THREE WIZARDS

DISCLAIMER & NOTES:

(1) We claim no rights to Harry Potter. We own no recognizable elements of this tale.

(2) Ellyanah gave the outline for the first section. I (pouf) did the rest. I will most likely be writing the remainder of this story alone, though Ellyanah may occasionally contribute ideas.

(3) I am so dreadfully sorry for the delay, and I will try not to do that again.

(4) Huge thanks to all reviewers! Your comments are all appreciated.

(5) If you're interested in the Azande witchcraft reference, read Evans-Pritchard. I couldn't really provide a suitable description of those beliefs, as they have nothing to do with the plot, but I do encourage you to find out more.

(6) This time, watch the hours, not the years.

(7) Poor Tom. …Poor, poor Tom. I fear Albus and Harry might induce an aneurysm before they can exert a delightfully nefarious influence on him.

(8) Before you say it: yes, Tom is being off-key, but there's a clear reason for that.

(9) And finally: Ellyanah—hopefully this will take your mind off the wisdom teeth and chipmunk cheeks (oh, and happy birthday again, you old coot ^_^).

CHAPTER THE SECOND

In which Tom's bad luck prevails as he is defeated through markedly muggle means,

Harry Potter vengefully pretends flippant ignorance of magic,

An indecorously befuddled Albus attempts to explain the universe,

And all experience extreme panic and mystification

(In an effort to pander to their pride: 'mild alarm').

11:56 PM, DECEMBER 24, 1912:

A CLEARING IN THE FORBIDDEN FOREST

"—DAVRA!"

As he enunciated the last syllable of his spell, Tom found himself rapidly redirecting his wand, as—incomprehensibly—the squirrel had somehow moved a few meters left of its previous location. Within the same moment, a green beam shot out of the tip of his wand, signalling the obnoxious fluff ball's imminent end.

Or rather, it would have signalled it, had a heavy mass not slammed into his forearm at the last minute and caused his curse to miss its target. Indeed, the killing curse, rather than producing the delightful sight of a fresh corpse, was wasted as it hit the dirty ground of the forbidden forest without harming a single thing. To Tom's dismay, it did not even hit a blade of grass.

Tom Riddle was, to say the least, rather frustrated by this outcome.

It was this frustration that fuelled his angry swivel toward the direction of the blow on his arm. He had never allowed anyone, or anything, to escape unharmed after hurting him or hindering him. Many individuals could testify to this fact—the bullies from the orphanage and his father, for instance. This response to harm was so deeply ingrained that his instinctive reaction was always quite simply to strike back with more violence; it had never failed him, and as a result was quite deeply conditioned. So it was that he automatically raised his still-numb arm with the clear intention of obliterating whatever had dared hit him.

As seemed to be the theme of his day, his goal was once again unachieved.

Before he had even fully registered that he was attempting to look at and curse a nonexistent aggressor, a brutal blow to the back of his head had his knees giving out for a few instants, and him dizzily attempting to regain balance as he staggered. When he recovered control of his body, Tom no longer cared about eliminating his assailant—he wanted him or it to suffer. With surprising rapidity for someone so indisposed, he had his wand pointed at the dark shape of a man, and an unforgivable halfway out of his mouth.

"CRUC—"

He really should have expected it to fail. Everything that day did, at least compared to his usual rate of success, so he wasn't sure why it surprised him when he was interrupted by the harsh whack of a cane on his already bruised arm. Unprepared for the pain as he was, a muscle spasm caused his hand to twitch; his wand dropped to the ground. His attempt to recover it was met by yet another blow to the back of his head. This time, Tom fell to the ground face first, and was, much to his displeasure, acquainted with much snow.

Tom was unhappy to find that the rush of air he had let out upon being hit had left his mouth open for quite a large amount of that snow.

He was even more unhappy to find that his fall had allowed the man to grab his wand from the snow and place it in his pocket.

As gracefully as he could, he spit out the half-melted snow and pushed himself off the ground with the intention of physically hitting the one who dared steal his wand.

This time, the walking stick hit him across the stomach. With a grunt, he bent double and tried to catch his breath.

A final blow to the back of his knees had him sprawled on his back with the man towering over him. Before he could once again attempt to stand, the tip of the cane pressed threateningly at the hollow of his throat, effectively immobilizing him. Tom had no choice but to settle for finally ascertaining his situation; he looked up at his attacker.

The moonlight shone on the man's front, allowing Tom to see him more clearly than he had earlier. A cursory examination revealed that he was probably shorter than Tom himself, but about as lithe; the trousers and coat fitted the man in a way that made his willowy stature obvious. He grinded his teeth in fury and glared up at the face of his muggle—for no wizard would wear muggle clothing—attacker, whose eyes were a rather bizarre shade of green, pleasantly quite alike Avada Kedavra.

Tom involuntarily shivered—from the cold, of course.

It was only then, as melting snow made its way into his robes and chilled him to the bone, that his mind caught up with his surroundings. Indeed, he made two disconcerting observations that had escaped him up until that point… and they were rather troubling, as far as observations went.

First; it was no longer midday, but the middle of the night.

Second; it was no longer summertime, but a very snowy, and very cold, wintertime.

He couldn't control the alarmed widening of his eyes, nor the sharp intake of his breath. Neither could he stop himself from breathing out a shocked—and painfully plebeian—"What the hell?!"

