Erasing Time's Tracks
Chapter 2

Disclaimer: This work of fan-fiction is not intended for personal profit. All characters utilized herein which are not creations of myself belong to J. K. Rowling.

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It had been quite fortunate that the owners of Malfoy Manor were very much into collecting all manner of items, including many an unusual book that would often have all sorts of Dark Arts spells in it. There were even ones that were designed to tamper with some things that decent people had decided were not to be tampered with. One could cast spells to force women to bear monsters for offspring, or use another spell which would liquefy the insides of a victim. Those were just a selection of a litany of unpleasant things one could find in those Dark Arts books.

However, Draco skimmed past all that, looking for any kind of temporal-transfer spell. Minutes turned into hours, which turned into a week. Draco had run into dead end after dead end, as none of the more obvious books revealed anything useful to him. Finally, in desperation, he began pulling books off the shelves whose covers had no words on them. Even there, he nearly ran out of luck, until late one evening, after yet another day of driving himself far too hard for his body to safely tolerate, a small red book whose inside frontispiece had an elegant drawing of a snake battling a phoenix, revealed pay dirt. The book had resisted several attempts to open it, almost convincing Draco that he should put it back on the shelf and look at another. Advanced Confundus charms on a book - Draco was impressed despite himself.

But, oddly, the book was blank after the frontispiece. What in Merlin's name was going on? The only clue that the book might be valuable was that its age was clearly evident. If nothing else, it was a book written perhaps three hundred years ago and well-preserved since then.

Draco, frustrated, almost threw the book across the room when he realised it might not be a smart idea. He began casting every revealing spell he could think of, starting with "Specialis Revelio", and moving on to some fairly exotic, and partly Dark, revealing spells. After nearly half an hour, nothing had changed. The thrice-damned book refused to show any printing on the pages!

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how one looked at it, Draco made the mistake of crushing a quill violently in his hand as he impotently raged at whatever strong magic was in the book. The pointed end of the quill was driven into his palm, and, crying out in pain, Draco dropped the quill on the table. Before he could turn his palm right side up, a drop of blood fell on the blank page just after the frontispiece.

Draco had just enough time to think, oh, shit before the book flared with a sudden violet light. He dived to the floor, hoping nothing would explode.

A minute later, nothing happened. The book wasn't giving off any light anymore, and Draco cautiously stood up and edged back over to the table. Shock went through him as he realised the blank page now had visible printing! He reached out, hesitantly flipped a page, and more printing was there. Eagerly, he sat down and began riffling through the book.

Soon enough, he found it. The words were old, and faded, but Draco was able to clearly make out and transcribe the spell, the title of which ran, "A Spelle To Transferre The Minde Acrosse Time". Unfortunately one needed magical strength on the scale of what Merlin or Dumbledore had (Draco might have despised the Headmaster of Hogwarts, but only an idiot would deny that the man had an enormous reserve of magical power and very good control over it), in order to safely use the spell. Additionally, the spell was designed so one had to have a good knowledge of Arithmancy and Ancient Runes. If one simply cast the spell itself without the appropriate Arithmantic results expressed as runes, it would simply do nothing.

If Draco had tried to cast the spell in his weakened, slowly recovering condition, he would at best send his soul back a few minutes, and at worst he would die from the separation of the soul from the body, since the reintegration at "the other end" needed power behind it. He needed to go back about six years, and he needed to be at the peak of his magical strength to even have a chance of a successful go at it.

For now, Draco was not in immediate danger, as far as bodily integrity was concerned, now that he had found what he was looking for. His mother was relaxed just enough to cease fussing over him so much, now that her healing charms plus the potions had restored her son. Truth be told, he didn't mind all the fussing right at the moment; it was good to be away from the horrible stress and pressure brought on by the meetings with the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters.

His methodical mind set out what he needed:

He first needed magical strength booster - a potion or several potions would work for that, he decided.

Secondly, a clear and peaceful place to work out the exact temporal parameters of the spell. He had luckily had some Arithmancy education and so he could understand what to place in the equations to derive the exact structure of the spell, and there were ample Ancient Runes references in the Malfoy library.

Remembering his self-imposed deadline of two weeks from his arrival at Malfoy Manor, Draco began writing on parchment, eager to erase the mistakes of his past. He vaguely registered his mother's admonishments to stop working so hard in his underground potions lab, seated for hours on end at his lab bench.

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Draco had decided to narrow down his arrival to approximately the day or the one previous to that, on which he had met Potter at the robe shop that Madam Malkin owned. He hadn't made a very good impression then and he had only reinforced it with his snotty attitude towards the Weasleys (but honestly, how a wizard could live without the finer things in life, Draco couldn't fathom). So he had lost Potter as a friend, or at least a useful ally.

He sure as hell needed Potter to be at least civil with him as he intended to get into Ravenclaw on the second go-round. There was nothing like soaking up volumes and volumes of strange and esoteric stuff, even if he would get a reputation as being a stuffy arse. It hadn't hurt Granger that much to be known as a bossy know-it-all, particularly when one considered how many times she had helped bail the Boy Who Lived out of danger.

However, he would need to have multiple backup plans in the event that the changes he made caused untoward ripple effects. One distant possibility was that Potter would get sorted into a house other than Gryffindor; ideally, he, Potter, and Granger would all get sorted into Ravenclaw, but that required a lot of fancy fine-tuning Draco didn't think he could accomplish. Nonetheless, no Slytherin would be one without at least one Plan B in mind.

With this in mind, Draco continued his research.

The Arithmantic equations seemed to imply a fundamental problem with accuracy in time travel. Due to the extremely large (but not infinite) amounts of magical energy needed to perform the spell and drive one's soul backwards in time, there was an inherent limit to just how accurately you could set your arrival time. What the book seemed to imply that if one had an infinite amount of magical energy, one could pinpoint exactly the time one wished to arrive. So if he chose to pick July 1, 1991 as his arrival day, and then picked a specific time – say, eight in the morning – the uncertainty implied by the equations meant that if he had a lot of magical energy going in, he could arrive within two or three hours on either side of eight o'clock, but if he didn't have that much going in, he might well arrive anywhere from several days before to several days after.

This would not normally have been an issue, but Draco wanted to meet his younger self before going to Diagon Alley and bumping into Potter, and keep his head down and his ears open until then. Draco decided to simply assume he could arrive at exactly 6 AM on July 30, 1991 and let the Arithmantic equations set the spell. He would work on driving the uncertainty down to the minimum possible however he could.

So, as regarded the magical energy issue, Draco was not going to be concerned about laws or regulations regarding any performance-enhancing potions, and set out to brew as many strengthening potions he could get recipes for. His only concern was for possibly negative synergistic effects, where one potion might not only cancel another, but even harm him in the process.

In any case, thought Draco sardonically, if I send my soul back, my body will be ruined beyond repair anyway. Mother can bury me in whatever fashion she deems appropriate and the Dark Lord can write off the Malfoys. And if I don't successfully send my soul back, the potions will play such havoc with my magical core I'll probably die anyway.

He pulled the next book off the pile of Arithmancy texts he'd accumulated, and went back to his parchment.

He now had, he reckoned, five more days.

Author Note:

I'd appreciate feedback as to the realism of the work Draco is doing on his time-travel adventure, or on the fic generally. :)

Incidentally, the energy and time issue outlined above is what I term a magical version of the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. ;-)

Addendum - Talriga made a good point in her review and so I have altered this chapter to make it a bit more of a lucky jackpot for Draco to find what he was looking for.