part one

Memories are supposed to fade with time.

This concept isn’t one of the topics of research Draco is pursuing at work—not yet, anyway. It’s a simple truth for most people blessed with brains that help them process pain and trauma by making their memories fade as temporal distance between the event and the present lengthens.

For instance, the memory of falling off his broomstick at the age of eight is so far removed from present day that Draco remembers the pain of his broken leg only as a dull throb even though it had been the most significant pain of his life at that point. He remembers that the pain was severe, even if he doesn’t remember the sensation, because he remembers crying hysterically until Dobby heard him and came to his aid.

He hadn’t remembered the intense shame he’d felt when his father had derided him for his tears until just now, however. The memory is vibrant now that it’s been unlocked. Clear as a crystal bell jar, he recalls how he’d choked down his sobs, his body wrenched with pain both physical and emotional without any outlet to release it until a Healer arrived half an hour later to set the bone and administer a potion. He’d felt nothing but numb as the potion flowed through his system, and he’d learned to hide his emotional turmoil from then on as well, only expressing it when it benefited him, and never where his father could see it.

He’d done such a good job of suppressing his weakness that even his brain had hidden memories of it from him. That is how brains are supposed to work. Self-preservation is the key to survival, and the human mind is an automated tool that ensures preservation without conscious thought.

Still, when he was sixteen, he mastered the skill of compartmentalizing his thoughts further, using magic to help his mind shove unimportant memories, doubts, and emotions aside so he could act without the crutch of remembered pain and shame. So no one could ever discover his intentions or weaknesses without his consent. He transformed his mind into a fortress with the security of armed guards and brick walls and frothing moats, a fortress that sometimes not even he can breach because he’s trained his defenses so well.

He is grateful not to remember the painful parts of his past.

And he pities anyone cursed with a brain that does not let them forget.

---

Draco shouldn’t be surprised to find his office empty when he returns to it with two mugs of tea in hand. For weeks, Ginny Weasley has been sniffing around Draco and his research, asking him questions about Time, inviting him to lunch, feeling him out for a collaborative project between their divisions. He had expected her interest to wane eventually, but it was rather rude of her to ask him for tea and then depart before he could return from the makeshift tea room Higgins set up in the Death Chamber.

He discards the tea on his desk, the milky liquid splashing over the lip of both mugs in his haste to be rid of them. Before he lets frustration overcome him, he steps out of his office in the hopes that perhaps she had decided to look at the various artifacts in the Time Chamber while she waited for him. The crystal bell jar at the far end of the chamber is a hypnotizing piece of magic that she may have become mesmerized by. Or maybe she’d stopped to look at the various time pieces on display in the cabinet where the Time-Turners used to reside before their almost total elimination over a decade ago.

Draco takes a quick turn around the chamber and pokes his head inside the various offices connected to it. He is alone.

He returns to his office in consternation. When she’d first started coming around, he’d treated her with the skepticism her friendliness deserved. Terse answers, cold shoulders, the normal behavior one person bestowed upon another they wished to ignore.

But she had been determined to befriend him for some reason, and her persistence eventually won out over his, even if he had remained a bit wary—deservedly so, it seemed.

She’d asked him for a cuppa, and he’d left her in his office to graciously retrieve it. Now she is gone, leaving Draco with two mugs of quickly cooling tea and no one to share them with. He Vanishes both of them with a frustrated wave of his wand.

Weeks ago, this was exactly the kind of behavior he would have expected from her. Ginny Weasley stepping foot into Draco Malfoy’s office, poking the bear with her inane conversations and lunch invitations and then disappearing before he could reply to a single word she said. She hadn’t done what he’d expected though. She’d stuck around to coax answers out of him and then listened to him when he deigned to speak. She’d shared ideas about Time and Thought with him that had intrigued him enough to encourage discussion, and she’d seemed to value his opinion on her theories.

They’d been on their way to a true collaboration, perhaps even a ground-breaking one. Time and Thought had not worked together on a project since the Hall of Prophecy had been established decades ago, and the project—to create a formula that could predict when a prophecy would take place—had been unsuccessful.

Draco sighs, exasperated with himself for feeling disappointment. The fact that he feels such a weak emotion in regards to a Weasley makes his face heat with shame, and that will never do. He unclenches his fists and splays them flat on his desk. Then he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. When he was still learning Occlumency, Draco had needed several breaths to gain control of himself and his emotions. He felt things so strongly, so vividly. It had been as difficult as stopping a waterfall, restraining the tumultuous flow until he was in control of nature and not the other way around. Still, it had taken several breaths to bring about the calm he needed to stem the tide of his unwanted thoughts and emotions.

Now he can manage it in one.

Once he’s free of the disappointment and shame, Draco can think clearly. Reason takes the reins over emotion. Perhaps Ginny stepped out of the office for a moment. Perhaps an emergency arose that required her attention. Just because she didn’t wait for him doesn’t mean she wanted to leave or that she won’t come back, he tells himself.

He begins to believe it until he opens his desk drawer to retrieve his Time-Turner—the last one in existence thanks to the battle in the Department of Mysteries nearly fifteen years ago.

The drawer is empty.

A shocked moment passes before he slams the drawer closed and stands. He doesn’t need evidence to prove that Ginny and the Time-Turner’s mutual disappearances are linked. He knows she took it just as well as he knows there are sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day—and also that those measurements are meaningless in the grand scheme of the universe.

Her weeks of inquiries, her fascination with his research, her interest in him... all of it leading to this humiliating moment. Her behavior makes sense now, and Draco does something he never allows himself to do.

He indulges in his emotions. He lets fury sweep him up in a torrent, setting ablaze his embarrassment at being fooled until it is a mere memory, one he will soon forget.

At the back of his office sits a filing cabinet, and from one of the drawers, Draco retrieves the only device that can follow Weasley wherever she’s gone. It looks like a Time-Turner, only titanium instead of gold and without the intricate engravings that decorated and protected the Time-Turners before their destruction. He throws the chain around his neck, touches his wand to the cold metal, and mutters the incantation he devised for this very purpose.

A savage yank sends him swirling through both time and space, a Time-Turner and portkey built into one device.

And there isn’t enough time in the universe to dull the sharp edge of Draco’s rage.

He begins his journey from within his office, a place in which he spends more time than his own home ever since he’d been recruited to the Department of Mysteries after his release from Azkaban. In linear terms, he’s been working as an Unspeakable for five years, beginning on his birthday in 2004 and continuing until the present date of March 13th, 2009. Technically, the exact length of his employment is a bit too nebulous to calculate thanks to his research in Time.

It is just past suppertime when he leaves 2009. When he reappears on a busy street in the midst of a boisterous, jostling crowd, the sun shines down on him, blinding him to his surroundings.

He doesn’t know exactly when he is, but after a few blinks, he knows where. Diagon Alley.

Draco has become adept at gathering information in the instant that he arrives in a new time period. Sometimes determining a date is difficult, depending on what kind of situation he’s appeared in, and even pinning down a year can be near impossible when the wizarding community holds onto some fashions for decades. But as soon as his vision acclimatizes to the brightness, he can see several signs that signify he’s in pre-war Diagon Alley.

Florean Fortescue’s ice cream parlor is booming with business for one thing. The shop never reopened after Fortescue’s abduction during the war. The street vendors that filled the streets during, and for quite a while after, the Dark Lord’s reign over the Ministry are nowhere to be seen. In fact, the street is overflowing with people, an abundance of families out shopping together—maybe purchasing Hogwarts supplies?

It’s the Diagon Alley that Draco remembers from his childhood. Buoyant, carefree.

Draco’s mood contrasts with the people bustling against him. The rage that sent him here does not dull one bit. The backwards passage of time has honed it to a razor’s edge, acute enough to carve hours into minutes, dice minutes into seconds, slice seconds into milliseconds and then shave off nanoseconds. Draco’s temper is strong enough to launch him through time, bend it to his will, make it run backwards.

That’s why he’s here in Diagon Alley, Date and Time Unknown. He must retrieve the Time-Turner before anyone in the Department of Mysteries discovers it missing, otherwise he can say goodbye to his job and hello—again—to the Dementors in Azkaban.

He won’t go back there. His five years of incarceration had been enough to last him a lifetime. Draco had learned how strong his mind could be to protect him from the Dementors, even while his body had wasted away, but keeping up his defenses for five years had been a battle. He doesn’t want to fight anymore; he wants to forget.

A flash of red hair—recognizable anywhere and in any time period—draws his attention down the street. It disappears into Flourish and Blotts, and off Draco goes, his anger propelling him.

