Their Hufflepuff: The Hourglass Heart

Prologue

15 years after the Wizarding War

The Wizengamot courtroom was not silent in the way of a library or a cathedral—places where silence is a choice or a form of respect. It was silent in the way of a tomb. The air was stagnant, tasting of old stone, dust, and the sharp, metallic tang of judgment that had been settling into the floorboards for centuries.

Theodore Nott stood at the center of the pit.

At thirty-two years old, he should have been in the prime of his life. Instead, in the harsh, flickering glare of the magical torches, he looked ancient. His frame, once broad and commanding, was gaunt, his skin pulled tight over high cheekbones like parchment over bone. His wrists were bound in enchanted silver—shackles that hummed with a low, predatory magic designed to feast on his own, keeping his power suppressed.

Beneath his charcoal-grey shirt, resting against the hollow of his throat, was a secret. Regina Scamander wedding ring hung on a thin, unbreakable chain. The gold was worn smooth, not by time, but by the three years Theo had spent clutching it in the dark, pressing it into his palm until his skin broke and his blood stained the metal. It was the only thing in the world that still felt warm.

Across the pit sat Harry Potter.

Harry didn't look like the Boy Who Lived or the Savior of the Wizarding World today. He looked like a man who had been forced to hunt one of the mans who had fought with him in the war. His Auror robes were rumpled, his hair a frantic mess, and his eyes were shot through with broken red veins. His hands trembled as they rested on the evidence table, hovering near a confiscated artifact: the jagged, blackened remains of a Time-Turner. It looked like a charred heart.

Ninety-nine attempts. Ninety-nine fractures in the universe. None of them had been enough to hold her.

The gallery was a graveyard of familiar faces, though to Theo, they were merely ghosts of people he had seen die or grieve in a hundred different ways. Draco Malfoy was seated behind the rail, his face a mask of pale, frozen marble. His knuckles were white where he gripped the wood, his breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches. Beside him, Blaise Zabini had his head bowed, his shoulders shaking with the silent, rhythmic tremors of a man trying not to shatter into a thousand pieces. Lorenzo didn't sit; he leaned against the back wall, his eyes fixed on the vaulted ceiling, stubbornly refusing to look at the broken man in the center of the room. He couldn't bear to see the end of the story.

The Chief Warlock's voice cut through the stagnant air like a jagged blade.

"Theodore Nott. You stand accused of: The illegal manufacture of Class-A Temporal Artifacts; Ninety-nine counts of Temporal Trespass; and the Gross Endangerment of the Magical and Physical Fabric of Reality."

The Warlock peered over his spectacles, his voice dropping into a hollow register. "How do you plead?"

Theo lifted his head. His dark eyes were hollow, stripped of everything but a terrifying, calm clarity. He looked like a man who had already seen the end of the world and found it underwhelming.

"Guilty."

The word didn't ripple; it dropped like a lead weight into a deep, dark well. No echo. No vibration. Just finality.

Harry leaned forward, his voice a raw whisper that bypassed the official dictation quills. "Theodore... please. Just give them something. A reason. A mitigating circumstance. Explain why the signatures of your magic were found at the site of every major temporal disturbance for five years. Tell them you weren't trying to destroy us."

Theo considered him. He looked at Harry not as a hero or an investigator, but as a relic from a life that had ended the very second Regina's heart stopped beating.

"I built it," Theo began, his voice devoid of tremor, sounding like the rustle of dry leaves. "Because the world stopped making sense the day my wife died. I lived in a world of cause and effect. I thought if I changed the cause, I could survive the effect."

The word wife hung in the air, sharp as a shard of glass, cutting through the legal jargon of the room.