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[personal profile] lomonaaeren
Title: The Higher Geometry
Pairings: Harry/Draco
Summary: The Unspeakables have invented a device that slows down time--sort of. During its testing in the Department of Mysteries, Harry and Draco accidentally set it off.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and her associates own everything Harry Potter. I make no claim to them and am not doing this for money.
Warnings: Sex, angst. EWE.
Wordcount: 17,600
Author’s Notes: This was a pinch-hit for prompt 124 in the bottom!draco Time fest, which gave me most of the story. Hopefully it’s plotty enough! Thanks to my betas, Linda and Christine.



The Higher Geometry

Before the Pendant

"This is stupid."

No one appeared inclined to listen to him, so Harry just had to keep his mutters to himself as they walked down the corridor that led through the convoluted maze of the Department of Mysteries. The department had changed a lot since the last time Harry had been here as a student, Harry had to grudgingly admit. That didn’t mean he was happy to be here, and so he glared in every direction he could.

The walls were flat and black, set with large stones, as though to say that the Unspeakables were as firm as the Ministry itself. The floor, on the other hand, shone with a long curlicue of blue light that was apparently meant to lead them to the display they’d come to watch. Harry prodded it once with his wand; it spat a disapproving spark at him and then continued primly running into the distance. Harry reckoned that could represent the Unspeakables’ determination to remain independent of the rest of the Ministry. They refused an investigation by the Aurors into their affairs every year, Harry did know that.

And then he started thinking about what the torches, in golden sconces behind glass globes, could represent, and had to give up. It was early and he had a headache, and he had never been good at games of symbolic logic anyway. Kingsley had only given him a stern look when he attempted to pass that class.

They came out into a large room that was circular for the most part, although Harry kept getting glimpses of unexplained angles and corners out of the side of his eye just when he’d started to relax. All the walls shone with the blue lights, and the central roof bent down like an inverted dome over a pentagon of golden pillars. Someone stood next to them, an Unspeakable from the robe, studying the device that lay on a crystal table between the pillars.

Harry was relatively calm, despite the fact that he was only here because Kingsley thought someone who had done a historic deed should witness a historic device, until the Unspeakable turned and Harry caught a glimpse of his hair.

"Malfoy," he hissed, body tightening.

The other two Aurors walking in front of him, both ancient sticks who had probably been chosen to represent the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at this ceremony because they could remember Merlin himself, turned around and frowned severely at him. Harry frowned back and waved a hand at Malfoy. "Doesn’t it bother you that the Ministry hires former Death Eaters to staff its most mysterious department?" he demanded.

"Thank you so much for the commendation, Potter," Malfoy said from right behind him, making Harry jump, and then hate himself for jumping. "It’s reassuring to know that Aurors at least have a grasp of some basic ideas, such as the Department of Mysteries being mysterious."

Harry scowled, transferring the hate for his nerves onto Malfoy. Malfoy looked perfectly calm and bored, damn him. His hood was pulled back now, and Harry could see not only his hair but also his face, bone-pale, with thin, red lips that looked as if he used some special kind of makeup on them. A small, thin scar ran from the top of his fringe to the top of his nose, between his eyes, and then stopped. Harry wouldn’t have seen it at all, given the pallor of his skin, except that it was a bit silvery, like the color of the scars Harry remembered forming on Malfoy’s chest after he’d used Sectumsempra on him.

Harry realized suddenly that he was staring and turned away with another scowl. He might have said something, but he didn’t remember it, and Malfoy was speaking with the two other Aurors as though he hadn’t heard, anyway.

"You understand that I can only provide you with a summary?" Malfoy’s eyes darted back and forth between the two ancients.

They nodded like the fools they were, and the one on the left, who had a beard that Dumbledore would have been ashamed of, said, "We don’t need the understanding of the magical theory behind your device, Unspeakable Malfoy. We only need a demonstration so that we can know whether it’s safe to put in Auror hands. Feel free to keep your secrets like the respected craftsman you are."

"The respected craftsman you are," Harry mimicked under his breath. Honestly, who talked like that?

Then he abruptly realized something, and stood up. "Wait a minute. Malfoy invented this device? Why are we in the same room with it and not a hundred miles away?"

Everyone else ignored him. Malfoy walked over to the nearest of the golden pillars, which bent inwards to the crystal table like teeth, and touched it. It began to hum. Blue lightning extended from it like grasping hands, wavered back and forth for a moment, hesitated, and then touched the next pillar. The lightning was more confident in going from that pillar to the next.

"You do realize that Malfoy tried to kill me more than once?" Harry asked loudly. "Now I know why I’m here. Because someone in the Ministry wants to get rid of me, and thought this would be the most efficient way!"

"Do shut up, Auror Potter," said the second Auror, the one with a brow so thick that Harry was surprised he could see from beneath it. He was watching Malfoy’s humming little device with fascination.

Harry huffed and crossed his arms. He almost hoped that something would go horribly wrong, because that would be all Malfoy deserved.

*

Draco hadn’t realized how hard it would be, to see him again.

Oh, he had known Potter still existed; he had known Potter was an Auror. It was impossible to get away from that, with Potter’s face always plastered on the Prophet and his eyes staring at the camera in feigned innocence. He had to know that the photographers were there, Draco thought, at least most of the time. He seemed to fool most of his public, but he wouldn’t fool Draco.

So he had been prepared, in some measure, by the papers.

But it was easy, too, to forget Potter: to sink into his routine as an Unspeakable, dancing the rings of time, weaving the spirals together, debating the circles. To dive so deep into an underwater world that the intrusion of daylight was shocking.