He’d been a fool to trust a word out of Ginny Weasley’s mouth. Her continued efforts to befriend him had eventually thawed his suspicious demeanor. In fact, something like warmth had infused him every time she’d smiled at him. If he’d known those smiles had been a distraction to steal his research, he never would have tentatively smiled back. Ginny had made a fool of him, and after he retrieved his Time-Turner, he’d make sure she paid the price for his humiliation.

To think he’d entertained the idea that Ginny Weasley might actually like him. To think he’d assumed her amusement, her laughter, her smiles when she’d interacted with him had been real... such rubbish.

As Draco approaches Flourish and Blotts, a colorful banner hanging above the door becomes visible over the heads of the excited crowd, and Draco comes to an abrupt stop for just a moment, shocked to confront a vision from his past.

GILDEROY LOCKHART
will be signing copies of his autobiography
MAGICAL ME
today 12:30 PM to 4:30 PM

Draco’s watch is useless, but he’d bet his entire Gringotts vault that he’d landed somewhere within the vicinity of 12:30pm and 4:30pm in early August of 1992.

Muttered curses stream from his lips, scandalizing the giddy women he elbows past to get into the shop. As soon as he passes through the door, he lifts the hood of his robes to better hide his identity. Draco has an idea of what they are doing here, and there are too many people inside the bookshop who would recognize him, not least of all younger versions of his father and himself.

And practically the whole Weasley clan, who Draco sees at the back of the shop, watching as Lockhart chummily pulls an adolescent Harry Potter into a stranglehold for publicity photos. He tears his gaze away in case a Weasley turns and catches him staring, instead scanning the crowd quickly for a sign of his thief.

Ginny darts up the stairs to the second level of the shop and he follows. There are hardly any people up here, most likely because all of the action—namely Gilderoy Lockhart—is downstairs. The lack of mob makes it easy to spot Ginny on the far side of the gallery, leaning over the railing to watch the proceedings down below. Her face is obscured, but her hair, red and glinting even in the dull light, hangs out of her hood, a curtain between them, a security blanket.

Draco grabs her arm in a tight grip and swings her around. The Time-Turner—his Time-Turner!—dangles conspicuously around her neck, on the outside of her robes, and his eyes fasten on it for a single moment before he meets her frightened gaze and says in a low, dark voice, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She yanks her arm out of his grasp with a “Keep your hands off me!”

She doesn’t moderate her volume, and Draco quickly pulls her, even as she struggles against him again, away from the railing before someone down below notices the commotion. He doesn’t let go of her, but it’s difficult to hold on while she’s attempting to wriggle herself free. If he releases her for a second, he has no doubt she will disappear again, either Apparating away or using the Time-Turner to send her back or forth in time just far enough to escape him.

“How did you follow me?” she hisses, finally doing her part to remain inconspicuous.

“Luckily I didn’t give you all of my secrets.” With his free hand, Draco reaches out, his fingers closing over the Time-Turner so he can return them to 2009 where they belong.

A sound below startles her, but Draco is too consumed with the task of seizing the Time-Turner that he doesn’t notice. It swings away from his fingers as she turns, and then she’s batting at his hands, trying to keep him from reclaiming it.

“Not yet! It’s about to happen!” There’s desperation in her voice, and that’s what gets his attention. Her eyes are wide with an emotion Draco can’t name because he has so little experience with them. She’s panting as if she’s on the verge of tears, though he sees no other evidence of them. Perhaps he could be kind enough to let her see whatever she came here to see.

But then it’s straight back to the present and the consequences of her actions. Draco isn’t sure why he chooses kindness after her transgression. Once they’ve returned, then he can decide what action to take against her. Then he can be as unkind as he likes. Besides, his anger has cooled now that the Time-Turner is within his reach. He can give her this one thing before he cuts her and her false desire for friendship out of his life.

Keeping his hold on her tight, he allows her to draw him back to the rail to reluctantly watch his past unfold.

Twelve-year-old Draco has just entered the picture with a sneer and a derisive taunt, first directed at Potter, then at Potter’s defender, tiny Ginny Weasley.

Seeing how fiercely young Ginny defends Potter, Draco begins to wonder why adult Ginny has come here. Why August 1992? Why this moment? Potter’s been dead for years now—at least, he had been back in 2009. Of course, here he is alive and well. Was this some scheme to revisit Potter while he’d been a boy, before his death in 2005?

“This is the first time we met,” she says faintly.

He peers down at the events unfolding and thinks back in his memory in case one of them is mistaken, but he supposes she’s right. This is the first time Draco and Ginny ever interacted with one another.

“Potter, you’ve got yourself a girlfriend!” the young Draco drawls, to the embarrassment of young Ginny, as noted by her face turning an interesting shade of red. His words are intended to mock, to deride, but Draco remembers how he’d felt realizing that Harry Potter had an admirer. Unfairness had nibbled at him from the inside at the realization that perfect Potter, as always, got the attention that Draco rightly deserved instead.

It hadn’t been personal. Draco hadn’t wanted Ginny Weasley specifically to fancy him, because adoration from a blood traitor would have been worthless. Embarrassing. It had been the principle of the matter that had galled him, that Potter, having done nothing in his life except survive an assassination attempt, had received notoriety while Draco, who had been born a Malfoy and should have been praised for his good fortune to have been so, had received nothing. No photographs in the paper with celebrities, no special favors at school, no attention from girls—even red-headed little Muggle lovers.

Draco looks back up at the elder Ginny, his mouth opening for an insult, but he pauses as he notices how pale she’s grown. Her lips are pressed together in a straight line, and he can tell by the twitch at the corners of her mouth that they would be trembling if they weren’t so tightly closed. Her glittering eyes stare as if nothing could be more important than the tableau below them. She holds onto the railing with her one unencumbered hand, her knuckles as white as her face. The strength and heat of the emotion she displays may burn her fingerprints into the wood.

“This is it,” she says, her voice low and dark.

Draco returns his gaze to the boisterous scene, where his father has just fallen into a bookshelf, shoved by hers. The second-hand embarrassment he’d felt as a child is multiplied at witnessing his father’s humiliating brawl again through the eyes of an adult. Both men put all their strength into their punches, but it’s a shamefully even fight. The Weasley children cheer on their oaf of a father while their mother voices her loud disapproval.

Suddenly, another oaf, Hagrid, stomps into view, and he’s pulling the two grown men apart effortlessly, his size and strength making them look like dolls. Another humiliation at Draco’s father’s expense.

On his feet once more, Lucius, who had somehow maintained his grip on a textbook he’d grabbed when Draco hadn’t been looking, forces the book into young Ginny’s arms and sneers. “Here, girl—take your book—it’s the best your father can give you—”

Then he and young Draco depart, leaving chaos in their wake for someone else to manage.

Draco continues to watch as the Weasley matriarch furiously chastises her husband like a child, until the Weasleys, Grangers, and Potter depart as well. He realizes when they are gone that he had been tense throughout the whole encounter. He wouldn’t be surprised if his grip on Ginny’s upper arm bruises her.

Draco knows why the fight upsets him—seeing his father brought low by someone so beneath him had not been a comfortable experience when he was twelve or even now at the age of twenty-seven. But the Weasleys are a family with no self-respect to start with, so why is Ginny so moved by the altercation?

And she is, still. Her brow creases with the depth of her distress, her hand tightening and loosening and tightening its grip on the railing as if she’s imagining her fingers wrapped around someone’s neck instead. Closing her eyes, her nostrils flare as she attempts to control her breathing. He can’t tell if she’s near tears or furious.

Draco is now more intrigued than angry, himself. Time cannot dull his rage, but his interest in Ginny Weasley can.

“What was this all about?” he asks her, his tone as gentle as he can make it under the current circumstances.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

The childish statement prickles him, a spike of resentment causing him to snap, “You’re in no position to withhold an explanation. You’ve been an Unspeakable long enough to know it’s illegal to remove an artifact from the Department of Mysteries. So unless you want to see the inside of an Azkaban cell, you’re going to have to make me understand.”

Ginny’s expression hardens, and she pointedly glances at his hand on her arm until he lets her go.

Blood rushes back to his fingertips, but while he’s marveling over the throbbing sensation in his hand, she’s pointing a wand at the Time-Turner hanging from her neck.

“If you can keep up, I’ll show you,” she says, just before she disappears into thin air, whisked away to some other unknown time period.

A strangled curse tears from Draco’s lips as she slips away from him, and when people in the shop below look up, he retreats deeper into the gallery, away from prying eyes.