02:18 AM, DECEMBER 25, 1912:

PRIVATE QUARTERS, HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY

Albus Dumbledore did not sleep long, not that his sleep had in reality been restful: quite the opposite, in fact. So restless had it been that, by tumbling around more times than one could count, he had effectively trapped himself in a twisted cocoon of blankets.

That is why, when he woke with a start and his bloodshot eyes snapped open, his attempt to get out of bed resulted in some issues. Indeed, when Albus endeavoured to move one leg off his mattress, he found that his second leg was also dragged along. His arms flailed wildly as he attempted in vain to catch his balance until, in a flurry of movement, he toppled over.

In the end, his abrupt awakening landed him on the floor, cradled within an undignified heap of blankets and pillows.

And with numerous groans of pain, Albus managed to extricate himself from the tangled mess—only to trip on a pillow as he attempted to rush out of his bedroom.

Contrary to what his current quandary might suggest, Albus Dumbledore was not a clumsy man. In fact, most would label him as somewhat graceful, and would describe his poise (characterized by benign smiles) as mostly unflappable, as he had not quite reached the level of emotional control necessary to be composed at all times. Indeed, those who knew him would testify that the rare instances where he was shaken constituted the only times at which Albus was ever clumsy. Nonetheless, he was capable of keeping his cool in most conditions that didn't involve Gellert or Ariana—

—Except in this one situation that had him running around in a manner reminiscent of a beheaded chicken.

This one situation included the fact that there existed an array of very important and complicated factors he had not considered when crafting an already exceedingly complicated spell. It also included the fact that the whole thing about unconsidered factors had only occurred to him in his sleep after he had cast the spell and wasted his time brooding about a complete failure that may actually really be something else, also known as something worse than complete failure, because the complicating unconsidered factors really might have done something bad, as in, something potentially world-shattering if his intuited suspicions were correct, and his intuited suspicions were almost never wrong, and, by Merlin and the Founders, what had he done, and—and he was so completely and utterly doomed!

… Hence, his panic and clumsiness.

But perhaps it was but a nightmare, and perhaps he had considered everything, or perhaps he had made sure his spell worked in an isolated vacuum, hermetically closed off from outside influences, so that he hadn't needed to consider everything, after all. Perhaps the tea had addled his mind; perhaps these horrible lacunas (which he still did not dare to name, even to himself) in his spell were just imagined, a product of his subconscious wanting to make him anything but a failure.

He couldn't truly have forgotten what he suspected he had, could he?

He had to check. Now, immediately, yesterday.

Albus picked himself off the floor once more and frantically set out of his bedroom toward the area he had occupied while crafting his spell. His quick lighting of the room revealed that the floor was still littered with his previous day's work. He fell to the floor on his knees and, hands trembling, grasped at his leftover calculations—those rare pieces of parchment that hadn't landed in the fire—and hysterically flipped through them for a few moments before he realized that he couldn't actually read any of it for a lack of spectacles.

He blinked and tried to recall what, exactly, he had done with his glasses. He vaguely remembered chucking them on the ground somewhere by the armchair… but of course, he was just visually impaired enough that he couldn't see them there. No matter: he crawled in the general direction of where he estimated the glasses to have landed, at a slightly more sedate pace than when he had rushed into the living room so as to allow himself time to slide a hand across the floor in search for the object in question.

Finally, his fingers curled around the eyeglasses. He pushed them onto his nose in such a hurry that his thumb left a smudge on one of the lenses. As a result, when he once again began hysterically flipping through his sparse notes for the spell, he found himself awkwardly trying to look around the blur by tilting his head this way and that. Unfortunately, one by one, the pieces of parchment revealed nothing of what he wanted them to reveal: there was nothing about ley lines. There was also nothing that kept the spell insulated from external influences like the ley lines, to say nothing of the litany of magical oddities that could sneak up on a person. A weight settled in Albus' stomach.

Well—well, with any luck, perhaps the final result might not be as bad as he suspected. Somehow the thought did not comfort him as much as he would have liked, and instead, the weight grew heavier. He knew that he needed to ascertain what his spell had done—because it was likely that it had done something… just not exactly what he had wanted it to do originally.

It was with a hurried reluctance, if such a thing can be experienced, that Albus once again prepared himself for some thinking; he set up his working area as he had the previous day and began accounting for the influence of the biggest forgotten factors.

The spell worked on the assumption that a person's magic was tied to their soul, and that, likewise, their soul was tied to their body. It combined elements of scrying and portkeys; the spell first sought out the largest concentrations of magical power and then brought them into contact with the transportation element that grabbed onto the magic—and by that fact, the entire person—to then pull the individual to the caster. It would likely have worked if Albus had isolated it from other magic.

Once that was taken into consideration, it was clear that ley lines would affect the spell's result in many ways. Since location was crucial, both to finding an individual and to bringing them to the caster, the flow of magic in the earth would have loaned extra power to the 'finding' part of the spell: perhaps multiple people would have been found, or perhaps the spell could have searched outside the normal boundaries of magic, or—more likely—both.

A few scribbled calculations on the edges of his used parchment revealed that it was, indeed, both. Albus didn't really want to consciously acknowledge any of it even though he knew exactly what it meant, so he left the knowledge dormant for further consideration.

