Chapter 3: The Crossings

Potter finally found it in himself to be quiet, and it was no wonder why. Within fifteen minutes, he was dead asleep in his chair.

Draco had seen the signs coming. As soon as Potter relegated himself to actually working, the fatigue that had shown itself in Shacklebolt's office reemerged in a bold way. Yawns gave way to lengthy sighs, and then Potter shifted so that both his legs dangled over the one armrest. He closed his journal and tucked it underneath his arse, folded his arms, and turned his face toward the chair's back. Potter's chest and shoulders rose and fell in a steady, slow rhythm.

In the new silence, it all started to really hit Draco just how big of a turn his day had taken. His office felt small, for it was certainly not fitted for two people and then a Vanishing Cabinet. It might not have felt like such tight quarters if it wasn't Potter himself that had landed here.

Thirteen years. . .

Draco had thought after the Battle of Hogwarts that seeing Potter kill Voldemort would be the last time they ever crossed paths. He expected his trial to be no more than a formality. Draco couldn't say it fully surprised him that Potter spoke on his behalf. That's just the sort of person he was (which was a bitter thought at the time). For it to actually mean something to a Wizengamot hell-bent to put at least one Malfoy away was something else. All of a sudden, Draco's shackles were being removed, he was being escorted out of the courtroom through a private passage, and someone from the Department of Mysteries was sticking their hand out to him before he could even change into proper clothes.

Draco sent Potter a thank you note a few weeks later, once he'd caught his breath. A response came with the owl upon return, but Draco didn't read it before burning it. He felt far too embarrassed about the whole thing—about everything—to know what Potter had to say. Draco just wanted to vanish.

So that was what he did. It unnerved more than annoyed Draco just how close Potter got to the truth by little more than taking a passing glance at his life. Draco did live in the Muggle world. He indeed owned a bungalow in Oxford. He'd learned whatever sorts of non-magical maths and sciences Oxford's various colleges taught by auditing the lectures and buying the textbooks to follow along.

Potter had changed, that was certain. Draco used to find endless entertainment before the war kicked off in how imperceptive he was. It seemed like everyone at school but Potter knew Draco fancied him. All this time later, Draco couldn't help but wonder if Potter ever actually figured it out. He'd figured some things out, at least, seeing as Potter's bisexual status had plagued the Daily Prophet for weeks when the news first landed.

Draco only followed it because he'd been proven right about the way Potter looked at Cedric Diggory. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Potter had grown into himself and turned out annoyingly fit. The only reason Potter looked so fit at all was because the Daily Prophet had skilled photographers, who would never dare to catch Potter at a bad angle.

It turned out Draco was wrong on that point. That very same fit idiot now curled up to sleep on a chair in Draco's office. Potter had seen today who Draco in kind had grown up to be, and he'd been impressed.

This was not good.

Draco resisted the urge to slap himself. Not only was it not good, it was ridiculous. This was not the context in which Potter reappeared in his life. They weren't teenagers anymore. They were professionals, and there were two people that needed Draco to bloody focus so that they could come home.

He quietly opened one of his desk drawers and retrieved a black box. Inside was a spherinder situated inside a gyroscope. An in-flux polychoron glimmered at its centre. Draco hung it around his neck and grabbed his omni-specs again. After tilting the Spacetime Turner and dropping a dimension, the world fell abruptly still.

Draco donned his omni-specs. His office lit up in gold. Magic emanated off of everything, including Potter. Like the central clasp on a robe, strands of gold all led to a common place on Potter's chest. They enveloped him completely, the same way they did Draco.

It was all very distracting. Draco tweaked the auxiliary lenses so they filtered the magic out of his vision.

That left Draco alone with the Vanishing Cabinet's faulty exit. The one at Hogwarts hadn't been broken like this. After mending the structure, its path had just needed to be pruned away from all the interference created by Hogwarts' magic. Had Draco looked at this particular concern back then, he wasn't sure he would have put two and two together on what the problem was.

"Well," Draco said under his breath. "Let's see where you go, then."

He teased the tear with the tip of his wand, unravelling it and being careful not to make contact ("Divelo. . .dureo. . .divelo. . ."). By the time it even started looking straightened out, Draco's arms and feet had grown tired. He made use of his unique place within the folds of space by suspending himself within it. It curved underneath the rear side of his thighs in a makeshift seat. Draco tilted himself backward when his upper back started to ache.

