco asked in a surge of last minute panic. It took a significant amount of willpower not to reach for it, to let Theo have control.
Theo nodded.
As he placed his thumb and forefinger on the hourglass, the Floo rushed to life on the other side of the doors behind them. Muffled footsteps sounded, then the doors swung open, putting Draco face to face with Hermione—the Hermione who existed in the present with him—for the first time in months.
She staggered back, eyes wide and brows drawn in an instant collision of confusion and surprise. Her mouth dropped open as her gaze darted to three distinct points in rapid succession, over and over. From Draco to Theo to the time turner between them.
How could they have forgotten? For all his worry and his planning, it somehow slipped his notice that if they intended to travel to a time shortly after Hermione arrived at work in the past, she would also be present in the present.
"What is that?" she asked, entirely unnecessarily. She already knew. Draco knew that she knew from the tone in her voice and his knowledge of her past. She'd spent a year with a time turner around her neck; she knew exactly what she looked at.
A dormant beast roared to life in Draco's chest, clawing at his ribs, tearing flesh and organ and muscle to shreds, demanding to be released, to reach for her.
It hurt.
It ached.
It burned.
Draco battered it back, accepting her presence for the gift that it was: one last chance to see her.
"We fucked up," he said simply. "I'm sorry."
He glanced at Theo, who nodded his understanding.
He flipped the hourglass: once, twice, three times, carefully aligning the last fractional turns to account for the two individual months they needed to travel beyond the three years.
Theo could have repeated the destination to himself a million times and it wouldn't have mattered, not when Hermione stepped forward, protest prepared on those lovely, impulsive, beautifully brave Gryffindor lips of hers. Her movement startled Draco, who inched away out of instinct, jostling Theo and ruining the precision required to select the correct month.
From beyond the blur and the cotton and the film, Draco heard Theo curse as the rest of the world fell away, leaving everything else behind.
—
When the time turner magic released them, a sensation Draco had grown disturbingly familiar with over the last few months, he and Theo stood exactly where they had been moments before. But when they stood seemed less certain.
Draco blinked, whirling to face Theo.
"When?"
Theo's face had gone pale, mouth opening and closing as he fought to articulate an answer. He pulled the gold chain over his head, leaving the time turner hanging solely around Draco's neck.
"An extra month, I think," he finally said, hands coming to rest at the back of his head, elbows wide as he sucked in a deep breath.
"Forward or backward?" Draco's stomach churned as he asked.
Theo had taken a half step away, breath heavy. "What?"
"Forward or backward, Theo. Is this January or March of 2002?"
Theos hands dropped to his sides.
"Backwards. I rotated too far. January. I think."
"You think? Fuck—Topsy."
Crack.
"Master Draco, you is returning from your meeting so soon. How is Topsy of service?"
Draco tried to force every ounce of his rapidly draining composure into his words.
"Just popped back for a moment. Topsy, could you remind me of something. It is January, yes?"
Topsy's head, already too big for her body, swiveled at a hugely comical angle as confusion registered in her posture.
"Yes, Master Draco."
"And you said I'm meant to be at a meeting right now?"
"With your future Mistress, yes."
"Thank you, Topsy. You are dismissed."
With another quirk of her head, Topsy vanished.
"I'm with Astoria right now. I must be meeting her for the first—okay. I will have just gotten back from Sarajevo yesterday, I'm visiting you tomorrow. Where are you on this day?"
Theo's foot and fingers seemed to be in competition over which could tap faster as he stared at the parlor door. His head rocked slowly from side to side, a precursor to shaking it. They didn't have time to panic or to freeze or to wonder what to do. They had to figure something out if they only had one shot at this before Theo's complicated time and memory magic erased any future plans from their forebrains. Despite Draco's own pulse pounding in the back of his throat and the cavernous pit of anxiety gnawing at his stomach, if Draco had learned anything in the years he'd spent with Hermione Granger, it was how to remain relatively calm in stressful situations: be they blood curses, insidious guest rooms, or doomed holiday dinners.
"Theo—we only have thirty minutes. I need you with me. Where were you the day before I visited?"
Theo broke eye contact with the wood panels he'd been boring holes into with his stare.
"At my estate, probably tinkering with the—" he broke off, eyes widening. "The time turner, at Nott Manor. It was my downtime project when I got tired of trying to break into the vault."
Draco's head throbbed as he tried to wrap his mind around their options, if they even had any. "If we can't actually stop ourselves from using it in—next month—what can we—" He ran a hand through his hair, trying to channel what might otherwise devolve into a debilitating sort of panic.
"We didn't account for Granger. How could we not account for Granger? It's not like she's stopped working—"
"I personally try very hard not to think about her these days," Draco snapped. "What do we do?"
"We're in the wrong time, Draco. I don't know. I'm going to ask you to use the turner next month. I'll tell you about it tomorrow. There's nothing we can do today."
Draco paced. He had to do something. His shoes clacked on the tile. He counted his footsteps, halfway down the corridor and back again. When he returned to his place in front of Theo, a stroke of an idea, a reckless, stupid idea, hit him.
