I. 1952: 1908

1.

Alexandria.

The city itself is a delicate oyster-shell pink under the glare of the sun, filled with shadow-women and ghost-men. The language is as exotic, pared down by the sand and refreshed by the water. Contradictory: written backwards, from right to left. After two hours in Egypt he can say ‘salaam waleikum’ and knows if he asks ‘when’ and someone answers ‘insha allah,’ it means never.

He stands in the shadow of the pyramids with his Leica slung around his neck on a black leather strap, taking photographs like a tourist.

He closes the camera, ridding himself of distractions like a snake sloughing off skin, and unfolds the map in his pocket. There’s a small red cross that marks the reason he is here in Egypt. Tom Apparates there and barely pauses before twisting the glittering golden Time-Turner around his neck.

2.

The top buttons of Rudolf’s herringbone shirt are pulled off lazily, pale against the browned patch of skin and the sharp jut of bone underneath. It matches the thin, delicate wrists and ankles visible above the olive green leather strap of his sandals. One leg is pulled up unselfconsciously to his body, back grazing the rough surface of the palm, eyes intent on the heavily-bound book in front of him. Tom approaches close enough to be able to hear the words he’s mouthing to himself. Mathematics.

His foot scuffs a drying palm leaf and Rudolf looks up, eyes wide and startled.

Tom opens his mouth and his German sublimates under the desert sun. “Salaam waleikum,” he says.

3.

Tom transfigures a rock into sugary ice-cream which melts all over Rudolf’s fingers.

4.

The water burns his throat with its coolness, and Tom can feel red-hot pinpricks because Rudolf is watching him so intently. He wipes a trickle of sweat with the back of his sleeve and smiles. “What are you looking at?”

“Are you real?”

Tom laughs. “Of course.”

Rudolf scuttles closer, at once awed and attracted by this spider-legged creature seated like an oasis on a sand dune. He reaches out tentatively and laughs when his fingers brush skin. “I-- had to make sure.”

“And,” he asks, smiling like a knife. “Are you?”

The boy grins suddenly, a flash of bright white against golden skin. “Not in the least.”

5.

Tom casts the cruciatus on a scorpion that climbed onto the boy’s shirt.

Rudolf’s eyes shine.

6.

Tom waits until the desert sun sinks and is swallowed up by sand. It is dark and cool and inviting at night, the shadow mitigating the majesty and forming a calm swell of ocean. The sphinx appears only at dawn.

“I’m leaving for Germany tomorrow--,”

“I know.”

“I’m going to the Evangelische Pada--,”

“I know.” Tom runs his hands through Rudolf’s hair and smiles. “I will see you.”

“When?”

Tom places a finger on Rudolf’s lips, feeling the history bleed from them, and smiles. “Soon,” he says, and twists the time turner.

II. 1953: 1911

1.

A gasp breaks the silence, intercedes into reality like a a comma, portending a surprise. “You!”

“Yes,” Tom steps forward and places a finger on Rudolf’s lips just like before only for Rudolf three years have passed. “Did you think I was a mirage?”

“Dust and dry air and dehydration,” Rudolf intones, his voice deeper now. “That’s what I thought you were.”

Tom smiles and rakes his finger along a cheekbone. “I’m real.”

“I don’t believe you.”

2.

Rudolf takes him home, holding his hand to make sure he doesn’t dissipate into the air, and introduces him to his father. “A friend, sir,” he says, heart beating faster. “From the Padagogium.”

His father scrutinises the dark haired boy over the morning paper, his eyes unkind. “You have a name, boy?”

“Heitz,” Tom responds. “Adolf Heitz.”

3.

“I hate him,” Rudolf says.

Tom considers. “I could turn him into a toad for you.”

4.

The paper drops with a rustle like the pages of a history book, and then shifts as a toad pokes its head out from under it. It’s bright yellow-green with bulbuous glass bead eyes that just stare. It leaps out from behind the spectacles and tries to dive under the sofa, but Tom gets to him first. “Thought you would get away that easily, Herr Hess?”

Rudolf’s laughing so hard that he has to hold a chair for support.

Tom is skilled at stealing souls.

“Got any flies?” Tom asks.

III. 1954: 1918

1.

A pause filled with the wind-blurred rush of all the years that have passed and then the present like a brick wall, glued together with the mortar of words.

“What are you?”

Tom doesn’t reply for a moment, and when he looks up his eyes glint red. “I am Lord Voldemort.”

“Wha--?”

“Obliviate,” Tom whispers, and it’s so easy.

2.

With arms curled around Tom over the white duvet, Rudolf says, “I think I’ve loved you since--,” a grin flashes. “Since you turned my father into a toad.”

3.

Listening to the beating of the heart, pressing his hands against Tom’ skin, harder and harder to see when he’ll evaporate underneath his fingers, Rudolf is almost convinced. Then he kisses him and there’s a crackle through Tom’s lips, on his tongue that speaks the language of God and everything recedes.

“Can you fly, Herr Adolf Heitz?”

Tom considers. “On a broomstick.”

Rudolf bursts out laughing. That reminds Tom just how ridiculous that idea is, how ridiculous magic is, and why he never goes to the Muggle world.

He levitates the bed and smiles at Rudolf’s yelp of surprise, though he kisses him five feet in the air.

IV. 1954: 1920

1.

There are stellar charts, ancient books and complicated diagrams strewn all over the bed when Tom appears next. Rudolf looks up and the guilt on his face is quickly replaced by incredulity. “I--,” he sounds distracted, distanced by the spin of constellations in his eyes. “I thought you’d come last year. All the planets were aligned but-- you didn’t. And I must have gotten it wrong, I knew I had done something wrong and--,”

“I’m here now,” he promises, and he’s more substantial than a glitter-galaxy through a telescope, untouchably white.

‘The blue of your eyes is the sky, the white tips of your fingers clouds, the green of your eyes grassy land, and heaven is a kiss against the curve of your chin, so delicate that blood pulses under my lips.’

When Rudolf says that to him, Tom smiles and his mouth is filled with sharp white teeth. “Melodramatic,” he confirms. “Clichéd.”

He’s known Tom for quite some time now, in fits and starts, so he isn’t hurt. “But you like it anyway,” Rudolf says and sees Tom nod.

2.

Tom sleeps in the crook of his arm like a child and that’s when Rudolf realises that the sky reflected in Tom’s eyes is not his. Every time they kiss it is a kiss goodbye, but this time Tom can taste the tang of time on Rudolf’s tongue, the crackle of it in his limbs. Rudolf has grown while Tom has been gone, and when he presses against him he feels insubstantial. A ghost.

Tom smiles slightly.

They break apart and Rudolf looks at him for the last time, carefully, intently, as if to memorise every detail but Tom knows that he has already faded into a silhouette, a shape waiting to be filled.

“--but you will remember my name,” he whispers, harsh against his ear.

3.

Tom knows: to name something is to make it real.

4.

He holds out his hand politely, absently. “Hess.”

“Hitler,” the man replies, silver swastika glittering like a galaxy at his collar. He takes his hand with the click of bone jarring against bone, and soon Rudolf forgets everything but Adolf's name.

*


AN: In the same universe as ‘A Map of Our Failures’. The Rudolf in this story is indeed the infamous Rudolf Hess, who was thought to have idolised Hitler in the extreme.

End.