Work Text:
It was October of 1990 when the first set of odd children arrived at Zaniba’s hut. She was quite fond of her hut in the middle of nowhere, specifically so little wizards couldn’t find her and hound her for her knowledge, and yet these, what, ten year old British children managed it? They spoke Herero just fine, and she’d never heard of a translation spell that could do that.
“Why are you here?” She had asked.
“To learn new things,” the red headed girl had said.
Zaniba was skeptical, and while they did have a man with them, one of the moon-touched, he looked very lost and confused, so she knew that this man was not in charge. A child she came to know was called Ernie confided in her later that he was there to feel better about them being out and about, but that they were much older than they looked.
And Zaniba believed it, watching them. They taught her the translation spell, the perfect translation spell that knew all languages because it heard and it changed in real time, plucking meaning from the speaker’s very brain, and she would simply sit and listen to these strange children. And yes, though it took a while, she taught them, and in barely a week, they had all mastered their second skins, some even their third. The moon man, Remus, looked as flabbergasted as she would have felt, had she not known how strange these children were.
“My old friends,” he said haltingly, “it took them almost a year.”
Of course, she laughed at him, they used the stupid method.
When the red headed girl, Susan, asked if their friends could come learn as well, or if she’d rather they simply taught each other, Zaniba pondered. Back in September, she would have said no, begone with you and leave me to my solitude. But these not-children, stuck in time’s web, made her miss her village’s children, even if they were completely different. So she allowed the other batches to arrive. They were very different, all of them, and all had things they wanted to learn about, but from her, she would give them their other skins.
Some were skins she had never seen before, half of them were magical, and all of them were fitting for these odd ones. Where Remus left, Sirius the dog man arrived. Like Remus had mentioned, he had used the stupid method of transforming, and Zaniba had to fix it and help him find his third skin. He took much longer to find it than his charges did, but was quite pleased with his wings.
There was a moment of scare when his boy, Harry, became the king of serpents for his third skin, but his curly haired friend was very fast with a spell and no one fell victim to his new, deadly gaze.
Before the second group left, replaced with Frank’s group, Harry left her with tears of his second form and a fervent wish she would live for many years to come.
By the time sweet Alice’s group of polite aristocrats left, it had been a year already, and Zaniba found her little hut in the wilderness was a bit too quiet.
It wasn’t so bad, though, and she often found herself with an animal visitor every week or so for the next six years until she passed away peacefully in her sleep.
It had been an honor to know those odd children, she mused, and to teach them something that would carry through each turn of the web. Maybe they’d deign to visit an old woman again next time.
Dernovich was not a nice man, or even a particularly good one. He hated his country, but hated everyone else more, and he despised children. The only thing they were good for was free labor, and even then they were often too small and clumsy to do anything important.
And these two brats would not leave him alone.
He didn’t particularly care for their names, though they had introduced themselves in the beginning before asking him to teach them rituals. The boy was quiet and intense, and the girl a little manic, but no less determined.
He was determined to have nothing to do with them.
And then, of course, they trapped him in a ritual circle he couldn’t read and he saw the boy actually smile.
He hated children.
They would occasionally give him food and water, and paper if he asked for it to try and tear the circle to pieces without it exploding, and every time they did they’d have more of his notes and more questions. He was infuriated that they had not only found his carefully hidden caches, but managed to decode them! They were tiny brats who probably hadn’t even had any formal education, there was no fathomable way they could read the runes well enough to break through the first part of the code, let alone the other two layers of cipher and magic!
And yet.
He found himself actually answering the questions they had, if only to correct their erroneous assumptions about things, and then these turned into fierce debates like nothing he’d ever had before. Some of his colleagues were less versed in ritual than these two infants, and as soon as he got out of this circle he’d rub it in their faces.
After murdering the kids, of course.
As the months went by, and he got an actual bed and chair (he had no fucking clue how this circle worked and he had spent the past 74 days working on it to no avail), he actually started to treat the brats as real people, which he never thought he would have done. He was actually enjoying the debates with Theo and Sue, as they had introduced themselves all that time ago (what? You think he had forgotten? Dernovich? No) and he briefly considered not killing them when he broke free.
Then they started asking about time and suddenly they made a lot more sense.
“It doesn’t matter if you kill us, you know,” Theo said offhandedly one day while they were all scribbling away, “it’ll be annoying, because that’ll be at least a few years we won’t get to learn more things in, but it won’t matter. Even if someone figures out how to stop the cycle, they won’t do it until everyone is fine. So kill us or don’t.”
The day he finally broke out, two years after becoming trapped almost to the day, the three of them looked at each other in utter silence for a few moments.
Dernovich huffed. “So the Norse translation of the Rosetta Stone-”
And it was like nothing had changed.
Maybe, he considered one night when their seven years were almost up, he’d been the lucky one of all the different versions of himself.
And maybe, he considered as he drew a symbol on his head in blood tinted purple, they’d figure it out next rotation.
It would be odd seeing the two of them as ten year olds again, he laughed.
He greeted them with a wicked smile the next time they showed up, one they easily returned.