His stomach cramped as what should be noon passed, but the sensation receded after a few more hours. Draco painstakingly translated features and magical marks into a series of runes. When he finished, he about toppled to the floor in a sag of relief.

Draco tilted himself back up to the fourth dimension, where it remained just shy of eleven o'clock in the morning. He'd been ignoring how badly he needed to use the toilet. That sensation ebbed away. His physical fatigue fizzled like a drop of water in a hot pan.

"Potter," Draco said while winding his watch back.

Potter groaned into the back of his chair.

"Wake up." Draco tapped him on the leg. "We're leaving."

"Leaving?" Potter repeated. "Where are we going?"

"My home."

Potter needed a moment to wake up before he was able to banish his chair and stumble over to where Draco stood by the fireplace. Draco held his Floo pouch out to Potter, then followed him through. Potter had already taken it upon himself to begin passively exploring Draco's home the same way he had his office earlier.

"Yeah," Potter said more to himself than Draco. "This looks a lot more lived in than your house in Nice."

"Still on about that, are you?" Draco asked. "And my house isn't messy."

"Lived in means comfortable, to me." Potter waved a hand dismissively through a yawn. "Why are we here, exactly?"

"While you were catching a wink of sleep, I found out where we need to go." Draco unbuttoned his waistcoat to ditch it. "We might as well eat, pack, rest, and then be off."

He turned away from Potter, irritated, because he had gone right back to studying Draco in that intrusive fashion.

"You've been at it?" Potter asked. "Without time, I take it? For how long?"

"I don't know, exactly. Do you prefer Italian or Indian?"

"Food?"

"Men."

"Wow, never heard that joke before." The roll of Potter's eyes was audible in his tone.

"You set yourself up for it." Draco smirked and shrugged off his waistcoat. "Who would I be to deny you?"

"Ha, ha." Potter rubbed his eyes again, pushing his glasses up toward his forehead. "Hilarious. And did I mention original?"

"Might have." Draco looked pointedly at Potter's Auror uniform. "Can you look more casual than that? You might draw some attention."

"We're going somewhere?"

"That's why I asked your preference." Draco edged toward his bedroom. "Or did you not gather that from the question?"

"Why can't we just eat here?" Potter called when Draco set his bedroom door against the frame.

Draco ignored him until reemerging in simple trousers and a thin jumper. He scoffed to see that Potter had made no similar effort toward dressing down. "As if a Malfoy would ever feed themselves."

"Right," Potter breezily replied. "That's why there's a plate with breadcrumbs on it by the sink. And a tea cup—"

"Quit being so nosy!" Draco snapped at him.

"Yes, how embarrassing." The corner of Potter's mouth pulled toward a laugh. "You fed yourself breakfast this morning. How will you ever survive the scandal?"

"Fine." Steaming, Draco marched over to the kitchen. "I'll mind that I don't poison you to such a degree that you die right away. You'll only suffer long and terribly."

"Already there." One of the kitchen table chairs protested against the floor before Potter dropped down onto it. "I'm too tired to go sit in a restaurant anyway."

Draco grunted.

"This way too, you could tell me what comes next. You probably wouldn't want to do that in public, huh?"

Draco shrugged as he dropped a few slices of bread into the toaster. "Muggles don't pay attention. Even if they did, they'd just think I was working on something from the university."

"Oh, I guess so."

"Tea?" Draco resented to ask.

"If you're offering."

Draco rolled his eyes.

"So what did you do, then?" Potter asked. "While I was sleeping?"

"I don't much feel like explaining it." Draco flicked the kettle on, then leaned back against the counter with his arms folded. Potter looking at him expectantly just about drew another eye roll. "Every moment in time has coordinates, within which naturally arises a universal address. I found this one's."

"How?"

Draco considered Potter in kind. This soon after doing it, he still felt drained. And yet, beneath that, a will to share things he never could before—with a captive audience, no less—flickered to life. While Draco thought about where to even start on explaining, he set on readying a teapot.

"Do you remember how strange looking through my omni-specs was?" he asked.

"Won't forget anytime soon, I reckon."

