Chapter Text
Malfoy-Nott Manor, Winter – One Month Before Scorpius’ Thirteenth Birthday
The diagnosis comes like frost in a still room.
St. Mungo’s doesn’t sugarcoat it. They can’t.
Astoria’s blood curse—ancient, tangled, quiet for over a decade—has reawakened. Something in her body is unraveling faster than even their most advanced spellwork can keep up with. The Healers tell Draco the truth in a bare whisper:
“She won’t see Scorpius turn thirteen.”
And just like that, time—which Draco and Theo have fought so long to bend, repair, conquer—becomes the one thing they cannot stop.
Astoria takes the news with calm grace. She always knew. She just hoped it would wait longer.
Theo locks himself in the vaults for days.
Draco loses his temper on a portrait and shatters a hundred-year-old frame.
Scorpius doesn’t speak about it. But he changes.
He becomes quiet. Careful. Thoughtful in ways no child should have to be. He lingers at Astoria’s side, begins to pray, though no one taught him how.
Not to gods.
But to someone.
And then—
One evening, just past sundown, the drawing room is quiet.
Astoria is resting upstairs. Theo and Draco are seated in silence, a bottle of aged Nott port open between them, untouched.
And she walks in.
Like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Clarette Morganach.
Not a ghost. Not a flicker. Not a memory.
Alive.
Whole.
Present.
And grown—aged as they are, dressed in modern robes with dust from travel on her sleeves and starlight in her eyes. Her hair is braided back, sharp strands of silver threaded through like veins of lightning. She carries nothing with her except a satchel, a wand, and the weight of everything unsaid.
Theo stands so fast he nearly topples the armchair.
Draco stares, blood drained from his face.
“Clarette?” Draco breathes, voice hoarse.
“Not the one you lost,” she says quickly. “But yes. Clarette Morganach.”
Theo’s hand flies to his wand out of sheer instinct. His lips move, mouthing a spell he doesn’t cast. His voice is gravel. “Which timeline?”
Her smile is weary. “The one where Cedric lived. The war ended differently. Dumbledore didn’t die. The Hallows never needed to be found.”
“Why are you here?” Draco asks, unable to move.
She steps forward slowly, carefully—as if she knows too well what her presence means. What it costs.
“Because Scorpius asked,” she says. “Not for me, specifically. Not by name. But for help. For a miracle. For someone to save his mother.”
Theo exhales like he’s been stabbed. “And you answered?”
Clarette shrugs. “Apparently I’m a soft touch when thirteen-year-olds ask for impossible things.”
Draco’s knees almost give out.
“You’re real,” he whispers. “You’re real.”
“Yes.”
“But she—” His throat closes. “The version of you we knew—she—”
“I know,” Clarette says gently. “She’s gone. And I’m not here to replace her. I couldn’t if I tried.”
Theo steps toward her, voice trembling. “Do you remember us?”
She looks at him.
And something in her gaze softens.
“I know of you. And I’ve dreamed things I was never meant to see. Versions of you. Of me. Of… the life we never got to finish.”
Draco lets out a broken laugh. “So this is how it ends. Or begins. You show up like some kind of cosmic answer to a child’s wish?”
“Not an answer,” she says. “A chance.”
Theo wipes a hand down his face, dazed. “A chance for what?”
Clarette reaches into her satchel.
She pulls out a vial. Inside: shimmering violet fluid that pulses faintly with inner light.
“A soulbinder’s cure,” she says. “One I helped create. Built from timelines that never frayed. From bodies that were never cursed.”
Draco doesn’t even ask if it’s real.
He just sinks into the chair and exhales the last decade of mourning.
Upstairs, Scorpius wakes in the night.
There’s a shadow by the window.
Not his mother. Not his father.
A woman he doesn’t recognize, but feels familiar.
“You’re her,” he says simply. “The one I prayed for.”
She sits on the edge of his bed and smiles like starlight.
“I heard you,” Clarette says softly.
“Can you save my mum?”
“I’ll try.”
Scorpius’s small hand curls around hers. “Will you stay?”
She thinks for a moment.
Then nods.
“As long as I’m needed.”
Clarette stands before them in the music room.
The same one where they once begged a ghost not to disappear.
The same one that hasn’t sung in years.
Now, it echoes with a quieter kind of pain.
Astoria sits nearby in a worn velvet chair, swaddled in layers of silk and silence. She looks at Clarette not with fear, not with awe—but with a kind of strange peace. As if she’s already accepted what the others cannot.
“I can cure her,” Clarette says again, steady. “Extend her lifespan. But the cost—”
Draco closes his eyes. “—is you.”
Theo stares at the floor. His voice, when it comes, is deadened and low. “You’re tethered to another reality. The moment your purpose here completes, the door closes.”
Clarette nods.
“I can only stay where I’m needed. Not where I’m wanted.”
Astoria leans forward, smiling faintly. “You speak like someone who’s done this before.”
“I have,” she says. “Twice.”
Theo’s hands are curled into fists. “And no way to sever the tie? No trace magic? No anchor spell?”
