Sixth-year sped by in a whirl. The tension that had crept into adult shoulders and lurked behind adult voices when Voldemort reappeared in Harry and Draco's fourth year at Hogwarts drained away again. If a professor snapped at a student, it was almost certainly because of a bad paper or sloppy work over a cauldron.

"Really, Severus," Minerva said as she poured herself a cup of tea. "I think I'm getting a letter from Mr. Longbottom's grandmother every week.

Would it be possible for you to ease off on the child, for the sake of my nerves if nothing else?"

"Part of the price you pay as Head Mistress," Severus said from behind his copy of Potioneers Monthly. "You get the power, you pay the piper in the form of parent Howlers."

"Temporary power," she said. There was no one else both willing and capable of taking the reins at Hogwarts, but she remained unhappy about it. She wanted to be teaching, and every year there were more and more administrative duties that came her way. First, it had been taking on the job of Head of Gryffindor House, now this. "But can the child really be so –"

"He learned from Voldemort for years," Severus said, cutting her off. "I know perfectly well you're tutoring him independently in transfiguration because he's so ahead of his classmates. He has no excuse for sloppy or mediocre work, and as his teacher, I plan to make sure he doesn't spend the next two years slacking off and coasting on what he learned from that… that…."

"Quite," Minerva said. "But I may direct all Augusta's future Howlers to you."

"And I will send one back," Severus said. Minerva knew she should probably stop him—yelling at parents was very much frowned upon – but if anyone deserved it, it was Augusta Longbottom. And she knew that Severus had a hair-trigger response to parental neglect.

"If you must," she said. "Merlin knows the old bat could use it."

He lowered his magazine to smirk at her. "You're getting catty in your old age, Minerva."

She stirred milk into her tea with extra vigor but did not dignify that with an answer. Instead, she changed the topic to Quidditch and asked how he felt his House's team would do that year.

"With Blaise Zabini finally thinking about something other than how much he hates his mother, we might do very well indeed," Severus said.

#

"He's gotten good," Hermione said glumly as she hung over the rail of the stands and watched Blaise zip in and out of the Slytherin Quidditch formation.

"It's because of his arse," Luna said.

"What?"

"Well, if you examine it closely – "

"Please do not make me think too much about Blaise Zabini's arse," Harry muttered.

"If you wish to live a life limiting yourself in that way, it is not my business to interfere," Luna said primly, but it was clear she disapproved.

"Well, I think his arse is spectacular," Theo said.

"Because you are a man of taste and discernment," Luna said.

"You two are fucking weird." Harry slouched over the rail and studied Blaise as intently as Luna was, but his concern was less the fit of Quidditch leathers and more the moves he might try to pull in a game. Blaise tended to feint left, and he pulled up in dives much earlier than he needed to. Both weakness that could be exploited. They might be friends, but they were on opposing teams, and Quidditch was far more important than bonds formed over a summer spent together.

"Speaking of weird," Hermione said. "Theo, do you have any idea how to do the arithomancy homework?

There's some kind of stupid prophecy bit we're supposed to integrate, and I can't get it to balance."

"Do you not believe in prophecy?" Luna asked.

Hermione opened her mouth, then closed it again. Too many shadows lurked in memories she shouldn't have for her to say that she understood everything about magic. That didn't mean she liked it. It felt fake, like something you'd find at a carnival being sold by a woman much more interested in what was in your pockets than what the future held. "I just want to get the homework right," she said.

"You can look over my notes," Theo said, which was about as satisfied as she wanted to be about pasts and futures that didn't make sense.

Draco was a bit hungrier for the truth. He turned the events of fifth-year over in his head, and what the Sorting Hat had said to him when he'd first come to Hogwarts, and the way his mother sometimes looked at him with shadows in her eyes and decided he needed to know more.

He waited until the Christmas holiday to corner her as she decorated a tree. She was floating globes with eternally falling snow to the highest branches when he asked, "What do you know?"

"About what, dear?"

"Voldemort," Draco said.

"Unpleasant bit of work," his mother said. "Probably unwell because of an abusive childhood, though he could have been simply wrong in the way some people are. I knew a girl in school, for example –"

"And Harry dying," Draco said.

His mother's hands froze mid-spell, and one of the decorative globes fell to the floor and broke open. The room's heat melted the snow, and the water soaked into the carpet, and she stood and said nothing.

"And a war," Draco added. "One we were losing."

Her face, when she turned to him, was bleak. "Sit," she said.

Draco sank down into one of the overstuffed armchairs and braced his hands along the side.

"When you were eighteen or nineteen," she began, and he interrupted her.

"I'm only sixteen now."

"I am telling the story," she said, "and if you want to hear it, you will remain quiet."

Draco pressed his lips together and nodded. The way her pale face had become ghostly frightened him, as did the way her skin seemed to pull across her cheekbones as if she were being stretched too thin or as if she had aged twenty years in a moment.

