So...um...hi.

There are three main reasons for my long absence (which I am SO SORRY for): school, the Internet that isn't this website, and the fact that I started the TV series Supernatural.

This is one of my next big projects after quitting on the Johanna Potter series (but not for good, I promise. There will be another series set in that universe, and hopefully Johanna herself could make appearance. Just not for a little while). The other, even bigger project is one that I just started. It's going to be a really long series, and it's a crossover between Harry Potter and Supernatural. I'll explain it in more detail when I actually publish it (which probably won't be for a long time). So this is all you're getting so far. Sorry!

Basically, I thought, "What if the characters from LotR and The Hobbit were reincarnated into modern times?" And this is the epic, disastrous, confusing result. The key word there being "confusing," at least at first. The POV will change every chapter with no particular pattern, and the first few chapters will mostly be exposition. If you have any questions, let me know

I don't own LotR or any of the other things I may reference in this chapter.

Enjoy!

Chapter One: Losing Things And Finding Other Things

In which Diana Halton has a Twitch, Olivia Atwood is one heck of a friend, the word "then" is used in excess, small shiny objects should be avoided at all times, and Gandalf gets punk'd.

The voice has been in my head since before I knew it wasn't normal.

Oh, I knew it wasn't good. That was completely obvious. What do you think, I was stupid or socially inept or something? Well, I'm more than a little socially inept, but definitely not stupid (much (alright, I'm an awkward idiot, happy?)).

I just didn't know it was somehow my fault.

Well, I guess, in a weird roundabout way that involves a past life, the only person I know who I could call my friend with complete confidence, and a possessed jewelry item, it kind of is my fault. I just didn't know that back then.

I thought everyone had voices in their heads that informed them that it was so dumb to just sit on the swing without pumping. That snarled that only cowards and babies cried. That told them the other kids were right when they called them retarded. That reminded them that they didn't have any friends and nobody liked them.

I know what you're thinking. I wasn't scitzofrenic-skizzofrenic-skitsofrenic-I didn't have MPD. At least, not yet. And only my family (my mom and my two older brothers, Theo and Joey) knew about it. And the kids at school, I think. It would explain all the weird looks I got.

Joey reacted the best to it. He treated it like it was no big deal, even though he knew it was a pretty huge deal. Mom thought it was just an imaginary friend (I didn't know anything, so I thought she might have been right. I didn't understand the word "friend").

Shortly after I moved from Missouri to Olive Woods, California, the voice became wrong about one thing.

I had a friend (and I knew what that meant).

I was sitting on the swings. The playground was empty. Everyone else was on their way home. I kicked the ground and swung back.

"Puh-thet-tic," said the voice. "You're not gonna just sit there, are you? I told you that's stupid."

"N-no," I attempted to snarl. It was actually pretty pathetic. No surprise the voice burst out laughing.

"Pathetic," it repeated.

"I am NOT!"

"Oh yeah? Prove it. Prove you're not pathetic."

I said nothing. I felt like I couldn't open my mouth.

"What I thought."

The voice had the decency to shut up when I was actually swinging. The fact that I jumped off the swing at full height and landed flat on my stomach and almost snapped my entire body in half was all me.

"I'M DYING! IIIIIIIIIIII'M DYYYYYYYYYYYIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!" I apparently shrieked (according to my best friend, who will be making her daybu-dabou-first appearance in a second. I don't know why I let her give input about this).

"Ya know, if ya were actually dying, ya prob'ly wouldn't've done that, wouldja?"

I lifted my head up and saw a very freckly hand in front of my face. I must have stared blankly at it for a long time, because she said irritably, "I'm helpin' ya up, loony."

"'M not loony," I said to the dirt and grass in my mouth.

"Sure ya aren't."

"I think I hate you," I told her.

"Who knows? I might hate you back. But we'll have to talk more to find out."

I made a whiny noise in the back of my throat (again, this is my friend's account).

"...you're gonna have to get up at some point, ya know."

I made a more frustrated version of the whiny noise from earlier and grabbed the freckly hand (I had nothing to lose, right?).

