[July Celebration Fics]: A Clock of Gold and Pearls, Harry/Lucius, R, 3/3

[lomonaaeren]

Part Two.

Part One.

Title: A Clock of Gold and Pearls (2/3)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters; I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Lucius
Content Notes: Established relationship, time travel, AU
Rating: R
Wordcount: This part 6000
Summary: Lucius knew that, although Harry loved him, he also suffered private doubts over being in love with the man who had endangered two of his best friends in his second year and fought on the other side of the war. Never let it be said that Malfoys don’t make extravagant gestures for those they love.
Author’s Notes: Another of my July Celebration fics. This is complete at three parts.

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last part.

“Father. I need to talk to you.”

Lucius staggered a little as he stood up from behind his desk, because the clock had dropped him abruptly and he had expected to find himself facing Harry, not Draco. His son gave him a wary frown. “Father?”

“I’m well enough,” Lucius said. “I caught my foot on the edge of the desk, that’s all.”

Apparently, their relationship had changed enough in the past few years for Draco to accept that excuse, because he smiled and sat down in the chair in front of Lucius’s desk. “Father, I know that you were reluctant to let me go back to Hogwarts after you defied the Dark Lor—I mean, You-Know-Who. And we talked about me studying at home next year.”

Memories shimmered and then became real in Lucius’s mind, although he had to manipulate his mental shields carefully so that they didn’t completely replace his ones of the previous timeline. Yes, he and Narcissa had debated taking Draco out of Hogwarts, but it hadn’t happened. Instead, Draco had found a small room that he occupied himself and defended outside the Slytherin dungeons. “Yes. Do you want to stay at Hogwarts next year?”

“Yes! And, Father, I’ve come for the Malfoy betrothal ring.” Draco’s head was high, and pink streaked his throat. “I’ve found the woman I want to marry.”

Lucius blinked, and asked, “Have you?” He felt a distant rush of warmth, both for the fact that Draco in this changed timeline was brave enough to ask him something like that, and for the fact that if Draco was in love with a woman, then he could not have fallen in love with the Harry of this changed world.

Both Father and Grandfather said that using the clock was risky.

“Yes. Ginny Weasley.” Draco tensed his muscles as if he expected Lucius to lunge across the desk at him and slap his cheek.

Lucius liked to think that he would never have done that, but he couldn’t discount the possibility for the man he had once been. He smiled at his son. “Congratulations, Draco. You took that piece of advice I once gave you about the Weasleys to heart, did you?”

Startled color flooded Draco’s cheeks, and he cleared his throat. “Yes, I did. She loves me, and I love her. We’re going to get married as soon as she’s graduated Hogwarts. Even if the war is still going on.” He threw Lucius another glance that dared him to object.

Lucius only smiled some more as he stood. There was the strong chance that Ginny Weasley wouldn’t have the lingering attraction to Harry that had happened in the original future, then, and for which she always threw Lucius dark looks when she thought he wasn’t going to notice. “Then come with me, Draco. Both you and your bride deserve the ring.”

The world convulsed around him, Lucius calmed his mind so he retained both sets of memories, and he was rushed to his next destination.

*

“I can’t do this, Mr. Malfoy. It’s too hard.”

“Tell me what’s wrong, Harry.” In Lucius’s head reverberated both the solemn ticks of the clock and the recent memory of a knock on the door that had awakened him from bed and made him rush downstairs in his dressing gown. Narcissa watched from the grand staircase for a moment, and then turned and shut the door, leaving him alone with Harry at the bottom of the stairs.

“We found Hufflepuff’s cup,” Harry whispered, lowering his hands. Lucius swayed a little from the impact of the despair in his eyes. His own Harry had never looked like that. “But it’s in Gringotts. The Lestrange vault. No one has ever broken into Gringotts and escaped.”

“I suspect they did, as a matter of fact,” Lucius said coolly, a memory that he might not have grasped otherwise coming forwards. He had in fact intended to retrieve the cup himself, but then, he had thought it would be the last Horcrux except for Nagini and Harry. “There was a break-in to Gringotts during your first year, was there not? Someone searching for the Philosopher’s Stone? That person escaped and was never caught.”

