Author's Note: Welcome to Across the Multiverse 1: Potterverse. This is a sequel to a previous work, The Chronicler Saga: Teen Titans. You should be able to read this story without having read the previous one, but I still recommend it. The "Potterverse" parts begin in chapter 2, and things really start rolling in chapter 3. Please review, and thanks for reading.
Clothing bloody and torn, Jon fell through the space between worlds and dreamed.
He dreamed of Japan, of martial artists in Nerima and goddesses in Chiba. He dreamed of demons and the dead, of life and hope, of his sister and his tribe. He dreamed the dreams of the expat, of hearth and home, and of the warrior, and of the poet.
With a sudden crackle of emerald lightning, a portal tore through the void around him and deposited him, harshly, upon concrete. He woke for a brief moment before his head cracked against the ground, and then he fell silent and dreamless.
Unseen and unnoticed, the tear in reality closed itself and left him bereft in a new world.
I woke up.
Shortly thereafter, I determined that this was a bad idea. My head hurt, and gentle examination with questing fingers soon found a bump which I took far too long to attribute to the concrete I was laying on.
Sitting up with a grimace, I worked my tongue around my mouth (apparently I had bitten it at some point) and worked up enough saliva to spit out a bloody globule. Luckily, I still had all my teeth.
As my mind sluggishly geared up to something approaching usability, I continued to take stock of my condition. I was in surprisingly good health, considering that my last memory was of Raven ripping my throat out. Uneasily, I brought my hand to my throat. I didn't even feel a scar.
My clothing, on the other hand, hadn't fared so well. Skin peeked through rents in the fabric, fuzzy and jumbled memory showing they had been ravaged by blade and tooth and claw. A question bubbled up through my mind, slow and inexorable as the moon rise. "Why was Raven attacking me?" I muttered as I thought through the problem.
In a flash, I remembered everything.
The force of my remembrance staggered me, and I rested a hand against a nearby brick wall to steady myself as my efficient mind slotted its memories back into place. My last clear memory was of speaking to Raven in our mindscape. After that everything was blurry and disjointed, flashes of impressions more than actual memories. Zarach had been in control after that, and I…
I blinked in shocked realization, the immensity of it finally filtering into consciousness. I sifted through my mind with frantic energy. Zarach was gone. Shadows of his memories remained, true, and some of his abilities that had been imprinted on my soul likewise, but the being himself was no more. I slumped to the ground and stared into space, laughing as tears of release rolled down my cheeks.
Time passed without my notice, so I'm not sure how long I sat there in the alley before I heard a voice ask, "Hey buddy, are you alright?"
I looked up, becoming aware of my surroundings once more. I had positioned myself with my back against the alley wall, slumped against a dumpster. With awareness came the awakening of my senses, and my nose crinkled against the aroma of refuse and rot. The voice came from the other side of the dumpster, hiding its source and me from him.
Yes, it was a male voice, and somewhat familiar. I struggled to my feet and when my head cleared the top of the dumpster I gaped at the sight before me.
Cyborg stood there, but his mechanical parts glowed a cherry red instead of the blue I was more accustomed to. He saw me at the same time, but his response was not what I was expecting. Recognition lit his eyes, but with a fury and fire I was unprepared for. "Chronicler," he snarled, his sonic cannon forming in an instant as he shot a pulse of ominous red at my position.
Gracelessly, I fell backwards, the motion causing a twist of nausea and a darkening of my vision. The attack, however, flew over my head and impacted the wall behind and above me, shaking loose brick and mortar from their places. In the brief moment that I lay there I heard Cyborg shout out, "Titans, to me! It's the Chronicler!"
I rolled away from a foot stomp that cratered the asphalt where I was laying a moment ago. "Whoa, what the hell, big guy?" I shouted out as I scrambled away from the semi-mechanical death machine. "I know we didn't exactly part on good terms but I thought that was water under the bridge!"
A wordless roar of rage was his answer, along with a continuing assault. I twisted and dodged as best I could in my impaired condition, absurdly thankful for the rage with which he battled since it made him sloppy. Still, I was no match for the Titan alone, and I was beginning to have my doubts that the rest of the team would do anything other than try to kill me.
I needed to get out of here.
As if in response to my desperation, I felt my magic reach out and twist space behind me. A tear opened in the world, glowing with soft green light and crackling about the edges with a sort of ectoplasmic energy.
With Cyborg's trademark energy attack bearing down on me, I took a step backwards through the portal. Both myself and the portal vanished, leaving Cyborg to rage at the night sky as his three teammates joined him.
I wasn't expecting to fall into the Ungültige Welt, but at the same time I wasn't surprised. As for whether my new transdimensional abilities were the result of something having gone right or wrong… well, it was too soon to say.
It was an interesting place, this world between worlds. Flashes of reality bubbled and frothed through the aether I floated in. I was reminded of a phrase, "the Quantum Foam", but I had only a vague glimmering of what it meant. Science was never my passion, although I had a love of its fiction.
Time was an odd experience here. I felt as though time was passing, although I couldn't fathom how. If each of these worlds had its own timestream, then I was certainly outside of it. Maybe it was recursive. Worlds within worlds within worlds, all the way down to the outside.
See the TURTLE of enormous girth. On his shell he holds the earth…
Who knows? Maybe there's truth in fiction. Lord know's there's enough fiction in truth.
