Everything At Once

By: Bonafake

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Author's Note: Thank you for the reviews, faves, and follows! They mean the world to me! I'm on tumblr at bonafake, if you'd like to connect. Sorry this chapter is so late!

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"Was there really no way to keep me out of it?" Regulus asked Hermione in her room. He stood behind her desk, frowning as his hands moved over her shoulders in what should have been a rather lovely massage. Instead, they were both too focused on the work in front of them to pay it any mind.

"No. Kingsley said you were an Order member or you were a street urchin. I assumed you'd prefer not to be a street urchin."

Regulus had to agree with that. "Okay, well do I have access to my vaults back yet?"

Hermione frowned at him. "This is a shite massage."

"I'm going to take that as a no," he drawled, knowing that the tone annoyed her.

"You'd be correct, then. And stop poking me!"

He laughed and took his hands off of her back, thinking a rather odd thought. It hadn't even crossed his mind to ask after Sirius, or his mother and father, and it had been at least a day.

"They're dead, right?" he asked, not sure if Hermione knew who he was talking about.

"Yeah," she replied. So she did know, then. He wondered how.

At that moment, however, Harry chose to poke his head through the door. "Any progress on why he's here, 'Mione?"

"No, and to be honest, I don't think it should be a priority," Hermione responded, pushing back from the desk. "There's so many other things that we could be doing, and yet Kingsley is having me research time travel."

"Yeah."

"How's Draco?" Hermione asked, very obviously changing the subject. Regulus frowned.

Harry grinned. "Good."

"I'll have to ask for no specifics, thanks," she said.

"Alright," he agreed amicably. "What have you two been up to?"

Regulus glanced at Hermione. "Well," she trailed off.

He cringed. If Hermione wasn't going to say it, he was. "It may or may not be nothing?"

"So you've been unproductive all day?"

"Please don't tell Kingsley," Regulus responded, lying back on the desk. Hermione looked towards Harry. "He gave me a lovely shoulder massage?"

Harry frowned, then smiled. "Alright. You probably should do something, though."

She sat up, and for some reason, Regulus noted that when she did, the pale blue T-shirt she wore rode up over her hips and back, revealing about an inch of creamy skin. It did things to him, that inch. He tried not to stare. Harry, however, appeared to notice his wandering gaze and grinned.

"Alright," Hermione said, apparently oblivious. "We should get back to the reading."

She tugged her shirt back down, and Regulus tried not to sigh. She was pretty, and that was a fact. He wished she wasn't, because he knew for a fact she was a Mudblood and that was a problem.

Sort of.

It wasn't a problem, but it was. It wasn't a problem because his mother was dead and therefore didn't mind any longer. It was a problem because Regulus didn't quite know what to do with the liberation of no longer having to be a bigot. It was both at once. He didn't know what to think, what to do, if she even liked him back. It was the stresses of being a teenager again. He didn't want to think about it, about her.

But couldn't he just sort of avoid the problem? Just not think about it? Yeah, that was exactly what he would do.

"Alright. I guess we should do something," she sighed, and pulled the book back towards her. They read in silence for about ten minutes, until Hermione jumped up with her scary-person face on. "I've got it!" shrieked Hermione "It's the ley lines!"

Regulus blinked. What was that supposed to mean? "Huh?" he asked, probably sounding like the uneducated male swine he was.

"The ley lines," she said with exasperation. "They're what helped you travel here."

He frowned, wondering what she meant. Ley lines gave power, right? So she was saying that he had stayed alive for nineteen some years, just waiting for them to come along? "It didn't feel like I was there for twenty years, though," he interjected. "Only a few minutes with the inferi."

She shook her head. "No, if the lines had been keeping you alive for that long, you'd have been found when Dumbledore and Harry went a few years ago. You time traveled when there was a surge."

"So I was just in the right place at the right time," he sighed. Of course it was that. Of course he hadn't been chosen specially to travel to the new time. What did he have to offer them, anyways? Nothing, only old information that the Order didn't need anymore. It struck Regulus that he actually kind of wanted to help the Order, and it didn't feel that odd.

Hermione shook her head. "I don't think it was only that. A surge wouldn't have transported you twenty years into the future. There had to be something else, too."

He frowned. "What was it, then?"

"Hold on. I need to keep reading."

Regulus lay back, and let her get to work. Hermione was only a minute this time. "I've got it," she said triumphantly. "You have to have sort of an anchor to this time―something that tugs you to this time. There's not really time on the ley lines, which might be part of the reason You-Know-Who chose the place―but that's besides the point right now―anyways. You got tugged here because something close was anchoring you to this time. And the line's burst of power propelled you to this here and now."

He felt his heart speed up―he had a reason to be here, something other than just pure dumb luck. There was a reason he was here. "So what do you think my anchor is?"

Hermione scrutinized him, frowning cutely. Even when she frowned she was cute. And smart. She was always smart. "I don't know," she said finally, turning back to the book. "According to this, most of the time, it's a person."

