Erasing Time's Tracks

Erasing Time's Tracks
Chapter 1

- - -

A blond-haired wizard staggered outside of the large muggle mansion and made his unsteady way towards the silent graveyard that was near the dilapidated house that sat on the hill. Had Harry Potter or Albus Dumbledore seen the house, they would have realised it was the Riddle Mansion.

They would also have identifed that wizard as Draco Malfoy. Unfortunately, Dumbledore was no longer among the living, and Harry Potter was still reeling from the aftermath of the previous night's events.

As Draco Malfoy unsteadily walked, he recalled what had led up to his current situation. He and Snape had recently arrived to report on the success (or failure, depending on how one saw it) of Dumbledore's death; the Dark Lord had been extremely displeased to learn that Draco had ended up needing the now-former Defence teacher to save his bacon, thus depriving Voldemort of his valuable spy within Hogwarts.

The punishment that followed afterwards had been quite intense but fully deserved; the blond coughed weakly and felt something rattle in his chest. He was in no doubt that he had, at the very least, some bruised ribs, and something bitter and metallic was in his mouth. He spat it out, and then realised a second later that it was his own blood. He wished that the bouts of the Cruciatus curse that he had received had been less severe than they were.

Groaning, he leaned against a cold and mossy gravestone and wheezed quietly to himself; he winced as the waves of pain spread throughout his chest. He realised that he could do no-one any good in his current state. He had few resources left to boot; the Malfoy fortune was being steadily stripped from Lucius and Narcissa, by means of the Dark Lord's incessant demands for money to finance his private army, or, if the war went against the Dark Lord, by a Ministry led by Potter or Granger, who would swoop down on the wealthy purebloods for old-fashioned revenge in the form of pauperisation.

In addition, he had clearly failed as a Death Eater. The Dark Lord had washed his hands of Draco Malfoy.

As for Dumbledore's Order, he doubted that Potter and his group would be very benevolently-minded towards him, given his complicity in Dumbledore's death.

He was screwed.

And he knew it.

Luckily he had never before had to use the emergency single-use Portkey his father had given him two years ago, which would draw him to just outside Malfoy Manor. Now seemed like a good time though.

So tired, thought Draco. If I tried to App--

He never finished that thought because his Portkey activated; the village of Little Hangleton disappeared in a swirl of colour and a jerk behind his navel, disturbing his thoughts and forcing him to concentrate on not vomiting. The journey ended with him plopping from out of nowhere outside of the tall front gates of the Manor; they were crowned by spikes and a swirling M insignia, with weathered gilding. He collapsed as soon as he saw that he'd arrived safely.

Draco would have died that night had a house-elf not come out to investigate the unexpected visitor; it was horrified at the state of its young master (who had been moderately more benevolent to the house-elves than Lucius had been) and instantly transported him into the grand house. A tearful Narcissa Malfoy had come running out of the parlour to cast healing charms on her only child before she settled him in his comfortable bed.

When Draco woke up two days later, he marvelled that he was alive at all.

He wearily pushed himself up in bed, and idly ran his right hand along the silk bedspread as he looked at the Dark Mark on his left arm. He'd been so naïve that day, to think that his mother bringing him to the Dark Lord would redeem the Malfoy name, allowing Draco to stand by the Dark Lord's side the way his father had always bragged had happened during the first rise of Voldemort.

His first clue that the Dark Lord wasn't really all that he'd been built up to be was when Draco had gotten that mission to kill Dumbledore. During sixth year, he had realised he'd been set up to fail. He turned his head away from his offending arm, and got out of bed.

After carefully going through his morning ablutions, Draco went into the manor's large dining room, which had several windows letting in the sunny summer morning. His mother looked up from her breakfast plate, and rushed up, worriedly fussing over her son. He'd looked at himself in the mirror and had been shocked at how ragged his hair had looked and how weak and frail he appeared. What she couldn't see were the numerous ugly-looking bruises and red blotches on his skin from the stress his body had been under due to the Cruciatus curses. Still, his appearance, such as it was, was enough to shock anyone.

It seemed that his mother thought the same, too, because she had said, "Oh, Draco, you poor child! Sit down, and get some food into yourself!"