Harry gaped at him. “How did you know about that?”

“Give me some credit for putting things together,” Lucius said, smiling gently at him. “Even if it’s mostly hints that you dropped without realizing that you were doing so.”

Harry turned as pink as Draco had when asking for the betrothal ring, but nodded. “All right. But I have no idea how he escaped.”

“I do,” Lucius said. The memories that he needed were there, and the knowledge. He suspected he wouldn’t have it at all without the changing of the timeline and the forcible stirring of his mind that was happening, but then, he wouldn’t have been in this situation if not for the changing of the timeline, either. “There were two personalities in the body that broke into Gringotts.”

Harry gaped at him.

“You are not the only one who dropped hints he should be more careful of, Mr. Potter. Voldemort did much the same.”

Harry nodded and straightened, the fire springing back into life in his eyes again. “All right. So what do we do? And why would two personalities do it?”

“Gringotts’s defenses work by focusing on identity,” Lucius explained, his mind speeding ahead. “They do have defenses in the building to pierce illusions and Polyjuice and the like, but even those work by looking for a hidden identity under the surface and revealing it. They cannot cope with two personalities in constant flux.”

“Brilliant. But that still doesn’t tell me how we’re going to do it.”

Lucius smiled at him. “You have never heard of the Two-Minded Curse?” Of course Harry had not, because Lucius had only that moment made it up. But Harry had shown a fortunate tendency to trust his “research” so far, and Lucius had no means to tell him the truth.

“No. What does it do, Mr. Malfoy?”

“It will enable someone to pass the defenses who can hold two distinct sets of memories in his mind, as if he’s two different people. All I need to do is drink a potion that contains some Pensieve memories from a different person and cast a certain spell.”

Harry nodded, his eyes so bright with trust that Lucius bit his lip. He still couldn’t tell Harry that he actually came from the future. There was no time for that. “All right, Mr. Malfoy. Thanks. Do you think—do you think that you can have the cup soon? I think Dumbledore is starting to suspect that I haven’t been telling him things. He’s questioning Ron and Hermione.”

“And perhaps trying to read it out of your minds?” Lucius cursed the fact that the nature of the clock meant that he could not offer to tutor Harry in Occlumency, as he had in his future.

Harry straightened up. “What?”

“Legilimency,” Lucius said, as he felt the walls warp around him. This moment with Harry was almost ended. “Occlumency. There is a book I’ll send you. You should learn the art of defending your mind.”

Harry obviously wanted to question him more, but the clock gave a great booming chime that even Harry might have been able to hear, and Lucius was in that memory no more.

*

Lucius walked calmly, confidently, into Gringotts. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, and requested politely that a goblin accompany him down to the Malfoy vault.

He waited until they were settled into the cart as comfortably as possible, and then called up his memories of the past timeline and set them into play in his head, invoking the only remnant of the man he had once been. The man who would have slipped a Horcrux to an eleven-year-old girl, the man who had demanded a hippogriff’s execution for attacking his son, the man who had returned to the Dark Lord’s service if not enthusiastically.

He could feel the magic of Gringotts pause, uncertain what to make of him. A ball of black light drifted towards him, and the goblin in the cart glanced over its shoulder.

Lucius laid his wand against the goblin’s back and wordlessly cast the Imperius Curse. The mere action again called up the man he had become, since the past one had never done something like this during the war.

The defenses of the bank were swinging over him like great pendulums, no more or less weighty than the clicks of the clock. The goblin obeyed when Lucius told him to take him to the Lestrange vault. He would probably need to recast the Imperius Curse when they passed through one of the magic-cleansing waterfalls, but if that was the most inconvenient thing about this expedition, Lucius would be pleased.

He kept changing his mind each time the defenses tried to hone in on him, thinking of past memories or new ones, and the ball of darkness that was following them blew apart into a dissipating pool like octopus ink in water. By the time they arrived at the Lestrange vault, he’d needed to recast the Imperius Curse twice.

He stepped out of the cart and faced the door that locked the Lestrange vault. This was the test that he had only been ninety percent sure he could pass, as opposed to the ninety-nine percent certainty that he could fool the bank’s identity-finding wards.

