Tuesday 20 October 2020

In which the narrator, disheartened, reaches a point of brief understanding with his adversary.

I lay curled on the old mattress, thinking, hunched against the wall, knees to my chest. My stomach felt unbearably tight, as though my body was turning to stone, and I could not force myself to relax. I assumed that night had fallen; although my cell had no real window, the light had dimmed to an eternal twilight and the Ministry had become quiet. I'd not rolled myself up into a ball like that since Azkaban. It reminded me of being a kid and in a strange way it was comforting.

What Ms Mbewe said had stuck with me, mainly because I could not pretend that there was no truth in it. There had been a couple of times when I'd stumbled, when I'd got a sense of the misery that was waiting to swallow me whole, if it could. I did prefer to think that I was in control, even if it meant blaming my pathetic past self for not being able to handle things, but it had become increasingly hard to avoid the realisation that this could all dissolve in an instant. I was afraid that I'd overstepped myself this time and that now my depression could rise up and take me again, and I would be left once more trying to work out who I was and what I believed in. This was more terrifying to me than Azkaban.

I had lost my magic and my sense of self long before I went to prison. Being sentenced to a decade in Azkaban had merely confirmed what I already knew, which was that I was base and malignant, that I was of a separate and lower order from the respectable folk who were horrified and disgusted by me and that I deserved to rot alone in prison. And yet… even in Azkaban there were slivers of light: the unnecessary tenderness with which the Healer treated me when I was sick with Dragon Pox, the time I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks before my release to see a golden Galleon-like moon creating a shining path over the sea, the reading outreach programme started by Hermione Granger that distributed approved books to prisoners in our cells.

I was surprised and maybe more than a little put out the Minister had still not come to interview me in person since my latest arrest. I wouldn't necessarily have expected it, of course, but we were in the same year at Hogwarts, and I was fairly sure that Granger had been using a Time-Turner throughout our third year. I'd seen her, once, tucking a tiny hourglass into her robes, and I'd realised that this must be how she was attending classes in every subject Hogwarts offered. I didn't tell anyone, either at the time or afterwards, mainly because I didn't want to risk revealing how often my gaze surreptitiously skittered over in Hermione Granger's direction, or exactly how well I knew her timetable. If Draco had even suspected that I had a thing for her, I would never have heard the end of it, ever.

Maybe Granger had heard about my collection of Muggle books and had been thoroughly freaked out by it. It wouldn't have been difficult to work out that it was comprised almost solely of titles and authors that she herself had publicly spoken about and, viewed objectively, this was perhaps a little disturbing. Still, it wasn't like I'd intended it as a deliberately threatening gesture. I didn't know a lot about Muggle literature and her recommendations had given me a way into it. I was genuinely interested in what she thought and what she liked, but I hadn't meant for her to find out about it.

Granger had also begun what had amounted to a point-blank obsession with time and Time-Turners that had hummed along in the background until I'd had the skill and the financial resources for what I knew would be a really big project. I had always found the problem of ageing with time travel and particularly interesting one, as it clearly hadn't been solved with the Ministry's hour Time-Turners. I frankly called bullshit on Croaker's five-hour rule (no way in hell was I going to call it a "law"), my opinion being that changing time was changing time, and that no set rule could change that. Going back further was more dangerous, obviously, but there were other factors at play too, such as who you interacted with, and what you did. You could end up changing a life or death outcome, which I thought was significant, whether it happened within the five-hour "safe" window or not. I thought that Nott's Law of using some common fucking sense applied here.

There was a loud clunk and I started up; Potter had entered the cell. He was alone.

"Potter," I said. "Shouldn't you be out stopping the Dark Lord from returning?"

"Of course, you want me to clean up your mess," Potter gave a humourless chuckle. I wasn't sure if he'd failed to detect the irony in my tone or if he was choosing to ignore it. "That's all anyone seems to want from me."

"I thought you liked it," I said, slowly easing myself up against the wall. I'd struggled with back pain since Azkaban. "Being the hero."

"It's not like I ever had a choice about it," Potter said. He'd walked across the room and was standing over me. "You think I went up against Voldemort as a child because I wanted to?"

"Um, I guess that is what I thought," I said, looking him in the eye.

Potter lowered himself onto the mattress next to me. He looked exhausted. "I was forced into it. D'you think Voldemort would have stopped coming after me if I'd hidden myself away?"

