Chapter 1: Through Time and Space

The day started like any other for Draco. He woke up, had tea and toast, and then dressed for work. He threw some Floo powder into his home's fireplace, which turned the temporary flames a cerulean blue. Draco stepped through into his office in the Department of Mysteries.

He heaved a sigh. "I believe I owe you an apology, Quackers."

The rubber duck on a platform on Draco's desk sat still and quiet, its orange beak agape in a wide smile.

"Things were said." Draco pulled the chair and took a seat. "Regrets were had. I'm ready to move on if you are."

Quackers' unfocused eyes remained as such.

"Much appreciated."

Draco's gaze swept over the rest of his desk, where he'd neatly placed various instruments. He took a second glance at one, then frowned.

It was the simplest looking one of the lot, called a librometer. It consisted of a diamond rod vertically balanced atop a basic wooden frame. Normally, it stood at a ninety-degree angle. It leaned slightly to the left at the moment.

Draco gasped facetiously. "You naughty duck, Quackers."

He nudged the librometer with the tip of his finger. It rocked itself back toward equilibrium before settling in the same leaned position.

"I know I promised I would never again speak ill of the factory that produced you, but this is beyond the pale," Draco said. "In what world is upsetting universal stability a suitable method of revenge?"

Draco supposed it created a lot of sudden work for him. Even then, it was a prospect that arrived with a flourish of excitement. The librometer had never gone off before other than under manufactured circumstances.

The degree of tilt came to 1.73 degrees. Draco wrote it down on a piece of parchment. His heart picked up, for that number meant something to him. Well, half the value did. He didn't want to make any assumptions as to why it had suddenly doubled.

A quiet chime sounded inside his inner ear, alerting Draco of an arrival in his inbox. He sighed again, annoyed. This wasn't the time to be bothered.

His eyebrows rose. Other Unspeakables occasionally requested his input on something. Never before had a red folder appeared, denoting the highest level of classification within the Ministry.

There was a note stuck to it:

The Minister put out a call for immediate consult. I thought this would be right up your alley. He's in his office. Return if not interested.

θ

Draco opened the folder. Only one piece of parchment was inside: a Magical Enforcement case file timestamped for a little over an hour ago. Names and locations remained redacted, but the story was otherwise plainly stated. A pair of Aurors, in pursuit of one of the Death Eaters that disappeared after the war, had cornered them yesterday. Said Death Eater jumped into a Vanishing Cabinet to make an escape. One half of the Auror pair headed in after. The Cabinet shut, and the door was stuck. The Auror's partner was unable to follow. Given some time, the missing Auror had not shown up or made contact.

Requesting consult to determine exit location, finished off the summary of events. Time sensitive.

"Well." Draco blinked and prodded his librometer again. "This is an unfortunate situation."

It was for that Auror and Death Eater, anyway. Draco himself had just been handed a means to further some research he'd long ago shelved.

Draco added the notes he'd made into the red folder. He grabbed his omni-specs before stepping back to the fireplace. The flames turned blue again. Draco came out the other end into Kingsley Shacklebolt's office.

Shacklebolt sat up straighter behind his desk. Just as Draco opened his mouth, the two people that sat in front of Shacklebolt turned around in their seats.

A jolt short-circuited Draco's mind. He blinked before returning the scowl he was receiving from one of them.

"Brilliant," he said. "I should have guessed you'd be somehow involved in this, Potter."

Potter leapt up out of his chair. "You've got a lot of nerve showing your face here, Malfoy."

"Harry," the third man in the room said in a stern, booming voice. It was Gawain Robards, the Head Auror. "Hold on."

Robards looked at the red folder in Draco's hand, and then the omni-specs hanging from his fingers by their strap. A headache started to push in on Draco.

"I was asked to consult on some matter with a Vanishing Cabinet," he drawled. "If you'd rather someone else, I can return the file to my superior."

"Who's your superior?" Potter shot at him.

Draco gave him a nasty smile. "That's classified, I'm afraid."

Shacklebolt approached where Potter had stopped about ten feet away from Draco. "You must have come from the Department of Mysteries."

Draco nodded. "Where's the Cabinet?"

"Through here."

Shacklebolt directed Draco toward a pair of double doors. They led into a conference room. At the opposite end, looking exactly as Draco expected it to, was a Vanishing Cabinet.

Draco tried the handle, to find it wouldn't budge.

"Already did that," Potter said in a clipped tone from behind.

Other than a roll of the eyes, Draco ignored him. His shock to have crossed paths with Potter for the first time since his post-war trial began to wane. "So I take it the Auror who disappeared was Ron Weasley."

"Is that relevant?" Potter asked.

