Day Six / Auction One / Magical Objects / Ravenclaw / Time Turner
A/N: Nobody actually goes back in time here, but considering the time-turners are there throughout, and are the sole purpose of/feature heavily in the story, I figured this fulfilled the prompt! Please let me know if I was wrong and I'll retract it. Only warnings are for possibly two swear words, I think? And this is set in some nebulous, hand-wavy, non-canon compliant time. Don't look too hard at the timelines! Oh, and I own nothing.
[Word Count: 3,065]
The deconstructed pieces glittered on the counter. Remus frowned, nudging his glasses until they rested comfortably on the bridge of his nose. The pieces had arrived by post, wrapped carefully in brown parcel paper and slipped through his letterbox in the quiet hours of the morning. He was a light sleeper, and woke easily at the faintest sound, but whoever delivered the parcel was silent. A note tucked inside explained that it had broken during a scuffle, and that a piece was missing, but payment was promised if he could put it all back together by the end of the day.
Remus liked a challenge, but this one was proving much more difficult than he expected.
At half-past three in the afternoon, the pieces were finally in place, laid out on a blueprint, each curved edge aligned with the sketches he'd made earlier. Three empty cups and several chocolate bar wrappers littered the surface, and Remus's hair was even more ragged than usual, as though someone had been rubbing balloons in it all day. But the mechanism was ready, and that was all he really cared about. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to squeeze out the tension behind his eyelids before it became a full-blown headache. He didn't fancy having to hand off this mechanism in the dark with a cold, wet flannel over his eyes.
Remus had always been very gifted at Charms. It was easy enough to darn a hole or stick a table leg back into place, but the truth was, repairing things with magic often had unintended effects. It altered the structure, made things a little more wobbly when they should have been sturdy. There was a limit to the amount of times repairo could fix a vase before the whole thing shattered entirely, turning to dust and chalk.
It was Flitwick that started him on the right track to opening this little shop. After his disastrous attempt at attending Hogwarts failed miserably one awful Full Moon, Flitwick took him under his wing. Quietly, of course, and in private, where nobody had to know that the werewolf still received magical instruction from the same person who taught all the other nice, normal kids. It grated on him at first, but by now Remus was used to hiding and lying low. It never hurts to be underestimated.
The clock on the wall chimed. It was an odd clock, only ever chiming at fourty-five minutes past, and Remus hadn't worked out how to dissolve it of that notion yet. Too much magic in the cogs that needed clearing out, but he rather liked it the way it was. He sat up, stool legs rocking, and faced the mechanism again, putting his glasses back on to see the problem. He rather liked the moment where it all came together.
"Time to put you together, I suppose," he said.
As though summoned by his words - and in retrospect, it seemed very likely that this was the case - there was a loud, ear-splitting crack. Remus winced, reaching for the wand he kept hidden in his drawer. But there was no need. When he looked up, he found a beaming grin aimed at him.
A witch stood in the middle of his shop, as bold as brass and cheekily unashamed of how she'd arrived. She had a shock of bright pink hair clipped back oddly at different angles, and very bright eyes that seemed an unnatural shade of blue, giving her the look of a bedraggled porcupine crossed with a startled owl.
"Wotcher," said the witch, winking at him.
"Hello," Remus said, removing his glasses and folding them up neatly, mindful of the spindly arms. "I'd invite you in, but it seems like you've taken care of that yourself."
The witch flushed. Her nose, which was button-sized and round like a mushroom, flared briefly to the size of a beak before deflating again.
"Ah, sorry. I'd have knocked, but you know how things can be. Mad-Eye's orders!" She paused, and winked again. "It's a pretty time sensitive issue, after all."
Remus blinked at her slowly. "Right, well." It didn't seem like the response she was after, but she just shrugged and shuffled closer. "I assume you're the one who left this here?"
"Actually, that was Mad-Eye," the witch said. "But he's technically in charge of me for the rest of my life, if you ask him, so I guess I'm just as responsible. Aren't you going to do any identity checks or ask me questions?"
"That wouldn't work, seeing as how I've never met you before." Remus raised an eyebrow when the witch flushed again. "Have I?"
"No, no, you're right," she said, shaking her head rapidly, bright pink fading into dark, flustered blue. "We haven't met officially, but Sirius talks about you all the time. We're cousins, y'see. And I've been assigned to a few patrols where I've kept an eye on you before. The Order's pretty keen on making sure you stay safe, so I guess I just forgot that we hadn't met officially."
It almost seemed like there was something she wasn't saying, but she looked earnest enough. Remus hadn't made it this far in life by poking his nose into the Order's business. They worked around him and through him, but rarely with direct contact. He glanced down at the mechanism. He was beginning to have a rough idea of what it might be, and how important it was, if they weren't bothering to hide their faces.
"I'd say it's nice to meet you officially, but you haven't given me a name," Remus pointed out, rising from the stool to shake her hand. She had rough, callused pads on her fingers, a sign of dedicated wandwork. "Remus Lupin."
