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.
---
Author notes: Because this fic is almost ten thousand words, I'm dividing it into two chapters, with the second posted tomorrow. So what do you think so far? Like it? Wish you'd popped those aspirin? Think it's lamer than a horse with one shoe? Review, please!
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