Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! As the day of gratitude approaches, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who has read, left followed, favorited, or commented on Turn Back This Cursed Clock. The steady stream of feedback motivated me to work on this chapter much more consistently than I usually do, and I would have finished it weeks ago were it not for the sudden onset of the end of semester slam. So, here's to a bountiful table for all and more updates in the future!

Draco spent the next days in a black mood. Fueled by his little chat with Potter, his dreams woke him almost as soon as he closed his eyes. As the shadows under his eyes darkened, so did his temper. Even Granger avoided him.

What was he doing, pandering to these brats? He was here to stop a war. To bring down a madman. Who cared if Potter and his little friends liked him? The bleating masses may have convinced themselves Potter was their "savior," but Draco knew better. They were children, and they would die like muggles.

Draco threw himself into research. He could never best the Dark Lord in a duel. He harbored no illusions about that. But he shouldn't need to. At this moment in time the Dark Lord was a wraith, meaner than the weakest ghost, eking out a pathetic existence on the fringes of reality. He already teetered on the edge of oblivion. All Draco had to do was puzzle out the enchantment anchoring him in this plane, destroy the damn thing, and then the Dark Lord's spirit would slip through the Veil. A fittingly ignoble end for the megalomaniac, Draco thought.

It was a simple enough prospect, except that the relevant theories were all Dark, dangerous, experimental magic of a complexity that most wizards could never dream of comprehending. They certainly weren't in the texts available to an eleven-year-old in his first weeks of school.

Draco snarled and slammed closed the latest, useless book he'd checked out of the library. McGonagall frowned at him from her desk, and he lowered his eyes, pretending to go back to the short essay about the Impermanence Theorem that they were supposed to be working on.

"Harry, what did you say to him?" Hermione whispered, clearly audible from the row behind Draco. She'd taken refuge with Potter and Weasley when his waspishness grew unbearable, and she now alternated between staring a disapproving hole in his head and pestering Potter about what had happened.

"I told you, Hermione." His tightly controlled tone indicated that the boy-who-lived was very close to a fit of temper himself. "I went and talked to him like you said. He wanted to know why I didn't like being famous. When I asked him what he'd do if it were his parents, he went off."

"But—"

Potter voice grew loud enough that other students started to look up, curious. "For the last time, that's all! So stop asking me every thirty seconds. If he wants to act like a git, let him."

Draco turned and shot the both of them a freezing glare. Was it a Gryffindor trait, he thought angrily, to assume that people's ears stopped working whenever you wanted to talk about them?

Potter glared back.

Fine then. Draco smirked deliberately and, as he shifted his wand to make room for him to write, gave it a little twitch. Potter's things flew off his desk in flurry of parchment. His inkwell landed in Weasley's lap, who jerked and successfully managed to knock over both his chair and the inkwell, the latter of which shattered on the stone floor. Potter's half-finished essay landed in the spreading puddle.

"Mr. Potter!" McGonagall snapped, mending the glass and vanishing the spilled ink in one angry gesture. Weasley picked up the ruined essay with two fingers and handed it regretfully to his housemate. "If your side conversations are so distracting that you cannot even keep hold of your possessions, perhaps you should not conduct them in my class!"

"That was Malfoy!" Potter said angrily. "He—"

"Hey!" Draco protested. "My last name doesn't automatically volunteer me to be your scapegoat, Potter!"

"That's enough, both of you."

McGonagall frowned at Draco. He stared back with an expression of righteous indignation, but inside he was grinning. Considering his (supposed) magical inexperience, his so-far pristine behavior, and his implication that Potter had something against his family, McGonagall wouldn't dare punish him. She prided herself on being scrupulously fair, and her dislike of Draco's father would make her especially hesitant, for fear she was unfairly prejudiced against the son.

Merlin, but he loved time travel.

"Ten points from Gryffindor, Mr. Potter, for trying to pin your own carelessness on one of your housemates."

"But—"

"You are lucky it's not a detention. I do not tolerate disunity and petty finger-pointing in my House."