Yes, Dernovich hated children.
Good thing they’d stopped being children on their second cycle, then.
Perenelle Flamel could never be called a normal woman, even before she and her husband made their greatest mistake and greatest achievement. But she was of the opinion that this group of children were all much stranger than she.
Little Draco had been the one to tell her their situation, ten and thirty three all at once, and she felt wholly unprepared to teach them anything. It had been centuries since she’d called herself a teacher, but they wanted to learn from her. Alchemy, but she found herself teaching them more.
Like how to live when it seems like you’ll never stop.
And how people change over time, including yourself, so people who are familiar can become strangers.
How love does not always remain the same, and sometimes you have to choose to keep the flame alive, to light the candle every morning when you wake up.
How giving up gets so easy if you let it.
When Nick’s old friend Albus asks if they’ve seen anything of the next class of Hogwarts students, who all disappeared one day in September not a week before her students showed up, she sends back a firm no, but that she’ll let him know if they do hear anything. When he asks for their mistake and achievement and little Morag laughs and scowls, she sends another firm no.
When little Seamus asks if she could show them that circle of fire again, she gives a firm yes, despite little Hermione looking very panicked, if a little resigned.
To be entirely honest with herself, Perenelle has not had a batch of students this delightful in several centuries, and delights in teaching the five of them alchemy and life both. Little Tony regularly sends out letters, and they all slip away in the first year for a mere moment.
Seven years pass easily and little Hermione offers a purple potion and a particular rune, and Perenelle shakes her head.
“If you have need of me,” she murmurs on that final day before time rewinds again, “you know enough about me to make me listen.”
And then she goes to sleep.
Kevin did not consider himself particularly skilled at magic. In any other country than the backwoods of the bible belt, he’d be considered a hedgewitch, a backwater hick, and they’d be right. But he knew the swamps better than any other wizard alive, dammit, and he was proud of himself.
He was slightly less proud when two kids hauled him out of quicksand.
Turns out, there were more kids, but Neville and Millie were the ones that stuck around a lot. Others from their “department” came and went, but those two were sticking it out.
Millie was rather fond of animals, as it turned out, and when Kevin very tentatively asked why she hadn’t gone searching for, say, a Scamander, she had waved him off and said he was next on the list, but his animals were more like a zoo and less like the wild, and she wanted the full experience . Kevin thought that was stupid of her until he watched her wrestle a crocodile into submission with a huge grin on her ten year old face and he was questioning his life choices.
Neville, on the other hand, was far more invested in the plants. No, not even invested, he was a damn plant whisperer and Kevin was insanely jealous when he cooed over the hydraingeas, a vampiric magical version of the muggle hydrangea called that for the phrase “they’ll hy-drain ya life force,” and the damn plant tried to feed him. A human! Hydraingeas don’t even feed other members of their species! Not to mention his insane ability to make anything bloom. He had merely stared helplessly the first time the swamp orchids budded and flowered under the boy’s careful touch.
He didn’t know why they were here.
Millie said it was to learn from him, but honestly, what did Kevin have to teach them? If they were looking for deadly, dangerous, and exotic, they’d be better off with his pen pal Flo!
Flo, in Australia, cursed Kevin’s name three years later when they did show up due to his recommendation, but dutifully showed these crazy British teenagers the outback.
They chewed it up and spit it out, raring for more and comparing it to the bayou and the Florida Keys where Kevin’d supposedly shown them the wilds and everything he knew about them.
Damn the man.
Small mercies, however, Millie had said they’d liked it better than Scamander’s ranch. Too tame for them, and Flo was in full agreement. Everyone thought he was the hottest shit, and Flo thought he was overrated. Her grimm dingos were the coolest shit ever! So yeah, the kids were wack, but she figured she was doing pretty okay as a mentor figure.
Even when Neville’s girlfriend Daphne came to visit and he just started gifting her the fucked up poisonous and venemous plants he’d apparently been cultivating on the sly. That she hadn’t known about. And can kill you with a brush of skin contact.
Fuck, this is why Flo didn’t have kids, only kangaroos.
They both lived though, and had both gone a little gooey eyed over the, erm, thoughtful gifts.
Daphne had said she’d use them well and honestly, Flo did not need to know.
Violetta Beauvais had been waiting for these two, ever since Thiago, Johannes, and Shikoba had mentioned the two british children. Like the other three, she had asked why they hadn’t gone to Ollivander.
Lavender had scrunched up her nose. “He’s kinda creepy. We’re pretty sure he’s a natural legilimens, so it’s not like it's his fault or anything. But still. Super creepy. And he’d tell authorities, I bet.”
Violetta was almost concerned that none of her fellow American wandmakers called any sort of authority, but she sees Greg light up and gush about the rougarou family she has camping out in her shed and softens at the otherwise burly and sullen boy.
Briefly, her acquaintance Kevin brings by two absolutely insane children who seem to know her two insane children, and they get along like a house on fire while not actually setting her house on fire, which she’s glad for. But while they stick around briefly, give their hellos and progress reports, it seems like, he and his kids head out and she gets to keep Greg and Lav. Lavender also sits her down to talk about her feelings on how people say her wands are only good for dark magic and she feels little better, but now she’s also wary of being alone in a room with the young girl because that felt an awful lot like therapy. She doesn’t like it. Even if it helps her.