Draco smirked briefly. "We aren't biologically equipped to process everything there is to see about reality. We perceive three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. Anything higher than that is difficult to imagine because it's not something we encounter in our day-to-day life."

"Okay. . ." Nodding slowly, Potter furrowed his brow.

"Do you remember what I said about places being tucked into other places?"

"Sure, yeah."

"It's not as if where Weasley wound up is billions of light-years away," Draco said. "It's here—all around us. Are you familiar with the concept of divergent timelines? For instance, you defeated Voldemort here, but there are universes out there in which you did not."

Potter's lips disappeared into a thin line.

"I don't know what the circumstances of the universe we'll be visiting are going to be," Draco said as the toaster popped. "We don't even know at what point in that universe's timeline we'll emerge at. You might see people who are gone. You might see people who haven't existed yet, or who never existed at all in our universe. Will you be able to keep yourself together if we see your parents? Voldemort? Dumbledore?"

"It's not like it's real. Right?"

"Their reality is just as valid as ours."

"What does that mean for Ron?"

"I'm not certain." Draco started building the sandwich with meat and cheese. "Are he and Yaxley visitors like we will be, or did the universe integrate them? That should be easy enough to sort out. We'll ask around if someone appeared out of nowhere claiming to be who Weasley is."

One of Potter's eyebrows lifted. "We'll be able to do that without cocking anything up?"

"There won't be anything to cock up," Draco answered. "Each universe's timeline is already set in stone from beginning to end. For this other one, that includes our temporary presence there."

"As if us going there was always going to happen?"

"I assure you, it's less a violation of free will and more a consequence of existing within a multiverse," Draco said. "What I'm saying is we don't need to worry about anything but the job itself, which might turn sticky if the universe integrated Weasley and Yaxley."

Potter's brow reached a new level of furrow. "What's that mean, exactly?"

"If that happened, they'll think they belong there. They'll have entire lives we'll need to take them away from."

As that sunk in on Potter, he gradually paled. Draco plated his sandwich and set it in front of him.

"Integration is only a theorized result of falling through a natural wormhole," Draco said. "That situation wouldn't be all bad. It would mean Yaxley didn't get a head start, if you're bent on bringing him home."

"Of course I am." Potter took a bite. "He's not getting a free pass, if this was what he hoped to accomplish by jumping into that Cabinet."

"Perhaps you have a greater appreciation now for why you'll be Obliviated once this is all over." Draco leaned against the counter next to the toaster. "Considering the possibilities, we may have to do some things you won't be proud of, Potter."

Potter said nothing to that, although he was certainly thinking while working on his sandwich. Draco made his and took a seat.

"We should get the equivalent of a full night's rest before we leave," he said. "Luckily for you, I feel compelled to be a good host. You get a choice between the bed or sofa."

"I can just take the sofa," Potter replied. "I'm used to sleeping wherever I can. It kinda comes with the territory sometimes."

"With work?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know how you could do that, myself," Draco said. "My days of strange sleep schedules are definitely behind me."

"It's a bit rich to say that when you just spent however-many hours this morning in a place where time stopped."

"It doesn't leave a mark once you return, spare critical exemptions," Draco said. "I should say that under normal circumstances, a wonky schedule affects me more than it used to. One bad night, and my entire week is off."

"It's different if there's adrenaline involved, or a sense of urgency. I've barely slept since Nice." When Potter blinked, he did so slowly. "It's definitely going to hit here soon. I was dead to the world in your office."

"Mhm," Draco agreed, smirking.

"Knowing what's happened brought me down from all that," Potter said. "It's comforting that you know what you're doing."

"Luckily for you." Draco hid his pride at that compliment behind a bored tone and survey of his fingernails. "Like I said, there are some things we won't know until we arrive in the other universe. We have tools at our disposal that I'm well-versed in. We might be flying a little blind, otherwise."

"I'm used to thinking on my feet."

"Good."

"I learned pretty early on in life that if someone in the room knows better than you, just shut up and listen." Potter popped the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth. "So when it comes to all this time and dimension stuff, if you tell me to jump I'm going to ask how high."

"I'll do my best not to take advantage of that."

Potter scoffed good-naturedly. "And if the positions are switched?"

Draco furrowed his brow.

