Chapter Text
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
―
The Ministry was dark and deserted, of course, seeing as it was the wee hours of Sunday morning. Draco wasn’t a stranger to coming in when it was quiet like this. Sometimes, he’d solve some work-related puzzle or another in the middle of the night (he didn’t sleep very soundly since the war) and instead of waiting until morning to check his theory, he’d throw on his robes and head in.
He usually hadn't been pounding gin all night, though. That part was new.
Draco didn’t mind coming in at all hours, really. He loved his job. He was proud to be part of such an elite, historically-important department. The Department of Mysteries had existed before the Ministry itself, and some of its secrets were older still. And the work itself was always challenging, always interesting.
Some projects were like a game of chess: a series of complicated moves that you had to be quite strategic about if you wanted to win. And you definitely wanted to win, because losing often meant being injured or driven insane or any number of other unpleasant results. Other times, the work occupied a different space in Draco’s head, taking him to a theoretical, almost dreamy place where no idea was too big or too strange, where it was acceptable to question anything and everything, and where he felt almost as though he were pulling at strings in the very fabric of the universe.
He liked both sorts of projects, although it was in the midst of the latter that he felt most like a wizard. Like Merlin, up in his tower, summoning lightning and learning the song of the stars.
The lift spat him out on Level 9. He was currently working in the Love Chamber, on that silly chest. The bottom drawer was the one Draco was most concerned about. There was something sinister there, something that, when Draco’d run his initial diagnostic on the thing, made his dark mark sting and his stomach heave. He was outside the entry to the chamber, about to go in, when something stopped him.
He was thinking, he realized, about Unspeakable Clarke and the Time Room. Nobody knew much about the project that had tried to murder Clarke again and again, except that it was time related. Draco knew a bit about what went on in the Time Room because Hermione had worked on several projects there. Apparently, she had been interested in time ever since she’d used a Time-Turner back in school (a fact which made Draco incredibly jealous, because why had no one let him use a Time-Turner in school?).
He knew, from talking to Hermione, that a typical Time-Turner took a week or so to properly study and catalog. It stood to reason, then, that Unspeakable Clarke had not been working with anything close to typical.
Suddenly, Draco felt a burning urge to know. He’d been curious about Clarke’s project from the start, but now that it was officially wrapped up, it was possibly – probably, Draco told himself – safe.
Safe-ish.
He turned away from the Love Chamber and made his way back past the lifts, past the Thought Chamber with its revolting Brain Room, and there it was. The Time Room. Draco had only been in there a handful of times, but he had clearance. Not to the little room off the back where Clarke kept whatever it was he’d been studying, but Draco would deal with that locked door when he got there. For now, he only had to wave his wand in front of the Time Room door and he was in.
The room was much more crowded than the last time he’d been in here. Time-Turners of all shapes and sizes sat unguarded on wooden desks and clinical-looking tables. Draco guessed these were mostly turners with Hour-Reversal Charms, which made them much more stable, limiting how far back a user could go. Five hours was generally considered the limit if you wanted to avoid trouble.
A few of the turners spread around the room had spells of protection in place. These, he guessed, did not have Hour-Reversal Charms, which meant you could use them to go way the hell back in time, back to the Stone Age if you wished. Hence, the added security.
But Clarke’s Time-Turner must be something different, or it would be out here with the rest. And Draco desperately wanted to see it, to understand it. He walked towards the little room off the back, where the thing was kept, and ran his wand over the door. Warded to the gills. Of course it was.
Clarke’s office was just outside of the Time Room. Draco popped back out into the hall and made his way towards it. He could get into a lot of trouble poking his head around in places he didn’t belong, but the likelihood of someone finding him here at (he glanced at the clock) 3:52 in the morning was slim.
He tried the handle of Clarke’s office, expecting wards or at least for it to be locked, but to his surprise, it swung open easily. Draco almost lost his nerve then, almost turned around, but he didn’t. Instead, he tip-toed to the desk. “Lumos,” he whispered, and gazed at the messy piles of papers and charts spread out across it.