"I suppose not," I said. "But I don't really get why you'd decide to become an Auror if you didn't like fighting Dark wizards."

"It was my destiny," Potter said. "With Voldemort after me almost from birth I could accept it, embrace it, or... well, try to escape it but end up living with it anyway."

"Destiny," I said. "That's an interesting concept. It was my destiny to be his servant. I was promised to the Dark Lord before I was even born, but well... let's just say it didn't appeal to me. I guess I can see how the idea of destiny would make sense to the Chosen One, though."

"Interesting," Potter said, with a sideways glance at me that I did not like at all. "Do you believe in prophecy?"

"Why?" I said suspiciously.

"A prophecy about your Time-Turner has just surfaced. You wouldn't know anything about that, would you?"

"No," I said, completely honestly.

"Well then, let me tell it to you: When spares are spared, when time is turned, when unseen children murder their fathers: then will the Dark Lord return."

"The thing about prophecy," I said hastily, "is that the wording is always quite loose and allegorical."

"'The Dark Lord will return when time is turned' seems fairly unambiguous to me."

"That doesn't mean it will come true, though. People look back on prophecies after an unspecified period of time and do all sorts of cognitive gymnastics to make them fit, and if they can't do that, they say that the prophecy hasn't come true yet, but its time will come. Most of the prophecies in the Department of Mysteries haven't come true, and many of them have now been proved wrong, but we keep hold of them still because for some reason people would rather believe the confused ramblings of some crackpot Seer than accept that there is no pattern or order to the way life happens, that it could swing in wildly different directions for the most trivial of reasons."

"So you're a sceptic. You like the idea of being in control of your own destiny."

"I would hardly call that being in control," I said. Potter's words were an unpleasant reminder of what Ms Mbewe had said to me. "It's kind of random. So I don't know what to think about prophecy. I guess I feel like if it isn't true all the time, or at least a reliable majority of the time, which it isn't, it's kind of pointless. But then, everyone knows about the prophecy concerning you and the Dark Lord. That came true and now Merlin forbid anyone say prophecy is a load of crap."

"It might not have been about me," Potter said. "It just mentioned a boy born at the end of July to parents who had defied Voldemort three times. It could just as easily have been about Neville Longbottom, you know."

"Longbottom?" I said, disbelievingly, although this was more of a reflex from my school days than anything else. Really, these days it seemed no more unlikely than Potter vanquishing the Dark Lord. I'd always thought Potter a mediocre wizard, and though Longbottom had been hopeless at Hogwarts, he had gone on to produce some exceptionally insightful research in his capacity as professor of Herbology. I'd even used one of his papers as the basis for a piece of work I'd done for Borgin.

"Voldemort chose me," Potter continued. "He made the prophecy come true. But he could just as easily have chosen Neville."

"But that's the power of prophecy, isn't it? People make them come true by believing in them."

"Yeah, I agree."

"You do?"

"Yeah, all this 'Chosen One' stuff was just completely overblown in order to sell newspapers. I know things could have happened differently."

There was silence for a minute. It was almost companionable.

"Look, I understand why you did it," Potter said.

"Did what?"

"Created the Time-Turner."

"You can't prove it."

"I don't need to. I just wanted to understand, and I think I do. All Dark wizards want to make their mark on the raw bleeding edge of new experimental magic. And you had more to prove than most."

"I'm not a Dark wizard," I said.

Potter snorted. "Only in the sense 'There is no good and evil, only power, and those too weak to seek it...'"

I turned to stare at him. This had been a favourite saying of my father's; he'd used it fairly frequently during my lessons at home, which I'd seldom excelled at. Coming from Potter, it was creepy. "What did you just say?"

"Do you think I don't know how Dark wizards rationalize what they do? There are plenty of ways to try to justify Dark magic: that's just one of them. You can call it whatever the hell you want, but what you do is still Dark."

"I don't-" I began, but Potter cut me off.

"I'm done playing games, Nott. A boy died at Hogwarts earlier."

"What?" I felt this like a punch to the gut. "Who? How did it happen?"

"Craig Bowker was his name. We don't know how it happened, but it coincided with Albus and Scorpius going missing with the Time-Turner."

I didn't say anything.

"People will kill for your Time-Turner," Potter continued. "Someone already has."

"Your son..." I said.

"A young witch has taken them," Potter said. "Know who she might be?"

"A witch? No idea."

"We will find out if you've been working together," Potter said.