We crossed over to a spot on the other side of the playground and sat in the shade of a low wall. I surveyed the girl warily. Backwards green baseball cap perched on a shoulder-length bird's nest of dirty-blond hair. Bright brown eyes. Small, flattish nose. A ton of freckles. A t-shirt that probably had some sarcastic slogan on it (she's always worn those). Filthy jeans (similar to mine). Scuffed-up sandals. Top it all off with a mischievous-looking grin. She seemed harmless. But you know what they say about books and covers.

"So...what's your story, kid?" asked the girl.

"I'm six."

"I'm seven."

I couldn't think of a response to that for a few seconds. "Don't call me kid," I finally said.

"Sor-ree," muttered the girl. "...my name's Olivia. Olivia Atwood. What's yours?"

I tilted my head to the side. "I'm Diana Halton. I know people call me Twitch sometimes, 'cuz I twitch a lot. My mom calls it nervous energy," I said, pretending I knew what nervous energy was.

Real smart. Now she'll never be your friend. Not that she wanted to.

I know. Shut up.

"Tuh-wiiih-itch," said Olivia, rolling the word through her mouth like she'd never heard it before. "Nah. You don't look like a Twitch. Do you have another nickname?"

"Huh?"

Olivia stared hard at me. It reminded me of the way I stared at people. And that wasn't a good sign.

"Dee. I wanna call you Dee. Di's lame. An' I don' wanna just call you Diana."

"Why not?" My voice somehow got even tinier.

"'Cuz I never ever call my friends by their real name," Olivia said like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

About ten minutes passed before I had to go. During those about-ten-minutes, we chattered about every single thing that came to our minds. I felt different after that. I wasn't any more confident (I still shrank back when someone called me a nasty name). But I was happier. I'd never met anyone like Olivia (other than maybe Theo). Someone who actually liked me. Someone who could tease me without acting like I would shatter with one wrong word (thought I'm not quite sure how untrue that was (or is, for that matter)).

But most of all?

I had something to say to the voice.

Twitch? I asked it (because I had a name for it now).

What?

You're wrong.

What!?

I have a friend.

But it wasn't that simple.

The nightmares started two days later.

The first one wasn't even that scary (at least not at the beginning). I was wandering around near a creek. The weird thing was, there were two voices in my head. One of them was, of course, Twitch (who was just a kind of hissing somewhere to my right ((at the beginning, anyway)). But for some reason, Twitch hadn't always been there, and it confused me. The other one was even weirder. It was kind of...singing or something, in a language I didn't understand. But it was so buaetiful-beutiful-pretty. Even when I woke up, I wanted to hear it. More of it. I couldn't stop thinking about it.

More nightmares came. Mostly, they were the same as the first one. They got darker and damper with each one.

And the dreams weren't all that scary. It was mostly just dark and wet and cold and hungry and killing and eating and...maybe they were a little scary. But not as scary as some other unrelated nightmares I had had.

You have to understand, I was six years old. Six. And even I know that six-year-olds don't need self-loathing, weird nightmares, and everyone hating them lumped into their little midget brains. But I still didn't tell anyone, not even Olivia. Especially not Olivia. Whenever I thought about her and the nightmares at the same time, I felt an awful, twisty guilt somewhere in my stomach. I didn't know why, and I didn't want to think about it. Coward, Twitch informed me.

(I also thought I heard Twitch saying something I couldn't figure out in a different kind of voice, a scarier one, but I wasn't sure.)

One of the ones I remembered most involved some person. I didn't even know if he was a person, because I remember wondering what he was in the dream. He was trying to do something that I could tell him how to do, but Twitch and me both didn't want to do it. But then he said something that reminded me of something else, and I asked him something, and then he ended up making a bet with me. I was allowed to eat him if I won (oh yeah, I ate people in these dreams. It actually didn't bother me when I was awake). He won the bet.

And before I explain this part, I have to tell you about It.

It was something. I didn't know what It was when I was awake. It was small, and I could hold It in my cupped hands.

And he stole It from me.

That was the first time I woke up screaming so hard it hurt all the next day. Joey ran into my room and (according to him) I did not react well to him trying to touch me. I clawed wildly at him, shrieking "IT'S GONE! HE STOLE IT! I'LL KILL HIM!"

It went like that for a lot more nights. I woke up shrieking like a fucking baby and I beat Joey up when he tried to calm me down. I thought that was the worst one of those I would have.

But then, about fifteen nights and ten dreams after the first one, I got the worst nightmare I had ever had in my life (and it's still pretty fucking high on the list).