It’s a good thing he has a means to follow her, he thinks as he pulls the titanium Time-Turner out of the neck of his robes.

Because when he catches her, she’s a dead woman.

---

part two

She’s waiting for him when he arrives approximately forty seconds later. Or not? Forty seconds have passed, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone forty seconds forward in time. It’s impossible, anyway, because the Time-Turner only transports the user in sixty minute increments.

However one measures the time it takes to travel through time, she’s there, waiting for him in front of an iron gate, when he arrives.

“How the hell are you following me?”

He doesn’t answer because Draco has gone pale, the ability to form words lost at the sight of Hogwarts’ towers looming in the distance through the bars of the gate. He never thought he would return here after the war. Unlike some of his classmates who were invited to return to Hogwarts to complete the erratic education they had received while the school was under Death Eater control, Draco had been sent straight to Azkaban to await trial. After his conviction, he’d gone back to prison to serve time as his sentence.

Even if he’d received an invitation to finish his schooling, Draco would have declined. There are three places he has vowed to never step foot inside again. The first is Azkaban. The second, Malfoy Manor. Third, and easiest of all to avoid until now, is Hogwarts. In the ten years since the war, Draco has managed to fastidiously avoid both his ancestral home and the wizarding school, but here he is, chasing Ginny Weasley to one of the places he detests most in the world.

“Draco?” Ginny says, and he startles, his gaze tearing away from the dark drive that leads directly to one of his personal hells. There’s concern on her face. That must be what the crease in her brow means, the frown weighing down the corners of her mouth, the way she caresses his cheek with a cold hand.

He jerks his head back and regrets it immediately. One of the ways that she has slithered through his defenses over the past few weeks is via her casual touches. The accidental brush of fingers as they pass mugs of tea to one another, an excited touch on his arm as they discuss theories of Time and Thought, and deliberate liberties taken to push his hair out of his face during a long night of report writing. The combination of her handsy personality and friendly demeanor had gotten under Draco’s skin. She can’t possibly know how long it has been since someone touched him in comfort. Draco barely knows. Maybe before he went to Azkaban?

His touch starvation and secret desire for company had finally broken down his defenses against her, and here she is once more putting her hands on him without knowing how much her touch affects him.

Ginny doesn’t comment on his unease. No expression of hurt crosses her face at his rejection. Instead she repeats her question.

And because Draco is still disturbed at the thought of returning to Hogwarts without the proper mental fortifications to prepare him for such a task, he answers her this time. Probably because his armed guards have fled, his brick walls have crumbled, his frothing moat has dried up. What defenses he had are now gone.

He lifts the titanium Time-Turner for her perusal. “I call it Tempus Prime.”

She reaches for it, examining it in equal measure with her eyes and her fingers. The gentle way she inspects the metal sends a chill through his body. For some reason, maybe because his defenses have been obliterated, he imagines how it would feel for her to examine him as thoroughly as she examines the device. Every inch of his body heats. His heart hammers in his ribs, constricting his lungs, making it just a little more difficult to breathe. This is why he’s tried to keep her at arm’s length. He loses control of his body when he’s around her. And now, when he feels his control on his mind also slipping out of his reach, he’s afraid of what she could do with him at his most defenseless.

“It’s charmed to copy whatever the Time-Turner does, isn’t it?”

Draco’s lips quirk upwards in a reluctant smile. This is also why he likes her. She’s clever, and well deserving of her position in the Department of Mysteries. Or more like the Department of Mysteries is well deserving of her.

“Yes,” he answers as he takes it out of her hand and steps back. “I created it after I lost a partner. We were testing the limits of the Time-Turner, seeing how far back we could travel and what, if any, physical consequences there would be. But something must have happened to him, because he never returned.”

“The Time-Turner came back though,” she says, placing her hand over her heart where she’s hidden his Time-Turner under her robes. The metal is probably nice and warm from her body heat, he thinks, and his cheeks redden further.

“Two survived the battle in the Department of Mysteries. I could have followed him with mine. I knew how many turns he was supposed to make and when he was supposed to end up, but if something happened to him when he arrived, it might not have been safe for me to go after him. If he’d miscounted his turns, then there was no way for me to know where in time he’d landed. We had a procedure for such accidents, a way to leave messages for each other. I never received one. So now my Time-Turner is the very last.”

“And then you created Tempus Prime.”

“Yes. With an incantation, it will repeat the number of turns the Time-Turner last completed, and it acts as a portkey so that if something happens to me, someone else would be able to find me exactly whenever and wherever I am.”

“You know, you missed an opportunity with that thing,” Ginny says as she turns and pushes open the iron gates that will lead them to the Hogwarts grounds.

“What opportunity?” Draco asks as he hurries to catch up with her.

She looks over her shoulder, and the smile she’s wearing is fragile. A vain attempt at levity? A diversion to make him forget the laws she’s breaking?

“You should have called it Prime Time. It’s the only name that fits.”

“I did call it Prime Time. With Latin thrown in.”

She waves her hand dismissively. “The Latin is an unnecessary embellishment. My name rhymes.”

Draco grabs her arm, stopping her. “I know what you’re doing. Don’t think you can distract me. What are we doing here? When are we?” His second question is the one for which he is most desperate for an answer. In the practice of time-travel, where one travels is rarely as important as when.

She yanks her arm out of his reach and scowls. “May 29th, 1993. If I’ve timed it correctly, then I’m down in the Chamber of Secrets and Harry and Ron are about to take Lockhart into the Chamber to retrieve me. We need to be in Myrtle’s loo before they arrive so that we can follow them through the entrance. So if you don’t mind, we’ll finish the rest of this trip in silence.”

She stalks off, leaving Draco stunned. But then she spins around and raises her wand. “Actually, we should Disillusion ourselves so that no one sees us.”

That shakes him out of his stupor. “So you can slip out from under me and abscond with my Time-Turner? Absolutely not.”

Her shrug speaks so loudly, she doesn’t need words. He can hear her body language loud and clear: If you want to make things more difficult, then fine. All she says out loud is “Silence the rest of the way” with a glare and a motion across her mouth that clearly mimics lips zipping closed.

They walk up the drive to Hogwarts, and the silence is the perfect conduit for thoughts Draco would rather keep locked up. The closer they draw to the castle, the closer to the surface his memories rise, memories that Draco had wrestled with and subdued years ago. In Azkaban, Draco had trained himself to hide away the worst of his memories so that the Dementors could not use them against him. His Occlumency had grown stronger as a result. So strong those memories hardly exist now.

But returning to the location where those memories had taken place is taking its toll on Draco. He can feel his Occlumency slipping away, and the panic of that knowledge gnaws at him, starting with uncomfortable nibbles at his fingertips and escalating into limb-tearing bites.

When he and Ginny walk right through the great oak doors, a fleeting ghost from the past treks through his mind, reminding him of the last time he’d walked out of those doors. In chains.

As they ascend the grand staircase, the eerie silence of the castle sends a chill up his spine, and he nearly trips on the steps. But he remembers now. All of the students were in their common rooms, commanded to return there by Professor McGonagall while the staff discussed the imminent closing of Hogwarts. Twelve-year-old Draco is in the dungeons, unconcerned by the attacks because he knows Slytherin’s monster only hunts Mudbloods. He’s safe and content in his bed right now, planning his future at Durmstrang after Hogwarts closes forever.

The little shit.

They enter Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom quietly. The annoying ghost is there, watching herself cry in a cracked mirror, and Draco leaves his body for a moment as another memory resurfaces, one he submerged so deep, not even the Giant Squid would have been able to uncover it.

Myrtle cooing comforting words as Draco leans over a sink, his body wracked with sobs he cannot control no matter how hard he tries to suppress the emotions. He needs more time, just enough to finish what he started. But there isn’t enough time, and he’s going to die, his whole family is going to die, and it will all be his fault because he failed to do as the Dark Lord asked—no, commanded. When he looks up at his cracked reflection, he sees Potter staring at him agog like an idiot. Draco attacks but Potter defends himself, and before Draco can utter a Cruciatus Curse… the one and only time he has ever meant it enough to be remotely effective and painful… he’s writhing on the floor, gasping and bleeding and there’s so much pain—the worst pain he’s ever felt—worse than when he fell off his broom and broke his leg at eight years old—

He’s dying right now, he knows he is, and Harry fucking Potter is going to be the last face he sees before he goes—

Draco is being shoved into one of the stalls and Ginny follows him in. She climbs up onto the toilet so that her robes aren’t visible below the door, and Draco climbs up there with her when she yanks his arm. They’re so close together, her breath is hot on his neck, and he can smell piss even though no one in their right mind would choose to use Myrtle’s loo and listen to that wailing while they relieved themselves.

