Chapter Text
Part One: 2002
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning
The end is where we start from.”
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding
—
January
Years. Broken into months into weeks into days—into hours, minutes, seconds—into moments. Simple at one end, complex at the other. In Draco’s experience, moments, even when simple, had a habit of becoming irretrievable. Moments grew, stretched, multiplied into ages and eras that defined whole stretches of measurable time. Draco regretted several moments in his life, some within his control, some without: all of them irretrievable in nature. At a certain point, wedged between ‘what-ifs’ of his own devising, he’d stopped trying to keep track of those regrettable moments: now and then, pushing and pulling, coming and going, beginning and end. Moments were only moments for just as long. After that, he had no control.
He’d wanted it to happen something like this:
A confident knock on his father’s study door—a pause, just for a beat—enough to acknowledge that Draco had engaged in the formality of it, before he let himself in anyway: poised, sure, a far cry from his former self so desperate for Lucius Malfoy’s impossible approval.
His father would recognize the shift; Draco had been in Europe apprenticing for his potions mastery for just over a year. Time heals all wounds and other such rot. Lucius would offer him a seat, and maybe even a drink of something forbidden and expensive from his personal stores. He’d ask Draco about his mastery with reluctant pride that Draco had taken initiative to make himself employable, respectful—a potentially productive member of a society that saw the Malfoy name as something actively unproductive. And all of this despite the fact that Draco didn’t have to work and never would: not so long as his inheritance, every last drop of his money tied up in the family name, continued to pay his way in the world.
Draco would share his thoughts with his father, more than he normally did. He’d share just how beautiful he found Sarajevo, how refreshing it had been to be nearly-anonymous on a day-to-day basis. How he’d stopped needing a Calming Draught every night before he went to bed. How he’d tried dating, women who had no idea about his money or his name or his family history. How the dating hadn’t gone very well, but the shagging had been a welcome change after two years of probation chained to the manor.
And that little detail, oversharing and a touch inappropriate, well, that would make Lucius laugh. He’d really laugh, in a way Draco hadn’t heard in years, certainly not since the war, maybe not since Draco started at Hogwarts. The sound of Lucius’s laughter existed—bound by time—in Draco’s memories before he’d started school, before the ominous creep of a new war had started making its presence known, rising like bile and tainting the taste of any laughter that might have come later.
Lucius would listen, be interested. He’d still be stern, stoic, stubbornly aristocratic in the way he sat with his back straight and expression schooled. But somewhere behind his gray eyes, a near mirror image of Draco’s own, would be a glimpse of the father figure Draco had so desperately wished to please, to impress, to emulate with every drop of the magic in his blood and bones.
It would be a short conversation, but meaningful. It would be representative of a change in their relationship: healing after their respective time spent in Azkaban, under house arrest, and then apart for a year. Draco would leave the study reacquainted with his father, cautiously hopeful that, man to man, they might be able to find a way to see each other again now that the fog of war had dissipated.
Instead, things went awry from the very first moment.
Draco didn’t even have the chance to knock on the door, and he certainly didn’t feel confident or sure of himself. He mostly felt tired, exhausted from several international Floo connections ferrying him from the Balkans and all the way back to Wiltshire.
“Enter,” spoken through the heavy wooden door stopped Draco’s fist in its tracks, a centimeter from contact.
Draco took a deep breath through his nose, lips pressed together. He pushed the door open.
Lucius Malfoy looked tired. Draco’s thoughts stalled on that observation as he approached the desk, watching Lucius as he scanned the parchment in front of him, evidently much more important than the son he’d not seen in a year. Lucius hadn’t looked much like himself since Azkaban in Draco’s fifth year. He’d looked even worse after a second stint while he awaited trial after the war. He’d steadily withered, whittled away, in the years of house arrest he’d been ordered to endure without the use of his magic. A year apart had not changed any of that, only made it more apparent as Draco’s eyes caught on the sunken pallor of his father’s skin and the dark circles beneath his eyes.
He was out of practice, Draco realized. The muscles had atrophied: the ones required to shove aside and sort through the complicated web of emotion and attachment he felt for the partially unravelling man in front of him, a man who’d once been his idol, his entire world.
“Sit, Draco,” Lucius said, still not looking up.
He’d forgotten how that felt. With a year of time and distance and very few owls between them, Draco had managed to forget how paralyzing an order from his father could be. He’d forgotten how closely it reminded him of all the other orders he’d received in his life: the ones he’d tried to follow, failed to follow, and hated to follow.
