It hadn't started off this complicated. One minute, he was in his Auror office, fiddling around with the strange runic object they'd recovered from their latest raid, the next he was on board some Muggle base thing and there was an angry man in an eyepatch shouting at him. Then he'd been seized by some Muggles and manhandled off somewhere, so of course he'd pulled out his wand and tried to stun them all, but then they'd called for backup and everything had gone black shortly after that, and now he was awake, and in some kind of cell, and handcuffed. Harry sighed, tried to run a hand through his hair in frustration, and remembered the manacles a second too late as his free hand whacked him in the face. He groaned, and tried to rearrange himself into a more comfortable position whilst taking an inventory of what he had. No wand – the Muggles must have taken it from him, along with the runic cube he'd still had with him when he arrived. They must've searched his pockets when he was out cold – all he had was his clothes. Of course, he'd only had a few staples with him – Instant Darkness Powder, Decoy Detonators, that sort of thing. Hopefully nothing that couldn't be explained away as a Muggle magic trick. Thankfully, the Cloak was still sitting in his desk drawer back home.

Oh God, where the hell even was he?

Think, Potter, put on your Auror head and think.

Okay, the shouty eyepatch man had an American accent. So, America then. There'd been a lot of Muggle technology about, which ruled out the possibility of backwards time travel, although not necessarily forwards time travel and yes, I know, he thought at the disparaging voice in his head, I know it's not likely but we'll feel pretty stupid if it turns out to be that and we dismissed it, won't we?

Nevertheless, the thought is not a cheering one, and so he continues running through possibilities. Dimension shifting was unfortunately on the list, but there was also a chance that, maybe, he'd just shifted locations onto this freaky Muggle base in the middle of America and maybe, once he explained everything, he could get in touch with the American wizards and some top-grade Obliviators and this whole thing could be straightened out. Maybe.

'Hello?'

The voice from the corner of the room is painfully scratchy, and Harry nearly jumps out of his hardened Auror skin. Not cool, Potter.

'Who's there?'

'Me,' returns the voice, and Harry suppresses a sigh with difficulty. Interrogation had always been his least favourite part of the job.

'And do you have a name?' he asks, steadily.

'Yes,' the voice answers, sounding rather like they were enjoying this.

'And will you tell me it?'

There is a pause.

'Tell me yours, and I'll consider,' is the eventual reply.

'I'm Harry,' says Harry, wondering if it's worth the energy it will take to wandlessly cast a Lumos.

'Daphne.'

Harry decides to risk another question. 'Do you know where we are?'

'Do you not?'

Merlin, this is frustrating. At least if he casts a Lumos, he'll be able to see for himself without getting into another verbal entanglement with Daphne, if that is indeed her name.

'Lumos,' he whispers softly. The light illuminates a figure cowering in the corner, hands over their face.

'Morgana, that's bright,' Daphne hisses, but Harry ignores her in favour of examining their cell – large enough for both of them, but annoyingly lacking in any distinguishing features. He extinguishes the light, and then belatedly realises the expletive used was a Wizarding one.

'Morgana?'

'It's just an expression,' she huffs, but he presses on.

'She was a witch.'

'Wow, ten points to the history boy.'

'Should have been in Ravenclaw,' he agrees mildly, and there's a pause before she makes a noise that Harry belatedly recognises as a laugh.

'My apologies, Harry, I hadn't realised we were compatriots,' and Harry can hear the smile in her voice. It does not feel wholly pleasant.

'Harry Potter, Senior Auror,' he introduces himself, and there's another one of those very pregnant pauses.

'And not just compatriots, but school peers as well,' she says eventually, tone laced with something that sounds like the second cousin of bitter humour. 'Daphne Greengrass, Socialite.' He can hear the capital 'S' she gives her title, and again there's an unpleasantness to it that he doesn't like.

'You disappeared over a year ago,' he says instead, and she hums in agreement. 'Have you been here that entire time? And again, where is here?

'Don't you know, Senior Auror?'

Harry thinks if there's a medal for patience, he's surely earned at least three in the past five minutes alone.

'No, Daphne, I don't. All I know is that I was put on your case when you vanished without even the vaguest hint of a trace, which is honestly quite impressive in itself, and frankly we all thought you'd either died in a ditch somewhere, or were living in one of those communes in the Rhineland.'

He can almost feel the amusement emanating from her corner.

'Goodness, they really did take anyone after the War, didn't they?'

Harry adds another medal to his mental tally for not rising to the very obvious bait. The silence drags on, and he wonders if it's worth trying to Apparate without a wand, or whether the resultant injuries from when he inevitably Splinches himself will be too debilitating. He knows the answer, really, knows he's fairly useless without his wand even if he did manage to get out, and knows too that he really can't leave Daphne Greengrass behind now, and she certainly won't have the strength to Apparate, from what he can remember of her in school (which is embarrassingly little – Slytherin, not Malfoy, not a hanger-on – not interesting).