Regulus wondered who his anchor was. His family was almost all dead, and the ones that were still alive were insane or traitors. Apparently, his cousin Andromeda had not survived the blood traitor purges. He shuddered at the thought. And he'd be in that group now, too, wouldn't he? "I don't know who it is," Hermione said carefully. "But even still, since you're anchored by both the ley line and whichever person it is, you can't go back. Ley line time travel is permanent."

"What about temporal paradoxes?" he asked, unsure about his contact with humans now.

Hermione waved that way. "They don't exist?"

He blinked. "They don't?"

She shook her head no. "McGonagall explained it all to me when I got the time-turner my third year. They can't exist, because everything is happening at once, and everything you do has already happened, will happen, and is happening currently. In a universe like that, there's no way to create time paradoxes. Because everything's happening and will, and already has. It's just a blob of everything."

"Oh. They said that time was fragile, before."

"It doesn't work that way," she said. "You can't. They only reason that they tell you not be seen while using a time-turner is because you have to have some sort of restrictions. They don't do anything that hasn't already happened."

"So I'm stuck here?"

"Do you want to go back?" she asked. "You die, you know."

"No."

"Good," she said. "You can't."

And that was that.

If the rest of their conversation felt impersonal and stilted, neither of them said anything.

Later that day, when Kingsley had left and it was only Hermione, Harry, Draco, and Regulus in the cottage, they went downstairs to eat something. Hermione stabbed Draco with a fork when he tried to eat her yogurt and Harry ate too many potato chips. Regulus laughed. It was something he hadn't done in a long time.

"So," Hermione began. "We know there's something going on. But we don't know what."

"What are they on about?" Regulus hissed to Draco.

"Harry and Hermione think that Kings is keeping something from them―something big, actually. I'm inclined to agree."

"Why?" he whispered savagely. "Because Potter's giving you blow jobs?"

Draco's smirk was almost enough to answer the question. Harry, however, answered with words instead. "While the blow jobs are both plentiful and excellent, that's not the only reason. The reason is because he's been leaving at odd hours and he had Charlie leave Romania and take up a Ministry job, something that he shouldn't have risked, and he also said that he was going to start rallying some other forces. There's going to be a battle, and I have to be part of it."

Hermione nodded at the table. "Exactly. We're almost certain that a big fight is coming up. For that, we've got to be prepared."

"Why don't we practice, then?" asked Regulus, frowning. "We can do some duels, you know, warm up?"

Hermione was instantly standing up, blocking him with her hands, rushing over and pushing him to the ground. "Don't."

He held his hands up in mock surrender. Hermione stood up, looking sheepish. She scuttled back over to her seat. "Sorry," she apologized quickly. "It's just―Look, do you have your wand?"

Regulus shook his head no. Its absence had bothered him for a while."Good," Hermione responded. "We haven't told you about the Trace, right?"

"No."

She turned to the rest of the group. "We really should, shouldn't we?"

"Yeah."

"Alright. There's something that happens when we cast any spells. The Death Eaters―they know where we are, when we do magic."

He nodded. "So they can track our magic."

"Exactly."

"Any known Order members or suspected people, and of course underage people," he mused. "Would that extend to me? I don't think he knew I, well, defected. Sort of."

Hermione shook her head. "Of course he'd take notice. You were dead for a really long time. If your magical signature showed up now, he'd flip."

"I guess that makes sense. Tracking people is the best way of getting everyone under your finger."

She frowned at him disapprovingly. "Anyways, Harry, Draco. We figured it out. Ley lines. That's how Regulus got here." Hermione didn't say anything else, and the rest of them dropped it.

Draco was leaning forward now, looking like the kind of boy Regulus was. "So. Black. Uncle. Sort of. Relation on my mother's side. What do you know?"

"Um. Well," he said, feeling somewhat flustered, but not really in the mood to show it. "The Dark Lord made a horcrux, and that was how he was immortal, right? And he also―I don't know. I don't know what's current and what was in the past."

Hermione frowned. "It doesn't make sense to try to puzzle that out. Your memories probably got scrambled in the ley line. Time is funny there."

"Yeah," he said, relaxing slightly. "I guess. Horcrux? You knew?"

"Of course. There was more than one. Seven," Hermione said, nodding. "We got them all, though."

"Then why isn't he dead? And how does that many soulbits work?"

"Badly," Draco said, putting a comforting hand on Harry's shoulder. "For literally everyone involved."

"I bet so. How is he even still walking? He's probably only got like, one percent of a soul left."

"How do you figure?" Draco asked, leaning back.

"Well, because he kept splitting it in half, right? It would eventually get really, really small."

Hermione opened and closed her mouth, looking rather like a codfish. He smiled at the thought. Finally, she made a choice and opened her mouth to begin speaking. "That makes sense, I guess. So would he be easier to kill if we got all the horcruxes or harder?"

Draco frowned. "I guess because he was less of a human, harder, right?"

"Or because he was less of a human, easier to kill."

"If he's hardly alive, you can't kill him, right?" Harry interjected. "So harder. Because he's got less than a percent of his soul leftover."

Regulus nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense."

Hermione stuck her tongue out at the table, looking annoyed about being in the wrong. Regulus knew she got huffy about it. He was just like that.