But this is better than his memories. He keeps himself grounded in the present—past-present? pre-future?—because to succumb to his thoughts would be tantamount to torture. There are so many places his brain could go, none of them pleasant, all of them excruciating.

He revels instead in the feel of Ginny’s hands on him, one wrapped around his torso, holding him up, the other fisted in his robes, keeping him steady. It’s a strong fist, white-knuckled and tight, but if he lets himself pay close enough attention, he can see the tremors. Their faces are nearly nose to nose, and she looks anywhere but at him. He forces himself to analyze her expression, try to identify it. Severe, down-turned lips. A creased forehead and brows that meet above the bridge of her nose. Glassy brown eyes that blink-blink-blink in quick succession.

Draco doesn’t usually allow himself to dwell on anyone else’s emotional state because that’s a short Knight Bus ride to him thinking about his own. But it’s easier to examine hers in this instant. The fear and distress on her face and in her tense limbs scream at him as loudly as Myrtle cries outside the stall.

Does his face scream back at her? What does she see?

With the way his walls are crumbling, the thought that she can see everything terrifies him.

Both of them look away from each other when they hear the door open and multiple sets of feet pour in.

“Oh, it’s you. What do you want this time?” Myrtle says sullenly. Draco missed whatever Ginny had said to Myrtle when they entered the bathroom, but based on her tone it must have worsened her mood.

Potter’s pre-pubescent voice answers. “To ask you how you died.”

The sullenness disappears at once, replaced instead with a macabre zeal, and Myrtle says, “Ooooh, it was dreadful. It happened right in here. I died in this very stall. I remember it so well.”

And as she recounts her tale, Draco finds her zeal for her own death odd. How did she turn the worst thing that ever happened to her into the most exciting thing to ever happen to her? How could she bear to talk about the end of her life with such enthusiasm?

Draco doesn’t understand Potter’s interest in the story until Potter asks Myrtle exactly how she died.

“No idea. I just remember seeing a pair of great, big, yellow eyes. My whole body sort of seized up, and then I was floating away….”

Draco stiffens, and his eyes meet Ginny’s. She’s already nodding at him when he looks at her, confirming what neither Myrtle nor Potter has said explicitly. She is the victim of Slytherin’s monster, the Muggleborn girl who died when the Chamber opened fifty years before. Everyone in the castle spent the entire school year speculating about the Heir of Slytherin and the monster, fearing for their safety, and the whole time, a non-living and non-breathing remnant of the original opening of the Chamber had floated among them in the form of a ghost too obnoxious to consult.

The grinding sound of stone invades Draco’s thoughts, and then Potter declares his intention to go somewhere, and Ronald, who has been there silently the whole time apparently, declares his own intention to join him. Lockhart declines, but he’s strong-armed by the twelve-year-olds and then shoved down a hole, apparently, judging by the receding tenor of his scream. The boys follow, and then Ginny and Draco are alone with Myrtle, who continues crying in her stall and thankfully leaves them alone.

He begins to speculate that Ginny put a spell on the ghost to keep her from interfering, which is just fine with Draco. Being near her, seeing her face, hearing her talk, knowing what he knows of the relationship that will grow between them in Draco’s hours of despair a few short years later—it all makes his stomach churn with nausea. And Draco just doesn’t have time to be sick at the moment.

They climb down from the toilet and exit the stall, and now, where one of the sinks used to be, there is the opening of a pipe in the floor, large enough for a grown man to fall through.

Ginny looks down into the pipe, but her hands are on the Time-Turner as if she’s considering leaving 1993 instead. Her entire body trembles, and Draco realizes he hasn’t thought through this plan to follow her where she needs to go. If the hole before them is the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, then that means Slytherin’s monster is down there as well. If he’d been thinking about the present instead of his memories, he would be trembling, too.

Taking a deep breath, Ginny stuffs the Time-Turner back into her robes. Whatever that breath did for her, it did not cure her of her shivering. “I’m afraid this next part is going to be tricky. We are going to have to Disillusion ourselves now and get ahead of Harry. The tunnel caves in at one point with Ron and Lockhart on one side and Harry on the other. We need to be on Harry’s side before the tunnel collapses.”

“Why are we doing this?” Draco asks.

Her eyes glaze over as if they want to shed tears. None fall. She wrings her hands together, rubs her forearms, tugs on her fingers. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I have to know. I nearly died, and I have to see what happened for myself.”

She nearly died? Draco doesn’t remember that, and not because of his skills at suppressing memories. At the feast that followed Potter’s defeat of the monster, Dumbledore had announced Ginny’s joyous, unharmed return, and Draco had always assumed her abduction had been uneventful for her. Maybe even boring.

Now his curiosity is piqued, but this is still a bad idea. He should grab her and the Time-Turner and return to 2009. Forget this ever happened and never speak a word of it so he can keep his job and stay out of Azkaban. If he lets her go down into that hole, he will have to go with her to ensure the Time-Turner’s safety. There will be no turning back at that point.

He only has moments to decide, which means she only has moments to convince him. She seems to sense the importance of the next few seconds because she grabs his hands, squeezes them.

“Please. I promise I will explain everything. I promise to give the Time-Turner back. But I need to do this first, and then I’ll accept whatever punishment is waiting for me in 2009.”

She doesn’t need to plead with him. As soon as she took his hands, he was hers.

He nods once, and she retrieves her wand. As she taps him on the head and a cold, wet sensation descends down his body, she says, “I’ll lead the way, so don’t let go.”

Draco has no plans to.

---

part three

They follow the sounds of Potter, Weasley, and Lockhart’s steps through the slimy, dark tunnel. Draco’s heart races after that disorienting slide down the pipe, but it continues racing long after they reach the bottom due to their breakneck pace. They aren’t flat out running yet, but it’s more physical activity than Draco has participated in since before he became an Unspeakable, and he’s loath to admit that a career in research, while great exercise for the brain, does not contribute to a fit physique.

Draco doesn’t dare let go of Ginny’s hand. There’s only one direction they can travel in, but the all-consuming darkness is eerie enough without feeling alone in it. A light would give them away once they drew close enough to the party ahead, so they travel in the darkness with only their clasped hands as reassurance that they are in this together.

Whatever this is.

Their pace slows as the tunnel bends and agitated voices meet them.

“—tell them I was too late to save the girl, and that you two tragically lost your minds at the sight of her mangled body—”

Draco freezes, his breath catching as he realizes Lockhart is referring to Ginny, referring to leaving her to die in the Chamber.

“Come on!” Ginny breaks out into a run and pulls him behind her as Lockhart raises a wand over his head.

“Obliviate!” he cries, and the tunnel explodes around them, stone the size of watermelons and larger falling around their heads.

Draco slips over some material on the ground and covers his head with his free arm as if an arm wouldn’t snap like a quill if a rock fell on him. Somehow, Ginny drags him where they need to be, and as the dust settles, as they hide against a wall and try to catch their breaths, he sees that they did indeed succeed.

A wall of rocks blocks the tunnel in the direction from which they’d arrived. Infant Potter stands in front of it, calling his best friend’s name.

Draco looks to his right where Ginny should be. He can’t see her due to the Disillusionment Charm and the darkness, but her trembling hand is still clasped in his, and he can hear her sucking in breaths through her fear. They stand shoulder to shoulder, and her body is a comfort after the excitement, her warmth feeding into him, sustaining him by reminding him that they’ve survived this long. A little cave-in couldn’t possibly finish them off after all they’ve been through.

“Was he really going to—”

“Yes,” she whispers, keeping her voice low so that Potter won’t hear them. “Then probably sell a heroic story about how he saved Harry and Ron but not me.”

“Why did his wand explode?”

Ginny’s voice wobbles when she answers. “It was Ron’s wand. He broke it at the beginning of the term, but my parents couldn’t afford a new one, so he Spellotaped it instead of asking for one. It backfired on him all year long.”

“That explains the slugs,” Draco says, remembering an incident when Weasley tried to attack him and ended up regurgitating slugs himself instead.

“Yes,” Ginny says, her voice a little colder.

Potter is moving now, and they move on with him, trying to keep their steps as quiet as possible. The tunnel goes on for ages, but Potter, using his wand to light the way, is an easy beacon to follow. They stop when they reach a dead end, a wall carved with the image of two intertwined snakes with glittering emeralds for eyes.