Draco had been so happy to be away from the stress of school, the Dark Lord, his mission--all that rot, that he didn't even sardonically question why his mother was babbling like some Weasley.

She'd refused to leave the table until he'd cleared his plate of breakfast and swallowed a nutrient potion followed by a general healing and strengthening potion. His mother looked quite unwell. Her once-shiny blond hair was dull and dreary. He also could have sworn he saw flecks of grey in it, even though she was not yet forty and was, in wizarding years, nowhere near middle age.

His mother said, "Draco, I forbid you, I absolutely forbid you to go back to the Dark Lord! He will force you into another mission designed to kill you, and it will! I will make your excuses to Severus. You have still not regained your strength and I will not have you leaving this manor at all!"

Wearily, Draco said, "Mother, you know it doesn't matter what you want. If the Dark Lord wants, he can level this manor to the ground and kill both of us. We probably have two weeks, if that, to come up with a way out."

Over his mother's protestations, Draco shouted, at some cost to his ribs, "Mother!"

Now that he had gotten her attention, he continued talking. "You know it's true. Professor Snape will have to eventually report in to the Dark Lord, and eventually nobody will believe I'm still on the mend from when I left Hogwarts."

Narcissa closed her eyes, her lips trembling as she bowed her head and acknowledged that they were playing a waiting game, trying to stave off the inevitable. She said, in a low voice, "Draco, all I can do for you then, my son, is help you rebuild your strength. I will order the house-elves to bring you refreshments and food. Severus foresaw the possibility that Lucius or you might need healing potions, and left plentiful stocks of them. The house-elves will bring you two nutrient potions a day, and one strengthening potion a day. Take them with your meals."

Draco, his own head bowed, mumbled, "Yes, mother."

He'd left the table that day, all hope lost.

That night, however, he proved the aphorism that desperate times tend to bring out the best and most innovative measures humans can come up with.

Draco had been sitting at his desk in his bedroom, a piece of parchment in front of him, while he stared at the wall, eyes unfocussed.

If he didn't have any options in the present, there was nothing stopping him from trying to seek options in the past.

And the past was certainly a much better cauldron to boil, as it were.

He had two weeks to come up with a plan.

It had been quite fortunate that the owners of Malfoy Manor were very much into collecting all manner of items, including many an unusual book that would often have all sorts of Dark Arts spells in it. There were even ones that were designed to tamper with some things that decent people had decided were not to be tampered with. One could cast spells to force women to bear monsters for offspring and another would liquefy the insides of a victim. There were any number of other unpleasant things, as well.

However, Draco skimmed past all that, looking for any kind of temporal-transfer spell. Minutes turned into hours, which turned into a week. Draco had run into dead end after dead end, as none of the more obvious books revealed anything useful to him. Finally, in desperation, he began pulling books off the shelves whose covers had no words on them. Even there, he nearly ran out of luck, until late one evening, after yet another day of driving himself far too hard for his body to safely tolerate, a small red book whose inside frontispiece had an elegant drawing of a snake battling a phoenix, revealed pay dirt. The book had resisted several attempts to open it, almost convincing Draco that he should put it back on the shelf and look at another. Advanced Confundus charms on a book - Draco was impressed despite himself.

But, oddly, the book was blank after the frontispiece. What in Merlin's name was going on? The only clue that the book might be valuable was that its age was clearly evident. If nothing else, it was a book written perhaps three hundred years ago and well-preserved since then.

Draco, frustrated, almost threw the book across the room when he realised it might not be a smart idea. He began casting every revealing spell he could think of, starting with "Specialis Revelio", and moving on to some fairly exotic, and partly Dark, revealing spells. After nearly half an hour, nothing had changed. The thrice-damned book refused to show any printing on the pages!

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how one looked at it, Draco made the mistake of crushing a quill violently in his hand as he impotently raged at whatever strong magic was in the book. The pointed end of the quill was driven into his palm, and, crying out in pain, Draco dropped the quill on the table. Before he could turn his palm right side up, a drop of blood fell on the blank page just after the frontispiece.

Draco had just enough time to think, oh, shit before the book flared with a sudden violet light. He dived to the floor, hoping nothing would explode.

