The Revisionist

So many times, when things went horribly wrong, people would shake their heads and muse wonderingly, “I just don’t know how this all went so wrong so fast.” Draco knew. He knew the precise instant Wizarding Britain began to shift and wobble and come apart at the seams. He knew the exact moment when the fabric of reality was torn, and he knew who was responsible.

He was.

---

Draco set the coffee mug down with a shivering clatter. His hands, once so elegantly steady that his mother had said with unending pride that he was equally suited to the battlefield as the tea room, now shook with the aged tremble of a wizard a hundred years’ his elder. The caffeine coursing through his blood and the gurgling emptiness of his belly did little to ameliorate the issue. It had been days at the very least, perhaps more, since he’d slept, and the malodorous wind that followed his frantic, darting movements was noticeable even to him. Astoria’s wan attempts to coax him from his study were met with bellowing rages, while even his mother’s sobbing pleas were rebuffed without feeling. His father barely merited a flung decanter. None of them mattered anymore, not even himself, and Draco would not rest, not even a moment, until he had found the solution he sought so zealously. He was a man possessed.

Harry Potter’s arrival, met with a horrified disbelief by his family, barely registered in Draco’s grief-struck haze. Until he’d stormed Draco’s study, wand out and belligerent green eyes blazing, that is. The former schoolboy foils stopped suddenly, each jerked momentarily from their mania.

“What the hell is this, Malfoy?” Harry snarled, eyes trying to take in the sight in front of him. Every moderately level surface was covered by books in haphazard stacks, some left carelessly listing to the side, others marked with great slashes of black ink. All of them were littered with bits of parchment, scrawled on and crumpled nearly into oblivion. It was enough to send Madam Pince into cardiac arrest if she could have seen it. Grasping his sparking wand more tightly, Harry ventured farther into the room, batting several brightly-colored lengths of string out of his way. The pain boiling in his chest needed an outlet, and Draco Malfoy was as deserving a target as he could think of.

“Stop!” Draco barked, hands held out in front of him, his grey eyes watery and frantic. “For the love of Merlin, Potter, you’re about to fuck it all up beyond repair!” Reconsidering quickly at the furious blaze of Harry’s eyes, he tried for a different tack. “If you’ll just stay still, I’ll explain everything.” For a moment, it looked like his entreaty had failed, but Harry folded his arms and cocked an infuriating eyebrow. Gingerly ducking around a hopeless tangle of green, orange and blue string, Draco gestured to two chairs near the hearth. “Here, Potter. Please.” The single word nearly strangled him.

“Give me one good reason I shouldn’t use every curse I know on your sorry arse,” Harry snarled, diluting the threat by rubbing tiredly at gritty, exhausted eyes. “Ultimately, this is all your fault, Malfoy.”

“Actually, it’s not.” The quiet words spoken from the doorway took both wizards by surprise, sending them back to their feet in a flurry of robes.

Ginny, her eyes feeling as hollow and empty as the rest of her, stepped carefully through the minefield that was Draco Malfoy’s study. He was clearly planning something, and Harry was just as clearly desperate for a solution, any solution, that would fix things. She was here to put a stop to such nonsense. There was no way to undo the events of the previous week.

“Mrs. Potter,” Draco greeted automatically, though he put no effort into trying to sound welcoming. She wasn’t welcome, neither of them were, but they were there and perhaps they could be useful. Unlike her galumphing berk of a husband, Ginny Potter made her way to the hearth without disturbing a single thing in the study. “If you’ll both just hear me out, I think I may have discovered a way to reverse the… last week.”

She listened, quietly and carefully, as Draco Malfoy outlined a hideously complex plot. Harry, ever the fixer, kept interrupting to challenge certain assertions and have his input. It was futile- it was all futile, and Ginny knew it as certainly as the two men with her tried to deny it. Scorpius Malfoy was dead, and it was her son, her precious James, who had done it. Harry and Ron had had to be restrained when he was removed to the Ministry pending trial.

It was a solid plan, to be sure, and carefully thought out, but Malfoy’s plot snagged on one central issue. “Time Turners no longer exist,” she said harshly during a lull in the discussion. Two sets of eyes, one a passionate, defiant green, the other a determined, calculating grey, landed on her. “They were all destroyed at the Ministry when we were just teenagers. All of this,” she said with a grand sweep of an arm, “is pointless, Malfoy. It’s just another way to deny, another way to escape. He’s dead. Your son is dead, and it’s our son’s fault.”

Harry gasped. It felt like his chest would explode. James- perfect, clever, vibrant James- had done the unthinkable, and all over a girl. It was always a girl, Harry thought spitefully. Wizards did absurdly stupid things when it came to witches, and the duel between James and Scorpius had hardly been the first over a pretty face. How it had ever escalated to the point where James had cast the one curse Harry had showed him for protection, strictly for self-protection in the most dire of circumstances, was beyond him, and he cursed the moment he’d ever discovered the potent Severing Charm in the Half-Blood Prince’s potions book. It snuck up on him at random moments, the certainty that this was all his fault. His oldest child was likely going to Azkaban for murder, and it was because of him.

Draco nodded at Ginny’s cold words. At Scorpius’ funeral, he’d seen the Potters and the Weasleys, standing way to the side as if uncertain of their right to be there. They’d had no right, of course, but Draco had bent to the iron strength in his mother’s voice when she’d hissed to him that they owed his family at least a public show of remorse.

During the ceremony, he’d found his attention wandering to the intruders, desperate for any distraction from the reality of his only child being enclosed in a marble tomb. Nineteen years old in three weeks, Scorpius would have been. Part of him wanted to draw his wand and murder every last Potter and Weasley there in retaliation, but Draco had learned one lesson from his involvement with Lord Voldemort so many years ago- no matter the intent, no matter the effort exerted, a deed cannot be undone. Nothing he did would bring his beautiful son back. Instead, he watched the intruders weeping and mopping at snotty noses with floppy handkerchiefs. They were so very obvious in their grief, and in a flash of bitter insight, Draco knew they were crying for the loss of their own son, not his. Ginny Potter had, however, been the exception. Out of the lot of them, she alone was dry-eyed, a pillar of burning cold in the center of that blazing grief. They’d locked eyes for a split second, and Draco knew that she would be the most dangerous adversary of them, that small, pale, dry-eyed woman who’d lost her child as surely as he’d lost his. He’d shivered, and returned his attention to the words of the Minister.