"Just curious." Draco hesitated. "Who was the Death Eater?"

"How about you focus," Potter replied, "and then we can talk about it."

"My." Draco stopped with his hand on the side of the Cabinet. "Aren't we touchy. Forgive me for being curious as to whether or not you finally tracked my father down."

"No," Potter snapped. "We didn't."

"There, was that so hard to say?"

Shacklebolt sighed. "Gentlemen."

Draco smiled again, even more nastily than previous. "Of course, Minister."

He set the red file on the table to free up his hands. It never occurred to Draco that his omni-specs looked strange, for any other Unspeakable that saw them never thought twice about it. There were far stranger things in the Department of Mysteries than some refashioned goggles fit with magical lenses. Here, outside his comfort zone, Draco could feel the intense stares of three people whose expertise consisted entirely of law enforcement.

The tingle of the primary lens' magic touched Draco's eyes. He blinked rapidly a few times against its coolness. As his eyes adjusted, the world slowly started to peel away from itself. If he moved his head, everything wavered as if aggravated by extreme heat. The gasses that made up the air became visible.

Draco adjusted the auxiliary lenses. After refracting enough attributes of reality that the human eye and brain could comprehend the sight, the room turned into a vacuum of very small wriggling things. Waves bounced off everything—sound, light, magic, gravity, and everything beyond and between.

The Cabinet was no different. It looked exactly as Draco would have expected, except for the golden trail fluttering off behind it like a curtain stuck in a gentle breeze. It came to an abrupt stop within the room, as though cut. The ends glimmered.

It confirmed how Draco had put two-and-two together already with his librometer and the timely arrival of the red file. He pulled off his omni-specs, then froze.

The file no longer sat on the table. Potter had it open across one hand. Shacklebolt and Robards both looked at it as well, standing on each side of him.

Potter glanced up. "What's this signature on the note?"

"Theta. My superior." Draco grew apprehensive. "You really shouldn't be reading that. That information isn't the sort of thing that can leave my office."

"There's not a whole lot here." Potter brushed that off. Draco couldn't decide it if was to his benefit or detriment that Potter had finally cooled down. "This Theta, they thought this would be up your alley? Because of the Vanishing Cabinet?"

"I suppose. My experience with them is why I was recruited to the Department in the first place."

"What's this thing about the. . ." Potter squinted. "This note about a librometer. What's that mean? Why'd you put it in here?"

"Oh my god, Potter," Draco said under his breath while rubbing his eyes. "I had almost forgotten how absolutely annoying you are."

"Is it even real?"

"No, I spend all my days making things up, just in case I run into you. I could never pass up the chance to get on your nerves, should it happen."

"It's working," Potter replied. "You know, in case you were wondering."

"Oh, good." Draco touched a hand to his chest. "All those years of work, not wasted."

"You need to start answering my questions in full earnest, Malfoy." Potter dropped the file onto the table and folded his forearms on the back of one of the conference table chairs. "Give up the act."

Draco blinked, then studied each of them more carefully than he had thus far. There was nothing in Shacklebolt or Robards' demeanours that went against the way Potter spun this entire situation. Draco may have been walking free for over a decade, but he would not yet forget what it felt like for a line of Aurors to have him cornered.

"Wait," Draco finally said. "You called me here. Isn't this about Weasley and whatever Death Eater you were after? Something really has happened. I measured it before Theta sent me the file. I've seen it now. So what is it? You didn't make up some cock-and-bull story just to get me here. You can't have."

"That doesn't exclude you having made up a cock-and-bull story," Potter said. "I've never heard of a lidometer before."

"A librometer, and you've never heard of them because I invented them," Draco coolly replied. "So are we just ignoring the fact that you put out a call for help on this, and it found its way to my desk? I don't have control over what Theta passes along to me. I could still be down in my office right now, none the wiser of anything, if they'd decided someone else might be better suited."

Potter's eyebrows hadn't stopped rising yet. "We aren't going to talk about Nice?"

"Nice?" Draco blinked, his confusion growing. "Nice, France?"

"Yes. Nice, France."

"What about it?"

"Where all this happened!" Potter snapped, his anger having returned. "You were there!"

"I absolutely was not," Draco replied. "I own a house there, but I don't live in it. I haven't been there in months."

"Interesting. And yet, I saw you." Potter's nostrils flared. "You slipped away. Can't say I've ever caught up to someone this quickly. And not even trying, at that."

"You have gone right mad, Potter." Despite that this was beyond asinine, Draco grew nervous. "I was not in Nice yesterday."

"Can you prove that?"