A minute later, nothing happened. The book wasn't giving off any light anymore, and Draco cautiously stood up and edged back over to the table. Shock went through him as he realised the blank page now had visible printing! He reached out, hesitantly flipped a page, and more printing was there. Eagerly, he sat down and began riffling through the book.

Soon enough, he found it. The words were old, and faded, but Draco was able to clearly make out and transcribe the spell, the title of which ran, "A Spelle To Transferre The Minde Acrosse Time". Unfortunately one needed magical strength on the scale of what Merlin or Dumbledore had (Draco might have despised the Headmaster of Hogwarts, but only an idiot would deny that the man had an enormous reserve of magical power and very good control over it), in order to safely use the spell. Additionally, the spell was designed so one had to have a good knowledge of Arithmancy and Ancient Runes. If one simply cast the spell itself without the appropriate Arithmantic results expressed as runes, it would simply do nothing.

If Draco had tried to cast the spell in his weakened, slowly recovering condition, he would at best send his soul back a few minutes, and at worst he would die from the separation of the soul from the body, since the reintegration at "the other end" needed power behind it. He needed to go back about six years, and he needed to be at the peak of his magical strength to even have a chance of a successful go at it.

For now, Draco was not in immediate danger, as far as bodily integrity was concerned, now that he had found what he was looking for. His mother was relaxed just enough to cease fussing over him so much, now that her healing charms plus the potions had restored her son. Truth be told, he didn't mind all the fussing right at the moment; it was good to be away from the horrible stress and pressure brought on by the meetings with the Dark Lord and the Death Eaters.

His methodical mind set out what he needed:

He first needed magical strength booster - a potion or several potions would work for that, he decided.

Secondly, a clear and peaceful place to work out the exact temporal parameters of the spell. He had luckily had some Arithmancy education and so he could understand what to place in the equations to derive the exact structure of the spell, and there were ample Ancient Runes references in the Malfoy library.

Remembering his self-imposed deadline of two weeks from his arrival at Malfoy Manor, Draco began writing on parchment, eager to erase the mistakes of his past. He vaguely registered his mother's admonishments to stop working so hard in his underground potions lab, seated for hours on end at his lab bench.

---

Draco had decided to narrow down his arrival to approximately the day or the one previous to that, on which he had met Potter at the robe shop that Madam Malkin owned. He hadn't made a very good impression then and he had only reinforced it with his snotty attitude towards the Weasleys (but honestly, how a wizard could live without the finer things in life, Draco couldn't fathom). So he had lost Potter as a friend, or at least a useful ally.

He sure as hell needed Potter to be at least civil with him as he intended to get into Ravenclaw on the second go-round. There was nothing like soaking up volumes and volumes of strange and esoteric stuff, even if he would get a reputation as being a stuffy arse. It hadn't hurt Granger that much to be known as a bossy know-it-all, particularly when one considered how many times she had helped bail the Boy Who Lived out of danger.

However, he would need to have multiple backup plans in the event that the changes he made caused untoward ripple effects. One distant possibility was that Potter would get sorted into a house other than Gryffindor; ideally, he, Potter, and Granger would all get sorted into Ravenclaw, but that required a lot of fancy fine-tuning Draco didn't think he could accomplish. Nonetheless, no Slytherin would be one without at least one Plan B in mind.

With this in mind, Draco continued his research.

The Arithmantic equations seemed to imply a fundamental problem with accuracy in time travel. Due to the extremely large (but not infinite) amounts of magical energy needed to perform the spell and drive one's soul backwards in time, there was an inherent limit to just how accurately you could set your arrival time. What the book seemed to imply that if one had an infinite amount of magical energy, one could pinpoint exactly the time one wished to arrive. So if he chose to pick July 1, 1991 as his arrival day, and then picked a specific time - say, eight in the morning - the uncertainty implied by the equations meant that if he had a lot of magical energy going in, he could arrive within two or three hours on either side of eight o'clock, but if he didn't have that much going in, he might well arrive anywhere from several days before to several days after.

This would not normally have been an issue, but Draco wanted to meet his younger self before going to Diagon Alley and bumping into Potter, and keep his head down and his ears open until then. Draco decided to simply assume he could arrive at exactly 6 AM on July 30, 1991 and let the Arithmantic equations set the spell. He would work on driving the uncertainty down to the minimum possible however he could.