Potter was all daylight, bright and hard and unforgiving. Draco could feel Potter’s gaze tracking him as he walked around the device, checking the strength of the lightning bonds. It bothered him more than it should have. He had given up the light and the dark for the shadows, willingly, and they ought to have sheltered him more.

Potter leaned against the wall and stared at him. Or he was behind Draco, on his heels, and staring at him. Draco didn’t know his exact position, and he was glad for that. It showed that one of his senses had escaped Potter’s domination. He addressed Aurors Greyson and Trevors, who seemed interested in what he was doing.

"This device slows down time for the criminal caught in it." He indicated the edge of the device, a crystal, tear-shaped pendant with a small golden clock embedded in it. Greyson and Trevors leaned forwards and made admiring sounds. "He can only stagger along in an endless, stretched second, while around him everything moves at a normal speed. You can see how useful this would be for the Aurors." He gave a confidential smile to Greyson and Trevors and tried to ignore the feeling of diamond-pointed observation from Potter. "They would be able to transport the criminal to Azkaban, a holding cell, or the courtroom, anywhere they liked, while to him his transport would seem instantaneous."

"I understand that you are also thinking about applications for prison," Trevors said. "That a criminal caught in such a device could be made to feel that he was living through a sentence of years, while he was actually only in prison for a few seconds or days?"

Draco nodded. In truth, he wasn’t quite sure about the ratio of time inside the teardrop of the device to time outside the teardrop, but there was no way he would tell them that. They would probably take his funding away. Always best to remain calm and confident and never give them a reason to doubt you. "Yes. There is some concern that criminals who spend years in Azkaban—physical years—come out broken in health and thus unable to contribute to our society, as well as bitter against the ones who imprisoned them and thus less likely to achieve a full rehabilitation. My device can give them the experience of punishment for their crimes while releasing them soon enough that they would be able to rejoin society and find almost no time gone at all."

Trevors frowned. "Is that wise, Unspeakable Malfoy?" Potter gave a childish snicker, probably at hearing Draco’s title conjoined with his name. Draco ignored him with studied magnificence. "Yes, it would seem like eternity to the prisoner, but everyone else would see him as having endured no punishment."

"The prisoner’s perception is more important than the public’s," Draco said. "The Ministry can manage the perceptions of the public with ease and skill; it is the minds of hardened criminals that we have more difficulty in cracking."

Through the bright surface of the pendant, he could see Potter’s eyes roll. Draco’s shoulders stiffened, but then he took a deep breath and made himself relax. What did anything Potter did or said matter? Draco took Potter more seriously than Potter took him, and that wasn’t a good idea, when Potter was simply an overgrown child playing hero.

"True," Trevors murmured.

Greyson took up the litany. "How do they survive inside the pendant? If they experience a subjective year, wouldn’t they starve to death?"

Draco shook his head with a small, smug smile. "No. I made a distinction between physical and mental years a moment ago." Both the older Aurors nodded and tried to look as if they had noticed said distinction; Potter just looked confused. Draco sneered at him sideways. That honesty will get him into trouble someday. "The body lives the physical year, in normal time, during, say, a sojourn in Azkaban, and so must be fed and bathed and rested. It does not live the same time inside my pendant, only the second or minutes the prisoner is held. The mind is what experiences the passing of that year. The prisoner will go through boredom, guilt, and endless brooding, but he will never starve or suffer, although he might feel as if he should be hungry, and I think it likely that most people will attempt to spend the time sleeping, so as to make it pass faster."

"It’s cruel," Potter said suddenly.

Draco turned, eyebrows lifted. He had little choice but to take notice of a direct question, irritating as Potter was. He cast an aura of heat around him, Draco thought, that could well disrupt the lightning bonds and melt the pendant. "I beg your pardon?"

"It’s cruel, to make someone suffer that," Potter said. "All alone? Suffering for a year with no companionship?" He shook his head, face stubborn. "Besides, I don’t see how this pendant will be useful if you have to set up these stupid pillars in every place where you want to use it." He swatted casually at the nearest crackle of lightning.

"Don’t!" Draco cried, beyond shocked. He hadn’t thought to warn them because he had thought no one would be that stupid, but—

A silent explosion of light opened around them, and Draco felt the hard sleeting past him that he associated with an opening shape of time. He lunged to the right, the only direction he could think of that might let him escape—

And then light abounded.

Within the Teardrop

Harry opened his eyes slowly. His hand stung, and he brought it to his mouth and sucked on his finger without thought. Then he winced. Ron would have told him not to do that, that the stinging insect or scorpion that had struck him might still have been there, and really, what kind of Auror was he, to think of danger last and pain first?

He looked around at the room he lay in. He knew that some sort of explosion had happened in the Department of Mysteries, the explosion he had been certain would happen, because Malfoy was trying to kill him no matter what anybody said.

But instead of on a hospital bed, he lay in an ovular, white room shaped like an egg. Harry rose to his feet in some alarm. The room seemed to rock around him for a moment, but Harry realized that must have been his head spinning, because when he reached out and tapped the crystalline wall a few feet away, it was solid and didn’t sway.

He turned in a circle. There was no bed in the enclosure, and no bathroom. He frowned and fought down panic. This wasn’t St. Mungo’s. He had probably got trapped in some experimental part of the Department. Well, they would find him and let him out in a few minutes. He started to sit down again in the same place where he’d been.

Then someone groaned.

Harry turned around, ready to say, "That was fast." The last time he’d been involved in a DoM accident, they’d left him trapped inside a small square enclosure that supposedly contained the souls of dead philosophers for more than a day.

But lying next to him was Malfoy. Harry stared, then frowned. "What the fuck are you doing here, Malfoy?" he demanded.

