Thursday 10 September 2020

In which the narrator remembers his past and considers his future.

One evening a week or so later I lay on my back on the mattress in my cell, looking at the ceiling, thinking. Although the bare cloth cover had a rather dubious stain, it lacked the dank stink that had permeated the flimsy pads they'd given us in Azkaban to keep off the chill from the stone ledges that served as our beds. Azkaban had been a vile place, where I'd already spent ten miserable, colourless years; there was no way I was going back there. If this situation didn't resolve itself and I did end up being charged, maybe I could get Ms Mbewe to smuggle in some poison. I'd fucked up, in that interrogation, letting my emotions win out over my own good sense: pity, mixed with a strong dash of pride. I wasn't sure I deserved to get out of this.

It was strange to now be holding my life so lightly. This time a month ago I would never have imagined I'd be thinking about suicide, but my life really wasn't worth a goddamned Knut if I had to spend the rest of it in Azkaban. I could have cursed myself. Not for breaking the law – I was firmly of the opinion that certain types of magic were illegal because they were interesting – but for getting caught. I'd been detained over two weeks already, and despite Ms Mbewe's optimism, as far as I could see I was no closer to getting out.

The hardest thing about being detained here was not knowing how long my imprisonment was going to last. The living conditions were actually fairly pleasant compared to Azkaban but, not knowing when it was going to end, I was getting tired of steeling myself day after day against the Aurors' probing. Potter I'd not seen for a while (I assumed he had other things on his mind with his son still gone) but the other two, Jones and Williamson, had been questioning me almost daily, trying to catch me out, get me to make mistakes in my story. I missed home, and I needed to know when I would get to the other side of this. They'd expected me to break sooner though, and that thought had helped to sustain me. I knew Williamson in particular thought me a weak, coddled pureblood scion, but he did not know the real me. I had almost been destroyed when I was younger, but I had survived and rebuilt myself through the force of my will alone. I was a Slytherin after all.

I remembered my Sorting, which incredibly was twenty-nine years ago just gone. I'd shuffled up to the stool, just a couple of people behind Draco and Pansy, who had been allocated to Slytherin pretty much the moment the hat had touched their heads. The outcome for me had also felt like a foregone conclusion. Professor McGonagall had dropped the hat onto my head, covering my eyes, and it had spoken to me alone. I hadn't realised that this was part of the process.

Theodore Nott. Now, where shall I put you?

"You know all my family have been in Slytherin, don't you?" I'd thought.

Of course, I'll admit Slytherin would be the obvious choice for you, the hat had said to me. But not the only choice. So let's be sure it's the right one.

"You know, I did always think I could end up in Ravenclaw," I'd pondered, "My father'd be upset that I'd broken the tradition, but I do like to do things on my own terms."

Yes, you're very independent, aren't you? the hat had said to me, quite kindly.My father had not been quite so complimentary about that aspect of my personality. And you do have the brains to hold your own in Ravenclaw, it's true. But there's a certain intractability to your nature that would make you quite unsuited to Ravenclaw.

"It was just a thought, I'm happy with Slytherin really."

Good, good. But you'd do very well in Hufflepuff too, you know.

"WHAT?" Panicked, I had nearly jumped from the sorting stool. "I can't be in Hufflepuff! My father would want to die when I told him."

But what about you? the hat had asked seriously. You can't live out your family's expectations forever.

"Hufflepuff!" I had been disgusted. "I'm not a Hufflepuff. They're dunces. Losers. I had higher expectations for myself than that."

They're determined. Loyal. Persistent. Qualities I can already see in you, but which Hufflepuff would help you develop more highly.

"You're joking." I had been ready to take the hat off and throw it to the floor.

You'd have the space to be your own person in Hufflepuff, and the support of the truest friends.

"Couldn't I have that if you sorted me into Ravenclaw?"

No. You don't fit there. If you won't be a Slytherin, Hufflepuff is the only other house for you.

"NO! NO!" I had thought desperately. This had gone far enough. "Absolutely not! I choose Slytherin! Slytherin!"

I'm not surprised, the hat had said. It had sounded somewhat disappointed. Well then, if you're sure. I suspected all along you'd be SLYTHERIN!

I had often wondered what would have happened if I had let the hat put me in Hufflepuff. I would look over at the Hufflepuff table every now and then, at Macmillan, Finch-Fletchley, Bones and Abbott all laughing together and imagine what it would be like to be sitting there with them. They wouldn't have trusted me at first, I'd thought, even if I'd been sorted into Hufflepuff. My family name was notorious, even then. But then the inevitable Howler would have come from home, and maybe Hannah or Ernie would have taken pity on me and asked me to sit with them. We would have talked, and gradually the other Hufflepuffs would have grown to accept me. My father would have been cool and distant with me ever afterwards, because I had not turned out as expected. If we had not been so close, my father would not have taken such an interest in my education beyond Hogwarts, would not have compelled me to become a killer to enhance my value to the Dark Lord. My whole life would have been better, probably.

