Chapter 4
This time they found themselves outside. The air was cold, their breaths forming clouds of smoke under the cloak and they were surrounded by trees. Had he not been able to just make out the turrets of the castle through the branches he might have panicked a little.
“So much for your theory about the timeturner taking us where we want to go. Or did you ask it to be dropped in the middle of the woods?”
“I think we’re just at the edge of the Forbidden forest” Harry said. “Not far from Hagrid’s hut.”
“Oh, just at the edge of it, no problem then” Draco brushed twigs off his robe, looking gloomy. At least Crabbe seemed to be off his mind. “This is just getting weirder.”
“Yeah” Harry agreed. “Should have grabbed a couple of books when we had the chance. Let’s try and get back inside, unless you have any other suggestions.”
“Well, I’m certainly not camping here.” Draco set off in a brisk walk. “Put the cloak on, will you” he called over his shoulder.
Harry followed but ignored the order. It seemed highly unlikely they would run into someone here, and even if they did, he figured they’d be protected by the darkness. The cloak would only be a hinderance in the thick vegetation, getting caught in the branches and after having walked with his neck bowed to keep an eye on his feet to avoid stepping on the hem for the past hour, he enjoyed being able to stride freely and stuffed the silky fabric in his pocket.
Draco threw him an annoyed glance but did not reprimand him. He seemed even more edgy than when they had first landed in the cupboard and was stumbling through the bushes with the stubbornness of a hippogriff.
“Hold on” Harry called, having trouble keeping up with the pace. It was only due to Draco’s cloak getting stuck on a branch that he caught up with him some five minutes later. “What’s the rush?”
“Oh nothing, just some time travel business I need to figure out before the end of my shift” Draco sneered, pulling at his robe to no avail.
“It won’t affect our own time.” Harry bent down to entangle the hem of Draco’s robe from a juniper bush, swearing as it spiked his fingers.
“Unfortunately Potter, there’s an evident risk that it will, see, I’ve been trying to tell you for the past hours but as always you...”
“I know” Harry sighed, finally freeing the robe and deciding there was no reason to tell Draco it had torn in the back. “I meant, given we are able to return, we’ll be back by the time we left, you said so yourself, I’ll still have dinner with Teddy and Andromeda, and you’ll be back for whatever date you have that’s so important.”
“I don’t have a date, Potter” Draco said, his tone still stiff but he walked at a more reasonable pace. “Stop prying.”
“I wasn’t prying” Harry said indignantly. “I’m just saying there’s no need to barge through the woods like an erumpent just to get to the library. We’re not Hermione.”
Draco let out an indignant hmpf and then stopped in his tracks listening, his shoulders tense.
Harry stopped too but could not hear anything out of the ordinary and they set off again. “You don’t like the forest, do you?” he asked.
“What civilized man does? These are Italian leather shoes, they’re not made to wade through mud in.”
“Just use a scourgify” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “It’s alright to be scared, you know, I’d rather you admit it than being a prat.”
“I’m not scared of the forest Potter.”
“You were the first time we were in here” Harry mused, recalling their detention, Draco barging out of there more or less the same way he’d been doing just now.
Draco turned to face him. “I was eleven. And that forest had you know who in it.”
“Well, yeah” Harry admitted. “It’s not likely to have at the moment though.”
“Isn’t it?” Draco asked in a low voice.
“What are you saying? You think we’ve gone back to first year, with Quirrell running about here, chasing unicorns?”
A look on Draco’s face told him that’s exactly what he was thinking. “Why do you assume we’re here, Potter? We were dropped in school at a time when you know who was in that very building and then in second year when he had a basilisk roaming the castle doing his bidding.”
“You think the time turner is trying to bring us to Vol..to you know who” Harry corrected himself just in time not to set Draco into another fit.
“No, I think it’s trying to bring you to him.”
Harry made a face. “Why would it? That thing looks ancient, it would have been cursed long before I was born.”
”We’re dealing with time here. It works in dimensions we’re unable to fathom, it’s not always linear. Someone could have gone back decades and put a curse on it.”