Malfoy lifted his head and gave Harry a sharp stare. Then he buried his head in his hands. Harry nodded. He could hope that Malfoy was beginning to realize how stupid he had been, to try and kill Harry Potter in front of other Aurors, but he still wanted to know what had happened and how Malfoy’s murder attempt had gone wrong.

"My device," Malfoy whispered. "You set it off, you idiot. We’re trapped inside it now. God knows how long we’ll be here." Then he laughed hollowly. "What am I talking about? It will only be a second."

Harry counted a second under his breath, and nothing happened. "Well?" he said.

"A second to the people outside the pendant." Malfoy sucked in a breath. "We’re here for—thirteen months. Thirteen subjective months. That was how much time I had set the device to imitate."

Harry stared. "Like the prisoners that you wanted to punish?" he asked. "We—we can’t be, Malfoy. We’d kill each other."

"It doesn’t matter," Malfoy said dully, shutting his eyes. "That’s what happened. I recognize this from the description of one of the men I tested it on. The crystalline walls and the shape of the room were just the same."

"You trapped us in the pendant?" Harry turned around again, thinking that he should be able to see faces peering in or at least the golden clock embedded in the device stretched above or to the sides. Wasn’t the pendant made of crystal? Crystal was transparent, and it would act for them as a window on the world.

But he discovered that not all crystals were created equal. This crystal was clouded transparent, with patches here and there where it looked as if Harry was staring into mist. He reached out and tapped one of them. It rang with a true, high note, but showed no indication of breaking when Harry threw his shoulder against it.

"You crossed the barrier with your hand," Malfoy whispered. "That means that the trapped time no longer was contained within a certain amount of space. It expanded instead, and to redress the balance, it grabbed the first people it could find. We must have been standing within an equal distance of the pendant when the explosion happened."

"How do we get out?" Harry asked. Much as he hated it, it seemed this had actually occurred, and Malfoy was the expert, so he was the one Harry needed to listen to.

"I designed the pendant to be impossible to open from the inside." Malfoy lifted his head and gave Harry an opaque look. "They’ll have to open it for us. Don’t worry," he added, in the apparent absurd belief that he could reassure Harry for the devastation in his expression. "No matter how long we’re trapped in here, how much time seems to pass for us, it will only be a second outside."

"But it will seem like more than that to us," Harry whispered, and sank to the floor. He didn’t want Malfoy to see the way his hands were trembling. The easiest way to keep him from seeing that was to turn away.

*

Draco watched Potter. He wanted to say a few more things, to explain how the device worked, by constructing a separate circle of time within the wider circles and spirals, and turning it sideways so that it came into alignment with the mind, but he didn’t think Potter would understand.

And then spite reared its head, and Draco turned away with a sneer that he knew was as precious as gold and therefore not to be wasted on Potter. Why should his be the duty of reassurance? Potter was the one who had fucked with the device and ensured that they came here in the first place.

Draco shrank from the thought of spending a year in Potter’s presence, and then reminded himself that at least he would never need to eat or relieve himself in front of Potter. But he would probably sleep, to pass the time, and that would give Potter the chance to slit his throat.

He heard the sound of Potter casting spells against the crystalline walls. Nothing happened. Draco had known it wouldn’t. When he said that he had designed the pendant not to be opened from the inside, he was speaking no less than the truth.

Potter grew more and more frustrated, from the sounds, swearing and kicking at the walls. Draco only grunted and closed his eyes. He might as well try to sleep. It was the only activity that he could see giving him a chance to pass some of the endless non-time before the spell faded and the pendant opened.

If it did.

The fear he had not confessed to Potter whispered through his heart. If Potter had crossed the bounds of the lightning, then Draco truly was not sure what would happen. It was possible that they would remain bound inside the pendant forever, hopelessly trapped, unable to escape even when the moment passed—

And because every second inside the pendant passed like a year, and their bodies would not feel the touch of time here, they might have condemned themselves to an eternity.

Panic stilled Draco’s breath. He could practically feel Potter staring at him, though, and with an effort, he resumed breathing. He would not think of that.


The Spiral and the Circle

"How can we be trapped in here? And how can our minds feel the passage of time when our bodies can’t? Just tell me that."

Harry was tired and frustrated. He didn’t know how much time had passed, but it felt like a lot. Malfoy slept and glanced at him and slept again, and although Harry never felt tired or hungry, he’d done much the same thing, when he wasn’t prowling in circles around the crystalline walls, kicking them, and casting spells against them. But even that was boring. The walls swallowed the spells instead of reflecting them back, so Harry didn’t have to dodge them or deal with boils and wounds of his own making. He had been grateful for that the first few (what would one call them? Didn’t days have to have a sun and a moon to make sense?) times it happened, but now, even a broken rib would have made a welcome change.

Even Malfoy’s conversation would.

Malfoy only glared at him out of perfect silver eyes and refused to answer. When Harry stared back, though, Malfoy began to speak in a flat voice. Harry suspected he was as bored and longing for entertainment as Harry, but just didn’t want to admit it.

"You idiot, Potter. You have no idea, any more than most people do, of the mysteries whirling around your head. You live in a world where you think of time as a river, waves sliding past you in only one direction."

"I don’t think of it that way," Harry muttered. "I’ve traveled by a Time-Turner before. I know it’s confusing."

"But in practice," Malfoy repeated stubbornly, "you do. Everything goes in one direction. People get older and eventually die, rather than younger. You’d probably laugh if someone came up to you and told you that he had lived years in an alternate universe, only to come back and find that no time had passed here."