He had three Gryffindors glaring at the back of his head now, but at least they were quiet about it. When class ended, he packed up his things and fled before Granger could corner him. In the process, he nearly trampled Longbottom, who was gathering his parchments with glacial slowness.

"Oi, why don't you hex him too while you're at it?" Weasely shouted after him as Draco's white-blonde hair vanished from sight. "That git. You alright, Neville?"

The round-faced boy blinked at being addressed. "Um…yes."

"Good on, then." The redhead clapped his housemate on the shoulder before he and Harry exited at a more reasonable pace, Hermione trailing an awkward half-step behind them.

Neville continued organizing his bag with exaggerated care until he was the last student in the room. Only then did he approach the desk.

"Professor?"

"Yes, Mr. Longbottom." She put down her quill and looked at him over her square, wire-rimmed spectacles. "You have a question?"

"Not as such, Professor." Neville took a deep breath, reminding himself of the days of careful deliberation that had led him to this conclusion. "I don't want to get anyone in trouble, but there's something I really think you should know."

When Minerva knocked on the door to the Headmaster's office, her disquiet could be read in the furrow of her brow and the pressed-thin line of her lips.

As she entered, she nodded politely to the Sorting Hat. It bowed back gravely.

"Minerva, my dear, you're rather early." said the Headmaster, prying apart two particularly stubborn candies. He wore lemon-yellow robes today, which clashed fantastically with his ever-twinkling blue eyes. "Would you like a toffee?" he asked, offering one to her.

"No, thank you, Albus," she said, seating herself in the chair before his massive, claw-footed desk. "A…troubling matter has come to my attention. I felt it best to inform you immediately."

What she really meant was that she couldn't focus on marking papers. What the Longbottom boy had told her was more than simply troubling. The innocent explanations for the situation he had described were precious few, and the more likely possibilities both chilled and enraged her.

She adjusted her hat—a nervous tic she had developed back when the first grey started streaking her hair. She had been self-conscious about it then, such a silly thing. Now she liked to think she had a clearer sense of priority.

"The matter is in regards to a student," she added, and Albus abruptly forgot his sweets, fixing her with the piercing intensity of his full attention. She was glad to see it. For all the children thought her stern and unshakeable, there were things she could not bear, times when she—indeed, all the faculty—needed Albus' gentle wisdom, his extraordinary insight, his implacable will to guide them toward the greatest good.

He would know what to do.

Minerva nodded firmly to herself and touched her hat once more. "It's one of my first-years," she said, deciding to ease into it. Maybe she was overreacting. Lord, let her be overreacting. "He seems to be plagued by…unusually disturbing nightmares."

"Ah." Albus relaxed somewhat, stroking his waist-length beard. "Mr. Potter, I presume. Given his circumstances, the odd bad dream is unfortunately not—"

"Not Mr. Potter," she said. She had made the same assumption, had been ready to explain about dark curses and their side effects and then get back to her marking, but Mr. Longbottom had interrupted her—politely but firmly—and asked that she let him finish. He was a very brave boy. She looked forward to seeing what he would make of himself. "It is Mr. Malfoy who seems to be the problem."

The Headmaster blinked, then leaned back in his chair and contemplated her over steepled fingers. "Perhaps I should allow you to finish before leaping to conclusions."

Minerva folded her hands to hide their half-nervous, half-furious trembling and relayed what she had been told: "First of all, the poor boy appears to rarely sleep, once or twice this week for a few hours each night. When he does…"

Levitation. Possibly animation, although she couldn't be sure without seeing it herself. Luminescence. And once the windows had rattled hard enough to crack. Longbottom couldn't say exactly how many of the other boys knew what was happening.

"Harry probably knows," he had said. "He's always cranky the morning after one of Malfoy's bad nights. But I expect everyone else sleeps through it." Squinting in thought, he added. "Ron thinks someone's playing a prank, because he leaves his stuff everywhere and it floats off. Then when the glass cracked, everyone thought it was an earthquake, but no one in the other rooms felt it. I asked."

He had ducked his head and shifted self-consciously under Minerva's increasingly intense gaze. "Really, I only noticed anything was off because I sleep with my curtains open. To watch the stars," he explained. "Anyway, a book dropped on me once, and last night I woke up with Ron's sock tickling my face."

