Fractured Time

Summary: Continuation of Birth of a Nightmare Man chapter thirteen, where we left Rabastan and Draco wondering about Harry Potter's fate. But now time has become a strange thing, and their world is dying. How can they escape? Will they ever see Harry Potter again?

Pairing/s: None.

Warnings: Time-travelling and dimension-travelling, some violence and gore. People acting OOC.

Disclaimers: I don't own Harry Potter nor do I make any money on fanfiction.

-o-

Time to see what happens in the world the Nightmare Lord left behind!

-o-

Chapter One

From Birth of a Nightmare Man, chapter thirteen:

Inside the Ministry, the air rumbled. Somewhere, people heard a distant scream. It echoed around them. Pressed against a wall, now forgotten, Rabastan and Draco looked at each other. They heard people run around, people searching for the person behind that scream.

"That was Potter just now, wasn't it?" Draco said.

-o-

The walls didn't stop shaking against their backs. The ground didn't stop trembling. It just got worse. As Rabastan and Draco looked, cracks appeared in the marble floor. Small stones bounced up in the air by the force somewhere beneath them.

Rabastan grabbed Draco's arm and said:

"Best chance for us to slip out without being noticed."

"But what about Potter?" Draco said. "We need to find him!"

"He told me to get you out," Rabastan replied. "By any means necessary. If that means knocking you out, I will knock you out."

Besides, that scream… this shaking. It wasn't good.

"But he…" Draco looked lost.

To think they both hated Harry Potter at one point. Hated him for years and years, Rabastan longer than Malfoy. Now Rabastan would like to go find the boy himself. Find that crazy boy, and haul him and Malfoy both out of there. But he had to get Malfoy out first.

"If he got caught, we'll get him out," Rabastan told him. "But now we need to move, or we'll never hear the end of it from him if we manage to get caught in this perfect chaos."

Draco nodded at last, and they began to move. The floor was difficult to navigate due to its shaking, and they heard people running away. Twists and turns didn't bring them to a safe point though, and Rabastan just barely managed to pull Draco behind some curtains in a shadowed corner before Amelia Bones showed up with several Aurors.

Another one, a young Auror at that, ran up to her and said:

"Minister, Potter—"

"Did you get him?" Amelia interrupted.

"No, Minister. But we found the room he was in last. The one with the time-turners."

"He used one?" she demanded to know.

"No, he didn't. It's… there are cracks."

"Yes, the whole place is shaking to pieces!" she said.

"No, Minister, not just in the walls, there are cracks in the air!" the Auror said. "The time-turners have all shattered. Potter's nowhere to be found."

"Show me."

"It's too dangerous, one of the Unspeakables approached the cracks, and he vanished."

"Vanished?" Amelia repeated.

Rabastan held his breath. Vanished? Into thin air? What was this about cracks, in the air? Of all the magic he had seen and heard about, that was new.

"His body, his magical signature, everything! It's as if he was never there."

Whatever had happened, they needed to get out. Rabastan sent a faint prayer that Potter had made it out alright, and pulled Draco back into the shadows to find another way out.

By the time they got to London, they noticed the trembling in the streets. Whatever magic had been unleashed, it wasn't disappearing quietly. Muggles stuck to each other, looking around. Rabastan pulled Draco behind him, avoiding bigger streets and searching for a place where they could safely begin to Apparate back to Malfoy manor.

"What's going on?" Draco wondered at last.

"I have no idea," Rabastan admitted.

-o-

Even for the Malfoys and Rabastan, who were in hiding, the news came quickly; five days after the Unspeakable had vanished, he showed up again. But to him, only a moment had passed. By that point, rumours spread that more cracks had appeared, and at least four Aurors and other Ministry personnel had disappeared into them. As if the cracks acted like time-turners.

But not everyone showed up again, and the cracks spread. Splintering the air, they moved across the Ministry levels, and eventually came to London itself. It caused a panic with the Muggle population when an entire busload of people disappeared, shortly followed by three cars and several pedestrians. Unlike wizards and witches, the Muggles appeared to be unable to see the cracks in the air.

Draco wanted to have a look.

"And you're just going to let him?" Narcissa asked Rabastan.

"I'm gonna be there so he doesn't do anything stupid, like trying to touch it," Rabastan replied. "I got him out of the Ministry when everyone was looking for us; I'm not going to let him disappear into a bloody crack in the air."

They went to London, under disguise, and saw the cracks for themselves. Draco stopped, and stared. Rabastan didn't blame him, since he was basically doing the same thing.

It was a road. In the middle of the road, the air splintered into several shards of reality. The cracks were slightly opened, and oozed time and power. There was the sensation in the air of something pulsating around them the closer they got, and the cracks were glowing slightly.

It felt wrong. Raw. Rabastan rubbed his arms, shrugged his shoulders but couldn't shift the strange air that had settled around him. He wanted to look away. He couldn't look away.

A Muggle girl ran over the road. She came close to a crack. It surged, and her scream was cut short as she was pulled into one of the cracks… and she was gone. Just gone. The sound of glass cracking, and the air splintered itself some more.

"That's just wrong," Draco breathed out. "What the hell happened down there?"

Rabastan knew about the Time Room at the Ministry, he hated that room, but the Ministry must have had another room since the Time Room had been destroyed. One with only time-turners? Was their destruction the explanation to this?

"What I want to know," he said instead of trying to explain or speculate, "is where the hell Potter went."

"Maybe you ought to ask when," Draco realized.

Oh, shit.

Once the cracks moved into London, the Ministry was overrun with them. The location of the entire Ministry was moved, while a small group remained to try and stop the cracks. It became apparent soon enough that they weren't successful.

"Figures Potter can put the magical world into chaos without even being here," Rabastan mused one day.

Potter hadn't returned to the house, and while Rabastan lived with the Malfoys he went back there just to check. He wondered if Potter truly had gotten pulled into one of the cracks of time. If that was the case, he could be anywhere, at any time.

People still feared him, and the Dementors. But that was another thing Rabastan had noticed. They had all left shortly after Potter vanished. He had tried to ask, as they floated past him, from the house to… somewhere. Only one had given him some sort of clue.

They couldn't speak a language Rabastan understood. But Potter had had the strange notion of teaching them to write. So one Dementor had written something to Rabastan, when he asked where they were going.

Home. That was the only clue, and it really didn't help in the end. Where was home for them? Was it Potter? How would they know where to go?

All Rabastan knew was that they had vanished, to wherever they seemed to believe home was.

And during all of this, the cracks of time continued to shatter the world.

-o-

London was abandoned within months, by both magical people as well as Muggles. They fled, however they could, from a city that was slowly cracking, shattering into thousands of potential places in time and space.

How far would the shattering of reality go? Was there no way to stop it? And where had Harry Potter ended up?

To be continued…

A short introduction to what reality Harry Potter, our dear Nightmare Lord, left behind.

Chapter two: Years pass, and Rabastan feels like a certain action must be taken, before it's too late.

See you later,

Tiro