"Maybe not," Harry said, thinking now of fairy tales that he’d heard Aunt Petunia telling Dudley, where people got taken away by fairies and came back years later, after what had seemed only a night in some hidden palace. They usually discovered that all their friends were dead or old and that their children were grown up. Or maybe a hundred years had passed and they recognized no one at all.

"In reality?" Malfoy arched his eyebrows and sneered a bit. "In a context like this, where you’ve seen that the power of time is real and one can halt it, yes, I imagine that you’d be more inclined to believe them. But without that? If you were in the pub having a pint with your mates, or whatever it is that you do, would you believe?"

He says pub and mates like they’re words in a different language, Harry thought in amusement. Then again, Malfoy had probably never had friends, much less ones who invited him out for a drink rather than to plot the domination of the world. "All right," he conceded. "It’d be less likely, anyway."

Malfoy produced a brittle smile in response. Flawed glass was nothing to it for readiness to crack, Harry thought, staring in fascination. He had assumed without thinking about it that he would be the first to go mental from being trapped in here, since he needed movement and freedom and Malfoy was content to stay in the underground confines of the DoM, but perhaps he’d been wrong.

"Time isn’t a river at all," Malfoy said. "It moves in different shapes—we who study time call it the higher geometry—"

Of course you do, Harry thought, stifling a snort. Ordinary names aren’t good enough for you, in any language. But he felt that he was making progress in being diplomatic with Malfoy, since he didn’t actually say those words aloud.

"And the most common are circles and spirals." Malfoy moved his fingers through the shapes as he spoke. Harry fought the temptation to bury his head in his hands. Did Malfoy really think Harry was that stupid? "The circles are the simple repetition of time, time returning to itself, the snake eating its tail. The spirals are—more complex. They seem to be returning to their own beginnings at first, but they slide past those beginnings and create slightly different times nested within one another—"

"Alternate universes?" Harry guessed.

Malfoy gave him a flat look. "Yes," he added grudgingly, after waiting a bit, probably to see if he could shake Harry’s confidence in his answer.

"So what happens when someone crosses over from one universe to another?" Harry settled himself more comfortably, or tried, and then snorted. As though he could. The pendant around him was featureless, the floor slick and smooth, the walls cold to the touch and so utterly sheer that reaching out to them made his fingers skate about. There was little to focus on but Malfoy, and Harry did hate that.

But since the git was there, he might as well focus on him.

"It doesn’t work like that," Malfoy said. "For that to happen, one’s whole spiral would have to cross another spiral, and no one has the power to control time like that."

Harry waited a moment, then glanced around at the device that imprisoned them and raised his eyebrows.

"Oh, I did something much less difficult than crossing two spirals," Malfoy said, with modesty that surprised Harry so much he would have had to sit down if he hadn’t been already. "There are people working on that, but it violates a basic shape of time. I don’t imagine they’ll succeed. I chopped a teardrop off from time and isolated it, that’s all."

"And that’s less difficult," Harry said.

"Of course," Malfoy said, oblivious to why it might not be obvious to Harry.

Harry waited some more, then sighed and gave in. "All right, why is it less difficult? Why can’t you cross the spirals?"

Malfoy smirked. Harry’s irritation rose again. That proved the git had known he was confused all along and had wanted to wait to explain matters because—because that was just the way he was, Harry reckoned. He resisted the temptation to turn away and knock his head on the wall. It would hurt his forehead while not helping his general state of knowledge.

*

Potter’s undivided attention was something new in Draco’s experience. He discovered that he liked it. He wasn’t used to encountering those who listened with such rapt attention and a clumsy, puppy-like effort to keep up. Most of his colleagues understood the theory behind what he was doing and would have considered themselves degraded if they inquired into it too closely. They should be able to figure out the theory from watching Draco’s practical effects.

But Potter watched him with head cocked to the side and mind flailing away behind the bright green eyes, and Draco found himself explaining more than he would have to a more experienced person, as if he was rewarding Potter for his naïveté.

"Do two parallel lines meet, Potter?" he asked.

Potter held up a hand, as though warding an obnoxious autograph-seeker off. Draco supposed that he must encounter them sometimes, as well as those whose attention he enjoyed. All classes of people had their less attractive members. "I know this one," he said. "No?"

Draco laughed, once, but got it under control when Potter glared at him. His body might not ordinarily suffer in a bubble of time like this, but matters would change if he was hit or kicked. "No," he said. "They don’t. And you can only have two spirals of time meet if they overlap. Overlapping one without doing it completely would cause destruction with the clashing forces of time, as they sought to continue along their natural track and instead burrowed through time and space occupied by another spiral."

"But what if you aligned them perfectly?" Potter asked.

Draco had to reluctantly nod his approval. Potter was smarter than he had thought, to ask a question that hadn’t occurred to Draco until two minutes into his research in the nature of time. "Then one spiral would become the other, and they would blend. We suspect that this has happened many, many times, though of course we can’t actually observe such a thing, from within our own limited spiral. It may account for odd phenomena like déjà vu and missing time."

"I don’t understand how that can happen," Potter said.

Draco shrugged. "There’s a limit to the knowledge of even Unspeakables," he said. "We do the best we can to work from knowledge and theory and reason rather than direct observation, which often is not possible."

"And yet, sometimes you do come up with a practical result," Potter said, with a long glance around the sides of the teardrop.

A thrill crept down Draco’s spine. Potter had sounded—vaguely admiring. No more than vaguely, but then again, if it had been more, Draco might have thought the world was coming to an end.

"Mind," Potter added, "this time it’s a practical result that endangers us and prevents us from fully engaging with the world. But it’s the thought that counts."

Draco sighed and turned over to go back to sleep.