"You said we might have to do things I won't be proud of," Potter said. "To me, that sounds like there's a chance of running into trouble. If a situation turns dangerous, that's more my field of expertise."

"Are you expecting trouble?"

"I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than unprepared." Potter shrugged. "You said you've visited other universes before. What's your experience been? Do you just act like a passive observer?"

"If things even hint toward turning testy, I leave." Draco chewed briefly on his bottom lip. "I suppose I won't have that option this time."

"You knew your way with a wand, back in the day." Potter squinted an eye with an assessing gaze of Draco. "Is that something you're still up to par with?"

"It's been a while since I used it that way," Draco admitted. "I don't put myself into situations where I need to defend myself. It turns out I'm quite capable of resisting antagonizing someone for the sake of it."

Potter snorted. "What am I, then? A special case?"

"You'll always be a special case, as far as that goes."

Stop flirting, a little voice in the back of Draco's mind said.

"Comforting," Potter replied. "Really. Show me to your sofa, then?"

Draco gestured toward the sitting room, where said sofa sat. "There's a blanket and pillow in the ottoman."

"All right."

"Help yourself to the shower or anything, if you need it."

"Are you trying to tell me I do?"

It was incredibly difficult to maintain a respectable glower when Potter grinned.

"There's no good answer to that," Draco said.

When Draco woke from a kip later in his darkened bedroom, light framed his door from Potter having turned some on in the kitchen. Draco could both smell and hear something cooking.

His mouth watered profusely through the short detour into the bathroom. The shower had run. Potter's hair was wet and half-tousled as he stirred a pot of something on the stove.

"Get enough beauty sleep, then?" Potter asked without looking over.

"I don't know." Draco rubbed his face. "Did I?"

"Terrible."

"You didn't even look to see."

Eyebrows raised, Potter gave Draco a pointed glance. He turned back to what he was doing without a further word. Stop flirting, came that voice again.

Draco leaned his hip against the counter, arms folded. Potter had a lot on the go. Cooked and drained fettuccine noodles steamed off to the side. The sizzling Draco had heard when he first woke was a chicken breast. Broccoli had taken its place in the pan. Draco couldn't see inside the oven, but he would wager good money that his mouth watered incessantly due to garlic bread. Potter stirred and added parmesan cheese to Alfredo sauce.

"This looks like a last meal," Draco commented.

"I can't tell if that's a compliment or not."

"Are you not planning on eating while we're away?"

Potter shrugged. "I don't know what we're walking into. It's not a bad idea to fill up while things are certain."

"We'll have accommodations."

"All right."

Draco assessed Potter anew. "Need a hand with anything?"

"Nah."

"I suppose I'll pack, then." Draco pushed off the counter. "I'm going to Floo to my office for some things."

"Okay."

Draco fetched his journal, the Spacetime Turner, and the librometer. He took a moment to see if anything else stuck out to him. He grabbed his omni-specs just in case, and hesitated at Quackers.

"Sorry," Draco said to the duck. "Perhaps we ought to spend some time apart to cool our heads."

Potter sat at the kitchen table when Draco returned home. He'd plated himself dinner, and poked at it with his left hand while writing in his journal.

Draco forked some fettuccine onto his plate. "You've gone rather quiet."

Potter glanced up. "I got thinking about something while I was cooking, and I'm just putting it down so I don't forget."

Draco resumed his seat opposite Potter. "What is it?"

"I never really questioned where that Vanishing Cabinet came from, or why it was at your house. When I thought it was you there, it made some sort of sense. Nostalgia, interest, use—take your pick." The tip of Potter's biro slowed. He put it down and switched his fork over to his right hand. "Can I ask you something mad?"

"Like what?"

"Could it have been you, at your place?" Potter asked. "A different you, from somewhere else?"

Draco's insides flushed. He hadn't even considered the possibility. But—

"I really don't think so," he said slowly, probing at the discomfort arising from gut instinct. "If it was another me, he would have had to arrive here over five years ago. That's when I finished developing my librometer. I can say for certain that nothing as large as a human being has arrived or departed in that time, until now."

"But you can't account for before then?"

Draco shook his head. "Weasley and Yaxley are hardly the first people to ever fall out of our universe like this. For the sake of simplicity, default-zero on my librometer doesn't account for any of those absences. It's only set to show any recent, local fluctuations."