Potter clears his throat, and a hissing sound fills the tunnel.

Hearing Parseltongue spoken once more makes all the hair on Draco’s body stand on end. Potter has the voice of a child, high-pitched and as sinister as a sleeping puppy. Despite that, Draco doesn’t hear a child when he speaks. He hears a memory. The Dark Lord speaking in low hisses, siccing his giant snake on the Muggle Studies professor floating above the dinner table while his most loyal servants watch and laugh. Draco’s parents didn’t laugh. They didn’t watch, either.

But he did. Draco had witnessed the feeding from start to finish, his horror paralyzing him as much as his fascination. He’d made himself watch to remind himself to be grateful he hadn’t met a similar fate after his failure to kill Dumbledore, to remind himself of the consequences of future failures. The snake had swallowed the woman whole, starting with her feet. Draco particularly remembered how her head had turned just before snake jaws clamped around it, turned to look at him. He’d never had Professor Burbage as a teacher, of course, but her eyes had pleaded with him until she found herself in the belly of the beast, quite literally, and he would never forget that look.

No. To be more accurate, he had forgotten all about the expression of terror in her eyes as she died because he’d made himself forget it using his Occlumency to lock the memory away with all of the other ones from the war. Hearing Potter speak Parseltongue has released it as if those hisses are the very key that fit the padlock on the box keeping the memories contained.

As if obeying a command, the wall splits down the middle, separating the snake carvings and creating an entrance to some unknown space beyond.

But Draco knows exactly where this door leads. This can only be the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets.

When Potter moves into the room, so do Ginny and Draco. While Potter walks straight into the center of the room, in between tall pillars adorned with stone snakes that peer at the center of the chamber, Ginny tugs Draco off to the side, behind the pillars where they can take shelter and watch the proceedings.

Potter’s footsteps echo, and they take advantage of the echo to hide their own steps. They keep pace with him as he passes pillar after pillar, until he reaches the last set before a gigantuan statue of a wizard with a beard that nearly touches the ground. The statue is so tall, and the ceiling of the chamber is so high, Draco can hardly see the wizard’s face. Even so, the Chamber of Secrets, home to Slytherin’s monster, would surely feature a larger than life statue of Salazar Slytherin himself.

At the base of the statue, in between Slytherin’s bare feet peeking out from the hem of his robes, a bundle of black and red lay unresponsive.

Adult Ginny releases a breath at the same time Potter says her name and rushes forward, throwing his wand aside to turn the bundle over, revealing the tiny girl, her hair red as fire, her face as white as snow.

“Ginny, please wake up,” Harry says, his desperation manifesting not only in his voice, but in the way he shakes the body.

Draco shudders. He knows little Ginny Weasley’s fate, but seeing her like this—yes, near death, as he can see with his own eyes—a part of him still wonders if she’ll live….

“She won’t wake,” another voice says from the darkness.

Draco looks around along with Harry, searching for the owner of the voice. On the other side of the chamber, a black-haired man—no, a teenager; he’s wearing Hogwarts robes—leans against the pillar opposite the one Draco and Ginny are hiding behind. There’s something strange about his appearance, a blurriness that makes Draco rub his eyes as if to clear his vision. The dim lighting and ghostly green glow that reminds Draco a bit of the Slytherin common room doesn’t help, either. But when he finishes massaging his eyes and blinking into the darkness, the strange blurriness that surrounds the boy is still there.

“Tom—Tom Riddle?” Potter says in disbelief, as if he knows this person.

Draco doesn’t recognize him, so it seems odd that Potter, who had been raised as a Muggle and, at this point in his life, had only been introduced to the wizarding world two years prior, would be familiar with an older former Hogwarts student.

Ginny’s hand disappears from Draco’s. She’s let go of him, and he hears her footsteps as she retreats, but he can’t see her, dammit. This lighting, the Disillusionment Charm, the echo-y chamber…. Even if he could follow her, he wouldn’t lest he draw unwitting attention to himself.

The loss of her terrifies him. Slytherin’s monster is here somewhere, and if they split up, how can they keep each other safe?

“She’s still alive. But only just,” Riddle says, his stare hard and unbreaking as he watches Potter.

A chill runs down Draco’s spine. His clammy hands clench in the material of his robes, looking for something to hold onto now that Ginny’s gone.

“Are you a ghost?” Potter asks.

“A memory. Preserved in a diary for fifty years.” Riddle points toward Ginny, to a black book lying on the ground next to her.

A memory brought to life. A manifestation of a life, an event that happened, apparently, fifty years ago, living, breathing, talking. A time-traveler, not unlike Draco himself. A boy out of place, out of time, visiting an era he’s never seen before. The thought incapacitates Draco. It’s one thing for his memories to wreak havoc inside his own brain, no longer restrained by his Occlumency. It’s quite another if they unleash themselves from his head and begin wreaking havoc on the physical world.

It’s the stuff his nightmares are made of, and while Tom Riddle is not Draco’s memory, it is not a far leap to believe that his memories could one day take on a life of their own, too. That the same magic that brought Riddle to life could make his memories a reality.

Potter begs Riddle for help as he lifts Ginny’s head and continues his attempts to revive her. Riddle still has a strange expression on his face, an intensity he directs at Potter, as if he’s everything he’s ever wanted, as if he’s been waiting eons to meet him.

Draco’s stomach turns.

Riddle has Potter’s wand, and he refuses to give it back. Potter begins to lose patience, saying with just as much urgency as the situation deserves, “Listen, we’ve got to go! If the basilisk comes—”

“It won’t come unless it is called.” Riddle speaks with composure that is inappropriate for the situation. He is, as ever, unhurried, as if he is unaware of the danger.

Or the master of it.

Draco watches with rapt attention as the two go back and forth—Potter demanding his wand—Riddle expressing his interest in meeting Potter—Potter asking what happened to Ginny.

And then Riddle mocks her. “I suppose the real reason Ginny Weasley’s like this is because she opened her heart and spilled all her secrets to an invisible stranger…. The diary. My diary. Little Ginny’s been writing in it for months and months, telling me all her pitiful worries and woes—

“It’s very boring having to listen to the silly little troubles of an eleven-year-old girl. But I was patient. I wrote back. I was sympathetic, I was kind. Ginny simply loved me. No one’s ever understood me like you, Tom…. I’m so glad I’ve got this diary to confide in…. It’s like having a friend I can carry around in my pocket….”

Riddle laughs, high-pitched, cold, and utterly familiar. It doesn’t sound like the kind of laugh a teenage boy could make, especially not one so young and handsome. It has a villainous quality to it, an evilness that Draco knows he’s heard before.

“If I say it myself, Harry, I’ve always been able to charm the people I needed. So Ginny poured out her soul to me, and her soul happened to be exactly what I wanted…. I grew stronger and stronger on a diet of her deepest fears, her darkest secrets. I grew powerful, far more powerful than little Miss Weasley. Powerful enough to start feeding Miss Weasley a few of my secrets, to start pouring a little of my soul back into her....”

“What d’you mean?” Potter asks, his question echoing the one Draco screams in his mind.

He’s gripping the pillar now, the stone biting into the soft flesh of his palms, leaving ancient debris embedded in his skin. But that doesn’t matter, because Draco wants to understand… he needs to know what’s going on….

“Haven’t you guessed yet, Harry Potter?” Riddle says, his voice soft, inviting—derisive. “Ginny Weasley opened the Chamber of Secrets. She strangled the school roosters and daubed threatening messages on the walls. She set the serpent of Slytherin on four Mudbloods, and the Squib’s cat.”

“No,” Potter whispers.

Draco’s mind has gone too dark and empty to think even that single word. It’s impossible, what Riddle suggests. The legend said that Slytherin’s heir was the only one who could open the Chamber of Secrets and control Slytherin’s monster. Draco’s father had said as such when he’d written home about the first attacks and messages on the walls. No one would have ever thought to suspect a Weasley to act as the heir of Slytherin, and even though she did Riddle’s bidding under duress, Draco still can’t imagine it.

Riddle drones on, and Draco hangs onto every word, trying to understand his motivation. And then an explanation arrives.

“Haven’t I already told you that killing Mudbloods doesn’t matter to me anymore? For many months now, my new target has been—you.

“...how is it that you—a skinny boy with no extraordinary magical talent—managed to defeat the greatest wizard of all time? How did you escape with nothing but a scar, while Lord Voldemort’s powers were destroyed?”

“Why do you care how I escaped? Voldemort was after your time….”