"I don't collaborate with people," I said. "You know that."

"It doesn't mean you never would."

"Well, I don't know who this witch might be. And I was telling the truth when I said that the Time-Turner is not connected to me in any way." I said. "I can't track or control it. But I really don't want the Dark Lord to come back."

"What can you tell me?" Potter said. "You're the only one who can help us, Theodore."

I paused; Potter knew I was wavering. "If you tell me what you know now, I won't use it as evidence against you," he said.

"How do I know I can trust you?"

"You don't. I'm asking you to make a leap of faith because you know it's the right thing to do."

"You betrayed my trust before," I said. "You said nobody would find out I'd lost my magic, but it was all over the papers."

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have told you that," Potter admitted. "There was no way I could have guaranteed that it wouldn't get out."

"It was the thing I was most afraid of," I said, lowering my voice. "It was utterly humiliating. So why should I trust you now?"

"I'll be completely honest with you. I won't use anything you tell me now as evidence against you... but I can't guarantee you won't be charged on the basis of evidence we already have or something that comes out later. And I won't try to fight that process. I think you deserve to go back to prison, but I don't want any help you give me to send you there."

"So this is just..."

"Your chance to stop Voldemort. Nothing more and nothing less. It will have no bearing on how we handle your case, I swear."

"Hmm," I said, thinking. It was the more morally fastidious side of my character that always seemed to get me into trouble, but try as I might, I could never seem to quash it.

"I know you have it in you to be a decent man," Potter said, reaching out to touch my shoulder.

"'Decent,'" I said, shrugging him off. Potter seemed to think that the default state was for people to be good; it was laughable. "What does that even mean?" Personally I was of the opinion that the vast majority of people, though they thought of themselves as being righteous and just and good, were venal, shallow, self-serving. I at least was under no such illusions about myself.

"It means you'll do what you can to stop Voldemort coming back, because you know that even if it made things better for you, you know the world is better without him. It means you understand the damage the Time-Turner could do, and you take responsibility for stopping it. It means you'll let your compassion overcome your fear, and you'll tell me what you know."

"Uh huh," I said. "So the situation now is... your son and Scorpius Malfoy took the Time-Turner from the Ministry and went back in time with it twice, after which it somehow got 'lost'. The next thing you know is that some witch has shown up at Hogwarts, killed a student there and now Albus and Scorpius are missing?

"Yes," Potter said.

"I don't mean to be rude," I said. "But how can you be sure that your son has been kidnapped by this lady? He broke into the Ministry of Magic and went back in time. How do you know he didn't go with her of his own volition? Or that he didn't kidnap her?"

"I... I may not have the closest relationship with my son," Potter said. "But I know he's a good person. He told me... he was trying to save Cedric Diggory's life. I just don't think he would willingly join a woman who he's just seen murder somebody."

"How do you know she did it? How do you know he saw it? How do you know he told you the real reason he went back in time?"

"I know," said Potter steadfastly. "I had a dream, a premonition..."

"Seriously?" I said. "Is that all you've got to go on?"

"Yes! This is why I need your help! I went to Hogwarts, after the dream, and they were gone. No-one could find them. We think – could they be – hidden in time?"

"Why do you think that?" I asked.

"We have a map," Potter said. "It shows the locations of people at Hogwarts." I raised an eyebrow; that was impressive magic.

"Where did you get that? Can I see it?" Potter hesitated. I pressed my advantage. "Do you want my help or not?"

Reluctantly, Potter drew out a rolled up sheet of parchment and unfurled it.

Tapping it with his wand, he said rather sheepishly, "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

I laughed. "Official Department of Magical Law Enforcement equipment, then? You didn't make that, did you?"

But lines of ink were spreading out from where Potter had tapped the parchment, branching and joining to form a map of Hogwarts and its grounds. Tiny dots were swarming through the corridors, sitting in classrooms, zooming around the Quidditch pitch, each labelled with a name. A title at the top bore the names of the map makers: Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. I did not know them.