"That’s all it takes?" Potter complained to his back. "You’re sensitive." Then he descended into mutterings of his own that Draco didn’t understand and had no intention of listening to. He closed his eyes firmly.

He had spent most of his life, at least during his school years and the trials after the war, explaining his perspective and actions to people who had already judged him and only gave him a chance to speak out of an idea that they were being fair. He had no reason, as a full-fledged Unspeakable, to spend time doing it with Potter now. Even if they were trapped together.


The Magic of Teardrops

"So, how did you get involved with the Unspeakables? What made you want to study time?"

Once, Harry would have thought that nothing on earth could persuade him to ask that question. What could be less interesting than Draco Malfoy’s background? Who gave a fuck why he’d made the decisions that he had?

But the pendant was less interesting, and Harry had run through every spell he knew, twice, and had only been repelled by the crystalline walls. He’d looked for flaws over every inch and found none. If Malfoy told him something new, it would be, well, new, and wouldn’t represent yet more repetition.

Malfoy, who had been sitting awake and apparently meditating from the slow way he breathed and stared at the crystal wall, turned around with an expression of annoyance. "You didn’t seem to be interested in me as more than an obstruction and inconvenience, if the way that you’ve referred to me in the past few hours is real," he said. Harry saw his expression change after he spoke, and knew that he was wondering if they really had spent only hours in the pendant. It felt longer than that, but Harry was learning to distrust his own perception of time.

He tried to imagine spending months here and shuddered away from the thought. He would die of boredom. He would go mad.

And the key to avoiding both of those fates seemed to lie in Malfoy.

"I am interested now," Harry said. "I probably wouldn’t have been if we hadn’t been trapped here, but I am now." He leaned forwards and tried to convey appropriate interest with an intense stare. For some reason, Malfoy turned his head away, a reluctant smile tugging at his lips.

"Fine," he said. "I went to the Unspeakables because they were the only ones after the war who would accept me, and I wanted to work in the Ministry. I became interested in the field of time because it was the most prominent one in the Unspeakables’ ranks, and I knew that I would be promoted faster and receive rewards faster. Satisfied?"

"Not hardly," Harry said.

Malfoy’s body was stiff as he whipped back around to stare at Harry. Harry was glad that some of his Auror lessons in reading body language had sunk in after all. Or maybe he was simply starting to know Malfoy well after spending several—times—cooped up with him.

That was a frightening thought.

"Why not?" Malfoy snapped. "I’m nothing more than an enemy to you. Why won’t you accept the truth when I tell it to you?"

"Wouldn’t I be more likely to think an enemy was lying?" Harry asked, but that made Malfoy turn away with an expression on his face that Harry recognized, and he really didn’t want the other man to retreat into silence and stillness again. "I’m sorry," he said. "But this is a new experience for me. The thing is, I saw you with the pendant and the lightning that enclosed it. I know that it matters more to you than just as a source of Galleons and rewards. I saw the way you looked at it. No one looks at something that way unless it’s important to them. A part of their soul."

Malfoy narrowed his eyes as though Harry had spit at him. "It seems that I never knew you, Potter," he said. "Such unexpected eloquence."

Harry shrugged. "I don’t usually have the words for things like this. I chose those, and they fit." He leaned forwards again. "Did you go into the Unspeakables intending to study time? Or did you start out the way you told me and then change your mind? I really want to know."

Malfoy waited as though searching for some sign in his face or posture that he would lash out. Harry smiled back and tried to look relaxed. He couldn’t really be, of course, with the possibility of eternity in here lingering in the back of his mind, but Malfoy would probably fold up again like a hedgehog if he didn’t try.

Finally, Malfoy made a queer grunting sound and leaned forwards. "Imagine that someone told you you could learn the secrets of the universe," he said, whispering as if he thought that spies from the enemies of the Ministry were in here with them. "Wouldn’t you want to do it?"

Harry shook his head. "I’ve never been interested in the secrets of the universe. I’m interested when people hide things from me, and I’m interested in secrets about people I know." It was a continuing source of regret to him that he would never know if Snape had managed to come to terms with his hatred for Harry after all, or what his mother was really like, because all the people who had known her best were dead. "But I became an Auror to catch Dark wizards and protect people, not solve mysteries."

"Perhaps the glimpse of depth I thought I spied in you was misplaced," Malfoy muttered.

Harry arranged himself so that he sprawled on his belly with his legs extended behind him. "Go on."

"I wanted to know them," Malfoy said. "At one time, I thought I might become an Astronomer or a Seer." Harry bit his tongue so that he wouldn’t make unfortunate references to Trelawney, but maybe Malfoy saw them in his gaze anyway, because his voice became sharp and haughty. "But I didn’t have the gift of prophecy that makes a Seer, and no reputable Astronomers’ school would accept me. Besides, my father wanted me to work for the Ministry. We compromised. The Unspeakables were the only department that satisfied my need to learn more and my father’s desire for me to have strength in politics."

Harry squinted at him, but he really didn’t think Malfoy had just admitted that he was a plant by Lucius Malfoy to control the politics of the wizarding world. What sense would it make to admit that? "All right," he said. "But why did you start studying time? Why did they accept you when no one else would?"

*

Strange as it seemed to Draco, he was having a civil conversation with Potter, and one where Potter kept asking the questions, so Draco didn’t simply have to pour his theories and background into an unappreciative ear. He was tempted to pinch his arm and see if he was dreaming.

No, he thought then, his training coming to his rescue. There are other possibilities. The pendant makes time rearrange itself. Perhaps it’s calling forth qualities that could have been ours if time had flowed differently, if we had been born into a different spiral, if Potter had taken my hand.