There is something odd about Riddle’s eyes now, a red tint to them that Draco might be imagining, though his instincts tell him he’s not. Just before Riddle opens his mouth, he puts it together, and Draco realizes why that laugh was so familiar, why Riddle’s eyes make him sick.

“Voldemort is my past, present, and future, Harry Potter….”

Using Potter’s wand, he slashes it through the air, not casting a spell, but writing three words large enough for Draco to read:

TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE

He waves the wand, and the letters begin to move in mid-air, rearranging themselves to say:

I AM LORD VOLDEMORT

“No,” Draco says out loud. He slaps a hand over his mouth, but his voice was a mere whisper, barely audible over Riddle explaining himself.

Looks like someone never outgrew his enjoyment of the sound of his own voice.

A delirious giggle climbs up Draco’s throat, but he smothers it back down using the sheer force of his will and his terror. As the wildly inappropriate laughter slithers back to the depths from which it came, Draco’s body descends with it, his legs finally giving out. He collapses to the ground and turns his back to the pillar, his knees drawn up to his chest.

When she was eleven years old, Ginny Weasley wrote into a diary that wrote back to her. The memory embedded in the diary became her dearest friend and used her vulnerability against her, to manipulate her, to possess her.

Draco had shared a residence with Lord Voldemort in his most evil form, and that memory had been so traumatizing Draco had vowed never to enter Malfoy Manor again and taught himself how to bury the memory deeply within himself so as to never confront it again. But Ginny had lived with the memory of Lord Voldemort residing inside her for nearly a whole year.

The Dark Lord had used Draco to do his bidding, threatening his parents’ lives and offering the kind of reward Draco could not refuse if he succeeded. The teenage version of the Dark Lord had controlled Ginny to make her do his bidding. He’d taken over her body, mind, and soul and forced her to hurt people, ghosts, and cats alike.

How had she lived so long with such memories? Draco hadn’t been able to function in Azkaban. The memories the Dementors had feasted on had turned him into a babbling, incoherent psychotic, and it wasn’t until he’d strengthened his Occlumency that he’d been able to think for himself again.

For fifteen years, this kind of darkness has lived inside her.

Does anyone know? Besides Potter, of course, who is dead now at any rate. Her family, her friends, do any of them understand what she went through at eleven years old?

How had they moved on as if nothing had happened? How had she?

He needs to know so that he, too, can learn to live with the memories of his past. Because he’s starting to see that ignoring them, locking them up, pretending they don’t exist, is not working for him.

Draco’s thoughts are interrupted by a horrific sound: hissing. He peers around the column to see Riddle standing at the foot of the statue, his arms lifted as he speaks Parseltongue to it. The sound of stone grinding together fills the chamber as Salazar Slytherin’s mouth opens wide, creating a black hole in the middle of Slytherin’s face to match the hole in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom that led down into an abyss.

Potter backs away until his back hits the wall closest to Draco, and a phoenix—which must have arrived while he’d been lost in his ghastly thoughts—takes flight from his shoulder, fleeing the way Draco wishes he could.

And then something falls out of the statue’s mouth onto the chamber floor, and Draco is scrambling to his feet because he knows what’s coming next, and with Potter so close to him, that means Draco is now in the monster’s direct path.

A snake, the largest snake Draco has ever seen, uncoils and looks to its master for instruction. Riddle points in Draco’s direction—at Potter—and speaks.

And Draco knows without understanding the language that he’s just commanded the monster to kill.

---

Potter had called the monster a basilisk earlier, Draco remembers. He doesn’t actually care about the creature’s proper name at the moment, but it’s the first thought that pops into his head before his body takes over in self-preservation.

He keeps his gaze averted to his feet as he runs, and Potter is right beside him, almost rubbing elbows. Then Draco realizes the error of his ways—he needs to get away from Potter, who is the basilisk’s intended target—and swerves to the left around a pillar. Back flat against the stone, he clenches his eyes closed and breathes through his nose, trying not to make a sound while he listens to the echoing noise of the chase behind him.

Feet splashing through puddles—a thud as something falls to the wet ground—the basilisk hissing and screeching—Riddle screaming about a bird—a melodic, melancholy tune that does not suit the environment but still somehow fills Draco with hope—

“KILL THE BOY! LEAVE THE BIRD! THE BOY IS BEHIND YOU! SNIFF—SMELL HIM!”

Draco’s eyes crack open to find Potter and the basilisk at the end of the chamber, near the entrance. Blood drips from the basilisk’s eyes, from wounds the phoenix must have inflicted to blind it. Before the giant snake, a defiant and weary expression on his face, Potter raises a sword, silver with rubies the size of eggs embedded in the hilt, the same sword that killed Voldemort’s snake Nagini in 1998. Potter raises it as if he believes a twelve-year-old boy can defeat an ancient monster.

The basilisk lunges at him. Potter lunges at the snake. They meet each other somewhere in the middle, and for one uncertain moment, Draco believes Potter to be swallowed whole like Charity Burbage. But no. The basilisk lurches to the side, dead. And Potter, still alive for now, slides down the wall that had kept him standing this long, clutching his arm.

Potter does not come away from his encounter with the basilisk unscathed. A fang protrudes from his arm where he’s been bitten, and he rips it out and drops it, his movements slow with exhaustion.

Or venom.

Draco creeps closer now that the threat has been vanquished. Riddle taunts Potter about his impending death; even the phoenix knows Potter is dying because the creature is crying tears directly over the bloody wound before being shooed away by Riddle.

Draco takes this opportunity to examine Riddle from a closer distance. The blurriness from earlier has sharpened, Riddle’s shape clearer than ever before. He glances back to the crumpled figure of Ginny, so pale in the darkness, and understands now that this is how Ginny almost died. As her strength waned, Tom Riddle’s increased. The only way his memory will be fully brought to life is to steal the rest of Ginny’s life.

He can see how easy it was for Riddle to manipulate her, to gain her trust. He has that look that Draco never could manage for himself, a handsomeness that endears people to him. A charisma that makes people want to know him or want to be him. That kind of affect is not something one can buy, though Draco certainly tried in his youth. Draco’s followers flocked to him because of his influence, but he can tell Riddle didn’t have to bully or bribe anyone into becoming his minion. At least, not before the red eyes and the bone-white skin and the snake-like nostrils. Not before the man’s monstrosity became exposed in his outward appearance.

Something brushes against Draco’s hand, and he jumps away from whatever it is. The touch returns, more insistent this time. A shimmery shape appears beside him, a dent in his vision. It takes his hand, grasping it like a lifeline.

Ginny.

She squeezes his hand with a strength that surprises him, her grip choking. Instead of squeezing back, Draco wants to jerk away. Resentment boils up inside him at her audacity to leave him after she instructed him not to let go. Then for her to come back and seek comfort from him as if she hadn’t left him at the mercy of the basilisk? At the mercy of his own memories? She doesn’t deserve to be comforted, not by him.

He tells himself to let go, to abandon her the way she abandoned him. His fingers disobey. They clench around hers and tighten, two shaking hands pressed together to strangle the tremors.

Draco pulls her down into a crouch as a shadow passes over them. His lungs scream in agony from the breath he holds at this new threat and then the eventual release when he sees it’s just the phoenix. The bird returns to Potter, still collapsed against the wall but his features gaining color as the basilisk venom leaves his system. Riddle stands over him with Potter’s wand outstretched until the bird drops the diary in Potter’s lap.

Draco blinks and suddenly Potter’s got the bloody discarded fang in hand. He arches it through the air with all his strength and pierces the heart of the diary, which splutters a fountain of ink like blood sprouting from an open wound.

Two screams accompany the gushing ink, one from the diary, and one from Riddle himself. His image flickers and blurs as he writhes, reaching for Potter or for the ruined diary—and then he’s gone. No flash of light, no ear-piercing sound. Just gone. And now Potter’s wand is on the ground, and Ginny sags against Draco. He can hear her soft cries as she loses the last of her strength.

He understands now why she had to see this for herself. Draco likes to think that if given the chance to bear witness to the defeat of his memories brought to life, he’d take it in a heartbeat. The truth is—he’s a coward. For ten years, he’s kept his memories locked up inside his head, afraid to confront them, afraid to acknowledge them.

If his memories ever came to life, he’d run as far away as possible rather than face them. The truth is he’s not as strong as Ginny. Or maybe he’s not as stupid.

They wait as Potter collects the diary, the Sorting Hat, and withdraws the sword from the basilisk’s mouth. By the time he’s gathered himself, a moan alerts them to young Ginny’s awakening on the other side of the chamber.