There are a few of us, who make esoteric magical artefacts; we know each other, not personally, but through our work. It's safer for everyone that way. Borgin shows me what he has in every time I drop into his shop in Knockturn Alley and he always makes a point of telling me who it's by, and I'm sure he does the same with the others, partly I think as a way of getting us to raise our game. He's got pseudonyms for us, a way of selling our stuff to the connoisseurs. You build up a reputation, and you can charge a premium. Mandible is easily the most prolific, and Rabenmutter has flashes of true brilliance, but Demeter is the only one who consistently inspires feelings of professional envy. I've always hoped that she or he feels the same way about me. I go by Lazarus, a reference to the loss and subsequent restoration of my magic. There are other, smaller players, whose handles I'd recognise, but Borgin calls us the Big Four. I'd never physically mark my work, though. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs were either naïve, stupid, or had nothing to fear from the law. I wondered which it was. Knowing Potter, probably the latter.

"Where did you get this?" I asked again, looking at the map in wonder. It was a beautiful thing.

"That doesn't concern you," Potter said brusquely. "They're not on here, and that's the important thing for you to know."

I was examining the map carefully, thinking about how it was probably made. A Homonculous Charm on the castle, it had to be, or else you'd have to individually charm everyone who set foot there, which was hardly practical. But the castle was large and powerfully magical, not to mention Unplottable; even with four of them it would take some doing.

"It covers everyone at Hogwarts?" I asked. Potter nodded. "But it only covers Hogwarts," I said. "Your son could be literally anywhere else."

"He's underage," Potter replied. "The Trace-"

"You know as well as I do that the Trace is only activated in close proximity to magical activity," I said. "They could be hiding somewhere in the Muggle world."

"It's possible," Potter said. "But I don't think it's likely. We've tracked their movements up to the time they disappeared... they were in the Owlery at Hogwarts, and then... they weren't. When we lost them before, Albus and Scorpius kept appearing and disappearing on the map. We couldn't work out what was going on and then we realised... they had the Time-Turner. They weren't there because they weren't then. They were hiding in time. We've searched for them, but if they were hiding in time... they'd be untouchable, wouldn't they?"

"Ye-es," I said. "But I still don't think it's likely."

"Why not?"

I paused. "The Time-Turner only takes you back for five minutes at a time," I said slowly. "So I don't see how they could be hiding in the past. They would be constantly coming back to the present, it just doesn't make sense."

"But what if it was broken, in the past? What would happen then?"

I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead with one hand, thinking. "I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"I wouldn't do it," I said. "There are several possible outcomes..."

"Death?" said Potter quietly.

"That's not the most likely," I said.

"But it's possible?"

"Of course it's possible, Potter," I snapped. "What do you think this is, O.W.L. Charms coursework? This kind of magic isn't free of risk. I'd think the most likely outcome is that they'd all be returned to the present, though."

"What about getting stuck in the past?" Potter persisted. Truthfully I thought this the least likely possibility. If Potter really thought they were permanently gone from the present, they probably were dead.

"It could happen," I said doubtfully. I did not think it wise to share my real thoughts with Potter. As long as he thought there was a chance his kid was safe, he'd want to keep me alive and healthy, in case I could help. If the kids were dead, the most probable result for me was rotting in Azkaban. "But if that's the case, what would you do about it?"

"Draco has offered us his Time-Turner," Potter said. "We know you made that one as well. He says it can go back in time for an unlimited period."

Fuck, I thought. Not only did Potter now have more evidence against me, he also needed me less than I'd thought. I'd been banking on him asking me to create another Time-Turner.

"The problem is, we don't know where they are," Potter said. "They could be anywhere in the past, couldn't they?"

"Pretty much," I said, although I was still convinced that wherever they were in time, they were dead. "Their course would be a vector, though, remember, not a single point. If they went back in time and stayed there, they could be intercepted at any time from their arrival in the past, even if it was decades later. And if they're not here now, chances are that's happened."

"If you were trying to find them, what would you do?"

"I dunno," I said. "It's difficult. I guess the best advice I can give you is to look for... disturbances."

"What do you mean?"

"If your kids are stuck in time... if they don't cause us to die or not be born... we might notice some changes... snags in the thread of reality... subtle changes... objects moving...changing. I can't promise they will lead us to them, but... they might."

"I don't really understand."

"It's hard to be specific," I said. "But if it happens, you'll know. You're looking out for it now. And if you need any help interpreting what you're seeing... I wouldn't say I was an expert, but maybe I can help."

"Thank you," Potter said, gripping my upper arm briefly and getting to his feet.

"Uh, yeah, no problem," I mumbled. I hadn't a clue why I'd just told Potter I would help him. He now had all the evidence against me he needed, and when he found out his son was dead, he would have me buried alive in Azkaban for sure. I was being a sentimental idiot again.