He stepped forwards and deliberately dropped the shields that kept his two sets of memories separated from each other.

Roaring, ringing chaos consumed him. He remembered speaking harshly to his son and more gently; he remembered Draco proposing to Astoria Greengrass and telling him that he meant to marry Ginny Weasley; he remembered parting from Narcissa after the war when he wanted to date Harry and she wanted to go to France, and he remembered living with her now.

In the middle of that madness, he reached out and touched the door of the Lestrange vault.

There was a long moment when he could hear many different things, and he hastily pulled his hand back from the vault door and lifted his shields again. Then the door gave a shiver and melted.

His shields held.

Lucius breathed out. Bellatrix had been insane long before she went to Azkaban, certainly the last time she had accessed this vault. Calling up his own kind of madness and forcing the wards to engage with it had worked. The goblins’ magic was very good, but not perfect. It couldn’t distinguish between two mad minds, and it always chose the most prominent characteristic in the identities of those wizards it was supposed to detect. Bellatrix’s most prominent one was easy to imitate.

For someone as accomplished as he was, anyway.

Lucius stepped into the vault, looking alertly about. He saw the cup at once, and he could also see the shimmer around it that marked it as cursed. An oddly juvenile set of curses, to make it burn and duplicate itself, but then, Bellatrix’s madness had not always served her well in more than the matter of making bank vault doors easy to open. Lucius disabled the curses with an easy twist of his wand and Summoned the cup. It soared straight at him and into the small black velvet bag Lucius was holding open.

Lucius slammed the bag shut and ignored the way that the cup tried to reach out to him, naggingly, insistently. The cup could do what it liked. Lucius had better things to do than succumb to an impatient Horcrux.

He turned and walked out to the cart where the goblin was waiting. Another irritation: the clock made him wait through the whole of the ride back through Gringotts, alternating his two sets of memories in his head, before it bore him away.

*

“Will you lot shut up for a second?”

Lucius was not entirely surprised to find himself seated on a couch in his own main drawing room, the place where he had brought Lovegood and Longbottom a few hours ago in his own personal time, but—a quick glance through the windows at the rich, full leaves on the trees—yes, it must be nearly a year ago in the new timeline. He turned back to Harry and gave him a reassuring smile that drew an answering one from Harry right away. Granger and Weasley, standing behind him with scowls, at least didn’t look as if they would have to be magically Silenced this time.

“Yes?” Lucius asked calmly.

Harry swallowed and fixed pleading eyes on him. “So we destroyed the cup. And my godfather found Slytherin’s locket in his own house, of all places, and we’ve destroyed that, too. But—I think Professor Dumbledore figured out where another Horcrux was and went after it himself. His hand is blackened, and he’s wearing this big old ring that he didn’t have before. And he wants to start showing me images of Riddle’s past, although I don’t know how that helps.”

“The ring I told you about.” Lucius raised his eyebrows. He had assumed that he would have changed the timeline enough for that to avoid happening, but he couldn’t say that he would mourn the old man overall. “Now that you think about it, why do you believe that he wants to show you those memories of Voldemort’s past?”

Harry thought about it, and his face darkened. “So that he could tell me about the Horcruxes without telling me.”

“You don’t know that!” Granger interjected.

“That’s a mite paranoid, mate,” Weasley added.

Lucius only held Harry’s eyes, and saw resignation in them. He nodded slowly. “I could ask him about the Horcruxes directly, but I think he would be cryptic. And if he did know how much I knew…”

“He would Obliviate you,” Lucius said, and his eyes flickered for a second to Weasley and Granger. Harry scowled at him, but didn’t shake his head. He knew as well as Lucius that if they did attempt to carry word of Harry and Lucius’s meetings to Dumbledore, then they would have to forget it.

“So.” Harry clenched his hands into fists. “Can you think of some way of getting to the snake? I know that you can’t go to Voldemort since you’re not a Death Eater anymore. And none of us can think of anything, either.”

“Allow me.”

Lucius turned in shock. Narcissa was standing behind him, in the door of the drawing room. She had left him and Harry alone at their previous meeting—and at others in Malfoy Manor that his memories were filling in for him like sand being poured into an hourglass—so he had assumed she would do the same thing now. But instead, she stood there with her arms folded and her face as smooth as the porcelain sculpture’s that her mother had given them for their wedding.