The second effect of the ley lines followed from the first; if more power had been used than Albus had individually invested, the final destination for the spell's subjects would be determined by the highest concentration of line crossings within reasonable proximity of the caster. Once again, Albus really didn't want to consciously acknowledge the consequences of his overlook, but he didn't really have a choice, as he'd just reached the end of everything he could work out.

So he let the realization come to him as his lauded intuited suspicions were proven to be correct.

… Albus had indeed ripped totally unknown and unsuspecting people from their place in the inter-dimensional space-time continuum and dumped them in the middle of the forbidden forest.

And he had—he had left them there, alone, for quite a while.

…

Not good. Not good at all.

He swallowed thickly. Attempted to calm down. Failed.

He was indeed, as he had so eloquently put it to indulge his inner melodramatic adolescent, completely and utterly doomed.

A pitiful soft whimper escaped him.

"Oh dear."

00:02 AM, DECEMBER 25, 1912:

A CLEARING IN THE FORBIDDEN FOREST

Harry stared. He blinked, and continued to stare. He really couldn't help it.

He did have a good reason for staring in abject incomprehension, for, at his feet, snowy and bruised, was a young and alive Tom Riddle. Only, instead of his usual arrogant, smug expression, he looked as if he couldn't decide between being utterly stunned and being extremely furious. His typically perfect wavy hair was completely dishevelled and, like his face, rather moist from all the snow. The end result was, though hilarious, not quite as handsome as his trademark air.

At the lowest level of his awareness, Harry toyed with the notion that the current look on the man's face was entirely priceless, and that he would have liked a photograph.

However—more importantly—his conscious thoughts were more than confused, and appeared to be incapable of exceeding the complexity of a very loud mental, 'what the hell?!' It took all of his self control to keep himself from actually voicing that opinion as he once again mentally went over the situation in an attempt to make some sense out of it.

The first thing he had noticed after feeling the portkey-like pull had been the abrupt change in time and scenery. While it had previously been late afternoon, he had quickly noted that it was now sometime during the night; he had quickly made a mental annotation that his current location had to lay somewhere in the middle of the Pacific if logic was to be believed—a deduction that made no sense for Harry's surroundings, which looked far too much like the Forbidden forest for his liking. Moreover, he hadn't actually touched anything that could have been a portkey; he didn't know what else could have just transported him like that.

Since, at this point in his life, there were very few types of magic of which he didn't know at least the basics, he had been forced to conclude that whoever or whatever had orchestrated whatever was going on had to be either very intelligent for inventing the way, very knowledgeable for using an arcane technique, scarily powerful for having willed his presence, or some combination of the above. Harry did not like any of those implications.

The second thing he had noticed had been the presence of someone in the middle of casting the killing curse at some poor squirrel. From that, he had presumed that his kidnapper—if this wizard was he—was an incompetent underling of some 'get rid of Potter' mission thought up by a lunatic who clearly hadn't gotten the memo that all such attempts had failed for a reason. After all, what self-respecting villain ever got distracted from an incoming mission target by a squirrel, of all things? Certainly not Voldemort, and clearly the ability to remain focused on killing him hadn't saved him, nor had it helped any of his subsequent would-be murderers.

Of course, at that point, his saviour instincts had kicked in, and he had announced his unnoticed presence for the sake of a bloody squirrel.

Harry was not happy with himself; as soon as that had happened, he'd known that it would take quite a bit more work to find out exactly what was going on. Incompetent underlings were at their most revealing when they didn't know the enemy was spying their every move, after all. Not that they ever hid secrets very easily, but it would take more effort to establish the basic facts now that he'd given himself away.

Putting that aside, he had ended up having to deal with a rather feral wizard—Harry did wonder what could have angered the man so much—and had finally managed to subdue and disarm him without revealing anything about himself other than his liking for hitting others with sticks.

The third shock had come when he had looked upon the face of the underling-who-couldn't-be-an-underling, because the 'underling' was Tom-'insert-an-eternity-to-gape'-Riddle. Hurrah for hyphenated names.

And so, here he was, staring in disbelief at Tom Riddle after repeatedly hitting him with his walking stick. Once again, this was totally impossible, as (a) he was quite sure that he had killed Riddle quite thoroughly, and (b) once again, Riddle was dead, thank-you-very-much. Dead men did not suddenly come back to life as de-aged version of themselves, nor did they get themselves beat up like bullied schoolboys by their killers. If he was honest with himself, Harry would admit that he felt a little offended that Riddle had let himself be restrained that easily. It was unbecoming of his arch-nemesis.

The object of Harry's ponderings interrupted his musings in an echo his summary for the current state of affairs.

"What the hell?!"

Riddle's eyes had widened, and were frantically looking around. He now looked quite panicked, actually. Had Harry felt even an inkling of compassion for the man, he might have offered him a sour cherry candy. However, Harry did not like to have his train of thought broken; especially not when he was trying to figure out what was happening to him, and even less when Riddle was involved—particularly when Riddle himself was doing the interrupting.

"You—shut up," he snapped impatiently, dismissively waving his walking stick at the soggy face looking up at him.

He attempted to resume where his thoughts had left off; on one hand, Riddle, who was supposed to be dead, was shooting killing curses at squirrels and trying to attack him. On the other hand, he had been dragged away from Siberia by an unknown method that didn't involve any contact with his person, and everything about his current location made no sense whatsoever. Both events were somehow related, and he knew it: there was absolutely no such thing as a coincidence in Potter-land.

