Chapter Text
“Where will you go?” Draco asks. There’s a deep tiredness to his voice. A resignation to a long war he never wanted to be a part of (no matter what side he stood on) but fights endlessly for anyways.
Sometimes he wonders why. Maybe for his father, killed by the Dark Lord. Maybe for his mother, desperately trying to keep her son safe even as he fights from the front lines. Maybe for this man in front of him, who seems so far away even when he’s right in front of him.
Harry looks at his friend. The pureblood heir that he’d never think to call close as a brother in the entirety of his lifetime.
“Back. Back to before this all started.” He says it calmly, as if he hadn’t spent weeks agonizing over it.
To go back years, decades, to the root of it all.
‘Harry,’ said the deep, rattling, rasping voice of Death. You think in straight paths and lines. Know that you can now transcend the confines of space and time. You have all of eternity at hand. Go back to 1981? You could do so much more.
Draco, however, knew nothing of this.
“How? Where? Harry you’re not making any sense,” He says with a hint of desperation in his voice. This was the boy who lived. The champion of the light. How could he just leave ?
Harry knew what he was leaving behind; A war-torn magical world, thousands of witches and wizards looking to him for guidance, looking for him to lead them against Voldemort and his cruel reign, and two best friends- one six months pregnant- both hidden away by Fidelius like an eerie echo of his parents.
But what could he tell him? How could he explain.
“Will you go with me?” Green eyes stare into silver. There's a vulnerability in those eyes that Draco hadn’t seen in a long time. War had hardened him, but behind those walls was the same hurt and scared child from many years ago.
Draco says nothing.
“Come with me,” I don’t want to be alone .
Without fully knowing, Draco understood.
“Let’s go.”
So they went.
--
“ Travel back to the 1930s?! Are you insane?” Draco exclaims. He might have agreed to join Harry but this, this was madness!
Harry looks at him with endless patience.
“Just trust me. Please. I can do it.”
In the safety of one of the Malfoys’ safe houses, the two discuss their plan.
Draco lets out a long sigh.
“I know I said I’d join you, but… my mother,” He says quietly.
Harry looks down at his lap.
“I know, it was a selfish request and I understand if you-” Draco cuts him off before he can finish.
“No. Stop that. Stop blaming yourself for trying to make things right.” It’s quiet for a moment before he continues.
“I just… we need to prepare first. We can’t just up and go, we need to decide what what to do, where to go, what will even happen to, to all this when we’re gone? Harry what the hell are you thinking ?”
He gives a wry smile.
“If you want the full story, we’ll be here for a while.”
Draco sighs- again- he’s being doing that a lot lately.
“Winky!” With a crack, a house elf appears next to the coffee table.
“What can Winky do for Masters Harry and Malfoy?”
“Bring us some tea, please,” She practically glows.
“Yes Master Malfoy!”
Soon steam is swirling up from two porcelain cups. It’s only 8 at night, but Harry feels very, very tired.
“It all starts with a boy named Tom Riddle…”
--
As Hogwarts sleeps, a lone pair of feet wanders its halls. Dark, perfectly curled hair, high cheekbones, and an elegant hand gripping a yew wand so tightly it seemed that it could snap with the slightest increase in pressure.
‘Damn that old man…’
Tom Riddle roams the castle with the restlessness of a hungry basilisk. Venomous and seething, desperate for answers in pages he’d already searched. ‘It has to somewhere , it must be… Perhaps the headmaster’s office? It’s the only place I haven’t been able to properly search.’
He feels a burning in his chest. It must be the calling of his birthright. ‘ It must .’
Somewhere, two figures stumble into an empty, decrepit street.
No one knows it, but a distant future shatters.