Ambition and intellectual vanity, that had been my downfall, even at eleven years old.

Still, there were benefits to being in Slytherin. I knew how we seemed to outsiders and what we represented: elitism, an ugly sort of grubbing for power, an obsession with magical lineage. But people outside the house rarely understood the other side to it, the fact that Slytherin enriched its members precisely because it took so much else from us. None of us were complete on our own, none of us were enough. Yes, blood was important, but it was not sufficient without achievement. Ambition was the defining quality of our house after all. We were hated; we all knew that, even the dimmest. But that made us, and bonded us, and set us each on our own path to greatness. To me, the emblem of Slytherin was not a snake but an ouroboros, consuming and hurting but ultimately sustaining itself.

Nobody knew what I had gone through, and nobody knew what it had taken, but here I was. The Dark Lord too had regained himself after being reduced to little more than a shadow, or vapour, and while it gave me no pleasure to think of myself as being like him in any way, I could not help but recognise that grim determination, that sense of purpose. Once I had taken it into my mind to actually build a Time-Turner to spin over decades, there was nothing that could sway me from that path. Although I'd been reading around the subject for decades, once I'd set my mind to it, the actual build had taken me less than six months.

I remembered when I'd first made the Time-Turner, when I'd really been tempted to use it. I'd tested it, of course, but I had been careful not to change anything, and not to be seen. I had real regrets; you would hardly spend years researching time travel if you were completely happy with your life as you'd lived it. The past was a locked door, but suddenly I alone had a key that could let me open it. I had the secret there in my hand, and all it would have taken was a quick gesture, a moment of concentration. I could go back to the day I killed someone.

16 August 1995.

But I'd done enough research to know that if time travel had a golden rule, it was to never, ever mess with your own past. The Time-Turner was still glowing gently in my hand. I knew it had the power to undo the worst mistake of my life. But I also knew that there could be no change without consequences, and no way of knowing what those consequences would be. If I undid the murder, I would not be the same person. Would I be a better person? I didn't know. I hoped so, but there was a nagging fear that had I not been exposed to horrific violence at such a brutally young age, I would have been far less averse to joining the Death Eaters. There was no way of knowing that I wouldn't kill more people, in the end, by saving one.

What I did know was that I, the person here with my own Time-Turner in my hand, could not exist without that past. I could go back and keep fifteen-year-old me from doing something stupid, but I would not recognise the person that fifteen-year-old would become. I'd make myself into someone else. There would likely be no present for this me to come back to, and the other me would know nothing of what I'd suffered to get this far - the guilt, the depression, the long years in Azkaban. As weirdly paternalistic as I felt about my younger past self, this was a sacrifice too far. I might be tainted by my past, but now that I had the ability to change that past, I fully realised for the first time that this taint was inseparable from who I really was. I'd put the Time-Turner into my desk drawer, locked it, picked up my book and called for Firewhiskey in the drawing room.

I knew too, that the rest of the world might change beyond the point of recognition, if I stopped myself from killing that Muggle – and selfish though I know I am, this did give me pause. Perhaps not as much as it should have done; it takes an astounding degree of arrogance to really, truly believe that altering one's past will greatly change wider historical events. There's evidence, though, that suggests that even small and seemingly inconsequential happenings can have huge and unexpected consequences. One cannot be sure of one's own impact. There was also, potentially, her impact to deal with, the Muggle. Could I preempt her kidnapping? How could I ensure that she wouldn't tell the whole Muggle world about the evil wizards she'd been taken by? What if this incited a more brutal and open war?

In a strange way it helped me, knowing that even though I had the power to go back and change the past, I wouldn't do it. I hadn't remembered deciding to kill the Muggle woman; I'd come home and she was just there. My father had had me do spells on her and in the end he expected me to kill her, and I went along with it, even though I never wanted to. At the time, it didn't feel like a choice. I'd look back on what I did during the years afterwards and wonder why the hell I hadn't just turned around and said no. Now I did have the opportunity to fully consider and undo the murder if I wanted to, it did become a choice; one I'd actually made and was continuing to make, every moment I didn't undo it. I hadn't expected that to help, but it did. It's not that I no longer felt remorse (I definitely did) and it certainly didn't bring her back or justify killing her in the first place. You don't get over something like that, ever, but this made me accept and come to terms with the enormity of what I'd done.