'As far as I can work out, this is an alternate dimension.'

Daphne's voice is a shock in the heavy quiet that has settled on their little cell. Harry sighs. 'Of course it is,' he mutters with a certain amount of resignation, and he can feel Daphne smile.

'I wouldn't be surprised if we were the only wizard and witch in this world,' she continues, and Harry revises his, admittedly optimistic, view of their assets.

'Great. That's… that's great. So who are these guys then?'

'Secret Muggle police force, I think. The ones who deal with all the weird stuff.'

'Like you.'

'Like us,' she corrects, and Harry inclines his head, although she can't see him. 'I don't really know much more than that, I'm afraid. They captured me along with this – well, he's not really a wizard, but he does magic, in his way, and I think they're keeping me here in the hope that he'll come back and rescue me. They've tried to get all sorts of information out of me, but I know absolutely nothing about anything, so of course they've completely failed.'

'So they chucked you in here until you either rotted, or this wizard-not-a-wizard shows up,' finishes Harry. 'Classic move.'

Daphne does laugh at that one. 'Yup. Got it in one. What happened to you, anyway? Clearly you weren't coming here for me.'

Harry winces at that, but it's a fair jab – the Greengrass case just hadn't been high up on his list, only foisted on him because of Ministry politics and lots of gold.

'Well,' he starts, realising with a sinking feeling that the story does not show him at his most competent, 'we'd just finished a raid, and we'd picked up this runic cube, and so I was just doing a… ah, preliminary investigation, and I think I activated it in some way because the next thing I knew, I was on this – whatever this is – and there was a man who looked like Mad-Eye Moody, only he had a few too many limbs still attached, and then they all started shooting before asking questions, and then I woke up here.'

Daphne lets out a long, low whistle.

'Runes,' she hums thoughtfully, and Harry ventures another question.

'How did you get here, then?'

Daphne ignores him. 'What did Muggle Mad-Eye say to you?'

Harry casts his mind back, with some difficulty. 'Er, well, it was something about how he didn't need another bloody teleporter right now, why did everything always have to happen at once, you know, that kind of thing... and then the woman next to him remarked something about a god of chaos and how this was all part of some master plan... it sounded a little crazy to be honest with you. And then his minions swarmed.'

'They really are quite attached to their Loki theory,' Daphne remarks, and Harry can almost hear the cogs whirring as she processes his new information.

'Loki,' he states, 'this is the wizard-not-wizard?'

'Norse God of Chaos, Potter, remember?'

'Er, no,' Harry feels the need to point out, 'I never took Ancient Runes.'

He can feel the Daphne's disbelief from across the cell.

'You never took Runes,' she repeats, 'and yet someone let you do preliminary diagnostics on a clearly very advanced and dangerous runic device?'

Harry winces.

'Well, it wasn't the official preliminary diagnostics per se…' he mumbles, and Daphne snorts in what he presumes is disgust.

'Men,' she says with feeling, and Harry opts not to respond to that, looking at what he supposes is the floor (but really, it's just a slightly different shade of black).

'So,' he says after a while, his voice sounding a little too loud and uncomfortable after the silence, 'I think we probably need to establish a plan of action for how we're going to get out of here.'

'We're not,' Daphne replies, as if talking to a particularly stupid first year.

Harry blinks. 'That is a very defeatist attitude.'

'Harry, think about this. We have no wands, no way out, and nothing to do other than wait until either someone rescues us, or they get bored of holding us, or, and I think this is the most likely, we die.'

'Oh.'

They sit in the dark together for a very long time after that.

XXXXXXXXXX

Harry wakes to sirens and Daphne shaking him, hard.

'Merlin's sake, Potter, wake up, I swear you sleep like the dead...'

'Wuzzgoinon,' he mumbles, struggling into a sitting position.

'Hear those sirens? That means someone's broken in,' Daphne hisses, excitement in her voice. 'Last time that happened, they came and checked on all the prisoners – this could be a chance, Potter, if you can get your Auror head on, we could actually attempt to get out of here.'

Harry blinks, waking up far more quickly now. Lights flicker on all around them, illuminating their cell in all its grungy glory, and both of them cringe at the sudden brightness.

'Where did those come from?' Harry mutters, in between trying valiantly not to swear.

'I think their normal light-maker isn't working, and when they use their back-up it lights up the whole ship automatically,' Daphne explains, 'this happened before, a while ago.'

'Right,' says Harry, 'and what happened last time?'

Daphne rocks back on her heels. 'Alarms, lights, someone came to check but I was too slow and they were gone before I could do anything. Not,' she adds, with a certain steel, 'a mistake we are going to make this time, O Boy-Who-Lived-To-Have-Many-Hyphenated-Names.'