“You need not,” Lucius told her, ignoring the way Weasley and Granger drew closer together and Harry stiffened.

“But I wish to.”

“This is my fight, not yours,” Lucius said, holding her eyes. He tried to force the knowledge he had into his expression, even though Narcissa was not a Legilimens. They had agreed, without speaking of it, that she should remain free and uninvolved in his betrayal. That way, if she ever did need to return to Voldemort and take Draco with her, she stood a chance of being believed.

“I am sick of it being your fight,” Narcissa said clearly, her eyes shimmering like mirrors. “I will not back off and you cannot force me to,” she added, when Lucius’s hand twitched towards his wand. “Trust me to know what I want and that you are better off leaving this entirely to me.”

“You do not even know how to destroy the serpent.”

“Then you may tell me that. And leave the destruction to me.”

Lucius sat there, looking at his wife and not knowing what to say. She had always cared for Draco, and for him even after they had stopped sharing the same bed, and for the family reputation. Nowhere in any of that could he see the willingness that she was exhibiting to take this risk. Something must have changed, but rifling through his new sheaf of memories did not tell him what.

Narcissa took a step towards him and raised a quick silencing ward around him and her alone. “He would have Marked Draco,” she murmured. “Draco has been receiving threats from his Housemates about it. He threatens my son even though we broke free of him. Let this be my fight.”

Lucius hesitated. But he knew that if he tried to push Narcissa out of the way, she was likely to come back into the fight at the worst possible moment and in the worst possible way. She would interfere, or distract him, or perhaps even change her mind on her own and do something that harmed Harry if it would protect Draco. Lucius knew she loved Draco more than anything else, despite how careful she had always been to show Lucius that she valued him, as well.

Looking into her face, he asked, “Would you be willing to swear an oath to reveal nothing of what I tell you to anyone else?”

“Yes.”

“That would include Draco.”

Narcissa gave him a small, annoyed, patient glance. “I would trust that you would pass on to Draco what you have told me, if something should go wrong.”

Lucius nodded sharply. He had no idea if she would succeed, but he had obviously made the decision or taken the action that he had come here to accomplish. Already, the walls were thinning and the air growing cloudier. He dismissed her silencing spell and turned back in time to see Harry glancing back and forth between them.

His eyes had gone opaque again, the way they had when Lucius was telling him about Horcruxes. But after a second, he nodded.

And what else his friends might have objected after that, Lucius didn’t get to hear, as the clock chimed him to a new destination.

*

“Did you know?”

Harry was standing in front of him on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. There were screams in the distance and the sight of trampled, blood-stained mud close at hand. Harry stood with his hand held out.

The Resurrection Stone gleamed in the center of his palm.

Lucius took a deep swallow and met Harry’s eyes, which gleamed like shards of broken glass. “I told you that you might be able to survive the Killing Curse if Voldemort cast it at you,” he said. That was his best guess for what was happening at the moment.

“Not that. I did that.” Lucius had to bite back a smile at the snap of indignation in Harry’s words, but it was a brittle snap. “I mean—did you know that I would master the Deathly Hallows?”

“No,” Lucius said, and it was pure honesty. As it was, it seemed his blended self had never told Harry about the Resurrection Stone being in Gaunt’s ring. And he had had no idea if, in this timeline, Dumbledore would leave the Stone to Harry or if Harry would manage to win control of the Elder Wand in the same way.

In fact, it could not be the same way, now that he thought of it. He trusted that his son was not a secret Death Eater who had been told to rid the world of Dumbledore. Lucius was curious, but now wasn’t the right time to ask for a story that he was probably already supposed to know.

Harry took a deep breath that sounded as if it tore up most of his lungs and looked away. Lucius dared to step forwards and rest a hand on Harry’s shoulder in sympathy. Harry shivered for a second. Then he said, not looking at Lucius, “You were the only one who always told me the truth. Dumbledore didn’t. He did want me to stand and face Voldemort and let him lob the Killing Curse at me, but he used his portrait to tell me that I was a Horcrux, and that was when I went to confront him after not finding any other way to get rid of the one in me. I don’t understand why he couldn’t simply speak up when he was alive.”