No, I’d rather not , Draco wanted to say. He’d rather his father look up from his f*cking parchments and actually greet his son.
Instead of demanding any of that for himself, Draco sank into the seat, stiff and forward, spine nowhere near making contact with the back of the chair.
Finally, Lucius looked at him. Years and circ*mstance might have weathered him, but that uncanny feeling of being lesser under his father’s appraisal still remained. Draco stiffened, muscles along his back snapping his spine even straighter, determined not to recoil.
Lucius offered him the parchment.
“Your betrothal agreement.”
He’d wanted this conversation to represent the potential for them to move on, to rediscover some kind of father-son relationship after they’d both had time apart.
He hadn’t expected, not for a single, inconceivable moment that this was what his father had intended. Draco had been back in the manor, back in the country, for less than an hour and already a marriage contract was being dropped in his lap? Draco wanted to laugh, and he nearly did. He could feel the sensation bubbling at the base of his throat, latching onto sheer absurdity. It was hilarious how ridiculous it was, how insulting, how utterly indifferent to anything Draco might have possibly wanted or had planned for his own life.
No, he wanted to say, I don’t have a betrothal agreement.
He could taste the words, knew the shape of them, could say similar things to just about anyone else in his life. But here, in front of this man, he simply reached out and took the parchment. He couldn’t bring himself to read it.
He supposed he had Aunt Bella to thank for his feigned composure, for the fact that he hadn’t choked on his indignation. He found the shard of shock inside his mind and flaked it away, a forceful removal from the spaces in his brain required to process complex thought, to speak. In the absence of shock, suppressed by Occlumency, Draco located his ability to engage in this conversation.
“Who?”
He hated that he asked. But his only other option was no , and he’d already failed to say that.
“Victor Greengrass has been exceedingly generous by even entertaining a union with our family, sullied as the name may be.”
The words fell out of Lucius’s mouth like ash, something foul and fetid and decidedly vile, puffing and pluming and choking the air around them with his distaste, with his disagreement.
And all Draco wanted to do was throw that rotted thing back at him, demand Lucius elaborate on exactly how their family name had been sullied, identify in excruciating detail every step, every decision he made that brought them all to this point.
But instead, “Of course, Father.”
Another breath through the nose. Draco had his own sense of something decaying inside his throat.
“The older Greengrass girl would not agree to a union with you.”
Draco’s first instinct was relief. He and Daphne weren’t close. She’d had a thing with Blaise for a couple of years, and she’d effectively stolen Pansy from Draco’s life after the war with words like healing , and space , and bad influences . Which would have been a hysterical assessment of his character if not so wildly hypocritical in the face of Pansy f*cking Parkinson.
Draco’s second instinct was confusion. He didn’t even realize Daphne had a sister. He couldn’t bite his tongue this time; the question slipped out with far less decorum than Lucius Malfoy required.
“How much younger is she—the other one?”
That feeling of decay in his throat slipped lower, souring in his stomach at the idea of being betrothed to a child, of planning a wedding and a life along a timeline that required she come of age first.
“Two years your junior. Not that it matters,” Lucius said.
It absolutely, positively, unequivocally mattered. As that thought careened to the first position in his queue of bewildered thoughts, Draco wondered what Lucius would say or do if he actually voiced it. But Draco could more easily be buried in a mountain of words he wished to say but didn’t, than actually work up the courage to say them. Self-preservation at its finest; avoidance of the issue was the only way to survive a conversation with Lucius Malfoy.
“Her name?” he asked instead, hating himself more than a little bit for it.
“Astoria. You’re meeting her tomorrow,” Lucius said. His lip curled, then softened before he spoke again. “Your mother insists that you meet her—that you be involved in the planning process.”
Draco didn’t need him to elaborate. Lucius’s distaste for the fact that Draco might have any involvement in planning his own wedding, his whole future that had just been handed to him on a sheet of parchment, was evident in his clipped tone. Draco took a deep breath, incapable of looking at his father, of looking at the contract in his hands, of doing anything but focusing on the slice of serenity he’d made with his Occlumency. He leaned into that, feeling calm, feeling something adjacent to bravery, and asked a question for himself, avoidance be damned.
“Do I have a choice?” Draco asked, as close as he could bring himself to something that looked like defiance.
Draco clenched his jaw, muscles grinding his teeth together when his father released a short, sharp laugh, sealed with a heavy stare.
