Chapter Text
Wednesday, December 1st, 2004
The roses were gray. Like the overcast sky outside, reflected by the enchanted ceilings in their headquarters. Like the tinge of their skin, from spending too much time underground. Like the layers of their hearts, peeled off one by one by every crushing defeat. Gray.
“Thank you, Harry, they’re beautiful,” Hermione said, toying with the red ribbon.
The low rumbling of thunder followed by a flash of lightning made them both look up. For a fleeting moment, they were lost in their thoughts. Hermione tried to remember what true sun on her skin felt like. Grass under her feet. Freedom. Even a whiff of it. If only it could be poured into a bottle so they could carry it around in their pockets, maybe life would be a little easier. The burden, lighter.
“Draco’s back,” he said. The pained smile on his face didn’t reach his emerald eyes.
“That’s wonderful.”
“He forgot about me,” Harry replied, looking down.
“Oh.”
The flowers hadn’t been for her, then. She placed them gently on the nightstand. And pulled Harry into a hug. They both lingered. Hidden inside a whirlwind of unspoken words.
“How long was he there for?” she asked.
The longer someone spent in the past, the more probable it was for their memory to be affected upon return.
Harry rumpled his hair. Still untamable. His glasses were lopsided. “About twenty years. As far as we can tell.”
Hermione swallowed the lump in her throat. Twenty years. How scared he must have been, how lonely he must have felt. It was unimaginable. Her eyes fell on the roses again. Gray. They had started to wilt, in time with their hopes. Harry hadn’t said Draco’s mission had succeeded. Twenty years. In a different place, a different time. An endless, hopeless fight. A narrow path, leading to the same dead end, the same brick wall. And always gray.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he replied, squeezing her shoulder. “Don’t be sorry about me. It was still a bit new when he left. What we…had. Us. I should have expected this. It’s fine. I’m more worried about him. He’s been gone for a long time.”
Harry let the heavy curtain of his bravery and resolve fall over his bitterness. To them, in the main timeline, Draco had left yesterday.
“He’s waiting for you. To check for injuries,” he said.
“What about you?” Hermione asked.
He huffed a small laugh. “Just a pain in my chest. Can you give me anything for that?”
“Maybe… maybe Draco still can.”
Harry absent-mindedly scratched the scar on his forehead.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
They had known each other for years. Since they were children. Hermione could tell. He was lying. The lies they told each other and themselves. Bricks in the walls they built around their hearts to shield them from the haunting, cold shades of gray.
The door to Hermione’s bedroom creaked as they shut it behind them. Their footsteps echoed in the dark, stone hallway. Who are we? she asked herself with each step. The shadows cast by the torches on the walls followed them timidly. Who are we? Deep inside the bowels of the earth, the last remnants of the Order of the Phoenix, still fighting, still resisting. Their numbers, dwindling. Into oblivion. Who are we? Was Draco still himself after spending so long in a different timeline? Were any of them still themselves? What made a human being who they were? Their experiences? Their memories? Would Dumbledore say love ? But he was gone. Long gone. Hermione couldn’t tell how many years had passed since his death anymore. Who are we?
Silence pressed on the round, stone walls of the Common Room. A few people had gathered around the Space Beyond Time. The narrow, mysterious space that the Unspeakable had constructed and locked behind glass panes next to a wooden table upon which stood a cracked vase with flowers that never withered. Somebody else had died in a different timeline. And disappeared from living memory, as if they had never existed. Their picture and name now floated behind the panes. To be commemorated, but not remembered.
“Lavender Brown,” Parvati whispered. “She seems nice. I wonder if we were friends.”
“We’ll never know, I suppose,” Neville replied, with his hands in his pockets. “I wonder what it feels like. To just… disappear like that.”
“Peaceful?” Parvati suggested.
Harry and Hermione said nothing. They moved on.
A few feet away, Cho was staring at the clock on the wall. Tick-tock , it said. Taunting. Mocking. She was hugging herself. Shivering. Rocking slightly back and forth. Tick-tock.
“What does it mean?” she whispered.
Hermione draped an arm around Cho’s shoulders. She recognized it. The shock after returning from a mission. Cho hadn’t displayed physical wounds. The soul, however, was harder to heal.
Hermione knew so many words from so many books and yet, none came to mind. Everything would ring hollow. Empty. After so many lost battles against tyranny, cruelty, and time, nobody needed comfort. They needed answers. What did it mean, indeed? Who are we?
“I need to see Draco,” she said. “We’ll talk later, all right?”
Cho didn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t hear. She was cloaked in palpable despair. Hermione squeezed her gently and let go. Eventually, they all ended up letting go of each other.
Another dark, stone corridor. Harry appeared to be deep in thought.
“I fucking hate seeing her like that,” he said, at length.
