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.

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.