The three of them move closer, Draco and Ginny nearly invisible, Potter rushing to Ginny’s side.

Both Ginnys are crying now, the younger one babbling with explanations and questions, the elder dignified in her silence. Both Ginnys are weak and lean against the men who escort them.

Draco waits for Potter and Weasley to depart, their receding footsteps no longer echoing into the chamber, before he removes the Disillusionment Charm from both of their bodies.

There is a part of him that wants to wrap his arms around her, not just because she needs the support, but because he does, too. All of him shakes, his teeth clattering until he grinds his jaws together, his fingers so unsteady he can barely hold his wand. If this is how he feels after repeating an event he had no original part in, what must Ginny be feeling now? He’s never cared enough to wonder about anyone else’s emotional state, and the concern that takes over his mind annoys him.

Grabbing her arms serves the purpose of holding her up and steadying his shakes.

“So,” he says, and she jumps at the venom in his voice. “For weeks you made yourself a nuisance, pretended to be interested in my work, burdened me with your company—all for the chance to steal my Time-Turner. And for what? What purpose did this serve?”

She backs away from him and shakes her head, but no words come out of her gaping mouth. Draco doesn’t let go, so he’s with her every step she takes until she’s backed into a pillar with no avenue of escape. Over her shoulder, one of the serpents carved on the pillar smiles at Draco, its emerald eyes glinting in the low light. What an apt representation of the woman before him. She pretends to be a righteous lion, but she is in fact the cunning snake.

Impatient with her reticence, he leans into her, his face close so that she cannot mistake his anger for a gentler emotion.

“Well? Why put yourself—and me!—through this horror? What could you possibly have gained from this?”

“You don’t understand,” she says in a throaty voice.

“I told you, didn’t I? You need to make me understand.” With each word, he shakes her, pushes her a little more into the pillar.

He doesn’t think he’s hurting her, but at this moment he just doesn’t care. This was a foolhardy errand, and Draco was an idiot for humoring her. He should have snatched the Time-Turner from around her throat and shoved her down that hole in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom, leaving her to rot in the Chamber of Secrets like Gilderoy Lockhart had planned to do.

With a defiant glare and a childlike sniffle, Ginny shoves her arm in his face and yanks at the left sleeve of her robe.

Draco’s thoughts immediately turn to the Dark Mark burned on his arm. So strange. He’s spent so many years avoiding it and all the memories surrounding it, he’d actually forgotten it was there. Such a simple action, harmless, innocent… just pulling back her sleeve while she extends her forearm towards him…. The simplicity of her movements must be what unlocks this particular box.

For an absurd, helpless moment, Draco wonders if she’s about to reveal a Dark Mark to him. But of course that’s a ludicrous idea. As if, after everything she went through with Tom Riddle, Ginny Weasley would align herself with the Dark Lord, as if she’d let him coerce her to do his bidding again. He knows without her having to tell him that she would have died rather than let him use her any more.

What she reveals instead are stripes along her arm, jagged and erratic like the stripes one might see on the coat of a wild cat, but criss-crossing over one another. Against the paleness of her skin, they are a horror, the lines themselves an inoffensive shade of pink, but the areas around them a more inflamed red. The color of the stripes and the way they protrude from her skin identify them for what they are. Not tattoos, not birthmarks—scars. The injuries are not new, but they are still healing. One day, if she treats them appropriately, they will be white against her skin, faint lines that she will eventually forget about, that she will trick her eyes into not seeing. For now, they are brutal, an aggressive reminder of whatever trauma she faced.

She raises her other sleeve to expose the same marks on her right arm. Together, they paint a picture of cruelty done to her by a foe Draco can’t fathom.

He releases her and steps back. “This didn’t happen to you in the Chamber,” Draco says. He’s drawn to her wounds, wants to run his fingers over them like chaotic roads mapping her body. He keeps his hands to himself and looks at her face instead.

Ginny shakes her head. “There was an accident at work…. I was in the Brain Room handling one of the brains, but I wasn’t careful enough. It attacked me, wrapped itself around my arms. You can’t imagine what it’s like... the feeling of those tendrils… the pain.”

“Tell me,” Draco says. He knows little about the Brain Room, but what little knowledge he’s accrued by working in the chamber next door to it horrifies him. Those brains are the stuff of his literal nightmares. He has to know what it’s like to be attacked by one—what it was like for her specifically.

“The only thing I can compare it to is a Dementor, but multiply that despair by a thousand, and add the worst pain of your life on top of it. My whole body was burning, starting with my arms where the brain’s thoughts held onto me and shooting directly to my head, to my own brain. Every horrible thought I’ve ever had, every terrifying experience I’ve ever endured came back to the surface, the memories so fresh, I felt like I was reliving them all at once every second the brain remained attached. I almost didn’t even notice the physical pain, that’s how debilitating the mental aspect of it was. I wanted to die just to stop the attack, and that’s when Higgins heard me screaming from the Death Chamber. How appropriate, right?”

As she wipes the tears from her face, she laughs a little, a sound that lacks any humor.

“My dad used to say, ‘Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.’ He said it more often after the disaster with the diary, but I bet he never considered that we shouldn’t trust the brain, either.” She frowns, seemingly lost in thought for a moment. “I survived my first year of Hogwarts. Until this attack, I was able to put that year behind me. But now… I think I can finally—actually—lay those memories to rest.”

“How?” Draco asks. “How did you put it behind you?” His voice cracks with emotion that he identifies as—desperation. It’s been so long since he felt this kind of desperate, this longing for what someone else has. Eleven years, perhaps? Twelve? Draco hasn’t known true peace since childhood, and he wants some of hers for himself.

“My family went to Egypt that summer, and while we were there, I made myself forget what happened to me. But I couldn’t forget it completely. Not when I went back to Hogwarts for my second year. Not when I walked through corridors where the basilisk had attacked. Not when I could still see those messages painted on the walls. Not when I desperately needed to use the loo one day and found myself in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom.

“Little by little, I let myself remember it all. As much as I could remember, anyway. And maybe that was my saving grace, the fact that I was unconscious for the worst of it. It took me ages to trust myself and my thoughts again, to not panic when my memory slipped and I forgot something as innocent as packing my favorite quill in my bag or to remind Ron to bring me back sweets from Hogsmeade.”

Ginny steps closer to Draco and puts her hands on his arms. Her hold is gentle, her now dry eyes unrelenting. And Draco is afraid that everything is written on his face, his past, his trauma, the ineffectual way he tried to deal with both.

Would it be a bad thing to be seen for once? For his pain to be acknowledged, especially since he himself has refused to acknowledge his own anguish for the last decade?

“I taught myself not to flinch from my memories, Draco,” Ginny says softly. “And do you know what happened?”

He shakes his head, his throat tight. If he opens his mouth, an assuredly degrading sob will fall out, so he keeps his lips pressed together.

Her hands slide up from his arms to cup his face. Her fingers are warm and perfect. They keep him in the present (The past-present? The pre-future?).

“One day, they stopped haunting me, at least until the brain incident a few days ago. I was genuine about collaborating with you. But then the brain… it refreshed certain memories, and I couldn’t concentrate on my work until I confronted them head on. I’m sorry for stealing your Time-Turner. I always intended to return it.”

She withdraws her hands to retrieve the Time-Turner from the neck of her robes. Then she slips the chain over her head and hands it to Draco.

He takes it, the metal still carrying her body heat. He inspects the device because he’s not ready to meet her eyes just yet, though his inspection is not necessary. He knows the Time-Turner like he knows his fingers. The tapered lengths that some people (Pansy) might call unmanly, the whorls of his fingerprints, the wrinkles of his knuckles, the depths of the lines embedded in his palms, the shape of his fingernails.

He knows every scratch and knick in the gold, the smooth way the hourglass turns, the flow of the sand from one bulb to another, the way it trickles through the neck separating each half. The edge of the Time-Turner is engraved with tiny stars. In between the stars, the words: memento tempus vincit omnia.

Remember, time conquers all things.

It’s the motto of the Time Chamber, a reminder to Unspeaksables that no person is immune to the effects of Time. Better wizards than Draco have tried to bend time in order to change their destinies. Worse wizards have tried to defeat it by seeking immortality. All those who sought to conquer Time found themselves vanquished instead.

Including the Dark Lord.

With that thought, for the first time ever, the motto he memorized on his first day as an Unspeakable comforts him.

Ginny strokes his cheeks with her thumbs, prompting him to finally look at her. “I have a theory, remember?”