“We’re terrorists under this regime,” Hermione replied. “We can’t exactly waltz into St. Mungo’s and ask for a Mind Healer. And I’m not sure there’s anyone on Earth who specializes in this kind of damage. I’ve been making progress, but-”
“Don’t you dare apologize,” Harry said, cutting her off. “You’re doing enough as it is.”
“Am I? I’m banned from going on missions again.”
A heavy silence. An uncomfortable topic. Memories that felt like a sweater several sizes too small. His dangerous smile. His dark eyes. His hands, wandering all over her body. Her desire, scorching, all-encompassing. His touch, his smell, his possessive, open-mouthed kisses on her skin. Everywhere she turned within the memories of that last mission, him, him, him . The enemy. But for once, for once, it hadn’t all been gray.
Harry cleared his throat. Hermione could almost hear his mind whirring, searching for a different topic.
“Do you remember I tried to date Cho? Merlin, feels like eons ago. Almost like one of those fake memories from a different timeline. But I’m pretty sure it’s from this one. Fucking awkward method to figure out I’m gay,” he said.
Hermione couldn’t help but laugh. The laughter, that luxury, that indulgence, sounded obscene. Too loud, too happy. Too much, too little. Out of place, at any rate, in their narrow, gray world where sanity did nothing but unravel.
“Thank you for that,” she said. “But I think you’ll find it’s actually a very common method.”
They both went into the makeshift Hospital Ward. Hermione was a makeshift Healer, but never to be left alone with a patient. Needed, but not trusted. It made sense, in their crooked hide-out underground, under a crooked regime, in a crooked world. Shunned, not trusted, but needed. And it was all because of him . That crooked, special version of him. She closed her eyes for a moment as nauseating memories flashed behind her eyelids. Nauseating but intoxicating. Exhilarating. Him. Him. Him. His whispers against her skin. His surprisingly strong hands, reluctant to let her go. The darkness. But he hadn’t been all dark, no. It hadn’t been that easy. He had been… gray. In a good way, for once. For once.
Draco was sitting on the narrow bed. He looked the same, but his eyes were clouded. He had seen things, that much was clear. Things he’d rather forget. They had stopped Obliviating people after missions a long time ago, though. It did more harm than good. He furrowed his brow.
“Hermione… Granger, right? It’s been a while.”
“It’s been a day for us, Draco,” she said, with all the kindness she could muster.
“Right. I’m still having trouble adjusting to that thought,” he said, stroking his chin.
He looked the same but he felt older. Different. It made sense, of course. But yesterday, he’d still held traces of the slightly arrogant, stand-offish, yet repentant Draco who had deflected to their side. The one who almost managed to lift their spirits with his quips and his smirks. The one who’d made Harry laugh for the first time in forever.
“Take your shirt off, please.”
“I’m fairly confident I don’t like women,” he said, attempting to smile, before the smile slid from his face. “Or did I? Do I? Here? I can’t remember.”
I should be grateful my memories were never affected by missions, I suppose, Hermione thought. She was lucky to have had shorter missions, but ultimately, it came down to bad luck. Draco seemed to have received it in heaps. Then again, maybe if I’d lost my sanity I would have forgotten him too.
“You didn’t, the last time I checked,” Harry said, looking away.
Looking away from Draco’s lithe muscles and Sectumsempra scars. His eyes clouded by pain. The same kind of pain Hermione felt when she thought about… about him . She still thought about him. Was it better to have loved and lost?
Hermione waved her wand all over Draco, checking for potential internal injuries. Some bodies couldn’t handle the strain of being pulled back to the main timeline. It was much, much worse than splinching. A gruesome way to die. Just one of the many risks of the only kind of missions the Order still went on.
They had abandoned everything else. Saving Muggle-borns, breaking people out of Azkaban, trying to sabotage the Ministry. For the slightest chance of ending it all, they were looking away. They couldn’t afford to lose any more members. There was barely anyone left. She murmured incantations under her breath, trying not to focus on everyone they’d lost in the past. Sometimes she was glad they couldn’t remember those who disappeared. They would be extra people the living had to mourn. A horrible thought, a selfish one, but self-preservation was strong. Compelling. It always whispered enticingly.
It’s not a crime to want to survive when we’re the only ones who can take down Voldemort. She felt her breathing become labored as she cast the final diagnostic charms on Draco. Who are we? Who. Are. We? Who am I? What memories are part of who I am? Is he part of who I am? Is Voldemort part of who I am? He’s not… He wasn’t… He wasn’t Voldemort. The crooked timeline, they call it. He doesn’t even become Voldemort there. We don’t know what he becomes, not yet.
“You’re perfectly fine,” she said, pulling herself out of her reverie. “Welcome back, Draco.”
“I’d say it’s good to be back, but…” He shrugged. “I wish I’d achieved something besides almost forgetting who I am. This mission took its toll on me, after all the others. I’m lucky I remembered to carry this around in my pocket.”