"Recent as in the last five years, you mean," Potter mused with one eye narrowed in thought. "Does that completely rule out it's another you?"

"Never absolutely." Draco hated to put that thought in Potter's mind. "It's very unlikely, though. It would first of all require that another me actually found this universe, among infinite others. Then, you have to wonder why another me would care to spend five years away from home, and for something so petty. He has access to dimensional travel. To have gone far enough in my line of work to be able to visit here, why would he consider helping Death Eaters he has no personal connection to a valuable use of that?"

Potter hummed.

"The simpler explanation is the more likely one." Draco paused. "There's also that Vanishing Cabinet to factor in. He couldn't have not known it was broken the way it was."

"Maybe Yaxley took it there for repair—hm, no," Potter stopped himself. "If he knew it was broken, he wouldn't have jumped through it. Unless he knew it wouldn't be dangerous."

"I don't know." That niggling gut feeling that this wasn't right returned to Draco. "It doesn't make sense, and I'm saying this as someone who's fully aware I could fall back into that entire ideology if I wasn't careful. I don't feel any particular draw to it—nor have I for some time—but it was a formative part of my development. It shaped me. Everything I am is built on top of that. I just. . .have to be aware of it."

Draco became immensely interested in his food. For him, his questionable past was an everyday part of his life. Potter didn't have the context of everything to fairly assess how it all translated to the present, though. He wasn't in an impartial enough position, and could deal some rather unsavoury consequences if he declared Draco to have slipped back into old ways. This morning proved that.

"We like to say the simpler explanation is the more likely one in Auror work too," Potter eventually said. "All this about an alternate you doesn't seem very likely. I also don't really want to wonder what kind of a bloody mess this job could be if we have to factor in influences from other dimensions, or what have you."

"I would hope that if it is another me, you wouldn't pin me with whatever he's done."

"No," Potter said, then paused. "I don't know how you would handle that."

"March him home, I suppose, and let the proper authorities in his universe deal with him." Draco's gut feeling swelled again. "I just don't know why he would care enough to spend five years here doing that, when he could be doing literally anything else."

"If it was your dad, maybe it would be a different story."

"I doubt it. There's an emotional divide across universes like that. Lucius Malfoy is my father, yes, but I don't regard any other version of him as such."

Potter hummed. "I might keep this in my notes, but it doesn't really seem worth entertaining. It's more likely you'd left some hair on a brush somewhere, and one of them was using it to make Polyjuice Potion. It's your house after all, even if you haven't been there in a while."

Anger flickered to life in Draco's stomach, borne of a strong sense of violation. Of course none of the Death Eaters—spare his father, perhaps—would care if Draco caught trouble. They'd found a good hideout, and that was apparently all that mattered.

"I don't know what help I could actually offer once we're done with Weasley and Yaxley, but you'd have it," Draco bitterly said. "So much for minding my own business, I suppose. If they want to drag me in on this, I'll do what I can to make them regret it."

"We'll have Yaxley then, so we could see what he has to say for himself," Potter replied.

"Yeah."

"For what it's worth, I really do doubt you or some other version of you had anything to do with it." Potter spoke in that stern Auror tone again. "Why would anyone with access to dimensional travel bother with something like this? After visiting your office, you definitely look a bit too preoccupied with bigger things."

Draco perked a little, his spine straightening. "Do you know what's interesting?"

Potter blinked, then relaxed. "What?"

"Well, the conclusion drawn from this won't be news to you, but you might appreciate the sentiment anyway," Draco said. "Do you recall what I told you earlier in Shacklebolt's office, about how reducing us to our basic components leaves us indistinguishable from anything or anyone else?"

The corner of Potter's mouth twitched toward a smile when he nodded.

"There are Unspeakables that study things like belief and behaviour," Draco continued. "Sometimes they consult with me—and not for my personal experience. You would think that looking at reality the way I do would have no bearing on such a uniquely human concept, right?"

"Depends what you've got to say about it, I guess."

"There is no moral code written in string for us." Draco started poking at his food again with earnest. "If we're all part of the same construct, then any form of violence at its essence is self-harm. How irrelevant from that perspective do things like pureblood supremacy become? War? Power? Money?"