Harry suppressed the violent urge to slap his wife. Over the last week, Ginny had become more and more remote to him, less willing to comfort him and more inclined to stare out the kitchen window, her hands immerged in long-cold dishwater and her mind a million miles away. When he’d needed her, she wasn’t there for him. “We know Time Turners don’t exist anymore,” he snapped. “But there must be something we can do- a spell or a potion or something.”

“There is something.” When both Potters turned to him, Draco reached carefully for a very old book, its spine broken almost to the point of no salvation. Turning it, he indicated a passage a third of the way down the page. “I hope your Old English is up to snuff.”

Ginny concentrated very hard on the words, wishing she’d been more scholarly in her youth, but the best she could manage was a general understanding of the painfully short paragraph. “You can’t be serious,” she blurted, brown eyes nothing more than cold, dark holes in her white face. “Trying to recreate that magic would be suicide. They say it took the Founders decades to perfect Time Turners, Malfoy. You’re just an average wizard, and Harry and I are no better.”

Once Potter had blown into his study, Draco’s mind had begun to recalculate quickly. Potter may have been just the thing he needed to make this whole affair work. “That’s why I need your husband to use his Auror status to access the Department of Mysteries and obtain a bell jar my father told me of a long time ago. With it, I should be able to create a single functional Time Turner.”

Ginny gaped at him. “You cannot possibly be serious.” She knew precisely what he was talking about- she’d seen it with her own eyes as a fourteen year old during their mad journey to save Sirius. It felt like another lifetime. “You’re going to get yourself killed,” she stated flatly. “And you just might take the entire world with you, Malfoy. Messing with Time is forbidden because of all the complexities and potential pitfalls. One wrong move on your part and you could bring Voldemort back, or cause a Third Great Wizarding War, or accidentally send a magical species to extinction. Have you thought of that?”

His skin crawled even as he said the words. “I don’t care,” Draco said with perfect equanimity. “I’d burn it all, every last blade of grass, if it brought Scorpius back.”

Clasping Harry’s icy hand, Ginny gained her feet. “I’m sorry, Malfoy. I’m so very sorry for your son, but that’s precisely why we can’t help you. You’re too much of a danger, have too few moorings to trust in something of this magnitude. If you’ll let me, I’ll send your research to Hermione. Maybe she could-”

“Go fuck yourself and your pity, Potter,” Draco spat, lurching to his own feet. “I don’t fucking care if you help me or not. I’m doing this, and you’ll have to kill me to stop me.”

Her wand was suddenly in her hand, and Ginny didn’t remember how it got there. There were a lot of moments like that lately, blank spots, missing connecting actions that spanned only a second or two. Her mother said that could happen with the grief of losing a child. Maybe it extended to discovering your child was a murderer, as well. Ginny’s voice was perfectly steady as she studied the wreck that had once been the ice-cold Draco Malfoy. “That can be arranged if necessary.”

“Stop.” The command, quietly spoken, froze both in their tracks. Harry pulled his hand out of his wife’s, staring at her as if seeing her for the first time. “He’s right, Ginny. If we do this correctly, he’ll get his son back and James will be cleared. We’ll have our son back, Gin.” His voice wobbled before he cleared his throat with a harsh cough. “Wouldn’t you do anything, everything, to save James from a lifetime in Azkaban?”

It was the worst thing she’d ever said in her life, but even the pain that threatened to black out her vision couldn’t make her lie. “No, Harry, there’s one thing I wouldn’t do for anyone, even our children, and that’s destroy the world. Mark my words- if you go through with this, you won’t be saving James, you’ll be destroying him, along with everything we’ve ever known or loved.” Even as she said the words, Ginny knew she’d lost. Harry had decided to help Draco Malfoy in his plan to save their sons, and God help anyone who tried to stand in their way.

---

It was laughably easy. It had taken Harry and Draco less than a week to finish the research. Draco had constructed a meticulously thorough timeline composed of seemingly endless actions and actors, each signified by a colored string stretched across his study, twined around others in a giant spider web.

The trip to the Ministry, completed in the dead of night, had provided access to the glittering bell jar that Draco knew to be the key to the plan. Opening it had been more difficult, but Draco had come prepared with a myriad of Dark spells to harness the power of Time. If it required a piece of his soul, so be it. He would bring Scorpius back if it killed him.

Giddy with their success, Harry and Draco Apparated back to Malfoy Manor, a once-ordinary hourglass now filled with glittering, crystalline light wrapped protectively in layers of cloth.

“It won’t be long,” Harry sighed, looking at the watch on his wrist that had once belonged to his own father. “The Aurors will be here for us any minute.”

Draco unwrapped the precious hourglass with trembling fingers. “The Manor wards will give us the extra time we need,” he murmured absently, turning the glass in his hands with reverence. “Get the spells. They’re in the safe behind my desk.” Waiting impatiently, he tried to quell the nervous tremor in his hands. They were so close now…

A sharp bang shattered the night outside, and the men knew their time had run out.

“Quickly now, Potter!” The parchment that symbolized the weeks of painstaking research and translation and calculations was thrust into Draco’s hand as Harry Potter withdrew his own wand. Deadly determination filled the green eyes that met his own.

“Do it, Malfoy,” Harry intoned solemnly. “I’ll hold them off as long as I can, but it likely won’t be more than a few minutes.” He shuddered once. “Good luck. Bring our sons home.”