Unfortunately for Harry, it was just as absolute a certainty that telling someone to shut up does nothing to make them stop panicking—and of course, being dismissive of one Tom Riddle wasn't ever likely to help anyone regardless of the situation.

"Why is it the middle of the bloody night?! Tell the truth! Why is it suddenly—"

Harry's thought process was interrupted at the precise moment the inevitable conclusion came to mind; naturally, Harry interrupted right back as his eyes snapped back to Riddle.

"This is your fault!"

Had he let his interlocutor finish his sentence or paid any attention to him, he might have found information to contradict that conclusion, but, of course, as Potter luck would have it, he had not.

"Excuse me?!" Riddle's panic receded as he spluttered in disbelief, "You attacked me for no bloody reason, and now you, a filthy muggle, accuse me!"

That last comment gave Harry some pause—so much so that he relented the pressure of his walking stick on Riddle's airway enough for the man to push it aside with the back of his hand.

Once again, he was confused. Certainly, he was dressed as a muggle, but it seemed… absolutely unthinkable for Voldemort not to recognize him. After all, he recognized Riddle, and the most he'd ever seen of him at the age he appeared to be was for a few seconds in Dumbledore's pensive, when he had applied the second time for the DADA post. He felt rather affronted that his antagonist couldn't recognize him just because he had aged a few years.

… He was not obsessed.

Harry's attention drifted back to Riddle, who had apparently continued to rant as, taking advantage of the lack of a cane at his throat, he stood and brushed himself off. Merlin, but that man loved to hear himself talk.

"... pathetic, weak mudblood dare—"

Harry decided to inelegantly cut off the tirade. He'd had enough of this.

"Oh, get over yourself. Get to the point and explain whatever this is all about—yeah, I get it, you want me dead, but you're clearly arrogant enough to enjoy the moment where you reveal your plans. So go ahead, don't let me stop you; I'm actually curious."

Amazingly, that managed to render Riddle speechless. Granted, it only lasted for a few seconds, but he felt somehow smug about making it happen at all.

"I don't know, you imbecilic fool," he ground out, "be assured that if I did, I would not have lowered myself to asking—but as you're nothing but a particularly ignorant muggle, there's no more need for that." Riddle's voice had, by then, taken on a decidedly self-satisfied tone.

This… made no sense at all. Voldemort should be gloating about his plan succeeding. He should have been doing that from the very beginning. Voldemort wouldn't have been cursing squirrels, he wouldn't have let himself get hit, and if he had set up the weird transport thing from Siberia, he wouldn't pretend to be innocent, and he'd definitely know who it was he had kidnapped—not to mention that he would have no problems recognizing Harry even if he'd just been trying to catch a random person. It was all so wrong.

And then it clicked. Riddle didn't know what was going on because there was a third party involved—and he didn't recognize Harry because there was something wrong with Riddle himself (other than his being impossibly back from the dead), and Harry intended to find out what it was. Since he couldn't detect another presence, the third party was currently in absentia. It would have to be dealt with later. Oh yes, he would solve this newest riddle.

"Now hand me my wand, boy, before I make you know pain so intense you will forget how to use your limbs—hand it over now," Riddle demanded, as he extended an elegant hand in the most condescending imaginable manner.

That had entirely been the wrong button to push. He was short, yes. He looked young, yes. But no one—no one—called him boy.

Harry's eye twitched.

Well, then—a muggle, was he?

He fought down a vindictive smirk as he reached into his pocket.

02:56 AM, DECEMBER 25, 1912:

PRIVATE QUARTERS, HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY

For several minutes, the silence in the room was punctuated by the sound of Albus' repeated attempts to regulate his breathing. His endeavour was failing, as evidenced by the fact that he was currently hyperventilating and a hair's breadth away from breaking down in sobs. His panic at this point was a result of having a fairly good idea of what his spell had done, but not knowing the possibly disastrous consequences of inter-dimensional time-travel. Every time he managed to calm down and start thinking, he kept expecting his own existence to cease, or the world to implode or pop out of existence. Of course, that did nothing to help his hysteria—quite the opposite in fact.

Reality soon caught up with his panic, though; clearly, he was still there, and so was the world, and he'd cast the spell quite a while ago, so, really, if anything was going to happen, it would have already.

His breathing quickened again when a stray thought hit him: if he was still there and the world was still there, what if his spell had killed magic? He stopped breathing altogether as he scrambled over himself to find his wand. He was about to give it a wave when he hesitated: what if he really had broken magic? Forcing himself to ignore the thought, he took a great gulp of air—and was about to cast a levitation charm on a chair when its wood cracked and splintered before exploding.

Wonderful. Accidental magic out of sheer panic. Wasn't he getting too old for this?

Nonetheless, it answered the question. Albus had not committed manslaughter upon magic, which brought him to the inevitable conclusion: he really needed to investigate, because he couldn't let otherworldly strangers roam around ignorant of what was going on, and so—he plucked himself off the floor and promptly rushed out of his quarters, unmindful of the fact that he was sporting a night robe and slippers.

Albus ran as fast as he could, down the hallway, a left turn, another hallway, stairs that didn't attempt to move, more chilly hallways, more stairs, through the shortcuts he remembered from his schooldays until, finally, he empty crossed the great hall with his footsteps noisily echoing back to his ears and made it to the main doors, only to be greeted by a wave of icy air upon opening them. It was not long before, with a freshly applied warming charm, he was halfway across the grounds on his way to the forest, robe flapping in the wind behind him.

