Hogwarts, Estd. 920 AD

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Hogwarts, Estd. 920 AD

Chapter One: The Handyman Can

*

It rained like God was trying to drown the earth.

Which, knowing God, Draco thought was probably true. It wasn't that Draco Malfoy personally knew God, inasmuch as the same way nobody could claim to personally know Draco. The knowledge was mostly an understanding based on the way that, just when you thought you were home free, life suddenly grabbed you by the balls and demanded repayment for every blood-drenched drop of happiness you had ever experienced. Draco was arrogant and self-centred, but not to such an extent that he thought God manufactured potholes expressly in his highway. God was just a nasty vindictive bugger bent on twisting up people's lives until they resembled a Picasso-esque corkscrew. To understand Him, you had to let go of logic, reason and rationality. It was a practice that Draco excelled in.

How bloody wonderful- here he was on a Saturday night, at home and completely alone. Well, strictly speaking, he wasn't quite alone; despite his father's untimely death and his mother's marriage to Marco Zabini, the manor still possessed a full complement of servants. Almost an army of them. It made Draco decidedly uncomfortable that all they needed to do was pull together against him...and there would be nothing he could do about it... Ah, but Lucius had never trusted much in the intrinsic goodness of man, either, and Draco was quite sure there were some kind of wards that would prevent such an occurrence. His father had told him once, but, as with many of his father's other conversations with him, Draco tried not to remember.

The lightning lit up the conservatory, illuminating the half scattered raindrops in a sudden blaze of rainbow before dying out into just darkness and pattering noise. There was an ornate wooden fireplace directly in front of him, which illuminated his features in soft amber light and flickered scarlet in his grey eyes. It was carved into the Malfoy coat of arms- a devilishly elaborate creation invented by Caligula Germanicus Malfoy I. He had a rather bent mind, which explained quite a lot about him, and, indirectly, the entire family line. He had died with his dearest friend's knife in his back. He had died thinking he was God.

Yes indeed, Draco thought, that Caligula was a twisted man.

Today, of course, they had snipped the "excess" [Lucius' words, not his] bits out of the insignia, leaving the black-and-green shield and a white dragon circled around it, biting it's own tail. Of course, right over it was a banner proclaiming their traditional motto 'Veritas Est Ornamentum'- Truth is a Weapon. He had always had the sneaking suspicion that his ancestor had also intended a play on the word 'ornamental' as well... It seemed like something an inward-looking mind would find interesting...and somewhat appropriate for the Malfoys. Draco sometimes thought he would have liked the old bastard...he'd have probably had some interesting thoughts on life. He took another deep sip of the excellent claret- this particular year had the best bouquet he had ever had the pleasure of experiencing.

He felt a little...eccentric...curled up in a crushed velvet chair at 3am in the conservatory, sipping wine alone. Of course, things would have been different if his father was alive. In all probability, he would have been out with some vapid social climbers, getting drunk out of his mind. Despite what they said about him, Lucius Malfoy was a good man. Well...good for Draco, in any case. He had always made it clear that while he had consented to be another's subservient, his son would never know the Dark Lord's brand.

But then the arsehole had gone and gotten himself killed by an overzealous Auror, and the Dark Lord had decided that Draco would make the perfect replacement. What could Draco do but accept? All a refusal would have achieved was his death, and, as odd as it might have seemed, Draco didn't aspire to that particular achievement. His fingers traveled almost involuntarily to his left wrist and pushed back the hem of the silk shirt to expose the black, charred Dark Mark. That was Voldemort's legacy- burned into the skin of his followers.

The fool's ego over inflated, and Dumbledore and the Do-Gooders soon cut him down to size. They killed him well and good this time, two weeks after Draco had started to wear the mask. And bloody uncomfortable it was, too. If those idiots had just speeded up their plan...his teeth clenched...he could have avoided seeing so much horror and pain, mostly his own. There had been a trial after that, high publicity, of course. They had let him off, finally, because he hadn't had enough time to actually do anything and he had been seventeen years old. Not to mention the healthy dose of monetary compensation the judge had received. But the bloody damage was done; people looked at him like a monster. They heard his name and their eyes traveled down to his arm, to the Mark. They didn't see anything else...

So who needed them anyway?

It was a logical certainty that if a person cannot get what they want, they immediately tell themselves that it wasn't worth having in the first place [which would be called Jonathan Barley's 'Sour Grapes' principle in one of those places where people occupy themselves with making up as many facts as humanly possible under the guise of 'sociology']. There was a time that the Malfoy name meant something [well, something other than oh-my-God-that-Dark-Wizard-who-roams-free-come-away-little-Robbie!]...but then, that was something his father would have said.