I was dragged up to this tower, and these awful things-that-weren't-people started torturing me and I didn't know why...and then they asked me a question. And whatever they were asking me to do, to tell them, made me so angry. It was something I'd never do in a million years, but then they were torturing me again and it hurt, it hurt so much, and I'm a coward.

Joey says he'd never forget that night, which is weird, because I barely remember it at all. He says I made the most horrible noises he'd ever heard. I shrieked like nails on a chalkboard, gasped like a fish on dry land, and made a very disturbing noise somewhere between that hacking cough you get when you're really sick, a retch, and a cat with a hairball (these were Joey's exact words (he makes weird metaphors a lot, it's kind of a thing with him)). Whatever. It doesn't really matter to me. No, not at all, no.

And then there was another dream with some hippie dude who was probably high on some cosmic shit. He looked like Dumbledore and he asked me a bunch of weird questions that Twitch screamed at me for answering. And some other guy came in and dragged me off somewhere that reminded me of spiders for some reason. There were a lot of snotty, creepy blond people. I was a prisoner. I hated everything. Then I escaped.

Then I found these people. One of them was the guy that had taken me to the spidery blond place. One of them was one of the spidery blond people. One of them seemed like a Warrior From A Far-Off Land (which he was). Four of them were stupid. And one of them had It. So I followed them.

But then they split up. And I followed the one who had It and one of the stupid ones because they had It.

When they finally realized I was there and almost killed me, they ended up not actually killing me. They did drag me around on a rope-leash, though. And that wasn't fun. I somehow ended up promising to do something for them. Twitch didn't want me to. It said we were going to that place where they had tortured me. But I didn't leave. I almost did, but...

The first one (the one who had It) I didn't hate, exactly. He had been nice to me. He was my friend (Twitch said he wasn't and he was trying to trick me because who would ever be my friend).

But me and Twitch agreed on one thing: the other one.

We both fucking hated him. Almost more than I had hated anyone before. I just wanted to kill him, strangle him, claw his eyes out and make him crawl. He was just like the bullies I saw on the playground sometimes, calling me names, winding me up just to wind me up, thinking me and Twitch were the same. But the part that made me want to see his blood on my hands, see him die? He was nice to the first one. He was like the nicest fucking person ever when it came to him, but not me, never me (but I can't even blame him because why would he like me, why wouldn't he try to choke me with burning rope).

I kept forgetting about most of these dreams. I still wasn't telling anyone about them.

It was nothing. It turned out to be some stupid thing that didn't have anything to do with anything. It didn't affect my destiny or any other bullshit like that.

Yeah, right.

Six years later

It wasn't the sound of knocking that woke me up. Instead, it was the sound of rocks being thrown at my window.

I rolled over and looked at the clock. 4:27 AM. Not too bad. I slid out of bed and shoved the window open. There was Olivia, just like any other summer morning, before anyone else in Olive Woods was awake. She grinned up at me.

"GOOD MORNING, U-NI-VERSE!"

"SHUT UP, O-LIV-I-A!" I imitated her game-show-announcer voice. She completely ignored this.

"Get down here! And not by jumping out the window," she added.

"Buzzkill," I scowled.
"Whatever, Pocahontas. Just get down here, will ya? There's something really, really, really important I have to tell you."

Her voice seemed to get more serious when she said that part, so I guessed I should get the fuck down there. So, ignoring what she had just said, I swung myself over the windowsill. I dropped onto the ground in a crouch with one hand on the ground supporting me.

"So..." I said slowly, ignoring Olivia's comment about she still didn't know how I could do that. "What was this really, really, really important thing?"
"Well, the first part's funny," she said thoughtfully. "Ish. It has to do with the Thing."

I was silent for minute. "Oh," I said finally. "The Thing."

We had known about the Thing since we were both seven (Olivia has asked me to tell you that she was almost eight. I would like to tell you that she is a little shit). The Thing is what this whole fucking story is about, so you'll thank me later for explaining it now.

I'll let Olivia explain how we found out about the Thing, but long story short, we're reincarnations of characters from Lord of the Rings.

Wow. Shocking. Bet you didn't see that coming. I'll give you some time to recover.

...

You might wanna get a snack or something while the story's paused.

