No… no, no, no…

Harry backed up until he hit the tree behind him, eyes refusing to leave Draco's cold body.

Laughter screeched and hollered throughout the Death Eater ranks, Voldemort at the head of them all, gloating above the broken body.

No...

The Elder Wand came into his blurry vision. Could it kill him?

Harry looked over at Hagrid, the half-giant's face soaked with blood, and then at the mangled remains of Snape's body.

No.

His gaze drifted back to the Elder Wand.

Did it matter?

The Boy Who Lived heard a final shriek of laughter and, just as green light arched from the wand, Harry spun the Time Turner as hard as he could.

Time and Fate had always gotten on well. They were intertwined with the fabric of the Universe, powers that were strongest when together. As Fate laid out the destinies of all souls, Time pulled them along over all the bumps and dips in the road.

But every now and then there was a slip-up.

The biggest one of these slips, Time would argue, was the invention of the Time-Turner. It was an unnatural sort of magic, Time claimed, a feeble attempt at a mastery of a power no living thing should have any control over.

Fate had promptly responded that this was actually a fascinating development and immediately began scrawling out complicated lifelines for its favorite playthings. Besides, Fate argued, it was Hogwarts this was happening at. No place on that measly planet, or really in that galaxy, was so close to the powers.

They didn't talk for, well, quite some time and Death eventually had to go chat with Time and inform it that yes, while giving the humans on Earth the power to master them wasn't exactly fun, there was no arguing with Fate and everything generally had the odd habit of working itself out. Emphasis on generally.

Besides, Death had said, these humans already had unnatural powers flowing through them as it was. There was no way to stop them.

So Time had accepted the Time-Turner, albeit grudgingly, and couldn't help its sigh of relief when they were immediately locked away and rarely used. Time could handle the occasional hours being flipped, and tuck away the extra threads without much problem.

Of course, that was before Harry Potter happened.

Time had considered killing the insolent weakling the second he started his flight away from his era, as it had done to so many who dare spin back more than a handful of hours, but Death outright refused to pull the broken soul into its realm. Fate assured them both that it would turn out alright and started hurriedly searching for its plans for the boy.

Time refused to listen and instead set about stripping the Wizard of any possessions that would make this hell even harder to manage and tried to mend where the universal fabric started to unravel. Death looked over its shoulder and sighed at the mangled mass of threads before simply severing them, and Time watched in horror as two lines formed at the point where Harry Potter landed.

This was a mess far beyond any human comprehension, however, and had no direct bearing on the now naked man slumped in the just outside of Hogwarts' Forbidden Forest August 24th, 1943.