Draco made it a point never to say anything he thought Lucius would have said; it was a move made mostly out of spite, in case his spirit could still hear him. "This is all your bloody fault, you know," he muttered, not having the energy to be angry anymore.

There was a slight rustling noise and a servant was beside him. Draco had stopped questioning how it was that menials managed that particular trick- he had a feeling it was a complex law to do with space, time and cosmic humour. People often discounted the latter, mostly to their own detriment. It was, of course, Mrs Ponde, a woman far too old to be his mother. She was very...square...and no-nonsense, with a hard, thin mouth and lifeless blue eyes.

Lucius had engaged her as a maid when she was eighteen years old, as a payment for some service or other that he had provided. She had been in the family ever since then, and had been elevated to the position of nanny when Narcissa Malfoy proved about as responsible a mother as a reptile with places to go and people to see. Even Draco's earliest memories included her. There was something about her that people found unnerving; it was the way she just stared at them. Draco had the firm belief that if faced with an army of ten thousand heavily-armed troops screaming things like 'We drink nanny's blood!' and 'Die, Mrs Ponde, die, die!' [generally, a large body of adrenaline infused men lacked somewhat in the innovativeness area] she would simply look at them. And they would, in the fashion of errant schoolboys everywhere, cough indistinctly and shuffle away.

"Is there anything I can do for you, sir?" It was a perfectly polite question, which she managed to infuse an air of diffident insolence into.

There were a lot of things that a person could learn from Mrs Ponde. "Not really, Mrs Ponde."

"Is that a yes or a no, Master Malfoy?"

"That's Lord Malfoy, now, Mrs Ponde," he reminded, a little chidingly. It didn't do to have servants speak as if Lucius was still alive. "It has been for a year now."

In a rare exhibition of emotion, her cheeks coloured slightly. "My deepest apologies, Lord Malfoy," but there was a slight stress to her words that left him feeling vaguely mocked. "I didn't mean to imply-,"

"I know you didn't." He snapped, far too loudly. It was probably the wine kicking in. "You never do, Mrs Ponde."

"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean, sir." There it was, that perfectly blank gaze.

"What's your first name?"

"Does that really matter, sir?" She raised one thick eyebrow.

"I've asked you so many times over the years, and you've never answered. Why is that, Mrs Ponde?"

"Well, sir," she paused for a moment, as if gathering her thoughts. "I suppose it's because of the same reason you stopped calling me Nanny once you turned six, milord."

Draco looked at her curiously for a moment, trying to discern anything in those pale pools of hers, but gave up. There were some things than men were just not meant to know. "It probably is, Mrs Ponde. I won't be requiring anything further tonight, you may retire."

"Indeed."

He looked away for a moment and she was gone, as he had expected. Bloody cosmic jokes. The master of the house leaned back in his chair once more and savoured the warmth of the fire...it seemed, quite suddenly...just perfect.

Bad choice of words.

There was a sudden flash and a kabong of which Quickdraw McGraw would have been proud of, before the room filled with dense orange-green choking smoke...

The last thing Draco could remember thinking was 'Bugger. I knew it.'

*

The very faint, faraway sound of laughter faded away after Draco opened his eyes. There was a harsh glare emanating from the ceiling, winding around the figure towering over him. Once the world had come into focus, he rethought the adjective 'towering'...it was more like 'small, quaint cottaging', as far as those things went. Draco had thought Mundungus Fletcher in a kilt was the worst sight on two legs he'd ever have to see; the creature that stood in front of him powerfully contradicted that idea.

A bright pink woolen sweater masked a moss green shirt with a happy little cartoon-family printed on it, overlaid with neon yellow 'World's Number One Handyman!' loopy writing. He was wearing a bulky camouflage hip-bag with bits of string, a large roll of scotch tape and a gleaming pair of scissors poking out of it. To complete the image were pink sweatpants cut off just below the knee, pink and black striped socks, black Keds with similarly pink laces and a highlighter yellow baseball cap turned backwards. It must also be mentioned that the apparition in pink was also just below three feet tall, with a spiky beard.

"Er- hello," Draco said, experimentally.

The being veritably puffed up in affront. "Oh, hello is it? Hello! You come here through seven dimensions, bugger up the entire timeline and create a gaping bloody hole in the bowels of reality and that's the best you can come up with?" By the end of the little tirade, the little man almost had tears in his eyes.

Draco would have probably been more taken with shock if he hadn't been wondering about reality's bowels, and the associated problems that would come with it. But perhaps, looking at the dwarf's expression, this wasn't the best time to ask about that sort of thing. It was probably just a metaphor anyway. "Sorry...but where did you say I was?"