“I’m informing you as a courtesy,” he said. “This is your duty to your family, Draco. Your independence has been tolerated long enough.”
Draco tried to ignore the itching reminder of his other duty born by him for his family. The one on his left arm, seared into his skin and in his mind, echoes of scorched flesh and strangled screams. These duties, they were the price he paid in exchange for vaults full of gold, a name that—even sullied—opened doors, and the promise of a family that protected its own.
But he couldn’t say it, couldn’t voice an agreement to the enormity of a marriage dropped on him as a welcome home gift. So he nodded, a quick dip of his chin, jaw muscles barely allowing the movement. He stood, almost wincing at the liberty he took by not yet having been dismissed. But he’d already committed to this little act of defiance, this moment of disrespect.
“If that’s all,” he prompted, holding his father’s stare, wondering when it stopped feeling like looking into the future and started feeling like a window to the past, tainted and fogged with bad decisions.
He didn’t wait to be dismissed; he couldn’t escape the study fast enough. His Occlumency wavered and his chest tightened like it might crack, ribs reduced to rubble. He fought to breathe against a throat insisting that it seal itself shut.
That wasn’t how he’d wanted their reunion to go. And, even if given the chance to do it again, to somehow right the series of wrongs that tumbled one after another over the course of a few stifled minutes, Draco didn’t think he’d know how. There had been moments, several of them, and he’d wasted every last one.
—
“Care of Magical Creatures?” she asked with a hopeful, guarded tone.
Draco couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from Astoria’s delicate fingers, almost surreal looking, fine bones encased in pale, flawless flesh. Everything about the movement in her hands felt purposeful and planned, executed with intent as she gripped her soup spoon, elegant but with a tiny, almost imperceptible wobble.
She was trying. He was trying. And yet, he could already feel the cloud of failure settling around them. Draco fought a grimace, forcing himself to look at something other than her spoon as she took careful sips of her soup with perfect pureblood etiquette.
“Hated it,” he said. “I don’t like animals much. I was, ah—” Draco couldn’t remember getting to know another person ever being this painful. Every inquiry into the others’ interests landed like a misaimed charm, miles from its target. “I was attacked by a Hippogriff in class once.”
There. He’d shared something personal, that’s how people did this, right? He felt rather like throwing himself off a bridge.
“I’d heard about that,” she said. “I was a first year.”
He made a noise of acknowledgment. He already knew that. They’d already suffered through stunted get-to-know-you’s like age, and house, and had now ended up on favorite subjects.
He watched her wrists this time, as she lowered her soup spoon. Something about her fingers, her hands, her wrists, they seemed so fragile, so birdlike. Draco didn’t know how to act around breakable things. In his experience, he had a tendency to break them.
“Are you going to eat?” she asked. It wasn’t accusatory. It wasn’t unkind. It mostly sounded curious, a little timid. The muscles around her mouth had tightened, just enough that he noticed, but her eyes remained relaxed as she glanced from his soup to his face. He wondered how much social training had been poured into her to result in such grace. It was impressive. She was lovely. And he felt nothing for her.
He looked down at his bowl.
“Right, of course.” He picked up his spoon but made no move towards his bowl. “Flying?” he asked. “Fan of Quidditch?”
She wrinkled her nose and then blinked, eyes widening. They were a pretty shade of blue. She was a pretty girl. Draco had known her for all of ten minutes and he already suspected that classic beauty and fine manners wouldn’t be enough.
She was the bird, but he felt like he’d been put in a cage.
“Flying is not—my favorite,” she said with a slight hesitation, just enough that he could see her effort, still trying so hard. “Was it yours?”
He tried to smile, to give her a kindness that said he was trying, too. The muscles in his cheeks fought against him: tight, resisting the disingenuousness.
“Potions, actually. Though flying was a close second.”
Astoria set her spoon down, letting her hands rest in her lap.
“I didn’t take potions past OWLs,” she paused and he could feel her searching him. Without her tiny hands in view, Draco focused on her dark hair instead: shiny and smooth, a brunette version to Daphne’s blonde. “Astronomy? I would imagine you were well versed before school with your Black lineage.”
Draco laughed, a small burst of it.
“My knowledge of celestial bodies is—extensive.”
He smiled.
She smiled.
The moment passed.
Astoria let out a small breath, her fragile hands reappearing from beneath the table to rest atop it.
“This is—uncomfortable,” she said. Draco nearly sank into his soup, so glad he hadn’t had to say it.
