The first February 28th, Cash had stayed up too late in his office, reading a mystery book. He caught a few hours of sleep, and when the valet woke him, he found himself still snowed in. He was the furthest thing from an important employee; he did not have to make any efforts to get to the Ministry. He read another few chapters of the Mystery book.

Eventually, Cash decided to head out for a walk — it was freezing, but he could not abide being stuck in his house. It made him feel itchy. He had to leave. He dressed, carefully, because he was not particularly fond of freezing — and started out, towards the woods at the edge of Wellingtonshire.

Cash had just reached the trees when he stumbled over something. He landed hard — the item beneath him was less yielding than the snow. Cash shifted backwards onto his knees, feeling through the snow to find someone's body prone in the snow — and shifted the body until the snow shifted and the man's face was exposed. A frozen yellow vomit foam around his mouth. Cash pressed fingers to his throat — nothing. He rolled up the man's sleeves and ran his fingers there, and could not feel a pulse — and startled at the feeling of scars beneath his fingers.

I know this.

He had never done it, but he recognized the impulse.

The next thirty minutes were blurry. He spent some amount of time trying to revive the man. He ran to the constabulary, found the constables, led them to the body. They brought him, and the body, back to the constabulary to provide a witness statement (and do whatever it was the constabulary did the man's bodies.)

They made the mistake of telling him the man's name. He didn't know him, but he knew him. Cash spent some amount of time trying to convince Constable Woodcroft that Ari Fisk had killed himself, he had not frozen to death — he had been sure, ever since he saw the scars. Time passed.

He made it home. The valet drew a bath. Cash sat in it until it cooled, periodically running his fingertips over his wrists, where he'd seen the scars on the other man. At some point, he heard the clock in the house strike midnight, and decided to step out of the bath — but he blinked and he was sitting at his desk with the mystery book in front of him.

February 28th, again.

Where was Ari Fisk?

—

It took Cash ages to fully bundle up. He didn't know when Ari Fisk would get to the spot where he died; he had to be ready to beat him there. He placed warming spells on his boots and gloves. Once he was ready, he walked out of the front door, locked it, and sprinted — the same pace as he'd run at when trying to get to the constabulary the previous February 28th.

(He worried, briefly on the run, that he was going mad — that he was losing time, that the previous day was a hallucination, that he should go home. But he could not be sure, so he had to try.)

He was nearly out of breath and it was only years of athleticism that kept him going at this pace when he saw the man, alive. Cash came to an abrupt stop, skidding in the snow until he was wavering on his feet a mere six inches from the other man, and could not muster words — he pointed, with one hand, at Ari Fisk.