Clarette shakes her head. “We’ve tried all of that in my timeline. If I stay longer than the magic permits… it unravels. People start forgetting who they are. Entire days vanish. Cedric lost three years once. Just gone.”
Draco steps forward now. Quiet. Strained. “So we get Astoria back… and we lose you again.”
“You never had me,” Clarette says softly. “Not this version. I’m just the echo of a second chance.”
His voice cracks. “You look like her.”
“I am her. And I’m not. Just like you’re not the man I knew.”
Theo finally lifts his head. His eyes are glass. “And you’d still do it?”
“Yes,” she says. “For Scorpius. For all of you. Because someone should choose life, even if it means letting go of something good.”
The silence that follows feels unbearable.
Then Astoria—pale, quiet, dying—speaks.
“Let her do it.”
Both men turn to her sharply.
Astoria smiles, soft and tired. “Don’t you see? She came for me. Not you. Not to patch some old wound in your hearts. She came because my son asked for hope. And if I say yes… if I choose to live… then you two have to live, too.”
Theo’s lip twitches. A bitter, aching smile. “That’s cruel.”
“It’s true.”
Draco clenches his jaw, then speaks, not to Astoria—but to Clarette. “Will it hurt you?”
“Not in any way that matters.”
“And if we tried to stop you?”
She gives him a look that says: You know better.
Theo turns to her now, brittle and aching. “Will we remember?”
Clarette hesitates. “Some things, yes. Others… not clearly. You’ll remember that you were loved. That you made the right choice.”
Draco laughs bitterly. “That’s worse.”
She nods. “I know.”
Astoria looks up. “Then do it.”
The ritual is not loud.
No glowing pillars. No deafening chords of magic.
Just Clarette, kneeling in front of Astoria. Pressing the vial to her lips. Whispering an incantation in a language older than Merlin’s line.
A light pours through Astoria’s body like dawn through frostbitten glass. She gasps—but not in pain. Her color begins to return. Her shoulders un-hunch. Her fingers flex, strong and certain.
And Clarette?
She begins to fade.
Not violently.
Not with screams.
But like a candle meeting morning.
Theo steps forward as she becomes translucent. “Wait—please—”
She touches his cheek.
“I would’ve said yes,” she whispers. “If this had been my world.”
Draco’s chest tightens. “You were our world.”
She smiles.
And this time—
She goes.
No ghost.
No trace.
Just absence.
And healing.
Scorpius runs into the room moments later.
“Mum?” he yells.
Astoria rises—alive—smiling.
He throws himself into her arms and begins to cry.
Draco watches them. Hands clenched at his sides.
Theo does not move.
Then, softly, Draco says:
“Tell me we did the right thing.”
Theo exhales. A long, shaking breath.
“We did the only thing.”
Months After the Cure
Malfoy-Nott Manor, Spring
Hope is a dangerous thing.
Draco once thought grief was the crueler of the two—how it gouged, how it never let go. But hope… hope slips in like light under a locked door. You try to shut it out, and still, it warms your skin.
He watched her go.
Watched her fade like morning mist—quiet, complete.
And still.
Still.
He dreams of greenhouses. Of her voice. Of the way her silhouette had shimmered before the final tether snapped. He dreams of the other her, the one who didn’t belong, the one who healed Astoria and gave them no illusions of staying.
But dreams don’t follow rules.
And the truth is: once they saw her again—real, alive, possible—they couldn’t unsee it.
Couldn’t unknow that some version of her survived.
That some version of her still lives.
Theo doesn’t talk about it.
But his research begins again in secret.
He starts slipping off to Knockturn twice a week, makes deals with old alchemists and dimension walkers with cursed eyes and cruel smiles. He returns with bleeding palms and burning journals and pockets full of regrets he doesn’t name.
When Draco catches him once, Theo just says:
“Time isn’t the only door.”
Draco doesn’t stop him.
Because he understands.
Even Astoria notices.
One evening, after Scorpius has gone to bed, she finds Draco in the study, hunched over old notes written in Clarette’s hand. The ones she left behind—deliberately or not—in their timeline.
He doesn’t see her at first.
She speaks softly. “You’re looking for her again.”
He lifts his head. Doesn’t deny it.
Astoria walks to the desk, lays a gentle hand over the parchment.
“She gave me my life,” she says. “But she gave you something, too.”
Draco looks at her then. “What?”
Astoria’s gaze is kind. And sharp.
“Permission.”
He breathes in. Shaky.
Astoria smiles. “You don’t have to pretend she wasn’t everything. I never did.”
Weeks pass.
Then one morning, Theo appears in the doorway of Draco’s private study.
His face pale. His voice low.
“I found something.”
Draco rises slowly.
Theo tosses a small object onto the table.
A coin. Old. Cold. Carved with an impossible symbol—a sigil Draco once saw flash across Clarette’s wrist when she sealed the vault to protect the prototype time turner.
Theo’s voice is flat.
“It’s a trace. From another her.”
Draco’s heart slams once. “Where?”
Theo answers like it costs him:
“Not here. Not now. But close.”
And with that—
The game changes again.
Because once you know she might be out there—
How do you not chase her?