As he ran, the exercise gradually ate away at some of his alarm to turn it into irritation at himself—all of this just confirmed what Albus already knew: he could not be trusted with power.

At all. Ever. For any reason. Under any 'extenuating' circumstances.

Negative emotions made Albus Dumbledore redundant.

He almost felt that it would be appropriate if someone wrote, 'handle with care if given any form of power: desperately needs humbling supervision,' across his forehead. If a day's work had done this, he didn't even want to think about what might happen if he ever let himself fulfil some of his ambitions. He didn't want to think about what might happen if he did acquiesce to Gellert's request and joined him in Russia or went hallow-hunting with him, either. Then again, denial had never suited him; he was far more prone to fits of self-degradation.

He further quashed his imminent panic attack with the thought that, as he had noted to put an end to his apoplectic fit, it wasn't like the world had imploded. There was no need for any panic beyond the apprehension of meeting wizards who may or may not react very well to being dragged away from their reality. Indeed, he was quite sure it was rather best to think of his emotional state as 'mildly alarmed,' and to focus his energies on getting through this mess so that he could properly blame and berate himself when it was all over.

A few minutes later, he had crossed the grounds and was directing himself straight to the centre of the forest. As he hurried, he briefly thought he heard a faraway scream of outrage, but dismissed it as a combination of his overanxious imagination and general lack of sleep. It was not long before Albus found himself at the edge of the clearing where multiple ley lines crossed—so many of them that he could feel the strong and heady flow of magic thrumming beneath his feet.

He was, somehow, both relieved and discomfited to find that there was no one. On the one hand, he supposed that it was for the best that his spell hadn't done anything, but the selfish part of him was disappointed that he hadn't met whoever it was that the spell might recognize as the strongest wizards, those for whom he could hope to feel some level of affinity.

The conflicting sentiments persisted until he looked at his feet and noticed, out of the corner of his eye, footprints in the snow. Closer inspection revealed that there were in fact two sets of footsteps. At some point the trails met, and there were signs that there had been a scuffle between these individuals a few metres from Albus if the collection of heavy impressions of hands, knees, and a back were to be believed.

And—oh dear—it even looked as though one of them had dragged the other on the ground through the clearing and right into the underbrush. Droplets of blood even stained the snow where stray branches had whipped at the unfortunate individual.

The young professor stared at the trail in bewilderment: surely there were politer ways for a wizard to ensure compliance.

Either way, he had the distinct impression that he should set about to following after the tracks in the immediate future. He was probably a few hours behind them as it was, though he dared to hope that the wizard doing the dragging might be slowed down by his unwilling passenger.

Albus resigned himself to a long and exhausting hike.

00:11 AM, DECEMBER 25, 1912:

A CLEARING IN THE FORBIDDEN FOREST

He saw the muggle's eye twitch as he demanded to be repossessed of his wand, and he did not like his expression when he reached into his back pocket and withdrew the item in question. Nor did he like his tone when he spoke.

"Oh, you mean this little twig? Why, I don't believe I will."

Tom thought that the muggle looked inordinately pleased with himself, for someone who didn't know the meaning of what he was doing.

Seeing his wand, though, gave him the necessary incentive to give it a tug of wandless magic… only to have the muggle tighten his grip on it and tut at him as if he were a disobedient child.

"Oh my, I rather think I almost dropped this stick, although," the mugglehad the nerve to say, "I don't know why I care, since it looks quite useless… well now, I may as well break it."

And with those damning words Tom's cherished piece of yew was bent until he could hear the wood creak and there was nothing he could do because any action on his part might break it and he wanted the muggle to die because this was his wand and—and then that blasted thief stopped applying pressure, tapped the tip of the wand to his chin and assumed a thoughtful expression.

"Then again," he insultingly pointed the wand at Tom and waved it mildly, "your expression just now gives evidence to the contrary."

It was Tom's turn to suffer an eye twitch, but the man resumed his insufferable gloating in a falsely innocent voice before he could deliver a suitable retort.

"Well then, my aggressive new acquaintance, it looks like your precious twig will be my hostage."

Had Tom Riddle been a lesser man, he might have actually done something unbecoming like allowing a frustrated scream to escape him, but he settled for biting his tongue and trying a more brutal wandless yank.

The muggle and Tom's wand remained impossibly unaffected.

Tom blinked in surprise ("Wha—?!"), and before he had any time to react, the wand-thieving muggle summarily grabbed his hands and tied his wrists together tightly with a length of rope that came from Merlin knows where.

He stared at his hands in silent horror.

His jaw dropped slightly.

He blinked once… twice.

And then—anger. His magic lashed out with his will to get his wand back and to remove the offending rope in the most expedient manner. He expected the ropes to pop away, or even to burst aflame, and then to catch his wand as it flew to him.

None of that happened.

He did not notice when he dazedly took a slow step forward, pulled along by the man who was holding onto the ropes: he was shocked into numbness.

Never had his magic failed him. Never.

His left foot slid forward by a few centimetres.

The entire situation could be reduced to one conclusion: there was something fundamentally wrong with him—and come to think of it, he did feel rather odd—in a slightly disturbing way, almost as if he were out of sorts. He couldn't identify precisely what was off with him.

His right foot followed.

Had someone cursed him during his earlier outburst of rage? He had been rather absorbed in his own magic, so it was possible that he had missed a detail or two (though he was loath to admit it).