He shuddered at that, as if a boy's dirty sock was the most horrible thing he could imagine. Maybe it was. Minerva found herself rather hoping so.

"That's when I saw everything floating," he continued, "and I heard Malfoy tossing about in his sleep. But I'm not complaining about him!" he hurried to add. "Honestly. I was just worried. He can't keep on not sleeping. It isn't normal, and with what happened to Harry, I guess I…I just thought a professor should know. In case he was sick, or…or needed help."

And he had been quite right to come to her. Minerva had stressed that as much as she could. Really, for all that she loved Gryffindors, as a group they had an alarming tendency to bull right into situations that they were hopelessly unqualified for.

"And then," Minerva continued, "the night of the Sorting, Mr. Potter attempted to rouse him from a nightmare, and it seems Mr. Malfoy blasted him right across the room."

Albus, who had been nodding thoughtfully as she spoke, suddenly frowned. He knew, as she did, that accidental magic rarely manifested in such a way. It was exactly what it sounded like—an accident. Wild. Unrestrained. The lashing out of a child.

This was not like that.

To throw a human being twenty feet across a room required control—power to provide the force, of course, but control to wield it in such a way that Mr. Potter and only Mr. Potter was affected. Essentially, it was the difference between dropping a plate when someone unexpectedly taps you on the shoulder, and throwing it at their head. Minerva suspected she herself couldn't do it so neatly without a wand, not unless she were quite distraught at the time. Even then, she might leave something of a blast radius.

And so they were left with the question of why. Why had Mr. Malfoy felt the need to attack his fellow student? And if he had not meant to per say and had acted instinctively, where did he acquire such an instinct?

Answers were there, if one had the intelligence to see them. If one had the courage to look.

Nightmares. Common enough in children, especially newly separated from their parents, in a strange new place, surrounded by strange new people. Hardly worth a second glance.

Insomnia. Not unheard of. Combined with the nightmares—assuming the nightmares were regular and caused the insomnia, which was not certain—it suggested Mr. Malfoy might be an unusually anxious child. Perhaps.

Strong reaction when startled from sleep. That fit with the anxious child theory. And it had, after all, only been a single incident. Not a pattern. Perhaps the boy had been having a particularly distressing dream.

Albus' blue eyed scrutiny intensified, but he did not speak: waiting, as promised, for her to finish. Minerva cleared her throat and continued, "Mr. Potter received a bloody nose from the encounter, which Mr. Malfoy repaired with his wand. The student who came to me remembered the incantation. Tergeo."

First aid knowledge. Tergeo was not a difficult spell, but it was rather specialized for broken noses. Mr. Malfoy could have picked it up from watching his parents cast it. If he was gifted, seeing it one or two times might have been sufficient to learn it. Even as a child. Even without prior magical training. He may even have been able to cast it perfectly for the first time on Mr. Potter that night. It was possible. It was. But not likely. (If that was the case he deserved reprimanding. Practicing healing spells on fellow students was incredibly reckless.)

More likely that he had received training. Yes, that was better. The scion of an old, powerful, wealthy house with many enemies, his parents may have seen fit to tutor him in self-defense and first aid. He may even have requested it, if he were an anxious child. He would have excelled at it, if he were gifted.

Albus' eyes were blazing now, but his voice was gentle when he prompted: "And his behavior? How is it?"

Minerva clutched her wand. "Disorganized. He seemed to be making friends the first few days. Ms. Granger attached herself to him remarkably quickly. He was quick to distract other students from the subject of Mr. Potter; although, I can't say if that was jealousy on his part or consideration of the poor boy's shyness. I even saw him share his jam with Mr. Weasley, and you know how their families despise each other.

"But the past few days…," Minerva took off her spectacles to rub her eyes. "It's been a complete reversal. He snaps at everyone. He does nothing but read all the time. In class. At meals in the Great Hall. Even at night, apparently. The others have begun avoiding him, even Ms. Granger, for all her enthusiasm."