"I work alone and I live alone." Draco looked to Shacklebolt and Robards for some sort of help. "The fireplace in my office keeps timestamped signatures of comings and goings, but that's it. What time was this?"

"About five in the afternoon, a time zone over. Four o'clock here."

Draco relaxed a little. "I was in my office. You could check the records."

Robards was the one to speak up. "How would we do that?"

"Send a note to Theta, would be my best guess."

Potter gestured at the table. "Take a seat, Malfoy."

Draco just crossed his arms as Potter took one opposite. He scoffed when, again, Potter gestured.

"This is ridiculous," Draco said under his breath. "Honestly. How long does this go on, Potter? Thirteen years since my acquittal, and I'm still getting shaken down like a common criminal."

Potter leaned back in his chair, studying Draco. Shacklebolt scrawled something on a piece of parchment. It satisfied Draco to some degree that, when Shacklebolt tapped it with his wand to send off, the memo slipped itself into apparent non-existence. Shacklebolt didn't seem surprised by it. That too was encouraging.

Shacklebolt and Robards chose to take seats at the other end of the table. The longer the three of them watched Draco, the more furious he grew. He never should've answered to this file, even if that meant spinning his wheels about what exactly had caused the balance of the entire bloody universe to shift off-kilter.

Potter opened the file again.

"What's a librometer for?" he asked.

"Wouldn't you like to know."

"Seeing as I asked, I suppose you could assume I do." Potter paused. "Or maybe you did just make it up, and threw it on a piece of parchment to try and lend some credibility as to why you popped out of Kingsley's fireplace."

Draco scoffed. "Can you believe this, Minister? He thinks that little of your office's security measures."

"You have Blue Floo," Shacklebolt replied. "That overrides a lot, if not everything."

"It's also standard issue solely for Unspeakables. You know, from the Department of Mysteries." Draco laid it on thick. "Where I work—and have worked, since '98."

"It also takes you anywhere you want to go," Potter said. "Like—I don't know—Nice, for instance? Just throwing that out there."

"Oh, Potter." Draco shook his head. "I would have expected such a highly-esteemed Auror to know that Blue Floo leaves traces wherever it goes. If it shows I was in my office at the time in question, I was in my office. There's no other way out. No corridor access. No Apparation. Fireplace only."

Potter raised an eyebrow. "No corridor access?"

Draco smiled again, his eyes squinted from the fury seething beneath his surface. "No. You see, back in '96, a handful of teenagers broke into the Department. Quite a mess, really. There were casualties—"

"Watch it," Potter hissed.

"What? He was my family too," Draco silkily replied. "After that, the Department decided that instead of risking such a thing happening again, its more sensitive operations would be partitioned off."

"And this is what you do?" Potter asked. "Sensitive operations?"

"Oh, very sensitive." With a sigh chock full of feigned hopelessness, Draco looked at the Vanishing Cabinet. "So sensitive that, without it and without me, I'm afraid you'll never see your partner again."

Draco's gaze slid back to Potter. He fought himself hard with that information. All Draco could do was smirk.

"I suppose we might as well just wait and see if I'll be going to Azkaban today." Draco sighed again, finally sitting down. "I'll have all my access taken away, if I do. And then what will ever become of Ron Weasley?"

Potter sat quietly with his head bowed, lips pressed and gaze roaming yet again over the minimal amount of words Draco had put down in regard to the matter.

After what felt like an age, a familiar chime sounded in Draco's ear. A folded piece of parchment had appeared on the table in front of Shacklebolt.

He broke the seal and read whatever Theta had sent. Draco wasn't sure what to think about Shacklebolt's eyes crinkling above a smile.

"You took a long lunch," Shacklebolt said. "Didn't get back in until nearly three."

"So?" Draco lifted an eyebrow. "I do that everyday. And then I went home at six."

"I have to admire Theta's thoroughness." Shacklebolt folded the note again. "They checked your office's surveillance. Said that at the time in question, you were having a rather heated argument."

Draco tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. "Is this relevant?"

"No," Shacklebolt said. "It's fine, Harry. He wasn't in Nice."

"So glad we've finally established that," Draco replied. "Would you rather I leave then, so the file can be passed on to someone else?"

"Hold it," Potter spoke. "You said you were the only one that would be able to find Ron."

"So I am." Draco stood and collected his omni-specs by their strap. "But I suppose if you would rather not deal with a nasty ex-Death Eater—who may or may not have been in Nice yesterday, or Prague, or Moscow, or Tokyo, or anywhere else—then I wish you the best of luck. Maybe you'll find someone who knows what a librometer is, and how to read it. Once you invent your own, of course."

