DISCLAIMER: Anything you recognise belongs to JKR.
Written for the school subjects competition on HPFC for Ancient Runes (must involve mystery)
He had been working on this problem for three years now, driving himself to sleepless nights and migrane headaches as he pored over every scrap of evidence he could lay his hands on. Well, three and a half if you counted the last part of his apprenticeship, where he first became interested in it. Though that strictly wasn't true either. As a child he had always loved the tale of three brothers, always requested it on story nights, with Lily agreeing as she liked the bit about the youngest child winning out.
It was only natural that his fascination would continue through the years, pretending that the invisibility cloak James had inherited from Dad was the real Hallow. Pretending that the wand he received at eleven, alder and dragon heartstring, was the real Elder wand somehow lost and refound in a dusty corner of Ollivanders. Pretending that the stone pendant he found behind the wall of Grimmauld Place was really the resurrection stone hidden away by pureblood descendants of Cadmus Peverell.
Now that his actual job pertained to examining the mysteries that even magic couldn't simply solve, it made sense for him to pursue the interest in an academic way. Not many in the department worked in Death, and he tried to balance the hours by the chilled stone archway with his studies in the Time and Faith divisions, pondering over a hundred different versions of the tale alongside wizarding genealogies and barely legible records of ancient villages.
He had successfully nailed down the time that the brothers would have lived, and even managed to trace three previously unknown jumps in the Elder wand's deadly history before he stumbled across the family tree that made his heart stop.
The letters of the female name were barely legible at the top of the page, and she was clearly considered unimportant compared to the central Abbott family patriarch who she had wed, but he eventually restored the almost invisible ink to see the name Illiana Peverell, familiar to him as the only child ultimately descended from Ignotius where the line died out. At the other end of the tree, tracing the path of the eldest son or only child from this joining to the base of the scroll led to another familiar name, Carandus Potter, the father of Rickard and Charlus Potter, his own great-grandfather and great-uncle.
As Albus collected his notes together and double-checked the protective spells on the precious documents he felt the dull ache in his head subside somewhat, to be replaced with a feeling of almost giddy excitement low in his stomach. It was time to have a very long talk with his father.