Draco sighs. With that single breath, all of the anger he’s carried since 2009, all of the fear that has wracked him since confronting his past, all of the pain of his stolen childhood, and the shame of his many, many mistakes… he lets go of them all with that single breath. Instantly, he feels lighter.

Ginny smiles. Her cheeks are still wet from tears, her face is still pale from the shock of watching her abuser destroyed, but, miraculously, she smiles anyway.

“Memories are just thought given time. When you increase the variable Time, the resulting Memory weakens. That’s how I put it all behind me. You can do it, too. Just give it more time.”

He nods because that’s all he can do. Now his cheeks are wet, and it’s not her tears soaking them—it’s his. For once, Draco bows his head and lets them flow. For the first time since he was eight years old, he lets himself feel what it means to be in distress.

Rising up on her toes, Ginny kisses his eyelids. One, then the other. When their gazes meet, she’s hesitant, uncertain of his reaction.

Draco’s spine stiffens, the tenderness she showed him uncomfortable only because it’s unfamiliar. There’s a part of him that believes he could become accustomed to her brand of tenderness, but he doesn’t want to embarrass himself by hoping for it. A different part of him also believes she’ll discard him now that she got what she wanted. Despite what she said, he can’t help but doubt her.

He doesn’t miss the flash of disappointment on her face as he throws the Time-Turner chain around both of their necks and begins spinning it, carefully counting each turn. He’s traveled through time so often, he knows exactly how many turns it takes to travel forward or backward a year, and there are a little less than sixteen years between their departure point and their destination, so it takes all of his concentration to count.

He’s aware of Ginny staring at his face the whole time. He’s also aware of the fluttering in his stomach as she does so.

When Time stops spinning the world around them, they are exactly where they started: inside the Chamber of Secrets. Low lights blaze to life, barely illuminating the room but providing just enough light to see the emerald eyes of the decorative serpents sparkle along the pillars.

Instead of a freshly slain basilisk corpse lying near the entrance to the chamber, what’s left are bones that have been picked clean by rats.

“Do you think we’re far enough under the castle to Apparate to safer ground?” Draco asks.

Ginny shrugs. “Are you sure we’ve arrived at the right time?”

Draco shrugs back. “I guess we’ll have to get out of here to see. Here, take this.”

He removes the gold chain from around her neck and deposits a titanium one instead.

“You’re trusting me with Prime Time?” she asks, ignoring Draco’s scowl as she examines the device with awe.

He shakes his head. “I’m trusting you with me. I think… if something ever happened to me….”

Ginny grins slowly, realizing what Draco loaths to admit.

He glances away, uncomfortable with her shining gaze, her hope and her optimism and her happiness. He isn’t used to such feelings in himself or others. Maybe it’s time for him to familiarize himself with them again.

Ginny closes her fingers around Tempus Prime and sobers. “If I take this, are you going to report me to the Ministry?”

“You’ll just have to come to my office first thing in the morning and see,” he says just before he Disapparates.

He reappears in front of another iron gate and pushes it open before he has a chance to talk himself out of this idea. Malfoy Manor looms ahead, as menacing as the day he left it to help at the Battle of Hogwarts. What he’s doing is nonsense and he knows it. He doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone. Not to himself or Ginny or even to the concept of Time that he worships day in and day out.

Confronting his own past by participating in Ginny’s could be an experience that heals him. Or it could traumatize him further. All he knows is Malfoy Manor is a sore spot in the fortress of his brain, a dungeon where people are tortured and maimed. Avoiding those dark corners has done nothing but make him even more scared of shadows than he was before. It is time to shine a little light on his memories and face those fears head on.

If Ginny can do it, he certainly can.

For the first time in nearly eleven years, Draco steps over the threshold of his childhood home.

The first step of many.

---

Memories are supposed to fade with time.

That’s the crux of the conundrum that Ginny proposed to Draco all those weeks ago, in between conversations about their research and invitations to lunch. Back when Draco had been suspicious of her curiosity and intentions.

It’s an intriguing paradox. On the one hand, forgetfulness is typically not a trait to be admired. At least, not until pain enters the equation. Most brains are designed to process pain and trauma by making memories fade as temporal distance between the event and the present lengthens. Ginny’s base formula is a good one: Time + Thought = Memory. Increasing Time decreases Memory.

But what of situations where the passage of time doesn’t weaken the memory? An innocent example that comes to mind is learning to ride a broomstick. They say once you learn, you never forget how. Muscle memory, the Muggles call it, and the point is that as more time passes, you don’t forget, even when the application of the knowledge isn’t practiced often. What of those memories?

Draco scribbles notes on these musings to distract himself from the cacophony of clocks in his office. They tick-tick-tick in unison, a chorus of reminders of Time’s passing.

When a feeble knock comes from his door, he sets down his quill and internally demands his heart to slow down, to not get its hopes up, to not make a fool of Draco.

But when he looks up, Ginny is in the doorway with a mug in each hand and a notebook tucked under her arm. Her lips lift in a tentative smile, and Draco beckons her in, indicating to the chair on the other side of his desk for her to sit.

She slides one of the mugs toward him and he nods in approval at the light color that denotes the addition of his preferred volume of milk.

“How are you today?” he asks at the same time she says, “Are you okay?”

Draco’s brow creases in confusion. “Me? That was your past we revisited.”

“I know, but it looked like I wasn’t the only one going through something.”

Draco glares as she takes an innocent sip of her tea, her eyes wide as if to say, Who, me?

“I wasn’t going through anything.”

“Of course not. I must have been mistaken,” Ginny says, the sarcasm in her voice thick. She meets his gaze head-on until Draco has to look away.

“Maybe… going to Hogwarts... seeing what the Dark Lord looked like before he came to power… seeing what happened to you… maybe that brought back some bad memories of my own.”

Ginny rolls her eyes. “Was that so hard to admit?”

“Yes. When you spend a decade trying to forget the past, being bombarded with reminders of it is a little—”

The words get caught in his throat. It is one thing to allow himself to feel his emotions once again and to embrace his memories. It is quite another to talk about his feelings and his memories out loud. He can’t bring himself to emote in front of an audience.

Ginny waits quietly, but the expectation is there in her eyes.

“Painful,” Draco finishes.

She nods in understanding.

It’s strange to think how much they have in common. Draco never would have considered Ginny Weasley someone with whom he shared experiences, what with the differences in their class, upbringings, values, the sides of the war they’d fought on. But both of them eagerly embraced Voldemort in their youth (she unknowingly, but still), both of them were manipulated and used by him. Both of them bear marks on their arms that would forever remind them of their pasts. Both of them struggle with those memories, though she, of course, has been more successful in overcoming them. Draco has only just become willing to start learning to overcome his own.

“Oh! Before I forget,” Ginny says as she digs in the pocket of her robes. “I need to return this.” Tempus Prime dangles from its chain as she offers it to Draco. The titanium glints happily, and Draco probably imagines it, but the device seems to tick in time with the timepieces all over Draco’s office, as if the ticking was the sound of Time resonating through its instruments.

Draco waves it away. “Keep it.”

“Keep it?” she repeats in disbelief. “What happened to the illegality of removing magical artifacts from the Department of Mysteries?”

“I created Tempus Prime, remember? I haven’t registered it with the Ministry yet, so as far as they know, this artifact doesn’t exist.” He shrugs, all nonchalance, but Ginny sees right through him.

“Why would you entrust me with this?”

Draco moves his tepid tea aside and leans forward. “I told you—I’m entrusting you with me. If something happens to me, you are the one who will be responsible for finding me, wherever and whenever I am.”

Ginny frowns. “Is this punishment for taking the Time-Turner?”

Amusement makes Draco’s lips twitch. “No. It’s an offer to be my partner. For weeks you’ve been trying to convince me to work with you on your Memory theory, and now I’m accepting. If you’re still interested, that is.”

She sucks in a breath and says with an intensity Draco doesn’t expect, “Yes. I’m still interested.”

There’s a hunger in her voice and her stare that makes him feel warm. Seen. Such fervor directed at him would normally trigger his Occlumency to protect his thoughts from detection. That instinct is still there, but Draco forces his defenses to lower. Being seen isn’t as frightening when she’s the one looking at him.

Draco stretches out his hand for a bargain-striking shake, his eyes never leaving hers. “Well, then. Let’s make some memories.”

Even together, they won’t succeed in unraveling the mysteries of Time, but maybe, just maybe they can vanquish their fears and their pasts.

After all, time conquers all things—and they have all the time in the world at their disposal.

the end (or beginning?)

---