They spend about a year with her, and when they’re thirteen, they say goodbye. She thinks they might be the best apprentices she’s ever had, and tells them that when they break the loop, to come visit her and give her the damn potion then.
They look a little shocked like she wasn’t supposed to figure out they were time travelers of some sort and piece it together from there, especially because she overheard them talking about looping her in. She’s flattered, really, but she’s also just a wandmaker, not someone that could actually help them break the cycle.
They promise to come back and visit when they’re out, and to have their friend Harry bring his wand to show her.
It takes her three months after they’ve left to figure out that when they say the elder wand, they didn’t just mean a wand made with elder wood.
She’s kind of excited for the next loop, now.
Severus Snape was not a nice man, nor a stupid one.
While he had not told Albus this, he had reason to believe that the newest crop of students, the year that would include his godson, were not all targeted by someone with access to the Book of Names. They were not kidnapped in a horrible crime, they were not all put to death or whatever such nonsense some of the hysterical parents believed, and they were not in danger. Much.
No, due to the fact that Miss Hermione Granger, the oldest of her year, had had a birthday the very day before they all dropped off the map, he had very good reason to believe that this was all planned, indeed, by the students.
He will admit, it took him several months to reach this conclusion, because he was not one to believe in the competency of ten year olds in any sense of the word, and he knew his godson. However, he had investigated every “crime scene,” partially because a good deal of the parents were muggles and he was the most adept at blending in, and found potion vials at three of the locations. Using the residue, he had managed to figure out what the potions were, and he was incredibly impressed. It helped that he had, in a fit of unusual deduction, gone to the Janus Thickery Ward and managed to find the same traces of potion in the vials that had supposedly revived the Longbottoms, before they too disappeared. Compounding with the mutt being broken out, causing an uproar like usual, and then being found innocent in absentia, and the wolf disappearing…
Part of him had tendered the thought that the wolf had snapped, healed two of his old friends, and broken out his last marauder, and then the group of four proceeded to kidnap not only their own children, but the rest of the year as well to give the two boys some “social interaction with peers their age” or some such rot, and the fact that it happened after the first girl’s birthday was coincidence. He quickly dismissed this, however, because if the wolf could come up with a potion this ingenious, he would have been making his own wolfsbane, and Severus knew for a fact he wasn’t.
So, back to the potion.
The Granger girl was very smart, her parents agreed, and when he asked if it was possible she could come up with a potion in the short time she had known of the existence of magic, they had said no, but that if she had had a few years, maybe.
And if she had remembered a few years, then possible, he filled in.
Oh, Severus would not admit that it took him several months of puzzling over the potion to reach this conclusion, since as far as he could tell the potion was to recover memory, but he couldn’t quite make the jump as to why the ten year olds would need to remember anything until he had heard from his suppliers in the southern swamps of America that they had an influx of swamp orchids for sale.
The tale of scarily competent ten year olds instantly caught his attention, and when he asked for the memory, he had confirmed it.
But the reason he hadn’t told Albus was simple.
He’d sent a letter to his godson.
Draco had of course instantly caved when Severus revealed what he knew so far, and explained further the situation. Realizing his godson was quickly approaching his own age was disconcerting, and his choice of paramour could have been better, but getting his letters was nice. Missing an entire year meant two less classes to deal with, more time he could devote to the actual art part of potion making, and so on. And Draco was happy to detail the process he, Longbottom, Granger, and Millicent Bulstrode of all people had used to make the potion, which was nice. He’d also gotten full permission to make the potion, and after a few wishy washy letters, a rune that would let him remember if he mixed some of his blood with the potion and wore it to bed the night of May 2nd. Apparently, the night of the final battle.
(He was also relieved, if a little exasperated, that they had been the cause of his Dark Mark fully disappearing, and when he met Draco and Potter for tea during what would have been their fourth sixth year, he found he didn’t hate Lily’s son at all.)
(The morning he woke up younger again and watched the Dark Mark fade away like it was never there, he was both hopeful and frustrated.)
(Surely, this time?)
(Draco sent a message: “THE SQUIBBORNS HAVE CRACKED, WE’RE GOING TO THE MUGGLE SIDE THIS TIME FOR ALL SEVEN YEARS!!! SUE AND THEO ARE WORKING WITH A RITUAL MASTER IN SIBERIA TO BREAK THE LOOP IF YOU WANT TO HELP. IF NOT, PLEASE HELP ME I DON'T KNOW WHAT A CAR IS BUT ITS VERY LOUD”)
(Of course his reply was “You’ve learned bad habits, sending a letter in all capital letters. Also you’d never catch me dead in the muggle world watching a bunch of brats, true age disregarded. Good luck, you little shit.” And maybe he hated the cold, but surely Scotland in winter was just as bad as Siberia… all the time. Hmm. Perhaps a letter correspondence…)