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?)
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?)
Author notes:
I'm so excited to post this part!! I rarely feel very good about my endings, but this chapter is one of my favorites I've written and really brought the whole story together for me.
Once again, the scene in the Chamber of Secrets, including all of Tom and young Ginny’s dialogue, is pulled directly from CoS and isn’t mine. The "official" replica Time-Turner does have words engraved around the edges, but memento tempus vincit omnia is, as I mentioned in the author's notes in the first chapter, my own construction.
Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed the story. n_n
The End.
idreamofdraco is the author of 51 other stories.
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