Potter ran a hand through his hair. "Malfoy—"

"You can keep my notes," Draco continued. "I'll make myself a new copy."

"Malfoy!" Potter snapped. "Stop being a twat."

"Goodness! I feel like we're twelve years old again," Draco said. "Thank you for the little reunion, Potter. I didn't enjoy it in the slightest."

"You know you're going to help." Potter stood as well. "If you already noticed something weird with—whatever it is you do—it's just as much your business as it is mine. Are you done lording it over me yet?"

"Lording what?" Draco asked, grinning. "That you were wrong?"

"Yes, that I was wrong," Potter ground out.

"I haven't heard an apology yet."

"For fuck's sake."

"Is that really so much to ask?"

Draco's grin bordered on painful. Potter was right, of course. Draco would help. Honestly, he would probably end up doing what needed to be done regarding Weasley despite whatever Potter said next, since it offered an opportunity for his work to take on a practical function.

Shacklebolt and Robards stood.

"We'll leave you two to it, then," Shacklebolt said. "Can we trust you not to kill each other in here?"

Draco hummed with uncertainty, while Potter scoffed.

"Brilliant," Shacklebolt replied. "Keep us in the loop."

They left.

"All right," Potter said under his breath. Running his fingers through his hair, he suddenly looked very tired. "Sorry then, Malfoy. Just the way it looked. . .chasing who I thought was you after monitoring activity in your house for the last month, then Ron's gone, then you just show up here like none of it happened. . .it's been a shitty night."

Something occurred to Draco that he hadn't had the chance yet to process. "So someone was squatting in my house? And impersonating me?"

"Yeah, I guess they were. And they had Corban Yaxley boarded there."

Draco studied the Cabinet anew. "He's the Death Eater that vanished?"

Potter nodded.

"Did you get a good look at who's impersonating me?" Draco's heart rate picked up. "How are they doing it?"

"Look, we'll figure that out later. Time's of the essence here. What about Ron? Where is he?"

Draco considered Potter for a moment. "Honestly, time isn't of the essence. There's no rush. Weasley's likely fine where he is."

"Likely?" Potter repeated with a slight croak. "What does that mean? What am I supposed to tell Hermione? Or their kids?"

"Have you told them anything at all?"

Potter shook his head. "We were supposed to be abroad until Friday. I snuck back when we transported the Cabinet. Where is he?"

"He's gone," Draco replied. "It's better you haven't told his family anything yet. Considering where Weasley's gone, they might not even have to know anything odd happened in the first place."

"Where's he gone to?"

"Weasley and Yaxley happen to have slipped themselves out of our universe," Draco told him. "Would you like to see?"

"Er, sure."

Draco held the omni-specs up to his eyes to see if the auxiliary lens angles remained correct. Looking through them, Potter turned into a mass of pinging energy running along their individual scripts of natural laws. Draco stood and came around the table.

"A librometer, by the way," Draco said, "measures the net sum of energy in the universe. It's supposed to be zero. Today, it's off by 1.73 degrees with a left lean. That's the total amount of energy that Weasley and Yaxley added up to, all said and done."

"What exactly does that mean?" Potter asked. "The degrees and lean?"

"I've measured before that one adult male comes out to about 0.865 degrees. The left lean indicates a negative sum. That means some energy has departed the universe. Hence, the equivalent of two adult males is gone."

Draco moved to stand behind Potter, which he didn't seem to like. He turned in his seat to look at Draco over his shoulder.

"Turn your chair so that you're facing the Cabinet," Draco told him. "It'll be easier if I hold them for you. It can be disorienting enough when the lenses are stable. That said, don't move your head. And take off your glasses."

Potter let out a little sigh. He set his glasses on the table, then kicked out his chair. He clenched his hands in his lap.

"Tell me if you feel ill," Draco said. "When I say disorienting, I mean disorienting."

Draco held them in place. After a few seconds, Potter leaned his head back with a groan.

"What exactly am I looking at?" Potter squirmed until Draco took them away. "What is that?"

"Congratulations, Potter." Draco couldn't keep the amusement out of his tone. "You've just seen the universe as it really is. No smokescreens, filters, or limitations of the human body's capabilities of perception."

Potter's expression remained in a grimace. He rubbed one of his temples.

"Did you notice the golden trail leading off the Cabinet?" Draco asked. "It looked a bit like a flimsy curtain in the breeze?"

"Er. . ."

"That's supposed to lead to the Cabinet's pair." Because he had long accustomed to the horrendous sensation Potter still reeled from, Draco pulled the omni-specs on. He walked over to where the trail terminated and ran his fingers through it. He couldn't actually feel anything across the dimensional rift. "You're welcome to look again, if you'd like to try. It's not everyday you get to see the edge of the universe. Perhaps you can understand how significant it is to even be in the same room as it, right now."