“That would mean leaving a lot to chance, wouldn’t it?” Harry said sceptically. “Placing it with that old lady, counting on me to pick it up. She might as well have gone suspicious about an unknown object appearing in her drawers and chucked it out. Especially when it’s a time turner, people are superstitious about those, for good reason I’d say.”
Draco sighed. “She wouldn’t have chucked it out because it was already hers when it was cursed. It’s probably been dusting away in the very same drawer for centuries until someone came along and decided to put it to use. And as for you to pick it up, there are ways of knowing you would, for someone who has access to playing with time.”
“That would require for them to know about this very time turner existing in first place.”
“A Black might” Draco said quietly.
“Bellatrix” Harry mumbled, feeling the hair of his neck rise.
They looked at one another, their breaths rendering clouds of smoke between them in the cold air.
“Let’s say she did” Harry said, reluctantly giving the idea a go. Bellatrix frightened him in a way Voldemort never had, ruthless to the core and terrifying because unlike Voldemort she did not have the weakness of fearing her own death but only cared about the success of her master. And she killed for fun while Voldemort had simply considered it a bland necessity. Still, he wasn’t too concerned because he could see a big flaw in Draco’s theory.
“Why would she bring me to him now? Even if he did manage to kill present me here it wouldn’t change anything for him, I’d still be finishing him at seventeen.”
Draco turned his gaze toward the star filled sky and it was a while before he spoke. “Bellatrix was always prone not to criticize the dark lord openly, and certainly not stupid enough to do it to his face, but she let some things slip in front of my mother. Like how she didn’t trust his judgement when it came to Severus.”
“Rightly” Harry said with a sneer.
“Exactly, she had intuition. Another thing was that she thought him a bit…lax when it came to you. Even if he did set store to the prophecy, he was convinced he’d be the one to kill you and not the other way around. I believe it wasn’t until that time he failed killing you in the summer after sixth year that it really started to bother him and he became obsessed with it.”
“That’s when he went looking for the elder wand” Harry agreed, remembering the desperate need of the dark wizard that had filtered into his mind during the war. “So?”
“He used to say you were alive more due to his mistakes than your achievements.”
“Maybe” Harry shrugged. He had indeed escaped Voldemort at a bare minimum several times.
Draco turned to look him straight in the eye. “What if he hadn’t made those mistakes? He only made them because he was underestimating you, right?”
“Maybe” Harry said again. “What are you saying?”
“If he would run into an adult version of you, that’s a big give away. He’d either think you had defeated him or that you became powerful enough to defy him for years to come. He would see you for a real threat. He certainly wouldn’t try to kill you now, weak as he is.”
“But he would try to kill the younger me.” Harry begun to see where Draco was going with it.
“Yes, he’d triple his efforts, make that his main priority.” Draco sighed. “Bellatrix would want him to see you now, before fifth year when he got too caught up in the prophecy and became set on having to kill you himself. If anyone could wipe you out, he could simply let one of his cronies do it. Quirrell, for example.”
Harry made a low whistle, thinking about Barty Crouch Junior walking the corridors for about a year, disguised as Mad-Eye, how he simply could have thrown a killing curse at Harry’s back at any moment, had that been his mission.
“So will you please put the cloak on.”
Harry looked at him for a moment before he obeyed. “What if that happened? If he saw me now and killed the younger me in this timeline? What would happen to us?”
Draco shrugged. “You’d seize to exist. I’d still be here, given he doesn’t become set on killing me too that is, but I’d thought you dead at eleven.” He frowned. “Or maybe I wouldn’t, but no one would believe my version when I got back and it wouldn’t really matter because it wouldn’t be the same present we left.
Harry thought of Ron and Hermione in an alternate, Voldemort-controlled world. What would have become of them? Would they have made it or would the death eaters have wiped them out together with the rest of the Weasleys? Would there still be resistance or would everyone have caved by now?
He threaded carefully over the roots and ducked a branch, thinking hard, his mind nearly overloading with the possibilities of a parallel timeline and of the threat of Voldemort returning. What if it happened the way Draco predicted it? What would dying be like this way, with part of him passing years before and another piece of him continuing along another, fictional trail, forming memories and relationships that would never have been quite real. There had to be a way of stopping it.