"When you were eighteen or nineteen," she said again, "you came to visit me. I wasn't sure how old you were, and you didn't tell me, so this is a guess. You might have been as old as twenty-three or twenty-four. War ages a face. Gives it wisdom it's better not to earn. And you were a baby, still sleeping in your cot. But I knew you because a mother always knows her child."

Draco's breathing sounded very loud to him as he waited for her.

"You were covered in blood and soot. Your clothes were the sort a person wears when he knows sturdiness matters, and they looked like they hadn't been washed in a month. And you held yourself…" Narcissa Malfoy looked down at her shaking hands. "You held yourself with the grace a man gets when he has confidence in his own power. When he knows what he can do because experience has tested him, and he has not been found wanting."

She looked up, and Draco was shocked to see tears shining in her eyes. "I was so proud of who you had become. I want you to know that."

She took a deep breath and went on. "In the world you came from, Voldemort had risen to unquestioned power. He'd… there was a war, and people fought. You fought. But he had almost won, and the end had become inevitable, but you… you and Hermione –"

"Hermione?" Draco asked sharply.

"Yes," his mother said. "You two had found a time-turner, and… Draco, they aren't supposed to work for times longer than a few days at most. The magical power it would take to send a person back two decades is… it is unfathomable. For the pair of you to have been able to wield magic like that and still know you were going to lose to him. I do not want to think too much about that world."

Draco could almost hear the battles in his memory. Theo falling.

Luna being consumed. Harry long dead. "I think it was bad," he said.

"You warned me," she said. "You warned me, and you warned Minerva McGonagall. You told us about his Horcruxes. You told us what we had to do. And," she took a deep breath. "And in doing so, you erased the person you had become."

"Because…"

"Because we changed the timeline. I've spent your life tracking down Voldemort's Horcruxes and destroying them, knowing with each one I ruined I was putting one more nail in the coffin of my own son."

"And saving me," Draco said.

"You can't both live," she said. "And your other self picked you, and I've tried the best I could to honor that sacrifice."

"And Hermione?" he asked.

At that, a warm smile filled Narcissa Malfoy's face. Draco had never wondered whether his parent's acceptance of the muggle-born girl he'd been bringing around since they were eleven was begrudging. If he had, the look on his mother's face would have put that worry to rest. His mother loved Hermione and had since long before he'd met her. "She was as dirty as you," she said. "As strong. As confident. And her only fear in changing the world was that in a different life, she wouldn't meet you."

"I would know Hermione anywhere," Draco said. The words were automatic and unquestioned.

"That's what you told her," his mother said. "I've rarely seen love like what you had then. Watching it grow between you has been one of the great joys of my life."

"What did I say," Draco asked. He wanted to know but was afraid too. He'd been powerful. Voldemort's Horcruxes had told him that. And he'd sacrificed it, and her, to make a better world. The sorting hat had told him that. Bravery formed in choices he had never made.

Loss from a decision he'd never faced.

His mother closed her eyes for a moment, then said, "I will find you in any universe, and you will find me.

Our love is forged in magic that time cannot tear apart nor sorrow break."

"And then?" Draco asked.

"And then you apparated to warn Minerva McGonagall, and if what she tells me is true, you faded before her eyes and were no more."

"And so I died," he said.

"You are not dead," his mother corrected him, though he could see the grief in her eyes for his other self. "You are standing here, talking to me, breathing, loving, not chained to a monster."

"But I sacrificed myself," Draco said. It was hard to imagine knowingly erasing himself. He was bone and blood and sinew, and all that could come again and be remade in another timeline. He would still be the same starting template, the same baby, but he was also all of his memories. He was the time he'd shoved Harry off a broom as they flew too fast, laughing and yelling. He was the boy crying for another stuffed otter. He was so many years of life building on itself to make this Draco Malfoy and no other. And he had knowingly erased all of himself.

He wasn't sure if he would be able to make that choice in this world.

"I let her go," he said softly. He knew what his other self would have done. Once his mad, heroic, selfless mission to the past was done, once he knew he would die, he would have fastened his eyes on Hermione so he could drink in as much of her as possible. How endlessly hard those final moments must have been as she started to fade. As he knew this was the end, and he would never see her mouth turn up in a smile again. Never see her turn at the sound of his voice. And when she was gone, he would have released any hold he had on time.

Draco knew it because it was what he would have done.

"You found her again," his mother said. "You knew you would."

He nodded. "Thank you," he said. For telling him, he meant. For listening to him when he appeared on her doorstep covered in war and ashes with a nightmare in his mouth. For changing the world.

"I love you," she said. "You are my son, and I would do anything to keep you safe." She made it sound that simple and, maybe, in the end, it was.

Draco kissed her on the cheek – something he hadn't done in years – and turned to leave.

"Draco," his mother said, worried, maybe, by the sudden affection. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going to ask Hermione to marry me."

. . . . . . . . . .

A/N – Thank you for reading. It may take me an extra week to get the next chapter done. Do not be alarmed if I skip a week of posting.