Draco nodded sharply as the dark-haired wizard he’d once thought he’d hate for all his days walked calmly to his study door, prepared to give up his own life to see their mission completed. Good luck, indeed. He’d need a hell of a lot more than that.

---

She’d known. Ginny had known when Harry hadn’t come home to her and Lily and Albus that the time had come. She’d debated, agonized, for days over whether she should keep her silence and let them complete their harebrained scheme, and had ultimately decided that it was just too dangerous. She was a mother, first and foremost, but Azkaban was not the worst thing that could happen. Oh, there were so many more horrific things that could happen if Harry and Draco didn’t get things precisely perfect. She had nightmare after nightmare about those things.

It had been her that alerted Kingsley of what her husband was intending to do, and her heart had broken as she’d done it. There was no way to lie to herself- she was betraying her husband, her son, by doing so, but make the Floo call she did. And when the Aurors had Apparated into her sitting room, she’d accompanied them to Malfoy Manor. They said that if anyone could talk down Harry, it was her.

They were wrong. So very, very wrong.

It was a terrifying display of what her husband was capable of when backed into a corner. In the beautifully decorated front hall of Malfoy Manor, Ginny watched in awe as Harry methodically took on all five Aurors at once. His skill was a terrible beauty in action, employed not to distract, but to decimate, destroy. Even Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy, who watched from the shadowed staircase, made no attempt to disguise their wonder.

It was inevitable, she supposed. Eventually, Ginny was drawn into the battle by an Auror with blood pulsing from a lethal-looking gash across her neck. “Stop him,” the witch had gasped, clutching at her throat with a gurgle, as Ginny had blanched. Harry was fighting to kill now.

“Harry!” she’d shouted, wading into the fray. “Harry, please! Stop!”

The roar that erupted from his mouth at her frantic plea sent her back a step in fright before she’d cemented her resolve. If only Ron and Hermione were here, she thought suddenly. They might have been able to talk him down.

“You!” he screamed, flinging a curse at an Auror even as he erected a Shielding spell around himself. He knew in that instant that it was his own wife who had set this into motion. Ginny had sent up the alarm, and the hatred that rose in him was more destructive than any Fiendfyre. “Why, Ginny?” He never waited for her answer.

Despite the Shield she threw up instinctively, Ginny was flung back against a wainscoted wall by the force of the curse thrown at her. She was no hack at duelling, but the sheer fury of Harry’s spells overwhelmed all of her considerable skill. Forced to abort the spell she began in favour of shielding again, Ginny was systematically pushed farther down the hallway until her back dug painfully into the banister of the staircase. Only then did she realize that the last curse Harry had flung at the only standing Auror had been an Unforgiveable- he’d actually Crucio’d one of his fellow Aurors, holding the curse as the man shrieked hideously and folded in on himself in pain. Her heart, or what remained of it, shrivelled and died.

Harry Potter had found himself a cause that superseded any and all ties to justice.

And when he left the smallest, the most miniscule of openings as he focused all of his considerable rage on the hapless Auror, Ginny took aim at her own husband and said a spell she never thought she’d utter.

“Avada Kedavra.”

---

The sudden silence after the deafening battle let Draco know he had nanoseconds left, but the complex spellcasting was too important to rush. He only had one shot at this, and he would not screw it up. He couldn’t.

The door crashed open with a resounding bang, but the horde of Aurors he’d expected never materialized. Instead, it was one small, pale woman, the only color on her a flaming tumble of hair and a bloody trickle at her temple. Her eyes, so dark and cold last time he’d seen her, were filled with a terrible knowledge, a ruinous agony that ate everything than ran before it.

“Malfoy,” Ginny said, her dead voice belying the uncontrollable shaking of her wand hand. “It’s over. Put it down.”

“Where’s Potter?” he replied, gently placing the hourglass on the desk in front of him. The glittering light that had filled it earlier had been replaced by a quantity of unremarkable sand, and he knew the spell had worked, could feel it by the sudden exhaustion that sucked at him. All that remained was to flip the newly-minted Time Turner over.

The tears that felt like they should be chasing each other down her face wouldn’t come, instead solidifying into a lump in her throat that Ginny knew would choke her to death. “He’s dead,” she whispered, her hand shaking so badly that she was forced to either lower her wand or drop it. “And now there’s five dead Aurors, a dead Malfoy, a dead Potter, and another one in Azkaban, Malfoy, and chances are that you and I are headed there as well. I tried to tell you, to warn you. This scheme was always destined to fail, to destroy the lives of anyone it touched.”

Leaving the Time Turner on the desk, he walked towards her, hands in the air, careful to keep his body directly between her and the hourglass. “Poor Cassandra. To see the destruction of everyone and everything she loved, and to never be believed.” Coming to a stop before her, he let her place the tip of her shaking wand at his throat. “I understand, Potter, I truly do, and I’m sorry for it. But I’ll fix everything, you’ll see.”

“You’ll ruin everything, even more than it’s destroyed now, Malfoy.” Her hand spasmed around her wand, sending sparks showering into his throat, but Draco Malfoy simply stared at her with burning, glittering eyes. She had the feeling he was past physical pain. Frankly, she thought she might be, as well. “It’s over. Come with me to the Ministry, and we’ll turn ourselves in together.”

Overwhelmed for a moment by the pain in her eyes, Draco reached out and cupped her parchment-pale cheek. “I’m so sorry.” His eyes flickered behind her. “Now, Father.”

The feeling of floating was curious, but the pressure of having another’s will enforced over her own enraged her. Lucius Malfoy casting the Imperius Curse on her was something she hadn’t been expecting, and the tiny voice in the back of her brain that was Ginny wailed at the stupidity that had allowed her to drop her guard for that critical moment. After all she’d done, everything she’d given up, Ginny was forced to do nothing but watch as Draco Malfoy walked back to his desk, picked up his newly-created Time Turner and flipped it over and over, holding her eyes with his own as he winked out of existence.

---

It should have worked, damn it. Draco stood in a field below Godric’s Hollow, the cold wind howling in his ears. He’d planned so thoroughly, so methodically, had been so cautious not to be seen or heard. But it had all been for naught.