“Extremely.”
“Do you suppose your parents have elves listening in?”
“Almost certainly.”
“Well that’s a bit of a relief,” she said.
Draco raised a brow. He couldn’t fathom how having his family elves listen in on one of the most painfully awkward conversations of his life, with the intent to relay it to his parents, could be anything even remotely resembling a relief.
Astoria released a small giggle at his confusion, delicate like her bones. Only two years his junior? Gods the sound of that giggle, she seemed so young.
“I would imagine the only thing worse than participating in this conversation is having to hear about it.”
He leaned back against his chair, momentarily stunned. Not by her assessment of their conversation—objectively, it had been awful—but more at the touch of schadenfreude she’d just admitted to. He supposed some birds were carnivores, and she had been a Ravenclaw after all.
He tried to smile again, tried to find something he could offer the girl in front of him. But he couldn’t shake the niggling reminder that it hardly mattered what he offered her; he’d already have to give her his name, an heir—his stomach dropped. Gods this was a nightmare.
“I think it will get better,” she said, a curious pull between her brows as she watched him. He reached out to place his hand over hers, cautious in case she wanted to pull away. She didn’t, and for a moment, he wrapped his fingers around hers, trying not to focus on how brittle they felt in his grip.
“Of course it will,” he said, finally forcing that smile through, reaching his eyes. “We have—quite a while to figure it out.”
She smiled back at him and it looked nearly as forced as his own felt.
—
“Are you pouting?” Draco asked.
It was the first thing he noticed as he stepped through the Floo to Nott Manor; Theo had a frown firmly in place as he lounged on a chaise, a large sigh signaling that he’d heard the question.
“You’ve been back in the country for two full days and I’m only just now seeing you,” Theo said, swinging his legs to the floor, frown shifting into a scowl. “Of course I’m pouting.”
Draco dusted a mote of cinder from his trousers, trying to withhold the laugh he knew Theo expected for his antics.
He’d spent his first day back in the country exhausted from travel, tense from having to see his father again, and reeling from an unexpected and especially unwelcome betrothal. He’d spent the next day mentally preparing for, living through, and then decompressing from the uncomfortable experience of meeting his betrothed.
Finally with his friend and out from under his father’s thumb, Draco relaxed: shoulders dropping, chest unclenching, breath reaching the bottom of his lungs. He could be himself, he could feel normal; he needn’t obsess over every word he spoke and every action he took.
Theo stood and rolled his eyes.
“I’m going to hug you now,” he said, advancing.
“Must you?”
“A year is too f*cking long. I’m giving you a hug.”
Draco allowed it. He couldn’t even bring himself to feign annoyance; he’d missed his friends. He’d missed this part of his life in England. The rest of it, the parts he’d had to endure during his first two days here? He could do without all that.
“Yes, yes. I missed you, too,” Draco said, disentangling himself and landing in the same spot on the chaise Theo had just vacated.
“You don’t owl enough,” Theo said.
Draco laughed, “My mother says the same.”
“Narcissa is a smart woman. Marriage to your father notwithstanding.”
“Yes, well. It would seem no one is perfect.”
The following quiet reminded Draco of the many moments when he realized his father was not, in fact, perfect. He knew Theo had surely experienced something similar with the late Nott patriarch.
“Get up,” Theo ordered.
“This is the first real chance I’m getting to relax since I got back.” A pause. A plea. “Don’t make me.”
“Sleeping in your Manor still troublesome?”
“Isn’t yours?”
Theo smiled, the face of opposition, “A literal nightmare. But we won’t let that stop us, will we? Get up.”
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t. I’m your best friend.”
Theo drew his wand.
“Planning on jinxing me, best friend? ” Draco asked with a lifted brow.
“If you don’t get up.”
“I pick Blaise as my new best friend.”
Theo tilted his head, wand not exactly pointed at Draco, but certainly not not pointed at him, either.
“That’s fair,” Theo conceded. “Blaise is probably my best friend, too. Speaking of, he’ll be here soon.” He sent a stinging jinx at Draco’s shoe.
“sh*te, alright. I’m up,” he said, giving up on the idea that he might have a relaxing lounge, maybe even a nap. He should have known better; a welcome home from Theo was never going to be an understated affair.
“That’s the spirit. Now come on, I want to show you my progress.”
