Time is a Funny Thing

by SecretlyRowling

Time is a very complex thing, we try to unfurl it, yet come no closer the where we started. While magic helps with just about everything, the closest we have come to understanding times workings has been the invention of the time turner. A collection of TimeTravel Oneshots, Drabbles, and Plotbunnies that I decided to post here instead of gathering dust in my files.

3. Choking

There was a stone wall digging into his back, pressure strong across his collarbone and shoulders. Harry was beginning to consider why it was exactly he got himself stuck in these circumstances if they tended to always end with him hurt in someway. The arm pushing him into the damp school hall was tense, ready to slide that fraction from restraining him, to choking him. The young man in front of him, tall, lean, hair parted to the side, eyes dark, brow furrowed, was supposed to be in bed.

Harry only took a second to berate himself for the confidence that he had in his knowledge of the boy. He had to remember that in this time, Tom was whole minded, if not souled. He tried to calm his breathing, having sometime ago learned that disinterest and exasperation were easy fixes to being caught following about things one should very much not be following around.

Tom leaned in close, face not far from touching Harry's own. His cool breath fanning against Harry's face like a Ridgeback's. Harry tried to speak, really he did, he had opened his mouth, tongue pressed to the roof of his mouth, when the arm holding him place ascended to his throat.

He wasn't nearly as strong, or tall as Tom. He could only grip the arm, push and slap at the boy and kick his feet out, but not for long. Tom slide in closer, pressing his body fully to Harry's, pressing in at all angles; suffocating the menacing boy with his arm and with his self. His robes twisting with the miner thrashing that the interloper gave, he watched as beautifully green eyes widened and teared up, slowly bursting blood vessels and red faced.

It was an inconvenience for the boy to, so suddenly, appear when he did so. If Tom had been a more unconcerned individual, or unobservant, then maybe the boy would have lived a bit longer. Maybe this boy would have been an idle threat, but he was just a boy, all alone, obsessed, weak.

He was just nobody.

When the body stopped moving, stopped breathing, Tom backed away. He looked down the dark dungeon halls, no where was always safe after all, and then turned back to the deceased boy. A quick blood boiling curse, and preservation charm, and the boy was taken to an unused, unknown hall. Tom left the boy propped in an alcove, he stopped for just a minute to rap the cloak around the dead figure. Just a passing thought which he would later berate himself for having.

Maybe the child would be cold, we wouldn't want that.