Scorpius lay at his feet, grey eyes too empty for Draco to even pretend that he was still alive, still capable of being revived. The sharp crack of James Potter Disapparating only moments before, sobbing hysterically, left no impression on Draco’s heart. Remorse after the act was useless. He of all people could attest to that fact.

And to think that all of this had begun over Penny Morey, little Penstemon Parkinson-Morey, whom Draco had held as a baby while Pansy laughed that she’d always thought she’d be birthing a Malfoy. The girl had grown into looks that far surpassed her mother’s, and a calculating personality that put both of her cunning parents to shame. Pitting a Malfoy against a Potter for her affections had been child’s play, an easy way to bolster her self-image and set the stage for an as-advantageous-as-possible relationship down the line. Little Penny had certainly never anticipated such a disastrous duel over her heart, Draco was sure, but persuading the girl to drop both his son and Potter hadn’t stopped the feud as planned.

Kneeling by his son’s bloody form, Draco touched a finger to the lock of white-blond hair that forever fell in his eyes; even death couldn’t force the unruly cowlick to bend to its will. A mirthless laugh bubbled into his throat at the memories of Astoria and even Narcissa casting charm after charm on his son’s head, trying to get his hair to behave properly. They had never worked.

Nevertheless, Draco thought numbly, dusting off his knees as he stood, the joints aching with the cold. He’d planned incorrectly. This time. Holding up the Time Turner, he carefully inverted it in a clockwise direction, methodically counting out the turns. He would simply go back, recalculate the actions and the solution he’d attempted, and try again.

---

Ginny sat in an overstuffed chair by the roaring fire, a warm blanket tucked snugly over her lap and a crystal snifter of brandy clutched forgotten in her hands. It had been mere moments since Lucius Malfoy had released her from the Imperius Curse and ushered her with surprising kindness to the seat- after confiscating her wand, of course. The man was no fool. His quiet assertion that his wife was notifying the Ministry and that they should simply wait barely registered in her brain.

She’d killed her husband. Ginny Weasley, who’d loved Harry Potter with all her heart from the tender age of ten, had murdered him in cold blood. Oh, certainly she could say that he’d gone mad, had killed five of his colleagues and used an Unforgiveable. She could claim that he would have killed her next, that it had been self-defense against a good man rendered insane by grief, but it was a lie, and in her heart, she knew it. She’d said the spell and meant it, because to do otherwise was to cast her tacit approval of his and Malfoy’s unthinkable plot to change history. She couldn’t do that. Some small corner of her soul, a dark, tainted piece that she’d denied since her first year at Hogwarts, knew that revising history to erase a death would have rippling consequences that no one, not even the most brilliant wizards of all time, could control. It said something significant that Voldemort and even Grindelwald had never attempted to revise Time.

Saving Scorpius Malfoy and stopping her precious son from committing an unimaginable act was impossible. She knew it with every fiber of her being.

Catching a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye, Ginny turned slowly. Draco Malfoy was once again standing at the parchment-strewn desk. She wondered dully why Time Turners didn’t make a sound when Apparition caused such an ear-splitting crack as the fabric of time-space was manipulated. A question for the more physics-minded, like her sister-in-law, surely. “So you’re back,” Ginny murmured, not moving to accept the hand Lucius offered to draw her to her feet.

Coldly furious with himself for miscalculating, Draco stalked around the room, checking the intersections of numerous lengths of colored string. Not releasing the Time Turner, he sent his father a warning glance, his eyes flicking meaningfully to the shocky-looking redhead. She was not to be trusted.

“Do you know what caused the failure?” Lucius asked quietly, stationing himself just behind Ginny, primed to intercept her should she make a move. “Did you not go far enough back?”

Plowing his free hand through his hair, Draco shook his head vehemently. “I went to the correct time, Father. I convinced Penny to cease her shenanigans, but the duel still took place. I’m not sure what went wrong, but I’ll have to go further back. I missed some earlier connection.”

As intimately familiar with the convoluted timelines as his son, Lucius considered their options. “We don’t have long, Draco. Your mother will have notified the Ministry of… the events here by now. You must be gone again and the study returned to its original state before they arrive.” He was tired, Lucius thought with a scowl. A man of his age was too old for such machinations, but there was no alternative. He would not accept the death of his bloodline lying down, not when Draco had gone to such lengths for a solution. Looking down at the head of vibrant red hair seated before him, his grey eyes slowly lit with a considering light. “Perhaps removing one of the boys’ acquaintances with Miss Morey,” he offered.

“They were all at school together,” Ginny cut in ruthlessly. “If you fuck that up, there’s no telling what results you’ll get.” She set the brandy down on a table with a loud thump and dumped the blanket to the ground. “This is what I tried telling you, Malfoy. You tried to stop the duel and failed. If you go back further and try something else, you may change the present to the point where you come back and your entire family is dead, or a blood feud kicked off between the Potters and the Malfoys, or worse. You cannot do this. It’s exactly what I’ve been telling you.”

Nodding at his father as the sound of a large group of people Apparating in the front hall reverberated through the study, Draco held up the Time Turner. “Or I could fix everything.” Pausing only to Banish his timeline, books and notes to a place the Ministry would never find, Draco tipped the Time Turner counter-clockwise and disappeared once again.

---

When he returned to his Present, Draco wanted to scream and sob and laugh all at once. He’d stopped the duel, had stood in that windswept field below Godric’s Hollow and shouted his exultant victory to the heavens when neither boy Apparated in at the appointed time. All of the planning and sacrifice had been redeemed.

He cautiously looked around his pristine study upon his return, noting that he was an hour late in returning to his Present. Despite his victory over Time, the lack of precision irked him.

“Draco? What are you doing in here?”