Lucius’s hand tightened. There were few things he understood as little as he understood Dumbledore’s motives. He couldn’t say that to Harry, though, not when Harry was grieving. He stood there, and held him, and didn’t speak.

“And then he willed the Stone to me,” Harry continued, speaking in a mumble. “And he told me how Kingsley had actually Disarmed him before he died, because he was convinced Dumbledore was trying to commit suicide and wanted to stop him, so I had go to the Ministry and find Kingsley and duel him to get the Elder Wand. I did it. I—it was horrible, some of the things Dumbledore said.”

Lucius waited. Harry added, “He knew about you.”

Lucius nodded grimly. He supposed he should have known that, given that he’d been in or close to Hogwarts for a few moments in this time.

“He told me that I was a fool to trust you, and I should have let him hunt the Horcruxes by himself until the ring hurt him, and then I should have gone and hunted them with Ron and Hermione. I told him that I wouldn’t even have known what Horcruxes were without you, and he said—he said that he was disappointed in me, that he would have told me if I’d only given him the time.”

Harry flinched with his head down, and Lucius gripped both his shoulders this time. When Harry gave him a miserable look, Lucius shook him a little and said, “It doesn’t matter what that old fool of a portrait said. He was the disappointing one, keeping such important secrets from you and then expecting you not to listen to someone who would tell them to you. You never have to see him again. You never have to speak to him again.”

Harry blinked, and then said, “But what about the Deathly Hallows?”

“I don’t know what mastering them means.” Again Lucius was telling the truth. Harry had never been able to figure out what it meant that he was Master of Death in his original timeline, either, except that perhaps it might have helped him survive Voldemort’s Killing Curse. “But I can tell you one thing.”

“Yeah?”

“What matters most is that you are you. Harry Potter. And that you’re here, and your enemy is gone.” Lucius let the full warmth of what he felt for Harry inflect his smile and voice for the first time. “You’re alive.”

Harry caught his breath with a curious high sound, and then took a step towards him. Lucius didn’t move away, didn’t disdain the wavering hand that Harry lifted to his cheek or the hesitant way he leaned up to kiss Lucius on the mouth.

Of course, a second later, he pulled away, flushing and averting his eyes. “I shouldn’t—you’re married—”

Lucius caught his hand. “Narcissa and I have long since made our own arrangements in these matters,” he said softly. “If you want to, then you should. I am flattered that you want to with me, when I am so much older than you and such a stranger.”

“You’re not a stranger,” Harry said stubbornly, his jaw thrust out. “You’re a friend. You have been since—for a long time. And you’ve risked so much to help me, maybe more than anyone. And you’re the only one who told me the whole truth.”

Lucius felt guilt squirm in his stomach at that, because he had not told Harry the truth about the timeline or anything connected to it, such as his “research” that was actually future knowledge. But he had told him the truth about everything he could reasonably tell, and as Harry said, that was more than anyone else had done for him in this world.

And he was not unselfish enough to refuse.

“The whole truth,” Harry said again, and his eyes gleamed for a moment with a strange intensity. Lucius opened his mouth to argue.

But when Harry leaned in again and offered his mouth for a kiss instead, Lucius took it, gently easing him back against a tree. Harry was quicksilver in his arms, trembling and warm and insistent, even though he also looked as if he was reconsidering his actions every six seconds.

Lucius went slowly. He touched Harry’s shoulders and chest, and waited each time before he eased his hand further down. He unbuttoned Harry’s shirt and learned, relearned, the curves of muscle there and the way that pinching Harry’s nipples made him buck forwards and his erection harden rapidly. And he kissed Harry constantly, long drugging kisses that Harry reciprocated enthusiastically, all but smashing his chin into Lucius’s.

In the end, it was Harry who took Lucius’s hand and drew it in between his legs.