"Let's break it."
"The time turner?" His eyes landed on where it rested against Draco's chest.
"The one the other you is working on. If it was broken enough, would you stop trying to tinker with it?"
Theo made several disbelieving noises in the back of his throat, only partial vocalizations.
"I don't know. I don't—I don't think so. I worked on the vault for five years. I'm good at fixating."
"Can't say it's my favorite quality of yours at the moment." A pause, a breath, a swell of annoyance cresting with a new idea. "We break it and we hide it"—yes, that could work—"you know more ward theory now, well—you you, the 2005 you—than you did in 2002. Hide it in the same place our version will portkey off to when we go back, ward it so you can't get into it and—"
"—Hope I don't fixate on trying to break into that instead of my family vault?"
"You already have a couple years sunk into the vault, don't you think you'd want to finish that first?"
A pause. "Yes, probably. And I suppose paradox avoidance will converge on us in 2005."
"Then what?"
Theo shrugged. "I really don't know."
"Do you have any better ideas?" Draco pulled his watch from his pocket. They were running out of time to make a decision, to do something.
Theo shook his head again, an unhinged sort of bobble, before he reached out and hooked Draco's arm. He turned sharply, and without preamble, apparated them away.
When the wringing pressure of apparation abated, lungs decompressing, Draco had half a mind to shout at Theo for the lack of warning. But all things considered, he could hardly fault the expediency.
"I'll be working in the east wing. I had a workspace set up there before I turned the vault into one," Theo said, already marching out into the corridor. He threw the rest of his words over his shoulders, clearly expecting Draco to follow. "I'm counting on paradox avoidance to—take care of the other me, I suppose."
"It did when Lucius invited me into the Floo parlor the first time. I should have been in there waiting." Draco jogged to catch up with Theo's deep strides.
Theo's partially debilitating brand of panic seemed to have fully relinquished its grip on him, leaving it its place a determination that propelled him through the halls of his Estate. He didn't so much as pause when he reached the door to a random room in the east hall. Theo simply pushed it open and released a shaking breath.
"Ok," he said. "I'm not in here. I mean, I probably was. And I am now. But paradox—"
"—it's all very confusing, I know. Where's the turner?" Draco cut in, unwilling to waste any more time or words on twists and turns and possibilities they couldn't possibly understand.
Theo approached a large workbench, rifling through the box sitting atop, the drawers beneath, the cabinets adjacent.
"I was just working on it. I know I was. I wanted to show you. I worked on it all week before you got back," he said, voice increasing in pitch as he turned out drawer after drawer, visiting every cabinet and shelf in the room.
Draco ran his fingers down the chain still dangling around his own neck, finding the hourglass sitting against his chest. Their version of the turner, still intact.
Draco looked at his watch again. They had less than five minutes remaining. And instead of experiencing panic, something strangely serene settled in Draco's chest, a hint to the idea he hadn't even fully thought yet.
"Theo," he said.
Theo kept rifling, tossing papers and trinkets to the ground, fully turning out the room.
"Theo," he said again. "It's not here."
"It has to be."
"It's not here just like you're not here, the other you, that is."
Theo's head snapped up from where he'd half bent himself over a crate of keys. "Paradox avoidance?"
"Probably." Draco lifted their version of the time turner up. "If it was in here with you, we probably triggered it for the time turner as well. It's—I don't know, equally as entangled in all this, right?"
"What do we do, then?" His head tilted. "Is there anything to do?"
"We were going to break it and hide it. I can't think of any better place to hide it than inside a paradox, jumbled up in time. If we have the only version now then it won't exist until it brings us back to 2005, and at that point we won't remember using it."
Theo barked out a single laugh, collected himself, then released the deluge, laughter spilling over.
"Poor future-past-indeterminable-time me. Probably constantly curious what happened to that time turner I was fiddling with."
"Let's hope it never turns up," Draco said, looking at the gold device resting so innocently in his palm.
"All this effort and we didn't even do anything." Theo's laughter had taken on a sharp, violent sort of quality. Less enjoyment, more condemnation.
Draco sank onto an upturned crate in the corner of the room.
"That's probably fitting. Since it's what should have happened all along."
"Does it count as having learned a lesson if we won't remember learning it?" Theo asked.
Draco felt a sudden urge to close his eyes and sleep. To seek rest and refuge from years and months and moments he'd lived and regretted and tried and failed to change. It wore one down, in the end.
"I don't know," he said, leaning his head against the wall, letting his eyes close. "I just hope that whatever timeline comes from this, I gave Lucius a little less. Took a little more. That a different version of me makes better choices." A sting rose in the back of his throat. "And I still hope to have what I had with Hermione. Even if it has an end."
"I suppose if we're confessing." Theo paused, frowning. "My family vault wasn't empty, not exactly—"
The blurring grip of time magic, when it came this time, sent panic shooting through Draco's chest. He heaved several breaths, facing an unknown future—and an unknown version of himself who would not remember any of these moments that came before—with fear and regret humming in his veins. But still, he faced it, refusing to let the fear consume him.