"You can call me Tonks," she said, pink-cheeked and still so bright-eyed. "You don't seem surprised that we've been patrolling."
"I was blessed from a young age with very good hearing," Remus said dryly, taking a seat again. His hand felt odd without Tonks's palm against his. Almost bereft. He shook it off and ignored her embarrassment, moving swiftly along. "Every piece that was in the parcel is in the correct place. The only problem is, I don't know what the end product will be. It's much easier and much less taxing on the materials to repair something if you have a picture in mind of what it should look like. Otherwise the object has to do all the work itself, you understand?"
Tonks's gaze sharpened as she surveyed the carefully arranged pieces. As they were, they looked like nothing more than a mess of little bronze edges and jagged smears of glass. Remus unfolded the glasses and handed them over.
"Look through these," he said. "They were designed especially for this."
They were one of Flitwick's own personal projects, though Remus had put his own spin on them to prove he was worthy of the apprentice position. The lenses were three sheets thick, and interlaced with a very fine layer of liquid that shifted freely. Everything was blurry to look at unless you laid eyes on a mess. Then the water shifted and flowed to show exactly which way the pieces should fit together. Remus spent hours taking the glasses off, shifting a piece of broken material, putting the glasses back on again, and making adjustments. It was time-consuming, but very effective, and no magic was necessary.
"Woah, this is wicked," Tonks said, batting her eyelashes through the glasses. The effect was a little more bizarre when magnified. "It's almost like there are little arrows pointing to where each bit will go."
"That's the gist of it," he said. "But see here?"
He pointed to one of the larger pieces of glass, which was curved upward like a swollen belly.
"I know all the glass pieces will come together to form a container, and I know all the brass pieces will come together to form a structure for that container, something to hold it all in. But I don't know what it contains. If there's a piece missing, the charm won't work. It's a much more delicate system than using Repairo, and if anything's missing when I try it, the materials will strain or change."
Tonks handed the glasses back with a frown. "I think I know what you mean. You didn't happen to have a spare bit of glass in here, did you?"
Startled, Remus paused, the glasses caught between their grips. He fumbled them back on top of his head, avoiding looking through them for now, and moved to the tiny box he kept on his desk. He didn't like to throw away glass without wrapping it up first, so he put anything that needed disposing of in a box and left it for later. He opened the box and pulled out a glass shard, holding it up to the light.
"This was in there," he said. "It had a different magical signature to the rest of the mechanism, so I assumed it came from a display case or something else. The magic is very protective and volatile. Most display cases explode with the right poke these days."
"You're not wrong," Tonks said brightly, jerking her elbow out for him to see and almost knocking into the counter. "I got a scar here from one of those museum cases. Nasty things, those. They had a bunch of stolen artefacts in there that were turning people mad when they looked in the glass for too long, so we busted in, but the cases didn't take too kindly to it. Ended up taking potions for a week!"
Remus, who was on permanent prescription for wolfsbane, could sympathise.
"Anyway, that's not what we're talking about," she said, hurriedly putting her elbow away. "We're talking about glass. Or what glass sometimes ends up being."
"What do you…?" Remus furrowed his brow, and inhaled sharply when the answer hit him. The glass shard suddenly seemed much heavier, as though it was laden with gold. But in truth, it was laden with something much heavier.
The pieces of the mechanism on the desk shone faintly. Remus put down the glass shard gently and got off his stool, taking two steps back.
"Remus?" Tonks said, cocking her head.
"You're an idiot if you think I'm going to help you fix a time-turner."
Tonks hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder, finding nothing, and fired off a few spells. Remus tensed, but he recognised the silencing charms and protective wards as they settled over the room like fresh snow, heavy but unobtrusive, soft and muffling.
"Look, the Order has a plan," she said. "I know it sounds like an idiotic plan, and to be honest, I wasn't on board with it either. But we went through a lot of trouble to get these time-turners, and you're the only one that might be able to help us fix them."
Remus narrowed his eyes. "You're speaking as though you have more than one."
Rather sheepishly, Tonks removed a small pouch from her jacket pocket. It was clearly heavily charmed, judging by the way her arm dipped with the weight of it. When she unwrapped the fabric, a gleaming time turner sat in her grasp. The air seemed to grow still in the room.
"They're much smaller than I imagined," Remus murmured.
"Right?" Tonks agreed. "I s'pose it shouldn't be a surprise, considering you'd have to lug it around wherever you ended up, but I always pictured something huge. Like a wall clock."
Remus huffed a laugh, and Tonks looked up at him, beaming with pride.
"Look," she said again, and then hesitated. She put the time-turner on the desk beside its broken companion, and tried again. "I'd like to believe you can change anything if you're willing to work hard enough, and keep working at it." When he met her eyes, there was something older and wiser than her optimistic outlook lurking there. "I still do believe that. But changing things that have already happened seems like asking for trouble, and I get in enough trouble as it is."
