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.
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.
Author notes:
Once again, thanks so much to macneiceisms for her invaluable help beta-ing this chapter. The scene in the bathroom is pulled directly from the Chamber of Secrets book, so all of the Myrtle/Harry dialogue is JKR's, not mine.
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