Draco's Mudblood - Draco Malfoy Fan Fiction - *Year One*

To Go Back

Theodore Nott was only a bit older, but people often swore he seemed 40.

He was a scrawny little thing. Tall for his age and made up entirely of gangly joints. His green eyes were the colour of a muddy swamp and his long, rich brown hair was always matted with dust and dirt. He was lightly freckled, but you would never know just how many freckles he really had under all the oil and dirt on his skin.

He spent nearly every second in the garage of his crumbling house, turning pieces of machinery in his hands as a nervous habit. He rarely showered, rarely changed, and never seemed to eat. His few neighbours had tried talking to him before, but he was as disattached as one could be. Some had even tried to call the police, claiming he was being abused at home, but those reports never went anywhere. After some time, they stopped all together.

He was always making something. He would sit in the middle of a heaping pile of wires and metal scraps, furiously bending and adjusting the knobs and cogs on his trinkets, almost as though he were running out of time.

Time. It was such a funny thing.

Even now, at the crack of dawn, Theodore pulled his jumper tighter around his fragile frame and snuck through the streets of his hometown, careful to avoid the street lights. The air was cooling again as autumn crept through the trees and into Theodore's skin. He would turn 7 soon, but he didn't feel like it. He felt like he was still 3, standing in the kitchen and watching his mother decay.

He launched himself over the gate at the edge of the property, clearly having done this many times before, and kept himself close to the ground as he snuck to the edge of the mountain of junk.

It was the only place he would ever go to when he left the house. The junk yard was filled with old machines and scrap metal, the perfect place for a young inventor and mechanic to scrounge through the piles of actual junk to find what he thought of as solid gold. He did so now, pushing aside a rotting toaster and a bent up bike, things he had already hunted through and left without a lid or chain. He pulled out a clock and a wind up music box, stuffing both into the pockets of his jeans, and dove deeper into the mess.

After an hour of picking his way through the piles, just as the sun was beginning to peak over the horizon, he took his leave. His pockets were heavy and made a fair deal of noise as he walked back the way he'd come, full of old pieces of small machinery and a fork or two. He held the music box in his hands and fiddled with the handle, listening for the sound of the internal crank, but there was nothing.

Most days, he would mindlessly string together screws and pieces of tin only to realise hours later that there was nothing he could make to go back in time. He didn't even know where to start, really. How would one make a device like that? It simply wasn't possible, but he tried anyway. There were dozens upon dozens of old attempts stuffed away in the garage, failed attempts at something he had seen in a dream when his mother died.

A doctor had once told him there was no way he could remember everything. Lillian Nott had been dying of cancer for nearly 4 years before Theodore was born, and another 3 years till it finally wrapped its fingers around her and squeezed the last of her life out. Theodore had claimed to have remembered the colour of her skin, how her golden tan from her hispanic heritage faded into a sickly pale yellow, how her magic couldn't keep up with the rate at which her hair fell out until she only had deep black wisps hang over her forehead. He remembered her hands, how delicate and paper thin they became.

The doctors were wrong. He remembered everything.

And he would do anything to go back in time and fix it.

Today, however, he sat in front of the music box.

It was an old thing, made out of a cheap wood and engraved with a meaningless pattern of swirls and circles. The corners were chipped and the crank was rusty, and of course, it didn't work. Theodore didn't particularly understand why he'd taken it, but he did, and now he sat in the rising sunlight from outside and set to work on it.

He carefully removed the bottom and let his hands work as his thoughts fizzled out into nothing, numbly working away at the interior of the box. It needed new cogs, the old ones were rotting away at his touch, so he picked through a box of old pieces he'd collected and replaced all of them, even the ones that seemed to work just fine. He relapsed the crank, spent some time whittling a new one of his own out of a piece of firewood, and carefully replaced some screws. By the time the sun had started to set, the box was finished.

Theo took out a pocket knife and carefully etched his signature hourglass onto the bottom, a T in the top of the hourglass and an N in the bottom.

He cranked it.

It didn't work.