Some things that can be good to know before we start this one-shot:

1: While this can probably stand on its own as just a random crossover, it is actually a part of a larger AU that will develop more and more as time goes along. Check out our tumblr (link in profile) for more info on the world!

2: Yes, Zoro has two surnames. It is a part of the greater AU and will be explained in time.

3: Yes, his name is flipped. I know this annoys some (I, personally, think that his name looks weird as Zoro Roronoa, and not Roronoa Zoro), but HP is set in England, where your given name comes before your family name, as opposed to Japan, so the flip was the only logical thing to do.

4. Yes, we have made Zoro a Hufflepuff. Please don't disregard this story just because of that. We know some prefer him in Gryffindor for his courage, or in Slytherin because of his great ambition, but after some discussion, we decided that his amazing sense of loyalty and his willingness to work impossibly hard (seriously; he certainly didn't start out with that monster strength of his) were more defining to his character. Live with it.

4. No, we don't own either of the amazing works this is based upon. Whatever gave you that strange idea?

Not All Those Who Wander

Not all those who wander are lost, but sometimes, those who are completely and irreversibly lost (even if they do not admit it) actually find themselves at their destination… or at least where they were supposed to be, even if it was not necessarily where they are aiming to go.

This might sound a bit confusing (and maybe even completely daft) at first, but to the members of the Hufflepuff House at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, it was a truth that became increasingly apparent as the years went by.

You see, in 1985 there started… well, a great deal of students, actually, just as it does every year, but for the sake of this story we shall focus on one in particular (the Founders know that we would never get anywhere otherwise). The name of this one particular student is Zoro Roronoa Isshin.

Now, apart from his green hair, which is natural in the sense that "yes, his roots actually produce hair of that colour on their own volition," and unnatural in the sense that "he was not born with that colour" (an incident involving Belgium and a young Necromancer), Zoro is a fairly normal boy.

A fairly normal boy who does not find it amusing that there, starting from his third year, has been a betting pool regarding the circumstances behind his hair colour (whereupon the theories consist of everything between the boring but probable "he had a potions accident" and the more exotic and strange "he's actually a demon, originating from another world"), but that is, all things considered, fairly irrelevant, so let us carry on, no?

…where were we, again?

Right.

Zoro is a fairly normal boy (disregarding his hair), but he has an absolutely atrocious sense of direction. Under normal circumstances, he can get himself lost on a straight road. This is not an exaggeration. It has happened, and it will happen again. Over the years, there have been many theories regarding why this is, but no-one has ever found the true cause.

Right now it does not matter how his atrocious sense of direction came to be, however, only that it is there, and that it took his fellow housemates almost six years to figure this out.

"Now," you may wonder, "whyever would it take so long for them to discover this simple fact, if he truly can get lost on a straight road?"

The answer is both very simple and incredibly complicated at the same time: Hogwarts.

Let us start from his first year. The first day of classes, more exactly. Now, the Professors have almost all gone to Hogwarts at one point, and even if they have not, even if their first time setting foot in the place was a mere week before the onslaught of students, they will know this one thing: Hogwarts is not, by any means, an easy place to navigate. As such, they actually expect their youngest students to be late for classes during their first few weeks (or at least days) in the castle and are very lenient to them if it happens, even if some may not seem like it.

That a small yellow-robed boy had managed to get to his classroom for his first class of the year before even Flitwick himself was as such very surprising to the man, who dropped the pile of books he was carrying when he almost jumped out of his own shoes. Soon, however, he had entered a most engaging discussion about sword duelling with the boy, and the oddity that was his arrival to the room slipped the Professor's mind.

That the very same boy was found sleeping in Greenhouse Three by Pomona Sprout not even five minutes after his previous class had ended was likewise dismissed, since a lot of students who never managed to find their first classrooms in time were likely to show up early for their second class. Also, the fact that he had somehow managed to enter (and fall sleep in!) the greenhouse served to give the poor Head of the Hufflepuff House a minor heart attack and successfully distracted her from the hows behind the incident. Really, the Greenhouses were locked just for the sake of keeping curious or lost first-, second- and third years who could harm themselves on the plants in there out.

That he entered the History of Magic classroom through a hidden passage behind the blackboard would have raised brows, had any other student been there or if Professor Binns had not been… himself. Or as much "himself" as any ghost can be, at least. However, despite the fact that his arrival had not been noted as anything of particular interest by the Professor this time, his classmates had started to see the pattern and some of them determined to follow him when he left the classroom so that they would not be late for lunch.

They failed, losing sight of him after he had rounded a corner ahead of them and spent a good twenty minutes wandering about before an older student took pity on them and guided them to the Great Hall… where Zoro was just clearing his plate of the last of his food. When they asked him how he had managed to get to the Great Hall so fast, he simply answered "I just followed the fruit," and that was that. At least he thought it was; little did he know that he sparked one of the greatest investigations and inquisitions that Hogwarts has ever seen before or since that day.

If he had, he would surely have answered them differently.

But more on that later; for now, we will move on to the double hour of Transfiguration, Zoro's fourth and last class of his first day. Minerva McGonagall, the resident Professor of the subject, had opted to eat in her quarters that day so that she could put the finishing touches on her lesson plans. After finishing up she transformed into her animagi form and waited for the first students to come (she has discovered it to be most beneficial to observe how the students interact with each other without a Professor around at the beginning of each year - it often allows her to nip potential drama in the bud).

This meant that when Zoro stepped into the classroom from the window instead of the door, threw a considering look at the blackboard (which Professor McGonagall had already prepared with the course aims) before meandering over to a desk at the back, sitting down and falling asleep, there was a brown tabby watching him. Still, this was not deemed overly odd by the cat-who-is-also-a-woman, since her classroom was on the first floor and it was, believe it or not, quite common for students who were lost or in a hurry to enter from the outside, rather than the inside, of the castle (before she discouraged them from the habit, of course – doors existed for a reason).

She did, however, resolve to take the odd occurrence up with her colleagues later on when the rest of the class arrived, barely beating the clock and loudly accusing the young boy – Zoro, she gathered from the complaints and Roronoa Isshin from the later roll call – of cheating and having some sort of magical compass or map that he was not sharing with the rest of them. The boy grumpily replied that he did not, and that they had simply gotten lost, and that they should not blame their bad sense of direction on him (it would be years before Professor McGonagall fully appreciated the irony in this).

It was not until she did so nearly a month later (because few plans – no matter how well thought-out – survive for long in the presence of 6000 magical students, and she honestly forgot about it until Sinistra mentioned that the Roronoa boy had nearly given her a heart attack by appearing behind her after having climbed the whole tower, something that the boy himself apparently did not see as odd) that all the professors finally pooled together their knowledge on the odd first year and realized that his manner of appearing and disappearing was not simply an strange quirk, but something that should almost be impossible (a few even shuddered, remembering some other young boys that had also had a preternatural ability to navigate the old castle, and sincerely hoped that the small Hufflepuff would never develop a liking for practical jokes).

After that particular meeting, the staff of Hogwarts started to surreptitiously listen in whenever the student body tried to pry Roronoa's navigating secret out of him.

Unlike the students, however, they gave up after one memorable afternoon, when the answer to "How did you get to the Quidditch pitch so fast?" was "I just followed the broom-shaped cloud."

Some mysteries are just not meant to be solved.

(Many will admit to feeling some measure of relief when it proved that Zoro's strange navigating skills only applied to Hogwarts, however.)

This section of the AU was brought to you by Seadevil~

Reviews are very welcome!