He took out the Snitch Dumbledore had left Harry in his will. The first one he had ever caught in a Quidditch match. Draco’s anchor to the main timeline.
“I think this used to belong to you?” he asked, narrowing his eyes in Harry’s direction.
“Er…yeah. It did.”
Hermione felt a wave of sadness for Harry. She hadn’t intended to, but she had overheard her best friend yesterday, when he pressed the Snitch in Draco’s hand. To remind you of me. But it hadn’t, in the end.
Harry moved to retrieve the Snitch and Hermione saw, out of the corner of her eye, the way Draco slightly jolted when their fingers brushed. He was still for a few seconds, before displaying one of his characteristic half-smiles. A glimpse, a ghost of the old Draco.
“All right there, Scarhead?” he asked. And then, his eyes widened in shock. “Salazar, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that.”
Harry burst out laughing and pocketed the Snitch. “No, it’s brilliant. You used to call me that in Hogwarts. Back when you were being a dick to me on a regular basis. More than you are now, I mean. Er…were, I suppose.”
Draco chewed his lip. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“It’s fine. I can take a joke.”
Draco tilted his head. “Regardless, I’m not going to start picking on you for amusement. I’m twenty years older than you now, Potter. Harry. I don’t remember what I used to call you.”
“You’re still you from where I’m standing, Draco,” Harry mumbled.
Hermione shuffled her feet. Draco hadn’t heard him. The only sound left was the ticking on Harry’s wrist watch. Mocking. Laughing at them. Tick-tock. I haven’t taken everything away yet, said Time. You still have important things left that I could take.
Harry cleared his throat. “We should go to the meeting.”
They tensed upon hearing the word meeting . It implied less of a conversation and more of a sentence. Either a death sentence or a life sentence. The risk of vanishing into oblivion, the risk of coming back addled. Who would be the next one sent out? They felt like lambs being picked for slaughter.
Harry, Hermione, and Draco made their way to the meeting room along with everyone else. It was quiet. Except for the shuffling of feet and the heaving of a sigh here and there. In the beginning, there had been optimism. Faith in their chance of winning. Even laughter. In the beginning, when they had first been driven underground. Years and years ago.
As time had gone by, the laughter had died out. Smothered by loss, grief, isolation, at a point even starvation. When the masked Unspeakable from the Ministry first made his appearance, it had become too risky to even venture out for supplies.
Hermione thought it might be a man judging by the tonality of the magically modified voice, but nobody knew for certain, except Moody. To this day, only Moody knew the stranger’s identity. But without them, the Order would have been wiped out long ago. Granted, they hadn’t brought good news.
Voldemort is hiding Horcruxes in the past , they’d said, to everyone’s horror. He developed a more reliable form of travel than Time Turners using the resources of the Department of Mysteries. Luckily, I managed to replicate it before I had to run. It can send someone as far back as a century and the traveler can be pulled back to the present at any time. There’s a catch, though. Every time something of significance is changed, a new timeline branches off from the main one. Voldemort already created four branch timelines by hiding his four Horcruxes. In what year and place, I can’t say.
Moody had said the stranger could be trusted. That they weren’t sabotaging the Order or spying for Voldemort. His statements had all been accurate. But only one Horcrux had been found and destroyed since, Helga Hufflepuff’s cup. And every time the Order went back to try and retrieve the others, they created more branches. At one point they started to suspect Voldemort was moving the remaining three between timelines. It was an impossible race against space as well as time.
The Timeline Tree with its glowing, writhing branches of sand, faced them from the wall. Ron, Moody, and Remus were analyzing it, while the Unspeakable kept their distance. The rest of them grabbed a seat wherever they could. On the rickety chairs, in the moth-eaten armchairs, on the grimy floor. Some of them stood with crossed arms. Everyone was looking away from the Tree and its perverse habit of swallowing up lives.
“The main timeline has become unstable,” Moody told them, without any preamble. “Missions are suspended for the time being. If we keep on creating branches, Time itself will start to unravel. The main timeline with all its branches will disappear and the world will end. Unless there are other questions, you’re dismissed.”
Hermione heard the collective sigh of relief and didn’t know what to feel, except that she wanted to laugh at Moody’s dismissive, curt way of delivering such monumental news.
“So what are we going to do to get the fucking world out of this mess, then?” George asked, from where he was sitting cross-legged in a corner. “Nothing? Just let Voldemort have it forever? Stay here and rot?”
“Come up with a new plan. Until we figure it out, yes, we’ll stay here. Whether you rot or not is your own business, Weasley.”
“If you think this is a good time for jokes, Mad-Eye, you have another thing coming.”
“We could all use a break, George,” Parvati said in a small voice. “None of us is exactly sane or stable enough to save the world anyway, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I notice a lot of things, that doesn’t mean I’m just going to give up.”