She stood and began to pace. She mustn't jump to conclusions. Maybe the assault on Mr. Potter had been merely a prank gone wrong. Maybe the boy had anticipated a prank and retaliated preemptively. He could be staying awake on purpose for fear of reprisal, or he could be fretting over possible punishment. The nightmares could be unrelated.

Perhaps she wasn't giving the anxiety theory enough credit. Anxiety was often accompanied by depression. Depression would explain his irritability. But if he were so anxious, shouldn't he be either painfully shy or overly eager for his classmates' acceptance? More concerned about his grades? Anxiety would mean there had to be at least one thing he was anxious about, surely. She had not noticed him startle easily. Today for example, when Weasley knocked over his chair. He did not flinch at the sound. Nor did he seem frightened of her, an authority figure. Perhaps because she was female? If his abuser was male...

If Lucius had hurt that boy, she would see him in Azkaban, Minerva decided, even if she had to transfigure him into a mouse and carry him there in her teeth.

"Minerva," Albus interrupted gently. His eyes were shadowed, but not blazing with the fury she expected. Had she missed something? Some kinder explanation? Please, God, let there be—

"Minerva," he repeated, and she forced herself to stop running in literal and figurative circles. "The boy is safe here," Albus reminded her. "We have time to discern the truth. Resources to care for him, whatever the cause may be."

She sank back into her chair. Yes, that was true. The students were safe here, guarded by herself, her fellow faculty, the greatest wizard alive, and every ghost, suit of armor, and stone in the castle. She breathed deeply and took hold of herself.

"Inform relevant faculty of the situation," Albus said, looking up at the ceiling. Others might have thought him distracted, but Minerva knew it was something he did when thinking deeply. "I trust you to select the ones who can be discreet. More eyes may give us a clearer picture of young Mr. Malfoy's emotional state and, hopefully, the situation as a whole. Advise them to contrive a reason for him to visit the hospital wing so Madame Pomfrey may perform diagnostic tests. That should confirm or deny most of our suspicions. In the meantime, I shall compose a letter to Auror Shacklebolt. If any…untoward events were reported and then buried, he should be able to dig them up for us."

Yes, that was sensible. As much as Minerva longed to take immediate action, they could not accuse a family such as the Malfoys without incontrovertible proof. Even then, it would be a hard-fought battle. But she could be patient. She would wait, and when she finally pounced, there would be no bolt hole left into which they could scurry.

She turned, already composing a list of the most suitable faculty. Severus, for sure. For all his surly attitude, he was a clever and perceptive man. Pomona as well. Her motherly appearance put people at ease, and she was as loyal and implacable as the badger of her house. Filius, of course. He was one of the most experienced professors on the faculty, after all. Rolanda. While not a full professor, some students felt more comfortable opening up to a coach, and she might need the forewarning should the boy have some kind of flashback in the air. Binns wouldn't even read the memo. Quirinus….no, she decided. Perhaps she was doing him a disservice, but he had changed since his days as a student, and she feared in his nervousness that he would give something away. Most of the other staff would have little contact with a first year, and she saw no need to make the young Malfoy's sensitive situation the subject of staffroom gossip. That was enough to be going on for now, then. She reached for the door.

"Minerva?" Albus peered at her over his half-moon spectacles. "Your concern for a student's well-being does you credit. I have no doubt that you will make an excellent Headmistress, in time."

She nodded her head. "Thank you, Albus. Although I trust you will hold the position for some years yet."

As always, your feedback is incredibly valuable to me. I stretched perspective beyond what I think would normally be accepted in a more formal work, so let me know what you thought of that. As for the interference of the professors, it's about time the Hogwarts staff were allowed to show some competency, so here they are acting like rational adults. As a side note, I am a semester away from a Bachelor's degree in psychology (among other things), so most of the child psych discussed here is actual, real, scientifically-based fiction. Simplified, of course, for the sake of brevity and good flow. Hopefully it was detailed enough to be satisfying without bogging down.

On a side note, I now have a Tumblr account! The name is wingsofmercury. Follow me to get updates, sneak peaks, and perhaps random tidbits about me and my stories! I am very new to it, so I will rely on your support and guidance!