Shaking his head at the strangeness of being caught up in such a ring after so long studying time itself, Draco answered, "I had had time to think about the nature of time during my year working as torturer for the Dark Lord. It wasn’t every moment that I spent by his side, but I noticed the way that my mental perceptions altered when I was." He was pleased that his voice was calm, though, in truth, there was little now that could make him wince when it came to that year. He had so often mined it for memories, so that he could compare his thoughts about time’s passing to the thoughts of other people and those he found recorded in books, that it had become well-disciplined and ordered in his mind, a series of intricate, braided glass rings. He touched those rings now as he spoke with Potter, and they did nothing more alarming than ring with faint music. "Time lasted forever there. In the hours away from him, it expanded and flew, and even being at Hogwarts with the Carrows seemed to go fast. As long as I was away from him, it worked."

Potter was frowning intently. "But everyone feels that way, some of the time. I don’t see how it’s real. I mean, when I was a child, the days seemed to last forever, but I knew they didn’t last that way for anyone but me."

Draco eyed Potter sideways. It was tempting to ask why his childhood had seemed to drag, given that he was the pet of everyone who knew him, but Draco didn’t. He couldn’t use it as original research here in the pendant, and he had nothing to write with. "Everyone feels that way because it’s a real phenomenon. It only remained to understand the laws of that phenomenon and codify it. In that way, I came up with the pendant."

Potter gave a faint smile, though Draco didn’t see why. "But your body and your mind aren’t separate. Your body only lives through a few seconds no matter how much time it seems like to your mind."

"They’re capable of being separated, even though they aren’t naturally," Draco said. "Muggles have had very strange ideas about that," he felt compelled to add. His research interests had led him in many directions, and some of the most puzzling books he had read were actually Muggle. Not that their ideas were challenging in the same way that Draco had seen esoteric magical theory be challenging, but he did wonder where some of them had come up with the notion that the body was less important than the soul or the mind. "We can separate them with magic. That’s the source of the pendant."

Potter turned his head from side to side as though the secrets of Draco’s construction would reveal themselves to his uninitiated eyes. "So what is this? Circle or spiral?"

"Neither," Draco said. "Those are only the most common shapes for time, not the solitary ones," he clarified, when Potter whipped his head back as if he suspected Draco of lying to him. "This is an oval shape, exactly what it looks like, and the clock face embedded in it provides an objective means of assessing the passage of time. The teardrop shape enforces one of the separations between body and mind that I was talking about. That’s why it’s such an effective prison, because the shape is the perfect one for pinning us and making our experience of a second seem the experience of a year."

"Does that include our words, too?" Potter cocked his head. "I would think that we couldn’t actually speak all that many words in a second, and words come from our bodies."

Draco smiled. Who knew that Potter could be interesting to talk to? "We aren’t actually speaking," he said. "We imagine words, and our thoughts touch. But if someone could be in here with us without being affected by the teardrop shape of the pendant—which, I have to admit, is impossible—then he wouldn’t hear anything. He would only experience a second of silence, and then he would return to the world around us. Just as we’ll do sometime," he added, with a sharp sense of fear in his chest that he wouldn’t allow to actually manifest.

"Now you’re getting a bit too metaphysical for me, Malfoy," Potter said, pressing his hand to his forehead as if that scar hurt. It was on the tip of Draco’s tongue to tell him about the lightning shape and what it signified in the higher geometry—including theories on how it might have made it possible for him to survive the Killing Curse—but he refrained, because he could be compassionate when it was warranted.

"I’m amazed that you know a big word like that," he said.

Potter scowled at him, but it was half-hearted, and although they went back to imagined silence after that, Draco thought it more comfortable. He still ended up falling asleep again, but he was no longer in dread of the next time that Potter spoke to him.

Until it actually happened, of course.


The Shape of Thought

"I’ve been thinking, Malfoy."

Harry really didn’t see why that statement made Malfoy flinch. They’d had a pleasant conversation—um, however many years or hours ago it seemed. And Harry had been doing a lot of thinking since then, so his statement was strictly true. There was no reason for Malfoy to sigh as though someone was pressing the weight of the world down on his shoulders and then stare at him with what was obviously strained politeness, just waiting for him to make a mistake.

"Have you," Malfoy said at last in a flat, discouraging tone, when he seemed to understand that Harry was waiting for an answer.

Harry nodded firmly. This was a good thought. He wouldn’t lose his hold on it just because Malfoy would like it if he did.

Although maybe doing other things that Malfoy liked wouldn’t be so bad.

Harry shook his head. He had spent too much time in the teardrop, and Malfoy had said that imagination ruled here. He was clearly hallucinating.

"I’ve been thinking about what you said," he told Malfoy, looking up at the crystal ceiling that arched overhead so he wouldn’t have to look into the git’s eyes. That ought to suit the git, who clearly didn’t want to look at him. "About spirals and rings and teardrops and circles. It makes me wonder if we can imagine our way out of this place. If we can imagine conversations and sleeping—which our bodies don’t actually need to do here—why not a way out?"

Malfoy said nothing. Harry looked at him, expecting him to be stunned by the force and brilliance of Harry’s ideas, and instead found him shaking his head with an expression of weary tolerance on his face.

"Why not?" Harry asked, more than a bit incensed that Malfoy apparently wouldn’t even entertain the idea. "After all, you’ve been telling me about all these amazing things that you can do with the study of time. It stands to reason that the study of time should help us out of this. Unless you have a better idea?"

"The teardrop shape is impenetrable," Malfoy said quietly. "That’s why I chose it for the prison I was making. Yes, you can think all you want of the wall opening and letting you out, but that doesn’t mean it will happen. The teardrop shape permits a limited range of interactions, rather like the spirals permit only certain interactions to happen within them and not others, and circles will only lead one back to the beginning again. It’s a good try, Potter, better than I would have expected of you. But impossible."