“Nobody’s giving up,” Ron said. “We just have to come up with a new strategy.”
“This isn’t chess, Ron,” George replied. “If you lot spend too much time thinking about our next move, there might not be anything out there worth saving.”
Was it better to have loved and lost? However harrowing, George enjoyed going on missions, provided they weren’t too far back in the past. So he could catch glimpses of Fred. Love had left scars too deep to heal for some of them. Remus was another example. He had never recovered from Sirius’s death. And traveling was one of the only ways of seeing him again, even if for a fleeting moment, from a distance.
Was she the same? Had love scarred her as well? Had it even been love? Or simply a poisonous drug? She hummed to herself, to drown out the noise of the memories. The images of his eyes, his half-sincere smiles, his searing kisses. Him, always. Everything revolved around him. Who was he? Who am I? Who are we?
“Absolutely not,” Harry said, slamming his fist into the table. “You’re not sending Draco back. He was just gone for twenty fucking years , it’s insane. And why did you lie to the others?”
They were in Moody’s office. It was dark, damp, and cold, like the rest of their headquarters, with the added bonus that it was filled with what Harry had always assumed to be Dark objects. He hated the place.
“We didn’t lie,” Moody said, his magical eye spinning erratically. “Not even by omission. You two have a higher clearance than the others. This is war, Potter.”
Remus was looking away. The masked Unspeakable, as usual, stayed silent. Ron was conspicuously absent.
“It’s fine, Harry,” Draco said. “I’ll do what I have to do.”
“This is ridiculous, send me instead.”
“We’re not sending you instead, we’re sending both of you,” Moody replied.
Harry froze. People didn’t usually go on missions in pairs. There weren’t enough of them left for that. And the two of them, on a mission in the past? He gulped. It shouldn’t have been his first thought, but Draco didn’t smell the same. Of course, during the twenty years spent in the branch timeline, he must’ve acquired a different cologne. He didn’t smell the same and his eyes weren’t the same, but he was still Draco, his… no, just Draco, he spoke in a different, more calculated way, but it was still Draco and he had just broken Harry’s heart, unintentionally, but still, and it was complicated and he’d been gone for so long in that timeline and nothing made any kind of sense anymore.
“Will you let me explain, Potter, or will you keep behaving like a petulant child?”
“Fine,” he said, gritting his teeth and sitting back down.
“We didn’t lie before. The main timeline is unraveling. But we do have a plan. There is a way to turn a branch timeline into a new, and we suspect, stable, main timeline. ”
Harry furrowed his brow. “How?”
Moody’s eyes darted towards the Unspeakable.
“It’s quite a complex bit of magic. Irrelevant at the moment. What we have to focus on now is choosing an appropriate branch,” they said.
Harry shuddered. That magically modified voice always crept into his bones and chilled his insides. He wondered how on Earth they trusted someone who still hid their face and voice after so long. The answer, though, was evident. The Order was desperate. They had no other option.
“But I thought all branches merged into our main one eventually? Because the outcome is always the same?” he asked.
“Not in the case of our two contenders,” the Unspeakable replied.
Harry felt like he had been dunked under icy water. Draco was still silent. Unwilling to meet his eyes. A dull, persistent ache tried to grab his attention. He shoved it aside.
“Two?”
“One of them is Malfoy’s latest timeline,” Moody said. “The second is Granger’s crooked one.”
Slowly, it started making sense. But Harry was hoping from the bottom of his heart that he’d misunderstood.
“So you’re sending her back as well,” he said. His mouth had gone dry. “Why isn’t she here, then?”
An uncomfortable silence descended upon the small, cramped room. Harry’s question hung over them, drawing ragged breaths, sucking the last ounce of hope out of him.
“Remus?” he insisted, only to be met with silence.
“Because she doesn’t know we’re being sent back, too,” Draco drawled. “There are two contenders and not enough time. You want us to choose the best one and jump over there, allowing this world to disappear. Moral implications be damned, of course, we’ve played God by creating new timelines for a while now. I assume the rest of the branches will disappear as well. And that jumping between branches is still not possible. Am I correct?”
“Fuck this,” Harry said, when nobody replied. “She has a right to know. Ron agreed to this? I’ll fucking kill him. After I’m done with the lot of you, of course.”
“Harry,” Draco said, in a calm voice, “it’s a race. And they’re giving us the edge. I know you’re much too noble to accept such a thing, but the deed is done.”
“It’s not,” he said, getting to his feet, “I’m telling her.”
“I assume she’s already gone?” Draco asked.
“You assume correctly,” Moody said. “You’ve grown, Malfoy. Take care of this one out there, will you?”
“I think,” Draco said, looking down at his fingernails, “I think I used to enjoy doing that. A long, long time ago.”