So, as regarded the magical energy issue, Draco was not going to be concerned about laws or regulations regarding any performance-enhancing potions, and set out to brew as many strengthening potions he could get recipes for. His only concern was for possibly negative synergistic effects, where one potion might not only cancel another, but even harm him in the process.

In any case, thought Draco sardonically, if I send my soul back, my body will be ruined beyond repair anyway. Mother can bury me in whatever fashion she deems appropriate and the Dark Lord can write off the Malfoys. And if I don't successfully send my soul back, the potions will play such havoc with my magical core I'll probably die anyway.

He pulled the next book off the pile of Arithmancy texts he'd accumulated, and went back to his parchment.

He now had, he reckoned, about five more days.

---

Four days later, a bitter and tired Draco Malfoy stood before six cauldrons that were innocently bubbling away; the aromas of various strengthening potions mixed to create an odour vaguely reminiscent of pine sap.

He had been furiously rushing to meet his deadline, and had managed everything with one day to spare according to his reckoning. The runes were carved; the potions were ready. All he needed now was to put stasis charms on the cauldrons, and re-check his Arithmancy calculations. The runes needed to be placed very precisely in relation to one another, and a spell had to be cast each time he placed a rune. The process was designed to facilitate the magic of sending his soul back the desired number of years and months. Days was another issue, and depended on the amount of magical energy he would have after imbibing the potions.

Deciding another look wouldn't hurt, Draco mentally inventoried his potions.

The first was a standard Strengthening Potion taught in school. It would ensure that he would remain alert during the spell-casting.

The next was a potion which was borderline illegal as it increased one's metabolism whenever imbibed - very useful for those who couldn't be bothered to diet, but it wreaked havoc on one's biochemistry and prolonged use often led to heart failure by the time one reached their sixties; when a witch or wizard could live to a hundred and twenty or even older, it was a pretty risky adventure in order to just lose some extra pounds. But in his case, it wouldn't matter. He had been wolfing down food whenever his mother or a house-elf brought it, and at the rate he was going, Draco knew he would actually get fat that summer, assuming he wasn't time travelling. All the better to metabolise with so he could cast a spell Merlin would quail at.

The third potion - Draco blushed again at the thought of what his mother would say if she ever knew he had brewed it - was supposed to increase one's sexual stamina; he had tossed it into the list because it worked by boosting one's magical core somehow; how that exactly improved the ability one had in bed, Draco had yet to determine. He half-wished at that moment that Pansy was around so that he could give that potion a trial run. He snickered and moved on.

The fourth, fifth and sixth potions were all illegal for quite a few good reasons; they had a nasty habit of inducing premature aging, since they somehow allowed the human body to be a conduit for forms of magic normally associated with inanimate objects or the Earth itself, and the human body was just simply not designed for that.

It was truly a mark of how desperate Draco thought his situation to be that as he had feverishly worked on his Arithmancy, then his potions, and now contemplated the best order to take the potions, not once did he entertain the idea of trying to have another go at appeasing the Dark Lord or trying to meet the Order of the Phoenix.

He concluded that the potions would best be imbibed roughly from most benign to least. That meant the normal Strengthening Potion, then the sexual enhancement potion, then the second, fourth, fifth and sixth in that order.

The potions books he had gotten the recipes from did not appear to imply a terribly specific dose was needed; however, Draco knew from basic Potions that the more you drank, generally the effect was proportional, so for the sake of convenience Draco set out six ladles, one for each cauldron. He then cast the stasis charms, and went upstairs for dinner.

At the long polished oak table, Draco's mother was sitting pensively, waiting for her son. She looked up, and smiled wanly as Draco approached and sat near her. She said, "Draco, I have been worried about you since you came home. Rushing around with these private projects of yours--"

Attempting to be soothing, Draco interposed, saying, "Mother, don't worry. I'm just trying to come up with some special personal defences for myself. I think we should go into hiding, you know. But we'll go separately; I'll leave first and give you time to empty the vault and strip the Manor of possessions you can shrink into a trunk. We'll meet in France, and then maybe go to Italy, if Zabini's relatives will take us in."

