It's Christmas Time Again: A Time-Traveling TMS Holiday Extravaganza

Just Before Christmas Holiday, 2013

"Why does Dierks wear three watches?" Victorie asked, looking up from her notes. She was sitting cross-legged on the pouf, my journal open on the table at her elbow. Her hot pink quill - made from the wing feather of a flamingo, a gift from a pen pal named Zöe, who lived in some equatorial country far away - shimmied as she shook it thoughtfully.

"I dunno," I replied. "He likes clocks." I was careful to stay concentrating on the swirling cursive writing on the pages of her journal.

Victorie lay down her quill and picked up her book again, turning the pages and glancing at my journal until she found the page she was trying to reference. "I suppose that's the engineering part of him." She paused. "How are you liking magical engineering, speaking of?"

"There's a lot of maths I wasn't anticipating," I replied. "How's animagi class?"

"Tres brilliante," she replied. "McGonagall is so amazing. I love her so much!"

"Have you figured out what you change into yet?" I asked.

She shook her head, "There's still sooo much to learn about the theory first, idiot." She smirked at me to let me know the pet name was just that and not intended to be mean.

"Well maybe if you weren't so busy dreaming weird things about my best mate you'd have time to study faster," I teased, waving her journal at her.

"At least my dreams aren't made up."

"Neither are mine."

Victorie snorted, "S'te plaît! They don't even make sense."

I shrugged, "Doesn't mean I didn't have them."

She shook her head and went back to her notes taking.

Truth was, I'd been having more and more crazy dreams that truly didn't make any sense at all. I'd started wondering if last Christmas had been one of my dreams. Ever since we got back to Hogwarts, Dierks had barely spoken about time travel or Ottalie and Alphard and whenever I tried to bring it up, he diverted my attention elsewhere. Apart from the Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist and the tinkling gold music box in his dormitory, I often wondered if anything had ever happened at all.

I worried that he was changing his mind about whether I was cool enough to be his friend.

"Is Dierks coming with you for Christmas this year?" Victorie asked, as though reading my mind.

I shrugged.

"Now would be the time to solve that. Seeing as we're leaving Hogwarts tomorrow."

"I know."

Little did she know Dierks had all the time in the world.

When class was dismissed, I grabbed my journal and bolted down the ladder from the divination tower. I couldn't wait to drop divination. The future was messy and unpredictable and honestly, who wants to know what's in the future anyway? Unless there's some hope of changing it, what use was there to know? And Professor Trelawney was a big believer in things happening precisely as they were meant to.

"You can try to change the future," she announced on our first day of class, back in September, "But it is impossible to say if the efforts you make ate precisely those which cause the events you are attempting to change! The future has a funny way of working itself out!"

"Is it true," I asked Dierks later that day when we were sitting in the room I'd made for myself off the Trophy Room Passageway, "That time works itself out regardless of changes? Do you reckon that's what artefacting corrects?"

He was tinkering with some of those old broken clocks he'd gotten the year before from the shop in Diagon Alley. He'd been working on them all year, but not one of their mechanisms had successfully started working again, despite how many bits and wheels he replaced on them. I would've given up ages ago - but Dierks was persistent. He'd left the box of them with me over summer, which he'd spent in time outside of time.