“Would it happen right away?” he asked. “Present me fading? If he sees me now and then kills the younger me, say…three weeks later. Wouldn’t that give us time to prevent it?”
“Possibly” Draco bit his lip. “But not likely. It would require for us to remain in this present and the time turner would know its purpose had been achieved and portkey us away.”
“A portkey only works as long as you are attached to it though.”
“Presumably.”
“So…” Harry thought about it. “Any sign of Quirrell or Vol…you know who having spotted us, we chuck the time turner at first chance and alert Dumbledore.”
Draco stared at him, or at the spot where Harry’s voice was coming from. “There are about a thousand flaws with that idea, but sure, let’s make it plan B.”
“What’s plan A?”
“Getting back to the present unseen and taking the curse off this godforsaken thing, like it’s been all along” Draco said rolling his eyes. “You’re losing the plot Potter.”
“Might have been the whole thing with the death sentence being put back on my head.”
Draco sighed and stopped, looking around. “We’ve been walking in circles” he said annoyed. “The castle is behind us.”
Harry realized he was right. Their conversation had indeed had him lose focus and with the cloak back on he’d kept his eyes on the ground to prevent the roots and branches from tearing at it. “Let’s take a break” he said, suddenly tired to the bone.
Draco nodded, leaning against a treetrunk. Somewhere there was the sound a branch cracking. It wasn’t that a strange noise in a forest filled with beasts but they both went rigid, their eyes darting around the trees.
“Maybe you should get under the cloak too” Harry whispered. “If it really is the night of our detention, you seeing yourself wouldn’t be good.” He let the cloak slip and Draco ducked beneath it. The presence of another body next to his was a slight comfort and he felt an inexplicable urge to rest his head on Draco’s shoulder but instead he turned his gaze upwards, taking in the million stars burning above him.
A glance at his watch told him time at home was just after 1 PM and it had only been about six hours since he’d got out of bed but here it could as well have been 1 AM. He let out a yawn, following Draco’s example of leaning against a tree, trying to have his tense muscles relax.
“You’re worried” Draco said and when Harry didn’t reply at once he added with a sneer. “It’s OK to be scared, someone told me it’s better to admit it than to be a prat.”
“I wasn’t being a prat” Harry objected. “But yeah, guess I am.”
He thought Draco would disagree on the prat part but he only let out a sigh. “Yeah, me too.”
“You might be OK though, regardless” Harry said softly. “Things might even be better for you.”
He could feel Draco growing tense next to him. “That’s a really shitty thing to say” he let out. “You’d think I’d want that? You dying? You know who at power?” He slipped out of the cloak, stepping out into the night and walked away.
Harry stared after him for a few moments before he followed. Again he stuffed the cloak in his pocket and ran for Draco only just managing to make a grab for his arm before he stumbled over a root and lost his balance, taking Draco with him to the ground.
It was the second time that day they found themselves entangled in a horizontal position. The landing had been softer this time though, leaves and moss breaking the fall, or perhaps it was because he had landed right on top of another body.
“Damn it Potter, you’re making a racket” Draco hissed underneath him.
“Sorry” Harry mumbled. “My foot got stuck. Are you OK?”
“Of course, I’m perfectly happy to lie on the wet ground in my good robes in the middle of the night.”
Harry looked down at him, the moon just offering enough light to make out the scowl. He drew a breath. “Draco, I’m really sorry” he said sincerely.
“It’s fine Potter, I’ll just throw a couple of cleaning charms.”
“I meant about me being a prat just now. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded though. It’s just, I know you had a hard time in the war too, and even if I’m not around, it might not mean you know who wins, someone else might finish him off. It could alter things somewhat, he might not choose you to kill Dumbledore.”
Draco stared at him for a long time. “Let’s just try and get back unseen and none of it will matter” he finally said.
“Right” Harry agreed, sitting up, brushing leaves from his arms and then realizing he was straddling Draco’s hips and that the reasonable thing to do would have been to get up the moment he’d found himself on top of him instead of staying there to have a whole bloody conversation. He almost jumped to his feet, pretending to tend to his robe to keep his blushing cheeks out of sight.
