Marauders - Always - Part One

CLXXXIV: The Silenced Floor

A teenaged Declan Alectric sat in the center of his bed, arms around his knees, rocking himself, and weeping into a pillow.

He was in the very next room, and could hear every word of the argument. The walls of the old inn were paper thin it seemed.

In fact, if he hadn't been there to silence the whole of the floor from hearing the fight a woman on the lower floor would have gone to the desk and reported it. Chase Volsung really would have arrived, and no - when he had, Sirius had not had time to go out the window. No questions had been asked and he'd been spelled down with the last words passed between them a pair of hateful statements neither had really meant about furry little problems - a statement he'd only half understood the first time he'd heard it.

But Declan had solved this death rather quickly - early on in his time travels, that is, and here he was to make that particular horror story of time right.

Which was how teenaged Declan ended up with a copy of himself in his own room.

"You can only see me because you're about to think of this," he comforted himself when he first arrived to the room. "You're alright, really, you're not mad, you're about to think up going back in time to silence the floor to save Sirius!"

"S-save Sirius?" stammered the first Declan, who had been upset only about the fight itself at the time and who had come to the inn for an entirely different reason before getting caught up in the drama with Remus and Sirius.

"Yes. So I'm going to go and take care of the silencing and then you get your time turner out and turn it to get me here."

The second Declan, then, went and silenced the floor, realizing as he left the room that he'd seen himself leave the room just before he had disappeared from the bed turning time and now he heard the pop of him disappearing from the bed and he hurried into the corridor before he could get caught up in a time loop.

That was the danger of the time turner. More than two of a given person in a particular time could result in a loop of impossibility. Or madness. And Declan did feel a little madder in the mind after that if he thought too much about having met himself and working out the matter of whether he'd thought of turning time himself or if he'd told himself to do it because in the doing of it he had undone the thing which made him do it and --

"There are rules about time only Mopsus understood, and those rules are best not thought about," Dierks Bell had told him once. "Its in the thinking about time that you go mad. You simply have to obey the rules."

"But if you know the rules then won't you know you're breaking them?" Declan had asked.

Dierks was flabbergasted, "I mean it starts a loop and if you think --"

"So I won't think - duh?" Declan had said with a laugh.

Sirius's that night was the first life he had saved.

He'd gone out in the hall, silenced the floor, and rushed back into the room next door to the fight, sandwiched between Remus's room and Oliver's.

But by stopping the arrival of Chase Volsung, he'd allowed the fight to continue, and now, back in the room after having silenced the floor, he was horrified by what he was overhearing... and he failed to get up to do what he had come to do, and there had been consequences of not doing what he'd come for because he'd been so upset about the argument and the nasty words being said.

Tears had fallen over his cheeks in streams. Why were they fighting like that?

But he hadn't dared to break the rules twice in one time to fix what he had come to fix... Somehow that maddness seemed too mad. That's the sort of circle Ottalie was caught in... he would have to fix the other situation another way. Another time.

But when?

And what if he didn't?

Would he fail and the time turning would be for nothing?

Which was why Declan was confused when the fight was interrupted next door, and he looked up from the pillow he was weeping into.

He heard footsteps in the hallway and a firm knock on the door and a female voice shouted out, "Housekeeping!"