Harry shook his head back. He thought something was indeed wrong with him. Instead of despairing over Malfoy’s words, he felt a little glow of pride that Malfoy had thought his plan a good try.

To keep his mind off that, as well as off the despair that probably would overcome him if he gave too much credit to Malfoy’s words, Harry stood up and began to prowl around the teardrop again. Malfoy watched him. Harry reckoned he didn’t have much else to do.

When he glanced at Malfoy, seeking some way to disprove his ideas, Harry saw that his hair was still perfectly clean, shining, and soft, and that his face didn’t show any traces of weariness. He hadn’t heard either of their bellies rumble, Harry thought. It felt like they’d been here forever, but that was only the effect of the teardrop, like Malfoy had said. It didn’t mean that they would suffer from bodily pains while they were here.

At this point, Harry would have liked to. He thought that was the only thing that would give him an accurate idea of how much time was passing.

"D’you think we’ll get out?" he asked abruptly. He wanted to see what Malfoy would say if he attacked him suddenly like that.

*

Draco hesitated. He hadn’t bothered telling Potter the truth he suspected, partially because he only suspected it, not knew it, and partially because he didn’t want to put up with Potter’s dramatics.

But Potter had acted surprisingly mature so far, and even now, there was an expression of deep concern and thoughtfulness on his face. Draco wondered if perhaps he could be trusted with the suspicions after all.

"I set the time on the teardrop for thirteen months," he said. "To feel like thirteen months to those inside, that is."

Potter shuddered, but stopped pacing—which Draco was grateful for, as he found it maddening to watch—and focused his attention on Draco. "But? There’s a tone in your voice that says ‘but.’"

"No doubt you hear that a lot," Draco snapped, again frustrated at being read by someone he hadn’t been accustomed to think of as perceptive.

Potter cocked his head wisely and waited.

Draco sighed windily and started to run his fingers through his hair, before he remembered that he had neither water nor mirror to readjust it. He let his hand fall limply to his side instead. "When you touched the lightning, you may have reordered the bonds between space and time that the pendant was designed to suspend. We might be locked in here for longer than the thirteen months. We might be locked in here for an endless second, living forever, no matter how long actually passes in the outside world."

"And if we stay in here for long enough that time actually passes in the outside world. . ." Potter’s face was ill. He sat down hard. "No wonder you didn’t want to say that, Malfoy. It’s bloody depressing."

Draco stared at Potter. He was accustomed to understanding from his colleagues in the matter of his calculations and experiments, but he hadn’t known that Potter could be personally accommodating that way.

Potter caught his eye and laughed ruefully. He didn’t have any compunctions about disordering his hair, as he proved with a hand through it. Then again, Draco thought, it already looked like a hedgehog that had barely survived a battle with a mountain lion. Potter couldn’t make it worse. "Yeah, Malfoy, I know. Who would have thought that we could get along?"

Draco looked away. He thought he would ruin the moment with speech. Potter waited as if he wanted Draco to comment, and then rose and prowled again.

Draco closed his eyes. He wondered if having a tolerable companion would make the time seem to pass more or less slowly.

Parabola

There was something.

Harry woke and slept, and slept and woke, and each time he opened his eyes, there was a tempting, teasing image in his mind, just out of reach.

He tried to ignore it at first, but at last it returned so persistently he was more or less compelled to pay attention to it. He sat up, arms looped around his knees, and looked over to where Malfoy slept. Then he had to look away again. There was something about the soft color of Malfoy’s lips and his relaxed, sleeping face that made it hard to concentrate.

So he thought of the teasing image instead, fixing his mind there until his head hurt. Then he relaxed and breathed in the way that Malfoy was always doing, staring at the frosted crystal patterns on the walls until the thought crept tentatively back into his mind and he could pounce on it.

Malfoy’s time magic seemed to be all about shapes. There was this shape to do this and this shape to do that. Some shapes constrained time, he said, and some shapes constrained the body and the mind.

Couldn’t they create a shape inside the teardrop that would make a difference? Harry didn’t see why not, the longer he thought about it. He wasn’t entirely sure what they would use to make it. So far, none of the spells he’d used had created anything permanent, not even an etching in the glass. But Malfoy might have some ideas.

Harry’s excitement ebbed a bit when he remembered the definite way Malfoy had spoken. If it was so simple to create a shape and get out of the trap, then Malfoy would know about it and would have suggested it, right?

On the other hand, Harry had seen lots of experienced Aurors freeze when confronted with a situation that they hadn’t handled before. This might be the same thing. Could Malfoy envision all the shapes that time would take? He had already admitted that the Unspeakables didn’t know everything about time.

Harry held up his wand and tried to draw shapes in the air before him, creating colored lines of light that would linger. Nothing happened. He knelt down and tried to scratch shapes in the floor of the pendant. Nothing happened. He sat back and muttered something uncomplimentary about clever people in which Malfoy’s name figured prominently.

"Potter? What is it?"

Malfoy spoke in a sleepy voice. Harry turned to confront him, already boiling over with possibilities and ideas that could become concrete if only Malfoy hadn’t been so stupidly smart and restricted magic in the pendant.

Malfoy’s face stopped him.

It was nothing Malfoy said or did, he thought later, when he had time to analyze his own reactions. Instead, it came from the way that Malfoy’s lower lip had a bit of glistening wetness on it, and the defensive way his eyelids fluttered, and the languorous blinks of his eyes. Harry couldn’t be angry with someone who looked like that. He simply couldn’t.

