Title: Time
Author: ianthe_waiting
Rating: MA
Disclaimer: The Harry Potter books and their characters are the property of JK Rowling. This is a work of fan-fiction. No infringement is intended, and no money is being made from this story. I am just borrowing the puppets, but this is my stage.
Genre: Drabble
Warnings: Insinuations, crude language.
Summary: #65 – Time. Time had been his jailer.
Word Count: 925 words.
Author's Notes: Drabble: a slice of fic in less than 1500 words. FEH universe.





Prompt 65 – Time








Time was every man’s enemy, however, for Draco Malfoy, time was more a cruel jailer.

When Lem Nix pulled the bandages away from his eyes, Draco wished in his deepest of hearts that she would be the first thing he would see. He wanted to see her again, with both eyes—only to be disappointed.

Two years apart from her, not knowing what became of her, only knowing that time had swallowed her before his very eye—singular, at the time. As he looked at Lem Nix’s kind, strange face, Draco knew it was time to go.

Time was a jailer and a puzzle.

Draco stood in the Forbidden Forest looking at his hands, scarred, calloused, dirt engrained so deep into old blisters that it would stain his skin for all time. He had a peasant’s hands, and he knew that there had once been a time he thought he would live a life of ease and frivolity.

His prison had changed, time had trapped him in the fifteenth century, and he built her home for her just as he remembered it. And in that house he built with his bare hands, Draco touched every surface, knowing that in five hundred years, she would touch the same spots.

He slept in the bed they had once shared, the bed where he had saved her from bleeding to death. In that bed five hundred years from that point, he would taste her skin, hear her voice, touch the softness of her flesh, and see her face glow with ecstasy. In that bed, he would say that he loved her.

He loved her every night, stroking himself with his rough, calloused hands, the image of her face engrained into every synapses of his brain. He had to get back to her; he could not live in the cottage alone with just a ghost of a memory yet to occur in time.

So, his jailer let him slip a little closer to the one he loved.

When he arrived in his own time, January 2008, he knew he could never see her, not until that night in the cemetery. Draco knew that he may only have the chance to see her one last time that night…the night Hermione Granger killed Harry Potter.

Erebus had struck her, he remembered, Erebus had kept her on task.

“You would not betray me, would you Erebus? You have been my steadfast one, my constant shadow,” Harry Potter had said before Draco/Erebus released the latch on the Time-Turner to send them back to June 24, 1995.

He said nothing to Harry.

Time had proven to Draco that Harry Potter was not as mad as many would like him to believe. Harry Potter was obsessed, that much was certain, and he would stop at nothing to see his obsession become reality—that was where many thought the man insane. Draco found Harry methodical, thorough, but foolhardy at times, whose mind was like that of a child’s.

Harry had never suspected that the dark shadow that had told Harry how to get a Time-Turner had been Draco Malfoy all along, and as far as Draco knew, Harry would never know.

All that mattered was that time release him, that time returned him to her, and her to him. All that mattered was that they could move beyond Harry Potter, and the need to keep time in mind. He was tired of time, and all he could think of was her.

When she reappeared before the chapel, spewing sickness into the grass, he felt every nerve and muscle in his body twitch to touch her. When she moved about the dangling body of her old friend, searching instead for his past self, he let his eyes follow the way her body moved. She was stiff, weary, and her face was pale, but she was alive, and nearly unchanged from the last time he remembered her. Her face had been vicious and determined when she buried the stiletto into Potter’s heart. Her face had been stone when Potter breathed his last breath, swearing love to her. Only a tear had marred that face, and Draco knew, somehow, that it was not for Potter.

Time had separated them; time had stolen him away from her side.

It was only when she would listen to reason that he could tell her that her precious Draco was not lost. He had never been lost, in reality, just imprisoned. Her shock was much as his had been nine years before. He could see the blankness in her eyes, her hesitancy, her pain; it was all too much, too fast.

To watch her trying so hard to understand made Draco want her more, crush her against his body, wrap himself around her, inside her so that time could never hurt either of them again.

Time had taught him control, it had taught him patience, but when he finally kissed her in the groom’s quarters, time had made him nearly insane with need. Violent visions coursed through his head, all the old fantasies he had had, Draco had to squash them lest he fuck her soundly upon the floor or on the bench without her consent.

Time he could give her, time he could give himself, as soon as she had returned to replace herself into the timeline, Draco Malfoy had been freed.

Time had finally rewarded him when she came back to him to stay, to be his only forever and a day.

Hermione Granger had been time’s great reward to him.