He took another haphazard step.

A curse would certainly explain whatever hallucinatory fit he was currently experiencing, seemingly involving an insane muggle, the sudden winter and night, and malfunctioning magic.

Tom stopped in his tracks.

Of all utterly absurd things to be doing, he was hallucinating.

The muggle tugged at the ropes a bit more forcefully. Tom resisted; he was most certainlynot about to let some fake muggle in a fake reality boss him around.

"I refuse to let a hallucination force me to do anything against my will, illusory muggle."

The hallucination in question looked completely baffled as Tom yanked his hands back toward him with the intention of making the man lose his grip on the ropes. Unfortunately, bafflement had failed to loosen the man's fingers. Instead, the muggle was jerked forward, almost lost his balance as Tom viciously jerked his hands from one side to the other to shake him off, and promptly shot a glare at Tom when he regained his footing.

Before Tom even had a chance to renew his attempt at liberating himself, his captor once again tripped him up with his cane: he landed belly-up on the snow. More rope was then quickly pulled out of nowhere, and it was with the threatening pressure of a foot on his throat that Tom had to watch as his ankles were fastened together, and his arms bound to his chest.

Apparently, whoever had cast the curse to make him hallucinate knew how he felt about muggles, and really wanted to humiliate him. That ruled out Dumbledore, who would never openly stoop to such techniques. It probably pointed to an inefficient follower with delusions of grandeur, who was going to suffer for a very, very long time before receiving the mercy of death.

Of course, that particular ambition was going to have to wait until Tom found a way out of the hallucination, preferably in a way that involved fulfilling his desire to see the illusory muggle's illusory innards hanging from illusory trees. How ironic that the Azande had done the very same to check for witchcraft-substance in the deceased accused of being witches. Of course it was the colonizing muggles who had named those beliefs 'witchcraft', and Azande notions of witchcraft had precious little to do with the magic that was taught at Hogwarts, but emulating the practice would amuse Tom for a few seconds.

Not that Tom had ever read any muggle anthropological monographs over his summers at the orphanage and actually found them interesting. Not he.

Further delightfully violent ponderings were interrupted when the muggle looked down at him as if Tom was a lowly insect—perhaps he could slowly kill him by making the most peripheral appendages explode and gradually making his way to vital parts—and rolled his eyes at him.

"Do you really think what you want will make a difference? You're physically weak, and you're tied up. I can break your important twig thing whenever I like. All of that means that if I want to drag you along on my way out of this forest, you get to suck it up, grit your teeth and endure it. Now shut up or I'll gag you."

When the muggle dragged him feet-first into the underbrush and the first branches snapped at his face, Tom reached the overwhelming conclusion that no amount of torturing him (or whoever had created his character for the hallucination) would ever satisfy him.

03:01 AM, DECEMBER 25, 1912:

SOMEWHERE NEAR THE END OF THE FORBIDDEN FOREST

In the end, Harry had not needed to gag Riddle: he had fumed and probably imagined all manners of torture, but had restrained himself to the occasional outraged snarl when he was hit by a particularly thick branch.

After a few hours of trudging through the snow and hauling his arch-nemesis behind him, Harry was tired, and Riddle was starting to feel heavier and heavier.

Now that he'd let Riddle see him as a muggle (and let him believe that he'd been thoroughly humiliated by a muggle), he was unwilling to levitate him the rest of the way to Hogwarts—for this was indeed the forbidden forest—or to apparate there directly when it was reputedly impossible to do so. No, it was best to keep the upper hand; the less Riddle and any new person he might encounter on this freak-adventure knew about him, the better. Revealing himself as a wizard was definitely out of the question.

As for knocking Riddle unconscious to keep him unaware while he used magic… well, that would take all the fun of seeing sharp branches disfigure him while he was completely powerless and aware that a muggle was putting him through the ordeal of being dragged through the underbrush like a hunter's common game animal.

It was so gratifying to use his own magic to block the other man's attempts to free himself, too. Wandless spells tended to lack the density of magic done with a wand: filaments of fabric as opposed to kevlar wire cables. They also tended to be precise, as an economy of energy, whereas accidental magic was wild and scattered: direct bullets as opposed to a poisonous mist. As a result of those characteristics, they were easy to isolate and snip, unlike other types of magic that required more elaborate means to stop them. Harry had taken full advantage of that fact.

… Alright, so maybe his main reason for continuing to walk through the forest without resorting to was to torture Riddle, and everything else was post-hoc rationalization. Still, it was mostly worth the trouble.

But the fact remained that Harry was exhausted and irritated, and that he was advancing very slowly through the forest. For sustenance, he had covertly conjured a few sandwiches into his bag and eaten them, so hunger wasn't an issue, but he wanted Dobby's hot chocolate. Was that too much to bloody ask? Why was it that whenever he thought he was finally getting a break, some freak happenstance just had to take over his life?

Vindictively, he 'accidentally' jerked Riddle into a jutting rock.

Apparently, that was the last straw for him: after letting out a pained noise, he bellowed, "ARGH! I've had enough! This nonsense stops now!" and let out a surprisingly intense burst of emotion-driven accidental magic that (quite viciously; Riddle did seem desperately angry) tore Harry's conjured ropes apart.