Draco sighed, forcing himself to stand and follow Theo through the manor, stopping in front of an enormous floor-to-ceiling portrait of one of Theo’s long dead ancestors. They bore almost no resemblance to each other, severe where Theo was not, and whatever familial traits they shared had been long since diluted by the centuries and a torrential flooding of forward time.
Theo stopped at the far edge of the gilded gold frame and, with great fanfare and an enormous, sh*t-eating smile, pulled the frame away from the wall, sending it swinging on a hinge, and revealing a door behind.
“You got past the painting,” Draco said, brows lifted.
“I did,” Theo said, a near jump in his step as he approached the freshly revealed door. “And now watch this—” he placed his palm flat on the door.
Draco leaned against the opposite wall, fighting the urge to yawn, not from boredom, but from true, bone dragging exhaustion.
“What am I looking at?”
“I’m still alive,” Theo sounded thrilled, disproportionately so, at that statement. He tapped his fingers against the stone door, knocked it once, and then patted it fondly a few times.
“It was warded, I take it?”
Theo nodded, reaching for the portrait and swinging it closed again.
“I might’ve been a touch eager when I finally got the portrait to open. Melted most of my left hand. Blaise wasn’t happy.”
Draco had no room to judge, there were several similarly warded rooms and objects in his own family’s estate. But nevertheless—
“Your family was f*cked up.” A valid assessment, either way.
Theo shrugged, still inordinately pleased with himself.
“I’m going to get into that vault even if it kills me. Who knows what kind of Nott treasures are hidden in there.”
“And f*ck your father very much for not teaching you the wards before he died,” Draco supplied.
“Precisely. Also, while you’ve been off refining your skills on the continent, I’ve been doing the same.”
Draco arched a brow.
With a quick accio , Theo summoned something gold and glittering, flying down the long manor hallway.
“Please tell me it’s not another portkey,” Draco said. “I think I’m still dizzy from the last one you made me test.”
Theo rolled his eyes and held a chain up between them: dangling from it, something that looked suspiciously illegal, but damn if it wasn’t interesting.
“Theo is that a—” Draco took a step closer, feeling his eyes widen as he stared at the tiny hourglass enclosed in a golden cage.
“Time turner,” Theo confirmed, giving the chain a tiny swish, letting the turner sway between them.
“I have questions,” Draco said.
Theo laughed.
“Thought you would. Isn’t this better than a nap?”
Draco opted to ignore the jab.
“Where did you get it?”
“One of my father’s studies, wild repellent wards around it, so of course I had to look.”
Of course.
“What have you done to it?”
Theo frowned, retracting his arm that had been holding the time turner out between them. Draco hadn’t even noticed how close he’d walked until it was snatched away from his reach.
“What makes you so sure I’ve done something to it?”
Draco arched a brow and engaged in an impressive display of restraint by not rolling his eyes.
“Alright, I’ve done something to it.”
Draco’s brow stayed arched. Theo wouldn’t be able to resist showing off for long.
“It can change things. At least I think it can, I haven’t tested it yet.”
Draco took a small step back, both in awe and reasonable concern.
“When you say change…” Draco said.
“It doesn’t take you in a loop. It takes you somewhere else, restarts a timeline, probably breaks several laws of time travel Merlin himself would take issue with, but I’m almost certain that’s what it’ll do.”
Theo didn’t seem to notice Draco’s disbelief; he just stared at the hourglass on the chain as it dangled in the air, swinging back and forth between them, a literal and figurative pendulum. Theo tore his gaze from the time turner.
“I’ve been waiting for you to get back—I didn’t, well, I haven’t told Blaise about it.”
No, Draco couldn’t imagine he would have. As a side effect of having a touch of Sight, Blaise tended to be exceptionally cautious about the future and the things that could impact it.
Draco let out a long breath, shaking his head from side to side, mostly out of disbelief. He ran a hand through his hair.
“sh*t. Theo. The Department of Mysteries has no idea what they missed out on.”
Theo’s smile dropped, twisting—just for a moment—into something resembling a frown.
“Well, since they didn't want to hire me, I’m putting my talents to personal use instead.”
“I have another question,” Draco said, throwing caution to the wind, feeling reckless. “Are we going to test it?”
“Can’t. Not yet,” Theo said, looking genuinely disappointed. “Still have a bit of fiddling to do. But soon,” he sighed through a smile. “I knew I could count on you to do something stupid with me.”