Soon enough (although who knew, it could be eons in this strange non-place) I felt a tug towards a particular bubble of reality. With no better plan, I reached out and felt my magic connect to it, forming a neat little slit in the bubble's surface through which I was pulled.
The world coalesced around me.
I stumbled as I landed, gravity reasserting its hold over my body. A glance around revealed that I was in Jump, and a mixture of relief and trepidation flowed through me. It was raining, a torrent of water and lightening in near equal measure.
I had materialized beneath an awning to a small corner store, the cheerful green and white stripes of it lit harshly and cast to strange hues by the neon lighting promising cold beer and ice. Thrusting my hand into my pocket, I was both relieved and surprised to find my billfold still housed within. I would have thought it lost between the various calamities I had found myself in over the past several… days? Hours?
Ruefully, I wondered who had it worse: time-travelers or dimension-hoppers.
Suddenly weary, I trudged into the store and gave a tired wave to the clerk behind the counter. He glared at me suspiciously. Bad enough to be covered in twisting lines of ebon ink from scalp to sole, but the state of my clothing did me no favors either. Carefully counting out my currency, I found myself forced to choose between a sandwich and an umbrella. My stomach turned when I glanced over the selection of morsels in the cold case, thus deciding for me.
Out of nowhere, a sharp spike of phantom pain slammed through my neocortex. I groaned and slapped my hand over my right eye before I quite realized what I was doing. "Hey man, if you're going to freak out go do it somewhere else," shouted the store tender. My eyes widened in sudden recognition. That was a huge burst of magic, unfocused and wild...
… and it felt like Rachel's.
I snagged the umbrella and strode swiftly over to the register, the wide-eyed man there suddenly reaching under the counter to grasp something as he stuttered out, "Whoa, I don't want any trouble." I slammed the cash in my hand onto the counter and strode out into the night, opening the umbrella as I went and ignoring the shotgun aimed at my back.
Relatively dry under the dome of black fabric, I struck out to track the source of the energy burst. I cast my senses outward, both mystic and mundane, searching for the familiar feeling of ebon and ivory that manifested from Rachel's soul. A desperate plea, drowned by the storm but brought to me by tendrils of eldritch energy shout-whispered, "No - no - Stop it - Azar protect me!"
Seizing the thread of energy, I raced to follow it back to its source, heedless of the rain that drenched me, the umbrella useless in the face of my sudden burst of speed. It was wrong, that voice. Rachel never sounded desperate, never begged protection from anyone. She was strong, almost prideful to a fault, and never, never, lost her control to panic. Another ice-pick of pain shot through my mind, causing me to shout and stumble sideways in surprise, slamming my shoulder harshly into a brick wall. The cold rain kept the painful throbbing I knew I would experience soon at bay, and I stopped at the entrance to an alley lit by white shadows and a palpable sensation of terror and despair.
This close, I sensed the subtle difference between this magic and Rachel's. It was the same substance, but a different flavor, wielded by someone other than the Rachel I knew. Still, I forced myself to continue forward. Regardless of who this person was, it was clear that they were distressed, and it was possible that I could be in a position to help.
With measured steps I paced down the alley, subtly encouraging the arcing, unfocused mana that swarmed in this place to ground around me. The maelstrom died down, and I allowed my aura to project warmth and caring, compassion and acceptance. Soon, the energy storm stopped altogether, allowing nature's fury predominance once more.
I saw her then, huddled into a small ball at the end of the alley, a slip of a girl with white silk plastered to her body, shivering and sobbing against the night. I stopped for a moment. She was so small, younger than the Titans and completely inconsolable in her misery. I didn't know, couldn't know what twistings of fate had led her here or me to her, but my heart went out to her. I remembered being alone, terrified and lost far from home, before I learned to wear the mantle of loneliness that was a Chronicler's birthright as a cloak against the world's injustices. She was not a woman, as Rachel had been despite her age, but a child. I walked closer, and my heart clenched to see her flinch away from my footsteps. I crouched a little, wove a small bit of magic about the umbrella, and held it towards her.
"Nobody deserves to be stuck out here alone, not in this weather, and especially not without an umbrella," I said gently, offering it a bit closer when it seemed she didn't notice it in front of her.
Her hand, petite and white-fingered from the cold, reached out and grasped the handle, more of a reflex than due to any real conscious decision on her part, I thought. I smiled then, seeing the cantrip of courage I had woven around the umbrella softly weaving around the girl. She didn't look into my eyes, but her head raised slightly and my smile softened to see her tears slowing.
"Keep yourself dry, hon, and good luck."
And suddenly the painful reality that this was not Rachel, and that this was not the universe I had found her in came back to the forefront of my mind. I slammed down on it ruthlessly, burying the pain and wrapping the familiar cloak of loneliness about me once more. I stood and strode away, exiting the alley and tearing a hole into that space between worlds that had, somehow, become an instinctive action for me. I slipped through the portal and sewed it shut behind me, the girl's call of "Wait!" echoing out of the alley's mouth, painfully like and unlike the girl I had fallen for.
Despite myself, I lingered next to the bubble of reality, watching the silk-clad girl as she clutched an umbrella in one hand and a dove in the other, watching as she searched the streets in a hopeless quest to find me.
After a moment, I heard her say, "Thank you."
I allowed the flow of the multiverse to pull me away once more.
AN: Special thanks to Raven's secret-keeper for allowing me to play with her OC, Dove. To see that last bit from Dove's perspective, check out her one-shot, Umbrella.