@thesilverlioness this isn’t exactly cheerful, but it’s actually more cheerful than my first idea.
They could have gone to any time. They could have been there to see Shakespeare’s plays performed by the man himself, to witness the execution of a King or the signing of the Magna Carter. They could have gone to Woodstock or lost themselves in the summer of love, but they wouldn’t have been them if they’d done that. The choice was almost too much, with all the moments of eternity laid bare before them, from the profound to the prosaic, the magnificent and the minute. Time and time travel had always fascinated Lucius, the limitations and the complications merely adding to his interest. Hermione had felt the strange weight of responsibility even when she had only been using her little time turner to attend classes, before she used it to save Sirius and Buckbeak, a temptation to attempt to change everything that crept into her mind after every loss of live even as she knew there was nothing to be done but to accept and move on.
A time machine changed things, gave them options that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. An element of protection that time turners could never provide. Brief visits without the risk that the harmless bacteria they carried on their skin would wipe out humanity before it began, eradicating all life on Earth prematurely, causing extinctions in their wake.
They could have witnessed the worst of humanity, the concentration camps of any number of regimes, the massacres and famines, the gulags and pogroms, deaths upon deaths. Flashes of light in early August to wipe out cities, the fallout brought down in toxic rain, moments that would fade from memories as the witnesses died but that should never be forgotten. Genocide after genocide with muggles and muggleborns just another blip on the eternal attempt of humanity to slaughter each other for perceived differences.
One thing they knew for certain was what lay before their eyes, billions of years in the future from the dates of their birth. Lucius could feel his skin burning slightly from the heat, even though they were protected from the worst of it. Had they stepped beyond the perimeter of the protections of the time machine they would have burnt to a crisp, worse than the gentle scalding on his cheeks and the way in which Hermione’s hair was starting to frizzle, the moisture sucked from the dead air. The sky they had often gazed up at, occasionally blue but more often covered in clouds, was filled with the redness of the sun, the atmosphere a thing of the past just like the vegetation and the life that had clung on to the fragile planet.
“Do you think humanity survives?” Hermione asked, poking at the ground that no longer held any of the richness that she was accustomed to, a dead thing beneath her feet, appreciating anew the manner in which the dirt she walked over in her daily life teemed with life even if she couldn’t see it.
Lucius coughed, even though the air they were breathing was from the past, their past, where there was still life and they could still live. It made so little difference, to think of blood purity or magic, when every one of them was still a fragile creature barely clinging on to Earth, barely alive and so insignificant compared to the vastness of empty space that stretched achingly around them, nothingness echoing about them. More alien than actual aliens, more alien than foreigners or the muggles that lived so close by comparison, differences dissolving as they always did when he had to think about them. It wasn’t really death, because that needed life and the gaping universe before them had no concept of life or death, it just was, temporary and permanent at the same time.
“No,” he answered, thinking back on the wars that he had lived through, more than her through length of life, wondering if she would see more as she outlived him. She shrugged, as if she agreed or disagreed, it didn’t matter. It was not something they would live to see, it was not something they needed to know. They could have chosen a time where they could have discovered for certain, overshooting all chance of finding out by enough that it would remain an open question, because sometimes it’s best to never know for sure, just as they knew they would die but preferred to keep the dates a mystery.