Astoria’s hesitant tones, so different from the bone-deep confidence his mother’s voice always contained, never failed to grate on his nerves. Still, she’d been a good wife these twenty-odd years, had given him a son and done as she was told. Everything he’d wanted in a spouse. If her mousy, biddable nature occasionally annoyed him, he chalked it up to his mercurial moods. “Where’s Scorpius?” Draco demanded abruptly.

Her shocked, pale face sent his heart freefalling into his shoes. “How could you?” she demanded around a sob. “How could you ask such a thing, Draco?” Not giving him a moment to press further, she turned on a delicately-shod foot and fled.

Chasing after his wife was indecorous in the extreme, but Draco had invested too much time and hope to accept such a vague response. He’d fixed everything, goddammit. Catching her in the hall, he caught her silk-clad sleeve and slammed her into the wall. “Where. Is. My. Son?” he demanded, ice in his voice.

The impact temporarily knocked the air from her lungs, and the sudden violence in her husband’s eyes was as foreign as another galaxy to Astoria. Never in their entire acquaintance had he laid a hand on her in such a manner. It frightened her to the point where she couldn’t draw a breath if she tried.

The fact that her eyes were rolling white didn’t deter Draco in the slightest. “Where is he, Astoria?” he repeated, barely leashing the violence he felt spreading through his veins like fire.

“He’s in Azkaban, awaiting trial,” his mother said in bitterly cold tones as she turned the corner from the front hall. “The same place he’s been for the last week, Draco, and if you insist on Obliviating yourself one more time, I will have you involuntarily committed to St. Mungo’s.” With a casual flick of her wand, she sent him skidding back from the visibly shaking Astoria. “Never lay a hand on a woman in anger, Draco. I raised you better than that.”

Floored by his mother’s revelations, Draco shook his head like a dog. No, it was impossible. He’d stopped the duel. Opening his mouth to ask more, he quickly rethought his position. His mother was not joking- she would have him committed without a second thought should he press further. Instead, he Disapparated with a loud crack.

There was only one place he could go for answers now.

---

Ginny’s sitting room seemed like it had been filled with people every moment since they’d received word about James’ death, and while she knew that her family and friends meant well, all she wanted was to be alone, to wail and lament her son, her precious baby who’d been taken by that murderous Scorpius Malfoy. She wanted vengeance; she wanted blood, and when the crack of another person Apparating uninvited into her back garden filled her ears, Ginny snapped. She charged out the kitchen door, prepared to tell the interloper to sod off before she cursed them into oblivion.

Draco Malfoy stared at her, the frost beneath his glossy shoes mirroring the color of his eyes precisely. Ginny withdrew her wand without warning and fired a curse directly at his face.

It was impossible not to notice the difference, to compare this fire-bright woman to the icy, controlled witch that had murdered her own husband, but Draco supposed that Ginny Potter no longer existed. He’d demolished that timeline and created this bastardized version, another Present that he would not tolerate. A Scorpius imprisoned for murder was no better than a dead one. Shielding against another rapidly-fired curse from her wand, Draco leapt forward, grabbed her sleeve, and Disapparated again with a resounding crack.

---

“Where are we?” Ginny demanded shrilly, looking around in vain. She had no idea of their location; this clearing in a thick forest could be any one of a thousand locations in Wizarding Britain.

The sheer luck that had allowed him to snatch her wand as they’d arrived in the forest was not lost on Draco; he had a sneaking suspicion that Ginny Potter could decimate him in a fair duel, and he didn’t want to test that theory. Backing away to a safe distance from the witch, who looked ready to claw his eyes out with her bare hands, Draco recalled all of his research from Banishment.

As colored string materialized between them, attaching to tree branches and bushes in an intricate web, Ginny glared at her captor. “My husband is going to murder you like your son murdered my baby,” she spat venomously. “And you know what, Malfoy? I’m going to fucking laugh as he does it.”

The irony was appalling, Draco thought with a bitter laugh. “You wouldn’t believe the incongruity of that statement, Potter. To think this is coming from the mouth of a woman that killed her own husband is actually amusing, in a desperately gothic way.”

“I’ve never killed anyone, Malfoy, you cracked pot,” she replied, wrath curling her fingers into claws. “That’s a horrible mockery, even for you.” Ducking beneath a green string wrapped firmly around a low-hanging branch, she began to stalk him around the clearing. “But if that was an invitation, I’ll take it.”

There was nothing for it; Potter was intent on killing him, and he’d either have to Stun her or Immobilize her to prevent it. He went with the option that would afford him some answers. “Look, Potter, I know you think you have the right end of things, but you don’t. I’m not in the correct timeline, and I know you likely won’t believe me, but I’m trying to fix this whole fiasco.” When she eyed him beadily but held her tongue, he continued. “Originally, it was my son who died and yours who murdered him, but your husband and I managed to create a single Time Turner to go back and prevent the duel from ever happening.” He sighed tiredly. “I thought I had stopped it, but apparently they duelled anyway at another time or location. I need answers from you to try again.”

Ginny blinked; her face was the only thing he hadn’t Immobilized. “You’re right,” she flung at him, wishing her words were poisoned darts. “I don’t believe you.”

He produced the Time Turner from beneath his cloak. “Then how do you explain this?”

She gasped. All the Time Turners had been destroyed years ago, when they were just teenagers. “Where did you get that?”

“I told you,” he drawled, his grey eyes droopingly tiredly. “Your husband and I created it in an alternate timeline with the intent of saving both our sons. Wouldn’t you want to help me if it meant bringing back James?” His hand twitched, as if he wanted to reach out to her. “In my timeline, you told me that you wouldn’t change Time, even for your own child. Do you still feel the same?”

If ever Ginny had understood the allure of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, it was now. Draco Malfoy held her enthralled in a forest, all alone, offering the one thing she wanted more desperately than vengeance- a chance to reset the clock. To have James back, to prevent this whole horrible reality… “No,” she whispered. “No, I’d change it if I could.”