Lucius cradled him and worked him gently, pumping him up and down, watching as Harry’s face became flushed with embarrassment, wonder, pleasure. His hand linked around Lucius’s and squeezed almost hard enough to hurt, then suddenly yanked down. He gasped, “Yes, that’s it, almost enough, enough, there—”

Watching Harry come apart in his arms was as beautiful as it had always been. Lucius leaned his forehead against Harry’s and watched as he shuddered and spent himself. Harry sagged back against the tree and panted a little, and Lucius kissed him again and reached down to attend to himself.

Harry was quicksilver again, his hand getting there first. “I want to,” he said, eyes narrowed at Lucius again as if he assumed that Lucius would forbid him.

Lucius drew back, pleased and unable to hide it. “Very well,” he murmured, holding Harry’s eyes, and Harry bit his red lips but kept looking at Lucius all the time as he took hold of him and drew him, slowly, out of his robes.

Lucius blinked, several times, and threw his head back at the end. Harry started as Lucius’s cock jumped in his hand, and started again when he came, probably from the sudden warmth and wetness on his fingers, but he never looked away.

When Lucius’s immediate need was satisfied, he leaned in and kissed Harry one more time. Then he said gently, “Your friends will probably expect to see you soon. You may wish to clean up before you go to see them.”

“What?” Harry was blinking at him, afloat still on the force of his kisses, and then he glanced down at his hand. “Oh, yeah.”

He huffed softly and stepped back from Lucius, smiling in a way that made Lucius wonder if he regretted what he’d done. But he’d barely opened his mouth to ask it when Harry glanced up, caught his eye, and seemed to understand what he was going to ask.

Harry shook his head violently. “Don’t think that!” he snapped at him. “I meant it when I said that you’ve been friendly to me and told me the truth. I trust you. I—like you.” From the blush that swept his cheeks, Lucius wasn’t sure that even Harry knew how much. “I don’t know what happens from here, but live in the moment, okay?”

Lucius felt his expression gentle. Harry could not understand how much living in the moment would mean to him, or how much Lucius was doing that right now, more than most other people he would meet. “All right. I will see you again.” He made that as much of a demand as he dared, rather than a question.

Harry grinned at him. “I can predict that future.”

He turned and walked back towards Hogwarts. Lucius hoped that he would remember to clean his hand and trousers before he got there.

He had no chance to see if Harry did or not, because the world vibrated, and the immense ticking sounded down the corridors of his soul until he didn’t know if it would end.

*

Lucius opened his eyes. He sat, once again, in the chair in the Rose Drawing Room that he had begun from. But his hand was empty, and when he turned it over and flexed his fingers, only the cramps from winding the key in the back of the clock remained.

He stood for a second, head bowed, letting the new memories flood in. He knew how Narcissa had destroyed Nagini, from her telling him, the daring way she had pretended to betray Lucius and had come close enough to the Dark Lord to strike out with an enchanted dagger Orion Black had once owned. The blade had been coated in an enchantment that made it kindle Fiendfyre on whatever it struck. Narcissa had survived only because Voldemort had been too concerned with his burning snake to chase her immediately. They had separated soon after the end of the war, much as in Lucius’s original time.

Draco had married Ginny Weasley. Lucius remembered their wedding, and the glares of her family, as if he had stood there under the white marble arch entwined with flowers and watched the bride in her shining golden robes and the proud, nervous smile on Draco’s face—as he had.

Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger still sometimes thought it was strange that Lucius was in love with Harry and Harry in love with him, but they were much less constrained and snappish around Harry now. They knew that Lucius had helped them win their war. The only conflict that still sparked up between them sometimes was that they visited Dumbledore’s portrait, and never understood why Harry refused to come with them.

Luna Lovegood had maintained a strange friendship with Narcissa, and they had a regular meeting for tea every full moon, Harry had told him. Lucius would not pretend to understand what they talked about.

Neville Longbottom had accepted Lucius’s presence in Harry’s life first, and he had given them a specially-bred white rose with delicate petals like a peacock’s plumes that had produced furiously-growing seeds in their garden.

Sirius Black was still alive, and tended to brag about his sexual exploits with Remus Lupin in a way that gave Lucius continued practice in casting the Silencing Charm. However, he was more than willing to listen to the man’s praise of his godson.

They lived—

They lived in the same place. And although their love had become real earlier than it had in their original timeline, it had hit many of the same low places, and climbed many of the same heights.