Why did he always end up doing these awkward things around the git? Like that time when a small feather had gotten caught in Draco’s hair and instead of simply telling him, he had trailed his fingers through the blonde hair to brush it off. Or once when Draco had dispersed a curse that was ringing so loud he’d thought his ears would fall off, he hadn’t just thanked him like he would have any of his colleagues but reached out and squeezed his bicep. It was saying something that Draco, who never passed an opportunity to mock him, didn’t even find the words to tell him off on those occasions but simply stared at him with an odd look to his face, like he was doing at the moment.
“If what you’re saying is true, how come we haven’t run into him yet?” Harry said, eager for a distraction. “It’s like the time turner is failing its mission.”
Draco turned to face him, back to his arrogant self. “If it really was Bellatrix who set the curse, she wouldn’t know exactly when or where Voldemort would be at the time, stuck in Azkaban as she was then.”
“That’s why it keeps sending us back and forth? It’s looking for you know who?
Draco shrugged. “Let’s hope it won’t find him. And for the love of Merlin, would you put the cloak on?”
“Right.” Harry threw it over both of their heads and it was a good thing he did because a minute later, they did stumble upon someone.
They had made it to the very edge of the forest, to a small coppice with nothing but a tree or two separating them from a clear view of the castle and in the middle of it was a younger Draco whipping his wand about, appearing to throw curses at random.
Harry instinctively ducked but Draco remained upright which almost had the cloak slip.
“Muffliato” came a whisper next to him.
“Should we put up a shield charm too?” Harry asked, eyes fixed on the younger Draco’s wand.
“No need” Draco snorted but did not elaborate.
“Any idea of when this is then?”
“Third year.”
“Third? Voldemort wasn’t even here then.”
“So? The time turner is a bit lost.”
But Harry looked at the young Draco swearing and casting about, thinking hard. It was the third time they’d run into a younger version of him, moving roughly a year each time. If this really was about Harry and Voldemort, the time turner was way off track.
“What’s going on?” he asked, nodding towards the coppice.
Draco was studying his nails as if he hadn’t heard him.
“Is someone else around?” he prodded on.
Before Draco replied, the voice of his younger self carried over the wind.
Expecto patronum
“You’re trying to cast a patronus” Harry said confused. “Are there dementors about?”
“No” Draco sighed, looking highly uncomfortable.
“Then why are you in the forbidden forest in the middle of the night, throwing that charm?”
“It’s not the middle of the night, it’s barely curfew. I’m not a rule breaker like you.”
“Then what?” Harry nudged him in the ribs.
Draco sighed again. “It’s sometime after that quidditch match when I dressed up as a dementor.”
“Yeah, not a rule breaker at all” Harry muttered under his breath.
“Everyone was far too impressed by you learning to cast patronuses after that game” Draco went on, ignoring him. “I was determined to beat you to it. As you might have guessed, I wasn’t successful.”
“Or you’d have bragged your head off about it” Harry mused. “Why the forest though?”
Draco shrugged. “Needed a place where I wouldn’t be spotted.”
They watched thirteen-year-old Draco do some more fruitless casting. His wand movements becoming more and more erratic but not as much as a silvery spark came out and he seemed to grow more frustrated by the minute, kicking about in the grass and cursing under his breath.
Draco groaned next to him and Harry had to bite his lip, he had forgotten just how comical an enraged, young Draco Malfoy could be. He took a step backwards to hide his smiling face and accidentally stepped on a branch that cracked with a loud echo.
He froze. So did the younger Draco, the look on his face instantly transforming to one of fear. “Who’s there?” he called out but did not wait for a reply. They watched him barge off towards the castle.
“Did we just affect something?” Harry asked quietly. It was the first time someone had noticed their presence in the alternate timeline and he knew he was the one to fuck up but surprisingly Draco didn’t yell at him.
“I remember taking off once, being startled. But I was pretty worked up from the start, going into the forest. I would have done that sooner or later and I didn’t see us so that should be OK.” He nudged Harry’s arm and spoke almost kindly. “We didn’t change anything big.”