But now Potter's son was out there somewhere with my Time-Turner, doing god knows what with it. Maybe he'd already used it. Maybe our reality had already changed, and we had no perception of it. I found I could accept this as an idea, although I also rather wished I had been transported to a reality where I wasn't in custody. Maybe one that reversed out some of the misery and sickness in the Muggle world too. Was that what Potter's son was trying to achieve with my Time-Turner? He wouldn't have any actions of his own to regret, would he? He was around fifteen, I'd heard, same age as I'd been when I'd killed that woman but it seemed impossible that he'd have something like that in his past. Why would he break into the Ministry of Magic and take my Time-Turner? Surely he knew what the penalties would be, if he got caught?

He was in Slytherin, I'd read; that must have been a surprise for Potter. When he'd come to see me, in Azkaban, Potter had talked a lot about Slytherin. I could tell that I'd become a bit of a project for him, that he had made it his mission to "re-educate" me, or some nonsense like that. He seemed to feel that we Slytherins were naturally selfish and amoral, that we needed the guiding star of true love (here he'd cited Severus Snape) or at the very least a strong moral guardian (preferably a Gryffindor) to live a decent life. Although I was not inclined to prove him wrong myself, I would have bet good money that Potter's condescending and sanctimonious attitude irritated his son like nothing else. Stealing the Time-Turner, however, was a rebellion so extreme and so open I just could not get my head around it.

My own father had brought me up with limited respect for the rule of wizard law, but he did not fail to teach me the importance of appearing to uphold the law. Why rebel so blatantly and cause the law to be enforced, when you can quietly disobey and be free to do as you please? Maybe there would be a reckoning later, but maybe there wouldn't; I had still not given up all hope that I could get out of this. My downfall had been selling the Time-Turner. The motivation to do this had been mainly financial, although it wasn't so much spending the money that appealed to me (for someone who lives in a manor house, I have fairly frugal tastes) as being able to quantify my achievement; to know how much someone would actually pay, how much respect was due. The Time-Turner had been the most lucrative work I'd ever done.

If I wanted to get out of here, I'd have to take care about what I said, but more importantly, how I felt. Potter's emotions had a way of getting to you, and I had to watch that. Maybe on some level I did feel as though I owed him something, but I tried to remind myself that Potter's troubled family relationships were not my problem. If his son now hated him and was choosing to express that by breaking into his father's workplace and stealing an illegal Time-Turner with an alleged connection to me, that was not my fault. He could have just as easily got an obscene tattoo in Knockturn Alley, or taken to getting shitfaced on home-brewed cauldrons of Hogwarts hooch or going out cavorting all night with gangs of vampires as a way of rebelling.

And yet he was missing along with Scorpius Malfoy, which did make me feel slightly uneasy. Scorpius was the only member of the Malfoy family I'd never met. Poor Draco, and poor Narcissa too, with this coming not so long after the thing with Lucius.

The irony, that the kids had broken into the Ministry of Magic (perhaps passing right by the holding cell I'd been stewing in) to steal the Time-Turner that had been taken from me, when the superior finished version had presumably been in Scorpius's father's possession all along, was perhaps hidden somewhere in the house they shared. I'd heard that things had become tense between Draco and Lucius in the last few years, perhaps because Draco feared Lucius would be corrupting influence on his son. Like me, Lucius had spent time in Azkaban.

Although Lucius had been a frequent presence during my childhood, I had not had much contact with him until he approached me about the Time-Turner.

"Call me Lucius," he'd said, as though we were peers now. I'd later realised that he was nearer me in age than he had been my father. He'd bumped into me on one of my rare trips to London and had intimated that he knew more about my recent activities than I'd expected. It would be worth my while, he'd said, if I would join him at Malfoy Manor for a snifter or two. At first I'd thought that he had found out about my dalliances with time magic and was planning to blackmail me, but while he did know about the Time-Turner, that was not his purpose. He simply had to have it. I'd tried to pretend that it wasn't mine. Yes, I'd seen the Time-Turner at Borgin's. No, I didn't know how much it was going for. Did I want to know? Well, yes, obviously. He'd slid a piece of parchment with a number on it over to me. I'd tried not to gasp when I read it.

"It's yours, isn't it?" Lucius had said. "Narcissa thought so too."

It had probably been Narcissa who had made the connection. She was a good deal sharper than her husband, although he was apt to take more credit than was due.

"Borgin asked you for more than this, didn't he?"

"Theodore," he'd said. "I've known you since you were small. I'm not going to rip you off."

"Can you go a bit higher than that then?"

He'd given me a shrewd look, and amended the number. "That's my final offer though."

It was a mind-boggling amount of money. I'd nodded numbly. Business concluded, Lucius had poured us out some drinks, saying casually, "Your father did well to take you in hand. I only wish I had done the same with Draco."

I was by no means an expert in salesmanship, but I'd felt it imprudent to contradict Lucius just as he was on the cusp of handing over millions of Galleons. We'd met once or twice after that to sort out a couple of things, but nothing more. A few years later he was found dead in a room above the Acromantula Arms in Knockturn Alley.

Poor Lucius. I still didn't know what had happened to him.