"That's right- typical of your species! Don't ask me whether I'm all right. Don't ask me about the hours I've spent trying to fix other people's bollocks-up!"

"Er- how are you, then?"

"Oh, so that's the way of it, is it?" He puffed his chest out even more belligerently. Draco thought only puffer-fish were capable of such rapid expansion. "How am I? How am I? I spent this morning fixing a time-loop in the fourteenth century, the rest of the afternoon trying to convince Kronos that he just can't bloody go around flicking his wrist and playing 'Master of Time' unless he wants to get in trouble with the Higher Ups, after which I had to deal with the honourable Lady Destiny who had a kink in her Sibyllomatic 2005.83 and was spraying bad prophecies like the Delphic Oracle, and inevitably overloading the temporal drainage system...after which I had to visit the twenty-fourth century and patch-up another infraction by that infernal Janeway woman, which caused me to miss my favourite nephew's twelfth birthday party! Do you know why he's my favourite nephew?" He thundered, not waiting for an answer. "Because he gave me this bloody shirt! The only person who's bloody bothered to ask after The Handyman." He said the last two words with a kind of ominous harmonic to it, like you would say 'Vlad- the Impaler, mwahahahahaha!'. "And I MISSED his birthday party! I have not been having a good day."

"You're a handyman?"

He looked at Draco like the boy was some kind of very small insect. This is extremely difficult to do if you are three feet tall, but he had obviously had a lot of practice. "Don't you listen? I'm The Handyman," he repeated his previous linguistic performance with the precision of a metronome. "How old are you, anyway?"

"Almost nineteen." He replied, with meekness that surprised even him.

"Still a kid. So, where you from, kid?" He immediately thought the better of his inquiry, holding up a hand. "Wait! Let me guess! I'd say...mid-eighteenth...no! Twentieth century earth! Am I right, am I, am I?" He asked with the earnestness that was the human [or Handyman, whatever the case was] equivalent of a cocker spaniel yelp coupled with that unerringly sad gaze. You never hear stories about the power of the spaniel Look, mostly because there's never anyone left to tell the tale. Seriously.

"Actually, yes." Draco was more than a little surprised. "Where did you say I was, exactly?"

"Oh, you're in the Temporal Hub..."

Now that the Handyman mentioned it, Draco could see the room stretching in all directions. There was a vast meshwork of very worn looking pipes and tubing, along with some more recent looking additions of glass and chrome. Little grubby signs were plastered everywhere, saying cryptic things like 'Civil War Sewage System', 'Baxter's 24^th C. Treatment Facility' and 'Eighteenth Century Recycling'.

The Handyman followed his vision to the last signpost. "Too much bloody nonsense going on in the eighteenth century. If you don't drain it periodically the whole thing clogs up."

"Where exactly is the temporal hub?"

"Temporal Hub. They're In Capitals." He waved his arm disgustedly in defeat. "Oh forget it. It's just seven dimensions away from mainstream earth."

"Dimensions? I thought there were just four?"

"Well, you don't expect Gods and the like to share the same dimension as you, do you? And of course, some of them can't stand each other...and of course, that isn't counting the half-dimensions that bloody Vulcan keeps forging every time he feels like it. Plus the fact that them Immortals don't take well to Time...prefer to live outside the dimensions it stays in." The Handyman glanced back at the system- a small jet of steam was hissing out from one of the pipes. "Damn! Duty calls."

Draco followed him, watching as he rummaged around in his pack. "What exactly is it that you do?"

"Not exactly good with imagining a Multiverse, are you, kid? Think of it this way. There's an order that everything's supposed to go in- I mean, you want the First World War to end in 1918 and not in 1818, because it hadn't started then. That would create a paradox, and to put it mildly, the entire system of reality itself would implode and crush every single thing inside it to the size of three point four atoms." He said it in an offhand way of one who deals with such eventualities every day. "So, you have to have someone to get to the problems and fix them before they go Critical." The Handyman held up the ball of pink string, snipping off a generous piece with his scissors and stuffing it into the hole. For good measure, he stuck it over with a length of scotch tape. "That's where I come in."

"You fix the timeline of the Universe with string and scotch tape?"

The man waved the roll of it under his nose. "Hey kid, let me give you some wonderful advice. Never underestimate the power of scotch tape."

"But...why haven't you fixed it all, then? I mean, if you're outside time you can just flip to any bit of it you want, and fix whatever problems there are, right?" Draco found himself actually getting the hand of this thing; and it was a little too late to stay in shock.