Visibly relieved, Narcissa Malfoy grasped Draco's arm, saying, "Thank Merlin at least one of us is keeping up with things. I'm sorry, Draco. I just can't seem to concentrate properly; it's all I can do to be a mother to you, now that you need one."

Draco picked up his knife and fork and began attacking the well-cooked roast beef. He muttered, "We won't have much time. As soon as Severus or the Dark Lord realise we've taken off, they'll come after us. Severus was..."

He had been furious. What Draco hadn't wanted to say was that as soon as Voldemort had received the news that Snape had had to step in and finish Draco's mission, he had said, "Severus, I believe now would be a good time to remind Mr Malfoy of the, shall we say, reward for failure."

Snape had hit him with the Cruciatus Curse, and then for good measure, had cast a Blood-Boiling Hex at him. The look of utter contempt on the man's face had stayed with Draco for some time after that.

Draco Malfoy most assuredly did not want his mother to know his former professor thought him to be lower than a flobberworm. She seemed to realise he didn't want to keep discussing past events, and silently attended to her own dinner.

---

The next day, without further ado, Draco stood in front of the cauldrons, and cancelled the stasis charms. He then began ladling up the potions, one by one, gulping them down. As he threw the last ladle back on the bench top in his underground lab at the Manor, he suddenly shuddered; his hands were racked by spasms and he realised that his body was reacting to the sudden and large increases in magical energy he was experiencing. He willed himself to remain steady as he leaned against one of the cool stone walls as he waited for his body to adjust.

After a few minutes of nerve-wracking shivering, teeth chattering and nausea, Draco found that the effects were lessening as his magic and body realigned. Draco counted his lucky stars that the cramping he'd felt in his arse hadn't led to an involuntary and messy problem, and closed his eyes as he felt the surge of power within him.

Almost automatically, his wand was out, and he opened his eyes as he pointed it at the ladle.

"Leviosa."

WHACK!

The ladle crashed against the ceiling before it fell back on the bench. Draco smirked and thought, well, that settles it. The potions work!

Suddenly, Draco realised he felt what a muggle would have termed static electricity running all up and down his arms. It took him a few moments, but he gasped as he realised the implications - he was feeling the rest of the magic in his vicinity! The Malfoy Manor wards were one of the key components to that uneasy tingling on his skin. Only a truly powerful mage could sense magic to that degree.

And at that moment, he realised, to his horror, that his time had nearly run out. He could feel several magical signatures two floors above; his mother, he was sure, was one of them. Even as he processed this information, the signatures began to spread throughout the Manor. Draco pointed his wand at the door to his lab and said, "Colloportus."

The sudden surge of magic on the door told the blond wizard that his locking spell had been quite powerful. He estimated he needed fifteen minutes. Grabbing the runes, he put them beside the pre-drawn diamond in a corner of his lab. With precise moves, he placed the first rune at the northern corner of the diamond, then cast the Temporal Alignment spell. The second rune went down at the southern point three minutes later, accompanied by a Temporal Shifting spell.

As Draco placed the third rune at the eastern point, he was momentarily distracted by a distant banging. Someone was yelling, "Open up, widdle Malfoy!"

Shit.

Draco's heart beat faster as he began hearing distant blasts, as though someone were attempting Reductor curses at the door. The Spatial Transfer spell took a minute to cast.

Draco forced himself to concentrate as he placed the last rune at the western corner of the diamond, and began casting the Spatial Reckoning spell; this one required particular care, since it depended on the exact placement and construction of the previous three runes. Luckily, the magic he felt was reassuring, and did not warn him of any danger. He took this to mean he had cast the first stage of the Temporal Magic correctly.

Standing inside the diamond, feeling the incredible magical field he was in, and focussing on the Temporal Transfer spell, Draco began intoning the incantation. As the spell took shape and form, he could feel a tugging on his mind. It wasn't unpleasant but was certainly odd. He was determined though to see this through to the end; his voice steadied and then got louder and more strident as he ended in a near-shout--

And the door blasted in, as into the room entered a white-faced Severus Snape, dragging a handcuffed Narcissa Malfoy with him, accompanied by a grinning Bellatrix Lestrange. Snape bellowed, "Traitor! Come with me now to the Dark Lord."