Potter hummed. "What about good things, in that case? Love, for example?"

"Love as a concept practically accounts for half the forces of nature," Draco replied. "Gravity is described in general relativity as accelleration. As humans, we say we're falling in love. It's attraction. So is electromagnetism. Interaction creates a charge."

Potter exhaled a chuckle.

"You laugh, but love is essentially a human expression of natural law." Draco put a piece of chicken in his mouth. "As above, so below. All the little things swirl around each other, so then do we, and so then do things like stars and galaxies on the largest scale."

"I'm not laughing, even if that's a little more sentimental than anything I'd ever expect to come out of your mouth," Potter said. "I like it."

"And you're accusing me of being sentimental."

"It just doesn't seem like something someone would follow up saying 'morals don't exist' with."

"There's no explicit moral code written into existence," Draco corrected him. "We have to make it for ourselves. I suppose you could argue that when human beings are an expression of existence, so in turn are our morals. God, what a mess of hypocrisy, in that case."

"Weren't you saying earlier that for every positive there's a negative?" Potter asked. "You know, balance and all that?"

Yet again, Draco found himself impressed with Potter's ability to keep up. "How do you know what Good is if you don't have Evil to compare it to?"

"Exactly."

While Draco cleaned the kitchen after dinner, Potter borrowed some Blue Floo in order to jump to his own place and back. Draco had gathered everything personal he expected to need by the time he returned.

"We'll head for the Department of Mysteries' lobby," Draco told him.

He let Potter go first, to ensure he wound up in the right place. Draco came out behind him, not surprised in the least that the night crew eyed Potter with mingled suspicion and curiosity. Potter fell in step with Draco on his way past them all, and through a door that led into a circular room fit with eleven more.

"Now it's all coming back to me," Potter said.

"I'm sure." Draco readjusted his bag's shoulder strap as the room began to spin. "Sometimes it hits me all over again that you and your friends broke in here. I mean really, Potter."

Potter shrugged, toying with his lip. "Is that archway and veil still here?"

"Yes."

"Ever work with it?"

"Here and there."

Potter fell quiet. Draco could almost hear all the burning questions ticking to life within him, but now wasn't really the time to get in about it. It wasn't as if Draco would have any answers that Potter liked.

The doors stopped. They carried on straight, coming into a corridor. Potter slowed in his step.

"Recognize it?" Draco asked.

"Think so." Potter brushed his knuckle against a door they passed. "There are brains in here, aren't there?"

"Mhm."

They didn't have much further to go. Draco led Potter to a door on the opposite side of the corridor. The room was illuminated by a faint red glow emanating from veins of light embedded in the walls.

"That's not ominous, or anything," Potter commented.

"It's just a travel room," Draco replied. "Stand in the circle here, and make sure no part of you is outside of it."

An empty rune annulus was painted onto the floor. Journal in one hand and wand in the other, Draco went about tracing the coordinates he'd taken earlier from the Vanishing Cabinet. Once the last one had been set into place between the inner and outer rings, they and the rings themselves glowed scarlet. A sudden wave of nausea hit Draco as the space inside it all undocked. The rest of the room flattened in appearance. A lack of depth perception made Draco's eyes feel strange.

He ignored it all in favour of his bag. His journal went away, and he pulled out the box containing his Spacetime Turner.

Potter's eyes widened. "What kind of a Time Turner is that?"

"Know about those, do you?" Draco asked. "This one's more advanced than just a regular Time Turner. It isn't limited to the fourth dimension, nor to only a few hours' worth of time."

"Huh."

"It's going to be disorienting," Draco said. "You'll want to sit down."

Draco did along with him. He held up the Spacetime Turner, watching the central polychoron. As its vertices and faces flowed about, they reflected the rune address back against its casing.

With two turns, the gyroscope began to spin. The runes showed on its gimbals as well. What followed was the sensation of being trapped as a ghost within a book, of which the pages rapidly turned. It came and went in every direction, not unlike the gyroscope.

The Spacetime Turner came to a slow stop. Once it had, the room returned to genuine focus. The runes faded away.

"That's us." Draco returned the Turner to its box. "Come."

"We're there?" Potter looked a little green. "Or here, I guess?"

"Mhm." Draco stood and shouldered his bag. "Let's go find out where 'here' is."