"The edge," Potter slowly repeated, as if trying the words on his tongue. "Like if we were inside a bubble, or. . .?"

"A bubble is too hollow an object for a perfect metaphor." Nausea touched the back of Draco's throat, so he pushed the omni-specs up to his forehead. "Imagine something not quite solid, but sticky to all the matter compressed inside of it. You're imagining a three-dimensional object, yes? If you watch this sticky bubble move through time, you can see the fourth dimension. When you start taking steps further back and registering even higher dimensions, this bubble begins to look more like a supercoiled book that's spent an afternoon in the rain. The wrinkled pages push apart as their flat properties are compromised by this new attribute of wetness."

"Something like that has an edge?"

Draco's eyebrows leapt up. That was a surprisingly good question for someone whose skull might be thick enough to stop a gamma ray.

"It may not seem like it because reality is inherently stable, but this thing called a brane in which our universe is located can be rather flimsy." Draco returned to the table, resting his bum on the edge. "You recall I said that the net sum of energy in the universe is equal to zero?"

Nodding, Potter folded his arms.

"For everything in the universe that's equal to a value of one, there's something equal to a value of negative-one. Just like dead things go back to the earth, so all those even smaller pieces return to the universe and become recycled. We don't just belong to this place." Draco waved a hand at nothing in particular. "We are this place. You might have an idea that you're someone named Harry Potter. I have an idea that I'm someone named Draco Malfoy. But really, we are just two conscious conglomerates of matter looking at each other—the universe looking at itself. Talking to itself. Other than that, dressed down to our tiniest components, we're indistinguishable from the furniture in this room.

"As for the edge. . ." Draco paused to think, which seemed also to Potter's benefit as his brow furrowed. "It's not just that every place you can call space is actually rather full. There are other universes curled and folded into, around, and within it. Given the right equipment, such as this particular Vanishing Cabinet, you can thin the wall. You can take a peek between those wrinkled pages. You can see that our universe is but one of infinitely many within a multiverse. You can leave this place, and you can come out somewhere else within the brane containing it."

"Have you?"

"Careful, Potter." Draco smirked. "We're coming back around to the things I can't talk about."

"Well, you're going to have to tell me at some point." Potter dipped his head indicatively toward the Vanishing Cabinet. "You said you're the only one that can get Ron back. That means you have to have some experience with this, or at least some sort of idea how it'll all go. And I don't see how keeping me in the dark about it all is going to work when I have no idea what we're doing."

Draco blinked. "Sorry, 'we'?"

"Yeah, 'we'," Potter said. "You weren't planning on doing this all by yourself, were you?"

"The sorts of things it's going to take to get Weasley back are very classified."

"So get me clearance."

Draco gave him a baleful look. "Like I have any say over that."

"So try."

All over again, it hit Draco that he sat alone in a room with Harry bloody Potter. Even though everything was different, everything was so painfully the same. Potter was still stubborn. He was still ready to jump head first into a situation to play the hero. He was still annoying beyond belief.

"Maybe you don't care, but I don't think Ron is going to trust you if you show up alone," Potter said. "And what if you run into Yaxley? Could you handle him yourself? I can't imagine you've had much practice at that sort of thing if this is how you spend all your time. Unless you get into it with whoever it was you had a row yesterday?"

Draco scoffed.

"Try," Potter repeated. "Ask Theta, or whoever you have to. Get me clearance. I can admit when I'm out of my depth. Can you?"

"As if I'm ever out of my depth."

"I'll take that as a no."

Draco drummed his fingers against the tabletop, then gave an insincere smile. He conjured a scrap of parchment, and summoned the quill and ink Shacklebolt had used earlier. The quick note he wrote to Theta disappeared the same way. Suddenly restless, Draco took to an idle walking pace about the room.

Potter shrewdly watched him. Draco just about broke on asking what exactly was so interesting when Theta's response arrived.

"Well?" Potter prompted Draco.

"If you would let me read the entire thing first," Draco said, although the gist was clear. "They'll give you clearance on one condition: you'll need to be Obliviated afterward."

"What?" Potter frowned. "What does it even matter? I seriously doubt I'm going to remember what anything like those goggles or that lidometer—"

"Librometer."

"—are. I definitely won't know anything about how they work."

"That's the condition, Potter. Agree to be Obliviated, or you're not coming." Draco handed the note to him. "Theta prefers an impartial third party do it. Shacklebolt happens to be right in the next room. How convenient for you."

Potter read Theta's note for himself, then sighed. "Fine."