Harry then found himself fighting off Riddle, who, in a bid to steal back his wand, had tackled him to the ground. He was not helped by the fact that he really was tired, and wanted nothing more but to collapse into a couch and stop moving for a few hours. Physically subduing a young Voldemort again wasn't a priority on his agenda.

Moments before Harry gave in to the overwhelming temptation to do the easy thing and stun Riddle (or 'accidentally' off him), a voice took it upon itself to interrupt their brawl.

"Gentlemen, gentlemen! Please," a breath, loud exhale, and deep inhale.

"Do show some decorum. I am certain," the speaker once again tried to catch his breath, "your dispute can be resolved through more diplomatic means."

From the corner of his eye, Harry noticed that he was not the only one who then turned to gawk in appalled realization at what he recognized to be a youthful and very much tousled and out-of-breath version of Albus Dumbledore grinning like a loon.

Of course, this mess would involve him in some way or another. Harry was surprised that he hadn't thought of it, in retrospect.

03:04 AM, DECEMBER 25, 1912:

SOMEWHERE NEAR THE END OF THE FORBIDDEN FOREST

Albus knew that he was grinning like a loon, and likely looking quite bizarre, when he finally caught up to his extra-dimensional guests and got their attention by breaking up their little fight. The two men were gaping at him—he presumed that he would have stared as well if someone came running in a bathrobe from deep in the forbidden forest. He didn't much care that he looked ridiculous—he was ecstatic!

"It worked! It worked!"

Childish giggles bubbled their way out of him. Albus should have been mortified, but he could barely even bring himself to do was to banish a stray thought that his eyes must be twinkling more than ever.

One of the men—the taller one, who, as the blood on his face testified, was clearly the victim of the branches Albus had seen earlier—twitched violently. Poor man, the experience must have traumatised him terribly.

Then the very same man spoke. He sounded on the verge of a mental breakdown involving manslaughter.

"What worked?"

"Why, my spell, of course!"

Mr. Trauma (as Albus had decided to temporarily call him in the privacy of his thoughts) looked inches away from having a seizure. How curious. The other man—Mr. Green, for his eyes—saw it as his duty to stand up and to take over the interrogation.

"…A spell. Am I to assume that this spell of yours is why I somehow suddenly went from one time zone to another?"

Albus felt compelled to provide a relatively modest answer.

"Yes, yes! Just yesterday I created an absolutely revolutionary spell designed to seek out the most powerful wizards and bring them to meet me!"

He paused to see the effect of his words.

Mr. Trauma had recovered from his impending fit, stood up and brushed the snow off his robes, and now looked smug. Mr. Green, on the other hand, did not.

"Well, I'm certainly not," he dryly (and somewhat exasperatedly) proclaimed, which made absolutely no sense to Albus. Surely he couldn't be claiming not to be powerful.

"What do you mean, dear sir? The spell would not have picked you out otherwise."

"Well, since I've no precise idea what you're talking about when you say 'wizard', I'm pretty sure I'm not."

Albus allowed himself blinked owlishly. He felt rather like someone had stolen a fresh stash of lemon drops right as he'd been about to sample it. How could one of the most powerful wizards think they were a muggle? Doubtless, he would have been tipped off by the sheer amount of accidental magic as a child… Unless his spell had done something wrong… But that was impossible; if this man was a muggle, there would have been nothing for the spell to latch onto. Or perhaps the man was a muggle, and had somehow strayed into the forest by accident… But no, the school's wards made that impossible. Unless… Yes, maybe this man was a wizard, knew it, but was playing a prank and pretending to be a muggle.

Well, better to go along than to argue with a man in a middle of a prank.

"I see…" he deliberately spoke slowly to make his argument realistic, "I suppose that there must have been some type of incongruence in the flow of magic at your location…"

He hoped his excuse was acceptable to Mr. Trauma—Albus didn't want to ruin Mr. Green's prank, because judging by his treatment of his companion, he was not one to be displeased.

A glance at Mr. Trauma revealed that he had not put Mr. Green's status as a muggle into question: he still looked smug, and was giving a disdainful, condescending smirk to the shorter man.

It was all rather rude of him. Perhaps Albus could understand why Mr. Green felt a desire to make Mr. Trauma earn that name.

But then that very man seemed to break away from his moment of satisfaction, and started to look quite suspicious. He hoped he hadn't seen through his flimsy excuse—he found himself agreeing with the idea to play a minor prank on Mr. Trauma.

"How did your spell 'find' me if I was already right there," the latter hissed, "when the middle of a summer afternoon magically turned into the middle of a winter night, hmm?"

Albus thought he might have liked it better if the prank had been ruined, instead.

"Well, you see," he hesitantly enounced, not quite enthused to reveal his blunder, "I—er—may have miscalculated slightly."

Blank looks from his guests encouraged him to elaborate; his bubbling happiness from earlier could deflate no further.

"The spell… went rather out of bounds. When it came to seeking, that is."

Although Mr. Green merely looked patiently expectant, Mr. Trauma was looking more and more exasperated, and thus charmingly expressed his displeasure: "Get to the point or I'll eviscerate you."

Albus found that having one's feathers ruffled did wonders for confidence.

"I'm afraid you are quite permanently displaced, both temporally and dimensionally. To Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Christmas of 1912," he offered, with an upward lilt in his tone that gave every phrase a hesitant, almost questioning quality. He cursed himself for being so weak, but at least, he thought, his voice was congruent with his shaky smile. Looking honest ought to count for at least something in their esteem of him.