Except that Harry had more love and laughter in his life, and less stress, because Lucius had gone back in time.

Lucius stumbled to his feet, blinking, and turned to face the doorway. The two sets of memories danced through his head one more time, and then settled quietly into place, one in each half of his mind. He would be able to forget the old ones if he wanted to, but Lucius did not think he would choose to. He would prefer to remember why he had taken the risks, as well as the risks themselves.

Harry was standing in the doorway of the Rose Drawing Room, watching him.

Lucius blinked, and said nothing. Harry walked over to meet him and clasped his hands. Those lines that Lucius had so hated to see scribbled into his face had eased.

“Did you think I wouldn’t know?” Harry whispered.

Lucius reeled back, but only a step. Then Malfoy composure helped him regain his balance, both mental and literal, and he asked, “How could you?” He knew things had changed. If Harry was aware of them, then that could not be so.

Harry turned and led him further into the Manor, away from the Rose Drawing Room, down a corridor that curved past alcoves and doors that Lucius was sure he had never seen before. Which was ridiculous, of course. This was his home and his family’s home, and he had explored every inch of it before he was five.

But this was still a new place, this small, round, dusty room with an unmoving portrait on the wall. In fact, the man in it was asleep.

Lucius stared at him. His hair was dark, and shaggy, if so long that it looked more tamed than the hair on Harry’s head. The shape of his face was familiar, but the lines in it even more pronounced and painful than the ones his Harry had worn before Lucius went back in time. There was a long, jagged scar down the left side of his face that looked as if it came from fangs, and one of his hands was missing.

“What…”

“Sometimes,” Harry said, his voice thick and soft, “someone travels back in time to make the future better. Sometimes—sometimes the future is so terrible that it erases itself of its own volition, and leaves very little trace behind.”

He turned to face Lucius, tilting his head up with trembling fingers. “I have the memories of all three lives, Lucius. The one I lived through the first time, where you didn’t help me and Dumbledore was the one who told me about Horcruxes. The one where I was this man, who went back much further than the war with Voldemort to make sure that the world didn’t wither and die because of an evil greater than Voldemort. And the lifetime you gave me, the happiest one, where certain other things happened that meant the dark future never would. We prevented it together.”

Lucius blinked at him. “And how were you able to travel in time when I know that a Time-Turner only goes back a few hours and only a Malfoy can use the clock?”

Harry gave him a weary smile, and the Elder Wand appeared in his hand as if forming itself from the air. “There’s a reason I had to master the Deathly Hallows, and it was because I’d always mastered them.” He flicked his hand, and the wand disappeared again. “And because they’re the only artifacts not linked to a particular bloodline powerful enough to conquer time.”

“Then…when you said that I’d always told you the whole truth…”

“I meant it. I knew, Lucius. I don’t know where the circle begins or ends.” Harry stepped towards him and cupped his face the way Lucius had with his younger self. “Did you think that you were the only one who could risk everything for someone he loves?”

Lucius drew in a difficult breath. He glanced again at the sleeping man in the portrait, and knew then that he would never wake. Lucius would know of that future only what Harry chose to tell him.

“And what happens now?” he asked. He wondered if they would have to pay a penalty for Harry’s use of the Hallows, or his use of the clock, or both.

“Now?” Harry smiled, and it was as joyous as a phoenix. “Now we can go on into the future that we fought for. The only one that’s going to happen.”

“With the memories that we choose to keep?”

Harry nodded. “With only those.” His eyes were gentle and hard at once, and Lucius knew Harry probably never would tell him of that dead and dying future.

Unless Lucius asked.

Lucius thought about it, while he held Harry’s hands, both of which were whole and intact, and looked into his face that bore only one scar. Then he said, “Let us live in the moments we earned.”

Harry leaned in and kissed him, with all the warmth of their first love and the passion of the younger Harry from this new timeline and, for all Lucius knew, with the determination of the man he had become in some far future. Then, together, they walked out of the room.

Lucius didn’t look back.

Yes, after all, it is time to ignore portraits, and clocks, and any other artifacts of the finished past. We have what we wished for.

The End.