Okay, unpause. So, we found out when we were seven and Lord of the Rings was being read to us. The second chapter. Basically, the name "Smeagol" was mentioned, I froze up and didn't know why, but then I did know why.

Whoa, okay. Another shocker right there. You must have had no idea which character I was. The nightmares I told you about were particularly suttle-not obvious. Want some more pause time?

...

Again, I'm letting Olivia give you the details, but here's the general idea: Olivia told me she knew what happened and that she was Deagol, I cried a lot, and we ended up making a deal that Olivia would tone down her magpie instinct (she likes shiny things) if I stayed true to the finders-keepers rule.

After a month or two, it stopped being that big a deal (even if Olivia shut up a lot faster when I told her I would kill her if she didn't and my speech pattern got a bit weirder (yes it did, yessssss...).

One of the weirdest parts of the Thing was remembering pre-It (the Ring, if you hadn't figured that out (in which case you're probably a fucking idiot)) life. We had been exactly like we are now, snarking at each other and getting in fights over the dumbest things and still being best friends. She gave me stupid nicknames and sang frighteningly off-key and I wondered why I put up with her. I mocked her a lot and beat her at contests and wondered why she put up with me.

Okay, I've wasted enough time telling you a bunch of stuff you should have already known. Now, back to the actual story.

"Yep," said Olivia cheerily. "So it's the middle of the night last night, and the phone rings, right? So my mom goes to answer and is like, 'Who is this?' And she literally spends five whole minutes screaming at whoever was on the other line. It was hilarious. I could, like, see the person in my head. Just staring. Like a moron."

...ladies and gentlemen, my best (and possibly only) friend.

After a few seconds of idiotic giggling, Olivia said, "So yeah. Important thing. So, a few minutes later, she comes in and hands the phone to me. So I'm like, 'nobody ever calls me, why does it have to be in the middle of the night that someone does,' and then this very deep old guy voice-" (Here, she did a very bad impression of a man's voice.) "You are the reincarnation of the third Ringbearer."

"It would have been funny if he had just said that and hung up."

"That's what I thought he was gonna do!" agreed Olivia. "So I just kind of sat there for a second, and then I was like, I was like, 'Yeah. And?' And then he was like, '...you knew?' And then I-" She paused to laugh hysterically. "I said, 'You got punk'd!' And hung up."

"...you woke me up at four-thirty in the fucking morning to tell me that you told some random guy on the phone that he got punk'd?" I snarled.

"What? No!" She sounded personally offended (as if that's not the kind of thing she would do). "So, yeah, then he just-"

"Wait a second...he called you the third Ringbearer."

"Yeah."

"...dude, you had it for five fuckin' minutes."

"No thanks to you," she added.

"He thinks that qualifies as being a Ringbearer? Also shut up."

Olivia looked even more offended. "Excuse you, I am one of the few people to actually touch the thing, most people just stare at it and go bonkers."

"Lucky you," I said flatly. "So everyone who touches it is a Ringbearer now? That means hippie Dumbledore was a Ringbearer. Serves that bastard right."

Olivia raised her eyebrows. "'Hippie Dumbledore' was the one on the phone, idiot."

I didn't have anything to say to that.

"...why the fuck was Gandalf calling you?" I asked.

Olivia bit her lip, looking like she was trying to figure out how to put her next sentence.

"There's a quest," she finally said.

I squinted at her. "Explanation please."

Olivia looked me dead in the eyes for a few seconds, then looked back down. "Diana...Smeagol..." (This was surprising, since she rarely called me anything other than "Dee." "Diana" when she's being more serious, "Smeag" when she's feeling particularly companionable and knows I won't do something stupid like freeze or cry or run, "Smeagol" when she's trying to hold my attention, "Gollum" a couple times when she's been really, really, really, really mad at me. Never Twitch, though.)

"It, it...the Ring. It's been reforged. The...the rest of The Lord of the Rings characters have been reincarnated too. We have to destroy it, Dee."

Okay, it was right about there that the world stopped rotating, oxygen stopped being a thing, and I seriously considered throwing up.

I took the urge.

Olivia flinched backwards, but stood calmly as I hurled my guts. She didn't even make a face at me when I wiped my mouth on my arm. After all of that, I stared at her for a few seconds.

Then I burst into tears.

(Yeah, yeah, I'm pathetic. Rub it in, why don't you.)