And there, under a cup of tea long gone cold, was a catalog file with Friday's date stamped in red on the cover. It was the project – the one they’d been celebrating.
Draco picked it up, an irrational fear of getting caught washing over him, making his heart beat double-time and his palms go slick and cold. He read quickly, skimming, but then he had to slow down and read it again, because this…this was fucking incredible.
Instead of dragging you across the years at warp-speed (hence Eloise Mintumble, who traveled from 1899 to 1402 and back again, returning home five-hundred years older before promptly dying), it seemed that this turner picked you up where you were and plopped you down in another time, somehow protecting you from the wear and tear of the travel itself. Furthermore, it allowed you to jump around from point to point, forward and backward, without any limitations save one: you could only travel to times in which you were alive. If you went beyond the date of your birth, you would kill yourself. And if you went beyond the date of your death in the opposite direction, you would, once again, kill yourself.
Ah, so that explained Unspeakable Clarke’s dozen near-misses. Draco wondered if the man had been trying to pinpoint the date of his own death. Draco could see himself wanting to do that, macabre as it was.
There were a few sketches of the turner included in the file. It looked nothing like the ones he’d seen, which largely resembled clocks and hourglasses. This was almost like a scale, the sort used in a healer's office, a row of numbers on top and one on bottom, with a piece that slid along each row.
Draco realized his head was spinning, and then considered it was nearly morning and he hadn't slept and was maybe still a bit drunk. But at least he hadn’t been thinking about Potter for a while. That was progress, he supposed. And now maybe he was so beyond tired that he would be able to fall asleep when he got home, despite the Potter-smell of his sheets.
He put the file carefully back under the stale mug of tea. "Somebody needs to clean his bloody office,” Draco muttered as he turned to leave.
Suddenly, though, something caught his eye. Something underneath Clarke’s disaster of a desk, glinting silver in the light of Draco’s wand. He bent down to take a look. There was a musky-smelling set of robes on top of whatever it was, and only a sliver of metal was peeking through. Lip curled, Draco moved the robes aside with his wand.
And gasped. Because there underneath Clarke’s dirty robes was the Time-Turner. Carefully, Draco picked it up and set it on top of the desk. It looked exactly like the sketches, like the scale in a healer’s office, but it was made of intricately embellished silver. The pieces that ran along the rows of numbers were gems: a ruby on the top row and a moonstone on the bottom.
There was a square of silver below the rows of numbers that jutted out, and set into the silver was a handprint. And in the palm of the handprint, words were carved: The water of time flows downhill, but I will send it back up the mountain; I will bend its path to my will.
Draco felt his hand rise, almost of its own accord, settling gently into the indentation, and something in the air seemed to shimmer.
He knew, suddenly, what he was going to do. Maybe he’d known it all along, or at least had been considering the possibility.
He was going to grant Potter’s wish.
He was going to go back in time and fix all the things that had gone wrong between them. He was going to make it better, make himself better. Make himself worthy of Harry Potter’s affections.
The top row of numbers was one through one hundred. The span of a life. Draco pushed the ruby over so that it rested in the notch above the number eleven. He slid the moonstone, which was on a scale of one through twelve, over to the place right before the number eight and then considered it for a moment. If this was Draco’s lifeline, then perhaps it was not the month of the year that mattered, but the number of months beyond his own date of birth. He shifted the moonstone to a point just behind the number two.
He set his hand back down onto the silver handprint and felt the strange charge in the air again. Then he spoke the words he knew to be carved into the meat of the silver below his palm.
“The water of time flows downhill, but I will send it back up the mountain; I will bend its path to my will.”
A feeling tore through Draco’s body, incredibly painful, like he was being ripped in half.
He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out, and then he realized he didn’t seem to have a mouth, or any corporeal self at all. He was water, rushing water, and the world was spinning, spinning, like a great bathtub drain. Spinning and spinning, no end in sight, and Draco wanted to kick himself because he was going to die, wasn’t he, in this stupid time bathtub, and what the fuck had he been thinking?
And then, suddenly, it stopped.
Draco opened his eyes – he had eyes again – and found himself staring down the bustling row of shops on Diagon Alley.