"Almost. The thing is, kid, if you could just go to any bit of time, it would mean that time is linear, which it isn't. It isn't in a loop either. Mostly it's curly and winding and overlapping and very, very unpredictable. So, you can get bits at a time and smooth out the anomalies-," he gestured towards the pipes. "Which is what we're doing here, but you can't fix everything at once because time doesn't occur all at once. So if you fix a problem in the eighteenth century and then find some time in the fourteenth and fix an anomaly there, the eighteenth century changes and you have to go at it all over again. It's a bit of a Sisyphusean ordeal, actually."

Draco nodded and tried to appear as if he understood everything. Mostly, his brain was still trying to get past the 'seven dimensions away' part.

"So, anyway, what are you doing here?"

"I don't quite know. I was just sitting in the conservatory one minute, and then -poof- here I was." Draco looked up at the Handyman. "You wouldn't be able to send me back home, by any chance?"

"Um, actually, no..." He reached inside the pouch and retrieved a pair of scissors. "I'm really sorry about this, kid, but I'm just going to have to kill you."

The boy had already started to back away. "No, no...you don't need to feel pressurised at all, Mr Handyman..."

"Sorry, kid. Rules are rules. No mortals allowed in the Hub...and besides, it's just a whole lot neater this way."

"For whom?" By the suddenly very nasty looking glitter of the scissors, it certainly wouldn't be neat for him.

"Temporally. You have to think about the big picture... It's not that I don't like you- that's the best conversation I've had in a couple of Ice Ages, actually..." He waved the scissors about, even as he advanced. "Look, if you're nice about it, I'll make sure you get reincarnated into something nice and peaceful. How about a tree?" At the horrified expression on Draco's face, he hastened to add to his suggestion. "Movement really is overrated...and having bark is actually quite nice once you get past the itchiness..."

That was the last straw. With an expression that was like a banshee's scream, only a thousand times more concentrated, Draco turned and began to run. He could hear the Handyman behind him, and paranoia made him imagine the footsteps even closer than they were. He turned a corner into Corridor 13A and stopped; in front of him was a huge wall dotted with chute-openings with brass lettering saying 'Portals 80-129'. There were individual labels above them; with tiny writing that Draco didn't have the time or the inclination to decipher.

It was obvious these portals led to different times...but which ones? It was a millisecond before Draco realised that it was a question that really didn't matter now. Anywhen but now.

"Come on, kid! It's really not so bad! Make it easier on all of us! I'm going to find you anyway!"

Taking a deep breath, Draco sprinted all the way to the edge of the wall, and without a moment of hesitation, leapt into one of the chutes. By the time his common sense had caught up with him, it was already a little too late. Even as he fell through the pitch black, he heard the same, faraway tinkling laughter and thought exactly the same thing as before.

Bugger.

*

"Where the hell did it come from?" A low woman's voice demanded.

Another woman replied, but in a softer, more curious tone. "He's not an it. It's a he."

"And he's a wizard, can't you sense the aura?" This voice was male, and somehow very smooth. Not oily, just...polished.

"What is it doing here?"

"He's not an it!" The previous voice had a somewhat more impatient note to it this time.

A different male tone sounded, more full and vibrant than the previous one. "Well, maybe he can tell us something. I think he's waking up."

"I think we should kill it!" The same low decibels again.

Draco felt the pointy end of a sword prod him a couple of times, but he remained motionless. Wasn't that the general sort of thing one did when attacked? Granted, these weren't bears but-

"Oh, well, that's your answer to everything, isn't it?" The other woman asked sarcastically. "What do we do? Oh, let's just kill it! He's our age...you'd think you'd be a bit more empathetic."

The pale-haired boy decided that this would be a fortuitous time to show signs of consciousness. He made a low groaning sound that didn't have to be faked; a headache the size of Alaska was pounding in his head [somewhere underneath the temporally-caused headache was an alcohol-induced migraine, and they both seemed equally intent on reducing his brain to mush]. One eye opened, and then the other, to reveal four faces bending over him with varied expressions.

"Hello, there," said the woman who had spoken previously, smiling down at him. She had black hair to her shoulders and clear blue eyes. Ah, now perhaps things were looking up. "Are you all right?"

"I think so," he tried to get to his feet and succeeded after a few tries. "Thanks...er...I didn't get your names?"

"It is nothing at all, and, I'm Lady Rowena, these two are Lords Godric and Sölvarr, and the woman over there is Helga."

There was a moment where time, as it was, really did seem to stop. In all probability, it was just Draco Malfoy's heart.

"Ah," he said, rather vaguely. "Pleased to meet you."