At almost the same moment, the world exploded in a haze of sheer white in Draco's vision. The last he knew, his mind - or consciousness - was zooming through this...odd tunnel so swiftly he feared the results should he disastrously merge with his younger self.

Draco Malfoy's soul left his body, zooming backwards in time to his eleven-year-old self, while his tired seventeen-year-old body bore mute testimony to the desperate, risky act Draco had committed to try and mould a better future for himself. It collapsed, unseeing, unfeeling, on the floor.

The magical backwash from the sudden high-energy transfer was felt around Wiltshire for miles. In the wrecked potions lab, Severus, Narcissa and Bellatrix coughed and threw pieces of wood and furniture off of themselves as they surveyed Draco's apparently elaborate suicide.

Harry Potter, in Surrey, would be startled awake by the sudden twinge in his skin, and wonder what kind of magical blast could cause it. But Harry wouldn't need to be worried about Dumbledore, or Horcruxes, or anything like that, as Draco Malfoy was about to take himself out of the equation.

He had sent himself back to July, 1991.

---

Whump!

Draco staggered in the luxurious bathroom in Malfoy Manor as he struggled to get his bearings. The meeting of his older self and younger self had been... bruising.

One moment, Draco's vapid eleven-year-old self had been busily unwrapping his robe to jump into the bathtub, which that house-elf - Globby? Blobby? - had been drawing for him. In the next, he had staggered as a sudden weight seemed to drive itself into his head. Blinking, disoriented, he stood, wondering why there suddenly seemed to be two of himself in his mind. An older - version? - of himself was rapidly displaying memories and feelings to him, and he had to lean against the bathtub to try and assimilate this strange turn of events.

Somehow, he had impossibly become implacable enemies with Harry Potter, the semi-mythical Boy Who Lived. He had carried on the antagonism of the Weasleys and Malfoys, and a bushy-haired Mudblood of no account had somehow bulked large in his resentment and anger.

His father had sat him down after fourth year and carefully explained that things were different; the Dark Lord had indeed returned, and Draco was to spy for him.

And then sixth year--

Horror dawned on the younger Malfoy as he tried to process the impossible - that he had been ordered to kill Albus Dumbledore, the living legend of a Headmaster who, if you didn't like, you had to respect. No wonder his older self had given up so completely!

As Draco got his bearings, and carefully sat down in the very large bathtub, he closed his eyes and let his older self do his thing; it seemed what he wanted to do was kick his younger self, metaphorically, into a corner of his mind and, as the muggles said, 'get the show on the road.'

But his younger self seemed to be having none of that, and finally, the merger was slightly more equal than his older self preferred. In the end, he had all the memories his older self needed, plus all the skills, while his mannerisms would be a cross between the two of them.

A world-weary Draco Malfoy marvelled that he would get to feel the innocence of going to Diagon Alley and Hogwarts for his first year, while at the same time keeping track of everything that was going on. He opened his eyes, focussing on the walls of marble and the tub of inlaid ivory, and breathed deeply. He looked at his hands, which seemed so small, and snickered at the thought of him wheezing and puffing, running about Hogwarts as though he were some muggle fitness trainer to try and build up his muscle.

...Which brought him up short; he couldn't afford to let his father know he really didn't care about his stupid ideas regarding mudbloods and half-bloods. All that had been burned out of Draco Malfoy when he had measured himself at the Astronomy Tower and found himself wanting. It had taken a half-blood, his mentor and professor, Severus Snape, to bail him out, and another half-blood, Harry Potter, had bested him at Quidditch several times. Even the Mudblood Granger had proven that ancestry was no bar to whipping his arse at grades.

But he had to keep up pretences; how to stay on the right side of the Golden Trio while making them realise he needed a cover? He knew from past - future? - experience that Ron Weasley was as subtle as a hippogriff and was prone to shooting his mouth off. But Potter - that boy had shown an interesting tendency to be a bit Slytherin in his ability to shrug something off when he had to, and he had certainly had to have his fair share of secrets he needed to keep. And Granger - the most level-headed of the three - her mind was like a steel trap.