"I. . ." He cleared his throat. "I just was thinking that it would be easier if we had any way to write things down."

"Hmmm. That would be convenient for games and the like, I agree." Malfoy blinked again. Harry expected the fragile sheen of newness to vanish from his face at any moment, but instead, Malfoy gave him a simple stare that wanted to be complex. "You and I could play chess, if we had a board and pieces. If we could draw the pieces."

Harry cleared his throat again. The longer Malfoy sat there looking just like anyone who’d woken up from a daze or a trance, the more trouble he had having animosity against him.

Well, that might be a good thing. They would need to work together to get out of here, after all.

"I’m talking about something else," he said. "About getting out of here, actually."

Malfoy gave him a silly smile, and then frowned. Harry wondered if his words were beginning to trigger Malfoy’s memories, unlikely as that sounded. Then he shook his head and snapped fully back into his usual self.

"I told you, Potter, that no one can escape the pendant," Malfoy said coldly. "It can’t be done. The teardrop is too perfect as a prison."

"There ought to be another shape that’s perfect as a key," Harry countered, relieved—and a bit mournful—that Malfoy was back to normal. "Why not? Shapes like the teardrop aren’t made for holding people, but you adapted this one to that purpose. Isn’t there some other shape that could be useful as a key?"

Malfoy’s brows bent down as he frowned. Harry stared back at him and wondered what Malfoy was seeing in him, if it ever was or could be comparable to the gentle loveliness Harry had seen in his face.

*

What Potter said made sense, enough sense that Draco was ashamed of himself for not thinking of it first.

He sat there with his hair, which was somehow still windblown despite the fact that no wind existed here, and discoursed intelligently of shapes of time. He had even anticipated Draco’s objection that there was no shape of time that was specifically made to free people from their imprisonment.

Draco closed his eyes and pressed his fingers against his temples. He hadn’t thought that someone who was a master of the higher geometry would ever be imprisoned in his prison, had he? The common criminal wouldn’t have that knowledge, and the Unspeakables dealt on their own with those of their own who went rogue.

So, why shouldn’t there be a solution that he hadn’t thought existed because he hadn’t thought he would be in this position?

Potter started to speak, but Draco waved a hand at him. "Shut up for a minute, Potter," he said sharply. "I want to think."

Miraculously, Potter shut up, though from the way he glared, Draco thought he might resent the insult. It didn’t matter. Draco had more important things to think about than whether Potter was pleased or displeased with him.

Perhaps not, if you wish to escape.

But even if Potter had come up with the idea, it would be Draco’s to implement. He sat there and forced his brain to stretch and wrap around the task, the way that he forced it to wrap around the equations for the higher geometry, while Potter waited impatiently next to him.

"Do you have an answer?" he asked, just when numbers had started appearing in Draco’s head to form and cradle the answers he needed.

He snarled in response, and even Potter seemed to know what that meant, because he shut up. Draco bowed his head and clasped it between his hands. He had to stop thinking about Potter and the way he fidgeted and the way his hair smelled, and to do that, he started to force his mind through the first list of shapes he had ever learned, something as basic to the higher geometry as the alphabet was to the art of writing.

A circle repeats. A spiral proceeds. A teardrop holds. A square cages. A curve ends. A parabola opens—

And then Draco felt his sides relax and his breath drift away. Of course that was it. He had been stupid not to have seen it before. Then again, he hadn’t thought the higher geometry could be of any use to him here except to help him understand exactly how badly they were trapped, and so it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t felt much interest in using it.

"A parabola," he whispered. "That’s the shape that we need. If we can only create it. How can we, when we have no magic?"

"A parabola?’ Potter had caught and understood that one word, though from his blank stare, Draco thought it likely that he hadn’t understood the rest. "What is that? How can we make it?"

"It’s a shape," Draco said, biting back the urge to scream. Surely that it was a shape ought to have been obvious to Potter before now? "A sharp curve. It descends and then rises." He lifted his wand and scrawled the shape in the air, though since he couldn’t cast a spell here, he couldn’t create the line of colored light that would have best illustrated his point. "I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. The parabola has a beginning and an end, while the middle forms a magical collecting point for time. The time brews there until it takes the path up and out, and that means that it should be able to combat the ultimate closing shape, the teardrop, that joins a slender stem as a collection point to a shape that doesn’t end."

Potter was smart enough not to pretend that he understood. He only listened, shook his head when Draco finished, and then pressed ahead with what seemed to most concern him. "Then what? How do we make it? You’re right, we have no magic. Is there something else we can use?"

Draco looked hopelessly at his straight wand, and then at his robes. Perhaps they could tear them into strips, but without a knife or a spell that would cut them along precise curving and straight lines, Draco didn’t know that he wanted to trust that stopgap. They wouldn’t get many chances to recut the robes, and only a perfect parabola stood a chance of opening the teardrop.

He looked at Potter’s hair without much expectation, either. There were twisting strands there, but once again, they would need to be perfect, and Draco doubted that they could hope to make them so without the kinds of measuring devices that he usually used in the Department of Mysteries and objects to weigh them down.

As for his own hair, he didn’t even consider it. The strands were simply too fine and straight.

"Well?" Potter was bouncing his useless wand off his knee, his eyes fastened on Draco and his frown so bright that it could have been mistaken for a smile from a distance.

"I don’t know," Draco said, turning away and closing his eyes. "Leave me alone for a little while. Let me think."

Potter snorted and shifted restlessly. "You do that," he muttered. "Just remember that the more time that passes here. . ."

Then he trailed off, perhaps because he’d remembered that nothing would happen to their bodies no matter how long they lingered here. Draco smirked wearily and shut his eyes.

Part Two.

August 2025

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