He held the innocent-looking hourglass aloft. “I’m offering you the chance,” Draco replied softly, holding her broken brown gaze. “Help me, Potter. Help me re-plot the timeline for the current Present so we can discover what the nexus is. I’ll go back and fix everything, I swear it.”

“No.” Ginny flung her long, still-red hair out of her face, her resolve solidifying in an instant. “If I help you now, if I do this, I want to come. I want to physically come with you to fix this. I want to save James myself.”

Well. This was certainly a conundrum he hadn’t anticipated, and one he wasn’t sure how to deal with. Would bringing a Ginny Potter from a timeline different than his own mess things up irrevocably, or did it not matter, since his Present no longer existed? For that matter, her Present was about to be erased as well. It all made his head hurt, but Draco nodded once, sharply. First, they had to update the timeline for her Present and decide what the event was that they had to prevent. “I accept,” Draco said with a frown, releasing her from the spell.

And hours later, as the sun set, Draco looked at his red-haired companion and nodded. The timeline had increased exponentially, stringing its way for meters in all directions. If he failed this time, he’d need a Quidditch pitch to set the damn thing up in next. “So this is it?” he queried, his fingers plucking gently at a confluence of dozens of brightly-colored strings. He’d thought it had all centered on the duel, on Penny’s decision to date two boys at once, but Ginny’s insistence that they look further out had paid off. Now he could see that he’d been thinking too immediately. He had to prevent Penstemon Parkinson-Morey from ever being born.

And when he flipped the Time Turner over while she was still on the other side of the clearing, the stunned look of rage and betrayal in her brown eyes pulled at a small corner of his heart- not enough to bring her with him, however. Two people trying to influence Time meant twice the chance to fuck up, and Draco was not chancing his son’s fate to Ginny Potter.

---

It was strange, being transported back to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Draco eyed the people around him, wonder tinting the edges of his jaded gaze. He’d forgotten what it had been like, to be young and freshly exonerated in a post-Voldemort world.

Since he’d agreed with Ginny that it would be practically impossible to prevent Pansy from having sex with her new husband, he’d carefully set the Time Turner to three years after Potter had defeated Voldemort, back when Pansy had decided that continuing to date a Malfoy that had no intention of marrying her was a stupidly loyal move with no benefit.

Corralling Pansy at the Ministry Christmas Ball was easy, certainly easier than the Ageing Charm he’d had to reverse engineer to give him the appearance of his twenty year old self. It had been the party where Carnelian Morey, Neeley to his old Housemates, had first asked Pansy to dance, and Draco had a deceptively easy time intercepting her before Neeley had worked up the courage. Sweeping his ex-girlfriend into a practiced waltz, Draco studied Pansy’s calculating face.

“I’m not going to shag you tonight, Draco, no matter what you promise this time,” she laughed up at him, her pug nose twitching with mirth. “Although it’s nice to have a dance partner not intent on smashing my toes into oblivion.”

Draco gave her his best imitation of the amused smirk he’d so favored as a young man. “If I asked, Parkinson, we both know you’d shuck off that meringue of a frock right here on the dance floor.” Noting Neeley’s approach through the crowd of dancers, he spun her along out of his reach. “But all teasing aside, Pans, I have to tell you. Word around the Ministry is that Shacklebolt’s nephew fancies you.” He let his eyes flicker uncertainly. “I wasn’t sure you’d be interested, but he’s reported to be quite the rising star.”

If nothing else, Pansy’s mercenary determination to be the wife of an ‘Important Wizard’ could always be counted on. “Really?” she squealed, before modulating her voice with a careful cough. “Well, isn’t that interesting?”

A tap on Draco’s shoulder startled him from his study of Pansy’s face.

“May I cut in?” Neeley Morey asked, his black eyes glittering as he looked at Pansy.

Draco handed her off with aplomb. “By all means,” he drawled, well pleased with himself. Striding for the abandoned hallway, he fingered the Time Turner tucked securely in his robes. All he had to do was lift this Ageing Charm and be on his way.

“You!” a velvety voice accused as a hand grabbed his elbow and hauled him behind a sculpture with surprising strength for such a small woman. “It’s an atrocity they even let scum like you into such an event, Malfoy.”

Draco’s lips quirked. Ginny Potter, now nineteen years old and still a Weasley, the new star Chaser for the Holyhead Harpies, scowled fiercely at him. It was eerily similar to the expression on her face when he’d left her in the forest at Malfoy Manor in her Present, minus the hurt, of course. “Hullo, Weasley,” he purred, appreciating the irony. “Enjoying the festivities?” He gave an exaggerated look around her. “Potter off playing to his band of lovelies, I presume?”

She dug her nails into his arm in retaliation. Malfoy always was such an obnoxious bastard, and the fact that he took such immense enjoyment out of twisting Harry’s friendly openness with people trying to thank him for finally felling Voldemort made her want to dropkick his sorry blond arse. “You’re despicable,” she hissed, leaning in close to him. “You’re a vile, horrible man, and you belong in Azkaban.”

He’d forgotten that her temper matched her good looks in those days, as well. Many a night had passed in the Slytherin boys’ dorm lamenting the waste of such looks on a blood traitor. “Ah, but your sainted boyfriend testified otherwise,” he replied silkily. “Or don’t you remember? Potter was so very convincing at my trial, after all. Poor Draco Malfoy, caught up in events out of his control, just trying to save his family.” Draco smiled slowly. “It was such a magnanimous gesture on his part, testifying on behalf of the boy he loathed with such passion.”

Ginny wanted to spit, she was so angry. “You didn’t deserve it.”

He nodded. Oh, the purity of belief they’d all had back then. “You’re quite correct, Weasley. No one with the Dark Mark could possibly deserve a second chance.” Just to be perverse, he peeled back his sleeve, flashing the physical reminder of his past at her. He leant in closer in a horrible mockery of intimacy. “After all, you’re Ginny Weasley, the pure little scion meant for our sainted saviour of the Wizarding world. Wouldn’t Potter just hate it if he knew you were hiding in the shadows with a cowardly, shady Malfoy.” A malicious thought took hold of him, and he pushed her back against the wall, crowding her with his body. “Wouldn’t it just burn his sense of entitlement to know that his beautiful intended was marred by a Malfoy.” Before she could protest, he slanted a bruising kiss, a punishment for the scorn and vitriol she had heaped on him back in those days, across her shocked lips. He pulled back before she could gather her wits enough to hit or hex him.