That settled it, then. He needed to get hold of Granger and Potter, before they got hold of the Weasel, and explain to them just one or two things. If they realised that a lot of what he was doing was maintaining a cover, they could go along, even if they didn't have to like some of the things he'd have to say. It wasn't like the beaver-toothed Granger would be helpless, anyway. She had proven her reflexes were plenty good enough when she had cracked him a good one across the face in third year.

Draco's thinking and pondering for so long had meant the water had gone a bit chilly, and he called for the house-elf, which his combined selves now realised was Dobby, to warm the tub again. It gave him some ideas.

"Dobby!"

The obsequious elf appeared next to the bathtub, and his ears drooped as he said, "Dobby is being nice, young master. Dobby is not being a bad elf!"

Draco didn't respond for a moment, startled at how different his voice sounded. He'd forgotten how annoyingly girlish his voice sounded when he was a kid. In some irritation, he tried to lower the pitch of his voice, though not really successfully.

He finally spoke to the house-elf, saying, "I didn't say that, Dobby. Listen - do you know who Harry Potter is?"

The elf looked around, and at that moment, Draco thought, Shit! The paintings! Is there one in here? I hope not!

Draco could have kicked himself. He'd gotten complacent after the absence of his father for a year; luckily he and the elf seemed to have come to the same conclusion, that Lucius Malfoy's spy network didn't extend into Draco's bathroom.

With some hope in his voice, Dobby said, "Harry Potter is the Boy Who Lived, young master. He is the hope to all elf-kind that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is surely dead!"

"Unfortunately, Dobby, it's not that simple. Listen, I promise to treat you better if you tell me if my father does anything really... unusual. Like takes Dark Arts artefacts away from this house, or meets anyone who used to be a Death Eater. Can you do that without being forced to tell him?"

"Young master is being far too nice to a humble elf like Dobby!" The house-elf promptly began hitting himself on the head with a soap bar, forcing Draco to hiss "Stop!" at him.

A bit dazed, Dobby continued. "Young master will be sure that Dobby is telling him when Master is doing anything strange, and Dobby is not telling Master what Dobby is doing!"

"Good. Warm up my bathtub, and then get back to work, Dobby."

The house-elf did as told, then popped away, and Draco knew that sooner or later, that rather barmy elf would be annoying Potter again. He snickered at the thought, and sardonically wished Granger well, once again, with her ridiculous SPEW thing.

---

It occurred to Draco after his wonderfully sybaritic bath (nothing quite makes a bath so enjoyable as having been in a potions lab for days on end, feverishly working, barely having time to properly clean oneself in the process), that he needed to check the date. Since he wasn't sure if he had his wand yet, he checked around his bedroom. Unfortunately, no wand. He called for Dobby again.

"Yes, young master?"

"Dobby, what day is it today and how old am I?"

"Young sir, it is being July thirtieth, and you is eleven years old."

"Good. Go back to work now."

So it was July 30, 1991, and he'd gotten there at about eight or nine in the morning. Not bad for someone whose magical power hadn't been all that stellar to begin with.

In the previous timeline, Draco had never bothered to wonder where the Malfoy fortune had come from. He guessed - correctly - that a good chunk of it came from disreputable means, such as stolen Ministry funds. The rest of it, he didn't have a clue. But he knew that if he was to restore the name of Malfoy after the war, he needed to know what generated the fortune instead of sitting on his lily-white spoiled arse, assuming the money came out of thin air.

In years to come that decision would stand him in good stead, as his father would treat him more like an equal. He would see that his son was less of an entitled, whiny brat than he had been, and more willing to take on the duties of a Malfoy heir. It would also assist Draco in gaining his father's confidence that he would be loyal when the time came, although Draco had no intention of becoming a Death Eater.

But that day, Draco wanted to be a kid again, and he rushed out to the sprawling lawns and gardens of the manor, and found his broom, a Comet 260 - until recently, a very top-quality broom that he'd been delighted to receive as a present. Remembering with some embarrassment that Madam Hooch had told him he'd been gripping his broom wrong until he got to Hogwarts, he struggled to pull up memories that were six years distant, and remembered what the orthodox grip should be. It did feel a bit more natural and imparted less of a strain on his elbows as he took off, and felt the rush of the air against his face.

It's good to be back, thought Draco. His thin, pointy face broke into a rare unforced grin as he soared high into the air, with not a cloud in sight, without a war hanging over his head.