"Then why are you going along with it?" Remus demanded.
"Because it's worth the risk," she said. "Because it's my job. Because it's not just me and my opinions that matter here. They don't want to change the big things, Remus. They just want to see what small details can be altered, and what can change as a result. Oh, Dumbledore said it better, but as stupid and risky and dangerous as it sounds, it seems like it might work."
"Dumbledore," Remus said, with a burst of realisation. "Of course. Dumbledore."
Nothing more was said for a moment. Remus examined the other time-turner warily. The sand inside drifted and churned much like the layer of liquid inside his glasses. It was funny to think that something so innocuous could change the fate of everything.
"Time is usually fixed," Remus said. "There's no telling what will change and what has already changed. Everything's already set in motion."
"If you think about it that way, it's kind of reassuring," Tonks chirped. "There's no way we can fuck it up, because we might already have fucked it up, which means we can't possibly change it! It's fate."
"We?" Remus quirked an eyebrow.
"Well, not us." Tonks flushed again. "But there are two time-turners. I'm not sure why I was picked for this job, especially with how clumsy I am, but I know it's going to be me and one other person. It's a two-person job! I just hope I get someone with good taste in music, and a way better sense of direction than me."
The pieces clicked together much like the mechanism. Remus groaned, rubbing his temples. Both time-turners seemed to mock him, laying there on the desk, still and gleaming.
"For the love of merlin," he muttered. "Couldn't leave me alone, headmaster, could you?"
Truthfully, Remus owed Dumbledore a lot. He was the only headteacher to accept a werewolf student into their school, and he was the first to vouch for him when the call came for his expulsion. He'd been disappointed when Remus bowed out of the school, and he was the one to nudge Flitwick towards him. Remus was convinced that most of his initial customers were sent his way by the interfering old man. He had a lot of respect for Dumbledore, and he owed him everything, and that just made it all the more infuriating when Dumbledore was, objectively, a manipulative old bat.
"Pack both time-turners into that pouch," Remus said, pointing at the fabric Tonks had discarded. "Keep the other bit of glass separate. That used to be the sand, didn't it? I can't imagine which idiot tried to use repairo on a time-turner of all things."
Tonks fumbled the fabric, and then moved diligently on, packing everything tightly inside it. Remus winced at the sound of pieces colliding as he locked up drawers and sent parcels whizzing out the window towards their intended recipient. He usually mailed them sensibly at the end of the week to avoid more breakages, but this would have to do. He had a feeling he wouldn't be back for a little while.
"Not that I mind the chaos, don't get me wrong, but mind telling me what's going on?" Tonks said, as she finished tying the pouch up. "You look like you're getting ready to do something stupid. And I should know. I do stupid things all the time."
"If Dumbledore sent you here, it's because he knew how this would end," he said. "You said it yourself, you don't know why you were picked for this job. But I believe I do."
Tonks blinked at him. "You do?"
Remus summoned his leather briefcase, an old, shabby thing, and began packing everything he might need into it. All his tools and equipment, everything he thought might be useful to fix a time-turner in the middle of nowhere. Then he summoned a few sets of clothes, making sure to pack a few of his thickest cardigans. When he finally latched the briefcase, he turned to find Tonks staring at him in bewilderment.
"You're coming with me?" she said.
"I am," he said. "You'll need someone to repair the time-turners if they break in the past. Dumbledore could have fixed this in a flash, but it's too risky for him to go back in time. He needed someone else, and what better way to find the right person than to have me fix them in the present?"
Tonks let out a soft breath, realization crinkling at the corners of her eyes. She looked worried and almost sad, but there was a steel glint in her eye that made Remus smile slightly. If nothing else, she would make a formidable partner.
"That doesn't explain why I'm here," Tonks said. "They could have sent anyone. What about Sirius or one of the Potters?"
But there was too much history there, and too much baggage. Remus shook his head, but didn't elaborate. Something about Tonks's blind optimism and cheerful steel was the exact right combination to get him involved, and Dumbledore must have known that. He couldn't explain it, especially not with Tonks looking at him like that, curious and open.
He looked around his shop, and found it already looked abandoned, as though nobody had been there in a while. Everything was closed and quiet, a little dusty in places where his cleaning spree had failed to reach the crooks and corners. The brightest spot in the room was Tonks, her pockets glittering with time magic, her hair shining like stars-pecked candyfloss.
With an air of acceptance, Remus picked up the glasses, the only thing left. He tucked them on a chain he kept out of sight beneath the collar of his threadbare jumper, and swept up his briefcase.
"It's a two-person job, isn't it?" Remus held out his arm for Tonks to take, already envisioning the Headquarters in his mind. "And everything's already set in motion. Everything we're going to change has already changed. If you think about it that way, then it was always going to be us."
Tonks grinned, and took his arm. "I'm not going to pretend to understand that, but it sounds pretty reassuring to me."