“Unless there’s a werewolf lurking about and we just stopped you from being eaten” Harry suggested, half joking, half serious, remembering his experience with time travel in that year. Hopefully Professor Lupin only neglected his potion once.
“It’s not the full moon” Draco said reasonably. “But you might just have prevented me from managing a successful patronus, which would have saved me from a life of ridicule.” His tone was light but his eyes were avoiding Harry’s.
“I don’t think it’s ridiculous if someone can’t do a patronus” Harry said carefully, realizing what Draco was telling him.
“No, why would you, you just whipped your wand a bit at thirteen and a full size stag erupted” Draco said sourly.
“There was a bit more work to it than that” Harry snorted. “If anything, that sounds more like the first time I wanked.”
Draco looked at him and then burst into a hearty laugh that carried over the wind, taking some of the tension away.
Harry grinned, pleased to have managed the rare feat of drawing a laughter out of Draco. “Anyway, I had the incentive of protecting myself from dementors. And I learned by a competent professor in a safe environment, while you tried to teach yourself in a place you were terrified of, it’s doesn’t exactly postulate summoning a happy memory.”
“Maybe not” Draco mumbled. “Let’s keep walking, shall we?”
They trailed the path in silence for a while, their shoulders bumping every now and then but they seemed to have gotten the hang of walking under the cloak at last and the turrets of the castle steadily grew closer. Harry found he’d gotten rather comfortable around Draco, or maybe it was just finding themselves in the third year of Hogwarts that had made the earlier death threat seem much less imminent.
“Will you let me teach you when we get back?” he let out on a whim. “The patronus I mean.”
It was too dark to make out Draco’s expression but Harry could feel him tensing up again. It didn’t surprise him, if there was one thing Draco was, it was proud and while their dynamic had changed since their Hogwarts days, Harry suggesting Draco trying to learn something from him was obviously taking things one step too far.
“Come on Draco, defense is my expertise, yours is curse breaking” he said to ease his suggestion. “Which you’ve been lecturing me on for about a year, so I’d only be paying you back.”
“Lecturing is one thing, I doubt I’ve been able to teach you a single thing, as proof of today’s events.”
“You have actually” Harry said thinking about how his cases involving curses ran much more smoothly these days. Draco was a surprisingly good teacher when he put his mind to it, explaining things with patience, making sure he was getting through, just like he had with Crabbe and Goyle with the effect that Harry now knew when to call for a consultant and which curses was safe to disperse off on his own. Perhaps Draco knew it too because he didn’t object further, neither did he say anything else about patronuses so Harry decided to drop it and turned his thoughts back to the case.
“Do you remember anything odd about the scenes we’ve seen?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, it’s just that they are all about you.”
“They are a bit about you too” Draco said defensively. “The midnight duel, the patronus thing.”
“The second year wasn’t” Harry objected.
“You might have been somewhere close by…lurking around the shelves” Draco said vaguely but Harry was positive that wasn’t the case. He might have kept an eye on Draco that year due to the whole Slytherin’s heir thing but he hadn’t hung around that part of the library and he certainly would have remembered watching Draco Malfoy doing someone else’s homework.
He didn’t say that out loud but considered the events of the day. “The curse didn’t activate until you came into the room, I did everything according to protocol but when you arrived, I felt compelled to open the drawer.”
“It’s not my fault you’re an imbecile” Draco started but Harry ignored him.
“And she’s a relative of yours, you said it yourself.”
“A very distant one” Draco muttered but he was starting to look uncomfortable meanwhile Harry was getting excited while closing in on a new idea, moreover one that didn’t involve Voldemort trying to murder him for about the hundredth time.
He pulled at Draco’s arm, forcing him to a halt. “Why would we keep butting into you if this was about me?”
“Because it’s always about you. And my theory makes sense, yours doesn’t.”
“It’s not a theory, it’s a pattern” Harry said. He’d seen enough of those on the job. The first time something happened, it was nothing, the second time it was a coincidence but the third, there was reason to stay alert and the fourth, you had a pattern. It might not have a fancy name to it like that Cocker law or whatever, but it held in practice.
He was about to argue this but was interrupted by the timeturner singing in his pocket.