Mr. Green's eyes grew particularly sharp at that.

"Permanently?" No mercy, much to Albus' chagrin.

"I frankly cannot say exactly how the spell managed to carry you from different time periods, let alone from different dimensions. There is little hope of reversing the process if it cannot be understood." That, and the fact that Albus did want some interesting friends (though he wasn't about to let that slip).

At those words, his interlocutor looked strangely resigned to his fate.

It reminded Albus of that time he had seen the unfortunate victim of a prophecy be carted off to marry their fated intended, who this person happened to despise very much.

Mr. Trauma (who currently looked beyond rage all the way into demonic possession) posed the next question with a tightly clenched jaw and a heavy sneer.

"And would you mind explaining the grand feat of magic that brought us to this singularly exotic destination?"

Lectures were, luckily, far less uncomfortable than admissions of incompetence.

"Well, the only clear thing about why you were brought to the forbidden forest instead of to me is that there is a major concentration of ley lines right about where you appeared—in other words, they created interference with the spell. The fact that power from ley lines was involved is probably what allowed the spell to seek outside this particular time and dimension.

"As for how it found and transported you, it all hinges on the fact that one's magic is tied to the soul—the spell scryed for high concentrations of magic and grabbed whatever soul the magic belonged to. For that reason, magical hotspots like Hogwarts or Diagon Alley—which cannot have souls—were not accidentally targeted. In essence, it was your soul that was found and transported; your magic and body followed because the trio share an intrinsic bond—an inherent quality, of sorts, that ensures that your magic does not stray from you and that, similarly, you cannot switch souls with other people."

When Albus paused to conjure some water for his dry throat, he noted that those words had a curious effect on his audience: Mr. Trauma blanched, and Mr. Green displayed a rather chilling smirk.

That charming piece of information certainly explained why he had been feeling odd. It wasn't because he'd spent the last few hours in a hallucinatory state. No, instead, his soul had carelessly and brutally been mashed back into one piece when its pieces were simultaneously transported into a single container.

Tom felt the blood rush from his face and correctly assumed that he had paled. This notion was indeed confirmed when the very cause of his distress expressed concern for his health.

"My dear man, are you alright? You look a little faint."

Oh, how he loathed Dumbledore. Always—always—the man had thwarted him, known things about him. But of course that fiend would never be content with just that. All his hard work with setting up a power base of potential followers, his research into the dark arts, his horcruxes that he'd just finished hiding… gone. Gone, at a mere whim that Dumbledore, in all his inexistent wisdom, had managed to turn into a ridiculous fluke. He wanted to make him suffer, to torture him until he had begged for mercy for so long that his screams of pain became boring.

He cast a sidelong glance at the muggle boy in hopes that the latter might be caught unaware enough to be relieved of Tom's wand.

Instead of the dumbfounded air he had expected in someone who had just been introduced to the maddest aspects of magic, he was met with a knowing glare that threatened to send shivers up his spine.

… Perhaps it was best to exercise some caution in his dealings with Dumbledore. After all, he had to admit, though grudgingly, that the man had proven to be powerful and cunning—a dangerous combination if dealt with carelessly.

All things considered, it would not be a good idea to allow the codger to find out that a muggle, of all things, had deprived him of his wand. He would get it back away from those twinkling eyes, or Dumbledore might otherwise get inappropriate delusions about his strength or lack thereof.

And it was better to let Dumbledore independently discover what an utter monster that man was.

This strategic retreat had nothing at all to do with the filthy muggle's feeble glares.

"Yes, of course—I was merely," Tom paused meaningfully, "taken aback by the enormity of this situation. I assure you, it's nothing to worry about: do carry on"

Still, if the oddities weren't due to a hallucination but rather to Dumbledore's stupidity, nothing explained why his wilful wandless magic continued to dissipate before it could affect anything. Something was afoot. He didn't know what, or who, precisely, had done something to his magic, but he would find out—and whoever was the cause of this distress would rue the day they decided to mess with Lord Voldemort.

Harry watched, torn between amusement and annoyance, as Dumbledore genially took a sip of water and finished explaining the general workings of his spell.

"Well then, as you can see, I added a small extra radius to include any clothing or objects you were carrying out of courtesy. The rest—most notably, how the spell crossed dimensions—remains vague beyond the probable influence of ley lines. Luckily, none of us need to worry about temporal paradoxes, as we are all from distinct dimensions that cannot influence one another."

It wasn't that he was leaving any truly important attachments behind; he could always take up his old profession in this dimension, and his friends (not that he had anything against them) included a grand total of one human who communicated through correspondence plus one obsessive house-elf. He couldn't say that he minded this new adventure too much.

Besides, Dumbledore (whom, it occurred to Harry, had apparently forgotten to introduce himself in his excitement) and Riddle were both more interesting than the average sane wizard.

"So, gentlemen, now that you are properly acquainted with the circumstances of our meeting, shall we be friends?"

As he watched Tom visibly suppress the urge to strangle, flay, decapitate, or otherwise mortally maim the twinkling wizard, Harry settled for the opinion that this new messy interference of Dumbledore's in his life might turn out to be more fun than not—if only he could manage not to burst in hysterical peals of laughter at the absurdity of it all.

After all, for once, he was the one who held all the secrets—who even understood what was going on in the first place—and his dearest old coot, despite being the instigator of their gathering, was the most ignorant of them all.