“How dare you!” Ginny breathed, wiping her lips with a venomous glare, yanking her wand from her sleeve.

Draco gave a short bark of malicious laughter. Oh, how he’d forgotten the trials of his youth. It seemed Time healed some wounds, after all. Giving her a final triumphant smirk, he whirled and disappeared into the crowd, intent on finding a quiet corner to undo his Ageing Charm before he returned to the Present.

He never noticed the two sets of narrowed eyes that had observed his self-indulgent attack on Ginny Weasley’s mocking purity.

---

Draco knew the moment he arrived in his Present that he’d fucked up royally. He even knew precisely what had done it- it had to have been the little indulgence of his temper with Ginny Weasley.

The platinum band that had sat heavily on the third finger of his left hand for twenty-four years had melted away, little more than a sparkle out of the corner of his eye as Draco cupped the Time Turner.

No marriage, no Scorpius. The equation was simple enough to work out, and so Draco didn’t bother wasting any time. He simply flipped the Turner counter-clockwise once more, sending himself right back to the Ministry Christmas Ball in 2000.

---

Intercepting himself was harder than he’d anticipated, particularly as Draco was certain he had to keep at least one version of himself unaware of the meeting. The exact reasoning behind the certainty wasn’t clear, but between hazily-remembered school lessons and the odd programme he’d caught on the space-time continuum, Draco knew that two versions of himself meeting would be a very bad thing. Such timey-wimey stuff was best left to the Doctor.

Carefully situating himself behind an ostentatious vase stuffed with peacock feathers, Draco waited until he found his very recent self headed for the hallway, fingers caressing the Time Turner in his robes. Shooting a whip-fast Memory Charm at the shining blond head, he snaked an arm around his other self’s shoulders and led him quietly out the nearest exit.

“Just what the hell is going on here?” a smooth voice demanded from behind him.

Draco froze, his arm stiffening around his thankfully-still oblivious doppelganger. Ginny bloody Weasley. Well, fuck. “Polyjuice potion,” he improvised quickly, slurring his words and giving her a lascivious wink. “Me and my mate here are off for a night of kink and vice.”

“As twin Draco Malfoys,” Ginny replied dubiously. “You can’t possibly be serious.”

“Want to join in?” he shot back. “Two blonds and a ginger. Sounds like a winning combination to me.”

Ginny fingered her wand nervously. Something was very wrong here, as wrong as the too-cozy conversation she’d just caught Harry in with a trio of giggling brunette beauties in a secluded alcove. “No thanks.” She’d had enough of wizards in general at the moment. Home sounded like the best proposition, and time to consider exactly how she planned to confront Harry in the morning. She eyed the mirror images of Draco Malfoy closely. On the other hand… perhaps a taste of his own medicine was precisely what Harry deserved.

The sudden change in her demeanor rattled Draco. He wasn’t sure how much longer the Memory Charm on his other self would hold, and Weasley looked like she was plotting something very much certain to be detrimental to his long-term health.

“Actually, Malfoy, that sounds nice.”

He actually did a double-take at her reply. What? “What?” he croaked, backpeddling as the red-haired girl advanced slowly on him.

Hooking a finger in his robes, Ginny sidled close enough to notice the faint, silvery stubble on his jaw. “And I know it’s really you, Malfoy, so drop the Polyjuice bit. I don’t know what you’re planning, and frankly, I don’t care.” Before her courage failed her entirely, Ginny threaded a hand through the silky hair at the back of his head and leaned up on tiptoe to press her mouth to his.

Oh God, Draco thought wildly. Weasley was doing her level best to kiss him into oblivion, and the best he could do was stand there dumbly and let her, his very confused twin standing listlessly at his side. Forcing himself to remove his tongue from her mouth, when he had absolutely no idea how it had gotten there, was far more difficult than he could have ever anticipated. The witch kissed like she was a drug, potent enough to wipe conscious thought from his mind. The only thing that brought him back was the erection suddenly making its presence known as she plastered herself to him. “I, er, I have to… Christ, Weasley, get your hand off of that!” He batted at the hand that had wandered below his belt.

“I thought you wanted to play?” Ginny asked, voice husky and lips a rosy red from his mouth. Oh, she had the perfect idea in mind now.

That was absolutely the last straw. The mere fact that he wanted to Banish his other self and Apparate Weasley to a very secluded location had him disentangling himself from her with all haste. He was not here for Ginny Weasley, no matter how appealing she was with her kiss-swollen lips and thick, warm voice. “Erm, bye,” he blurted out, wincing as he Disapparated.

Christ. How embarrassing, to be done in by a teenage Weasley.

---

When Draco returned to the Present, things were fucked up beyond all hope. He surveyed his surroundings in despair.

“Daddy,” a little red-haired girl pleaded, her large brown eyes nearly undoing him, “just one more story before bed!”

Terrified of what he would find, Draco turned his head. There she was, Ginny Weasley –Potter –Malfoy? Fuck. He again had a wedding band on his finger.

Draco did the only thing he could think of.

He read the goddamn story, kissed his wife, and scrambled madly for the door, pressing his spinning head against the cool wood before upending the Time Turner one last, desperate time. There was only one person now who had any hope of untangling the clusterfuck he’d created.

---

“I’m afraid, Mister Malfoy,” Dumbledore said as he studied him over the top of his spectacles, “that it doesn’t work quite so linearly. Attempting to change a single specific event in history is much like using Spellotape to repair a broken wand- you’ll be able to channel magic through it in some form, but it will be entirely useless in a practical sense. The premise holds true for Time, as well. Every time you go back –although in this timeline, the appropriate term is ‘forward’- and make another attempt at changing things, you make the issue much, much worse.”