Harry flushes. 'Right,' he says again, and then stops, thinking.

'That looks like it hurts,' remarks Daphne, and for a moment Harry's reminded of Ron's endless snarking.

'You stay here in the cell, visible,' he says eventually. 'There's a chance that whoever comes to check might not be aware there are supposed to be two of us here. I'll stand by the door, and when they poke their head in, I'll whack them, and you dive in to stop them hitting the floor too hard and making a noise.'

Daphne raises an eyebrow. 'This sounds a lot more thought-out than any of your school hijinks.'

'They made us do training courses in planning,' Harry replies glumly, 'so many courses. And extra remedial ones for me because of my reputation for—'

'Idiocy.'

Harry glares at her, and then decides to do the super-mature-adult thing of completely ignoring her. She rolls her eyes.

'Get in position, Potter.'

He rolls his eyes back, but does. And not a moment too soon; there's an echoing thud on the steel door, and both of them freeze.

He raises his eyebrows at her – ready?

She nods, and Harry braces. There is another sickening bang above the alarms. He can hear people shouting, someone's screaming, a shot that sounds like one of those Muggle guns and a thwack as something hits the door again. Daphne looks terrified, and Harry remembers that this is really not her day job.

The noises stop. Only the alarm still blares on, searing through his head. He almost misses the soft click of their cell door opening, as the thick metal swings outwards, revealing a tall man with long black hair and slightly weird clothes standing outside, amid a pile of unconscious people.

'Don't.' Daphne's voice is clear, steady, and directed straight at Harry.

Harry makes bug eyes at her, but she's looking at the man, who asks in a politely bored tone, 'don't what?'

'Loki, Harry,' Daphne introduces, as if they're at some party, 'Harry, Loki. He's a wizard, like me.' Harry thinks that part is also not directed at him. He coughs, feeling awkward. The man looks at him in a way that reminds him of a young Draco Malfoy, sneering and dismissive.

'I didn't think you'd actually come,' Daphne continues conversationally, as if this man's arrival is merely that of an unexpected guest at a tea party.

'I am terribly sorry,' he replies, bowing with just a hint of mockery, a smile twisting his face into something worth looking at, 'I got held up. Terrible traffic, you know.'

Daphne laughs.

'Shall we?' the man, Loki, asks, offering her his arm, for all the world as if they are in a ballroom rather than a prison cell.

She takes it, and nods to Harry. 'Come on Potter, our ride's here.'

Loki frowns at her words, but sweeps out rather than reply, setting a pace that has Harry half jogging through the corridors with Daphne trying to catch up. He's got absolutely no clue where they're going – this place is like a bloody rabbit warren, twisting and turning, with most of it looking fairly destroyed anyway. Loki blasts down a door in front of them, and Harry sees rows upon rows of evidence bags.

'Look for your things,' he directs towards Harry, 'quickly,' before walking off with Daphne, presumably to find hers. The room is in alphabetical order, and much neater than what the Aurors have back at the Ministry, although he supposes that's just because Muggles don't have summoning charms. It takes him a while, but he finds the P's eventually.

His stuff is not there. His name is not there. Damn.

'Harry?' comes Daphne's voice from somewhere far away.

'Yeah?' he yells back.

'Come back to the entrance, we've got to get going!'

'I can't find my things!' he calls, struggling to hide the note of panic.

'Leave it then! We'll come back later!'

Harry curses under his breath – he's seen the damage on their way here, he knows full well they're not coming back to this ship, that this Loki wants it to crash to the ground and burn. But he has no choice. There are other voices now, male, shouting orders.

'Harry!' comes Daphne's voice, 'you're going to have to Apparate! Diagon Alley!'

'Wait! Daphne!'

There is no response. Wandless Apparition it is then. Harry closes his eyes and tries for calm. He wouldn't have Apparated in this state with a wand, let alone without one. Splinching, bar a miracle, seems almost inevitable. What was it that Ministry official was always muttering on about? Destination, Determination, Deliberation... Harry pictures the back room at The Leaky that Hannah always reserves for them, takes a deep breath, and turns.

Nothing happens.

He tries again, focusing not on the Alley, but on the Muggle street outside The Leaky Cauldron. Deep breath, he reminds himself, don't panic... the voices are getting closer, they'll find him in a minute but don't think about that, just picture the street, got it, good, and TURN!

It's 2 in the morning in London. The street outside The Leaky Cauldron is deserted, lamps casting a yellowish glow on the pavement. There is no one around to see when a twenty-something man with messy black hair appears out of nowhere in the middle of the road with a large crack and promptly throws up all over the tarmac.

All in all, it is not the worst day Harry Potter has ever had, but it's getting pretty bloody close.