Draco knew it was a stupid thing to do, downright idiotic, to be honest. But if he was meant to carry on a family legacy, marry a stranger, and rot in the mausoleum of a manor he had the honor of calling his own, he could at least permit himself a sliver of idiocy, powered by intense curiosity.
“Well, if you can get it working before next month maybe you can get me out of the Ministry’s f*cking decommissioning project.”
“Malfoy Manor is up?”
“Starts next month.”
Theo wound the time turner’s gold chain around the broad surface of his palm—once, twice, three times—until he held the tiny hourglass in his fist. It looked so much smaller there, more like a toy and less like the exceedingly illegal experimental bit of magic it actually was.
“So—they found someone willing to take on your estate, then?” Theo said. Then, with a scoff, “Only took them four years.”
The time turner disappeared into Theo’s pocket. Draco couldn’t break his gaze from the glints of gold as it moved.
Draco snorted. They’d certainly found someone to tackle Malfoy Manor.
“I take it Lucius isn’t pleased either?” Theo asked before he summoned a house elf, requesting champagne. The elf appeared and disappeared in a crack .
“I could hear him yelling through the Floo from a different wing when they told him who’s working our estate.”
“Well?” Theo prompted. “Who is it?”
“Hermione Granger.”
Theo didn’t say anything, not at first. He shifted on his feet and Draco heard the chain from the time turner sliding in his pocket, reminding Draco of its presence.
“What the f*ck are they thinking?”
Draco didn’t know. He’d wondered the same thing when his mother told him, explaining away his father’s ire with excuses about surprise, and stress, and disrespect of their family home. But it made no sense that they would send a witch who’d been tortured there, who had such an unfortunate and intimate history with the property and the family tied to it.
While, quite unfortunately, the number of people who experienced torture in his home was decidedly more than zero, all three current occupants included, it didn’t seem like it would be an impossible task to find a competent soul who had not experienced such a thing at his home to do the job.
“Hermione Granger,” Theo parroted, something wistful, awestruck in his voice. “She’s going to be at it for years.”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“No, really,” Theo continued, “between how much insane sh*t your family has collected over the years and her—let’s call it attention to detail—it’ll be years before the Ministry let’s the manor go.”
Draco flexed his jaw, completely aware of all these things. They were some of the first he’d thought, too.
“Think she’s still as awful as she used to be?” Theo asked.
“I doubt she can be worse.”
Draco’s nails dug into his palm, stinging: a fist he hadn’t even realized he’d made.
“We’re not as awful as we used to be,” Theo said.
“I don’t have any plans to call her names, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“I know that. Maybe you could—tell her some of—”
“Not happening.”
Theo gave a small smile, forced and stiff. He nodded.
The elf reappeared with a bottle of champagne. Theo let out a relieved noise as he accepted a glass, thanking the elf profusely, and then forced champagne into Draco’s hands.
“Well—welcome back,” Theo said with a small lift of his glass in toast, face twisting towards pity. “Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think?”
Draco laughed, downing his champagne in a single gulp, wincing at the assault of bubbles against his throat.
“Maybe you should get that time turner working and we can avoid Granger and the decommissioning altogether.”
“You say we—”
“I sat in front of this painting and watched you try to dismantle these wards for two years. If I have to suffer through Hermione Granger gutting my ancestral home, your job is to distract me.”
Theo frowned.
“She did testify for you.”
Draco frowned, too.
“I’m planning on avoiding her as much as I can. I might not even notice her if I try hard enough.”
Theo pulled the time turner from his pocket, letting it swing from his fingers again.
“What would you change?” Draco asked, distracted by the glinting metal once again.
Theo shrugged.
“Not sure. Don’t know. It’s a lot of pressure, isn’t it? The idea of changing something. You?”
“I don’t know. All of it? None of it? Enough?” Draco said. He knew what Theo meant. The idea of changing time, suddenly so big, so all encompassing, felt completely surreal.
“Well, we have time to figure it out.”
Draco almost jolted, hit so fiercely by the same words he’d said to Astoria the day before.
Theo offered him a wink, clearly unaware of the small shock he’d just delivered to Draco’s system, “I’ll try to have it done before Granger blows up your life.”
Perhaps that’s the moment he would change: find a way to keep Granger away from his home. Or maybe he’d go for something smaller, like the lie he’d told Astoria: that they’d figure it out. Or maybe he’d pick the moment he got back to Wiltshire and where instead of marching straight into his Father’s office, he’d waited to be summoned. Or perhaps further back, during the war, before the war. So many moments. Not enough time.