Draco rubbed the bridge of his nose tiredly, trying to ignore the headache that had been pounding between his eyes for what felt like a lifetime. “I came to you for help. You’re the only one I could think of that might be able to fix this mess.”

Dumbledore smiled sympathetically at him. “When I was a young man and the Ministry was trying to enact legislation to ban Time Turners, the Daily Prophet ran a serialized story named ‘The Revisionist.’ Have you ever heard of it? No? Well, to put a point on it, The Revisionist faced a great personal tragedy and took it upon himself to put things right, but no matter what he did, no matter how he acted, he was unable to change the future tragedy. Everything else surrounding the sad event changed and mutated, but his tragedy occurred time and again, like a broken record.”

“And the moral of this little tale?” Draco snapped. Christ, his head hurt. All he wanted was Scorpius back.

The old man smiled sadly. “You’ll never get the result you want. No matter what you do, the very sad loss of your son has occurred, and you cannot undo it. In fact, you’ve now wiped out your son’s existence entirely. Frankly, Mister Malfoy, you’re very lucky you haven’t created a tear in the space-time continuum. Much more meddling and I can say with some certainty that you’ll wipe out your personal timeline entirely.”

He let his head fall back against the hard chair in front of the Headmaster’s desk with a thud. “And if I simply go back to my Present?”

An ugly ring with a cracked black stone sat like a weight on the blackened hand the Headmaster raised to scratch his long, crooked nose. Noticing the direction of Draco’s gaze, Dumbledore smiled. “Ah, that’s a story for another time. And a very good story it is, too, if I do say so myself.” Pulling his wand from his sleeve, he tapped it against his desk. “But we’ve damaged enough timelines simply by having this conversation, Mister Malfoy. I’m afraid it’s time you made a choice: you may choose to return to your new Present, sight unseen. Should you do so, I will be casting a hex on this Time Turner, making it good for one journey only. A one-way trip, if you will. That Present, whatever it may be, will be the timeline you must live out.”

“And my other option?” Draco sighed, stroking the Time Turner dejectedly. How had everything gone so horribly wrong?

The sparkle in the rheumy blue eyes he remembered so vividly from all those years ago returned. “Well now, that’s an interesting question. This is pure conjecture, mind you, as I don’t think anyone has ever muddled Time quite so thoroughly before…” He ignored the young man’s wince. Despite everything, Draco Malfoy appeared to have matured into a solid man. “I believe, if I am correct –and I usually am- that smashing your Time Turner here, in my Present, will render your timeline null and void. Either you will cease to exist in this incarnation and will revert to your teenage self of my Present, or that Draco will vanish, and you will be inserted into his timeline.”

He’d never considered himself anything but exceptionally intelligent, but suddenly, Draco thought he understood how Crabbe and Goyle must have felt. Dull-witted was an understatement. “What?”

“Either this will all vanish and you’ll remember –and regret- nothing, or you will be given a chance for a ‘do over,’ as you students say.” A warning lit his eyes. “That being said, Draco, there are certain… events that must occur in my timeline. I’m certain you’re aware of what I’m referring to.”

So the old man had been aware of Draco’s ‘assignment’ from the Dark Lord from the start. Somehow, Draco wasn’t surprised. “Yes,” he replied simply.

The grandfather clock in the corner chimed eight times, and a sleepy Fawkes rustled his feathers. Somehow, a moment of this importance felt like it should have come at midnight, not curfew. Somewhere in the castle, at that precise moment, Draco was plotting his glorious ascent through the Death Eater ranks. He snorted at the horrible irony.

“Time runs short, Mister Malfoy. What do you intend to do?”

Hefting the Time Turner, Draco eyed it with regret. His beautiful son, forever erased from Time, and it was all his fault. He’d fucked so much up with this… but there was no do over, no perfectly-wrapped answer, only two very undesirable options. A single tear trickled down his cheek as he handed the Time Turner to the Headmaster. “Here.”

The old man nodded knowingly. “I’m so very sorry for your loss, Draco.”

He met the blue eyes and said the words that had been burning a hole in his heart for years. “I’m sorry, Headmaster. For what I’ve done. For what I’ll do.”

When the Time Turner shattered, Draco closed his eyes tightly and prayed, prayed for oblivion, for release from this horrible burden of knowledge.

---

“Weasley, for fuck’s sake! Put that down!” Draco eyed the witch that had walked into his family’s offices that morning.

She frowned over her shoulder at him. “Jesus, Draco, it’s just an hourglass! You don’t have to get your knickers in such a knot over it. I was just looking at it!”

Draco eyed the C.V. she’d handed him with a cursory glance. He needed an Acquisitions Manager, and the former business manager of Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes was considered quite a catch. Several of his competitors would be gnashing their teeth when they found out he’d swept her out from under their noses, he thought gleefully. “Yes, well, we look with our eyes, not our hands,” he replied snippily. He couldn’t remember where he’d gotten the dusty old hourglass, but he thought perhaps it had been his father’s. It was the only reason he could think of for his strange attachment to the thing.

Ginny folded her arms under her breasts and leaned impertinently against his chair as he continued to stare blank-eyed at the parchment in his hand. “Oh, give over!” she finally burst out huffily. “There’s no one more qualified for this job and you know it, Malfoy.”

Blinking, Draco laid the parchment on his pristine desk and swivelled his chair to face her, snaking a hand around her waist. “Fine, Weasley, if you insist on hearing it- yes, you’re the most qualified, a fact I intend to spread far and wide when people accuse me of only hiring you for your arse.”

“And fabulous tits,” she added with a wiggle. “Don’t forget those.”

He gave her a lopsided grin. “Why Potter ever let you get away is beyond me, but I’m not one to lament something that is clearly in my favour.”

Ginny pressed a hard, hot kiss to his mouth. “And never forget it, Malfoy.”

---

FIN