In which Morgan reads the Daily Prophet, Wizard Trotsky vaguely recalls a time when his world was a far more surreal, unstable, and uncertain place, and with the appearance of a familiar stranger wearing Wizard Trotsky's face, Morgan is forced to make the most horrific of choices.

It was a cold day once again and looking at the sky Morgan was almost certain that it was going to snow. Not yet, not in the clear early morning as mist formed from her breath, but soon, it was going to snow.

Wizard Trotsky didn't even seem to notice. Neither the clouds nor the cold could shake his attention from his newfound passionate zeal for the inevitable communist uprising of wizarding England and his hatred of the bourgeoisie. He stood on a soap box, conjured from thin air, at the edge of Diagon Alley, dressed in black and red that not one pedestrian seemed to recognize, and with a fire in his eyes he shouted out to the indifferent crowd, "When will enough be enough, Britain? It's only beginning now but will we really standby and let it happen again?!"

This didn't seem all that out of character for him though, Wizard Trotsky was a slave to his own fantastical whims, or at least, so Morgan thought. As for his latest flight of fancy…

"I can tell you now, comrades, that it won't be the Wizengamot, filled with Malfoys, Blacks, Crabbes, and Goyles that will help us. No, we all know the truth! The truth is that they will turn their heads as they did eleven years ago! Because our leaders, these bourgeoise petty lords who have tyrannically ruled over us for one thousand years, belong to the dark lord."

Black and red, it suited him, it brought out his pale skin and his blue eyes, certainly it suited his name, except… Except there was something almost painful seeing him with a black overcoat and a red scarf. Even though he was picturesque standing there, in the perfect position for a propaganda poster, he was painful to look at directly for too long.

The very sight of him, for reasons she couldn't understand, seemed to tear her heart in half with bittersweet nostalgia.

"Yes, even those who talk about muggleborn children and how much they care belong to him and his ilk! Think about it. We know the name of every Death Eater, we know the names of the ones who never went to Azkaban. Yet here we are again, and nothing has changed! Tell me, what's the difference between condoning and saying nothing?!"

Morgan herself was dressed as nothing particularly special, except, that she was dressed to look like anyone but herself. She was wearing muggle clothes, much like Tom was, dark shoes worn thin, an oversized holiday sweater featuring something that looked like a festive reindeer or else a moose, a pair of out of season sunglasses, and all her hair stuffed up into an oversized Santa Claus hat leaving only a few stray crimson strands to curl out from under the brim and escape.

In other words, she looked utterly ridiculous, even among wizards and especially in juxtaposition to darkly dressed Wizard Trotsky on his righteous soap box.

He shouted out towards the crowd, his eyes tightening, grimacing at their lack of attention, "Is it because we're afraid or is it because it's convenient! Convenient for us to be gotten rid of this quickly and easily!"

However, he'd insisted, when he'd insisted they go out and start inspiring the countrymen to revolution, that she look like anyone but herself, and it was either this getup or him cutting off her hair and dying it nondescript brown. Somehow, the terrible sweater and the stupid hat had seemed like the lesser of evils (and the sad thing was, even though he'd winced when he'd seen her conjured clothing, he hadn't seemed to disagree with her choice).

As it was no one was glancing at her, or Wizard Trotsky for that matter, their eyes were instead on the ground, ignoring even the holiday cheer of Diagon Alley. There was a tenseness in the air, the smell of smoke, and everyone's eyes darted in every direction for anyone and everyone that wasn't a muggleborn child on a soap box.

"Do you really intend to stay still and silent, relying on nothing but a few odd aurors barely graduated from Hogwarts, again?! Can we really stand to do that?!"

The holiday music playing, a tinny poorly recorded "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year", was strangely eerie among the hurried footsteps, harsh breathing, and lack of conversation. Perhaps, Morgan thought to herself as she watched dispassionately, there was something to her Christmas association after all.

Here an irrational and unquenchable fear and dread were practically bleeding into the holiday.

Abruptly, the fire seemed to die in Wizard Trotsky's eyes as he surveyed his lack of an audience. For a moment he looked terribly distant, as if his soap box was the height of a mountain, it was a god's distance from a people he could no longer comprehend. Quietly, he said, "You people will never change, will you?"

Someone passing by, in their haste, accidentally dropped a copy of the Daily Prophet at her feet. With a glance towards Wizard Trotsky, now staring in contempt and disappointment at the mob who only wanted to get their holiday shopping done as quickly and quietly as possible, carefully reached for it and unfolded it.

There, on the front page, was none other than Diagon Alley the day before, a burning shop that specialized in muggle knick knacks and curiosities, and green light and smoke in the form of a skull devouring a snake grinning down upon the scene with malevolent glee.

"This is all you're capable of, isn't it? I suppose, for a moment, I had forgotten that."

She stared at it, for a moment, the streets of Diagon Alley, the ink of the witches and wizards fleeing in terror on the printed page, and then she started flipping through, through and through until somewhere in the middle of the pages she came across a blaring centerfold headline, "Hogwarts in Chaos: Girl Who Lived Kidnapped Again and More!"

There, in copious and rather melodramatic words, reporter Rita Skeeter detailed the first half of 1992 to her avid readers, "Heirs of Slytherin, dark magical maladies and signs of possession, multiple students missing and presumed kidnapped, murdered Hogwarts professors! Shocking and horror filled 1992 has somehow topped even 1991 when Quirinus Quirrell, beloved Muggle Studies then Defense professor, kidnapped the girl who lived to Albania.

And at the heart of it all, just as the year before, none other than incompetent Headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

Our story begins only a few months ago when ominous messages, written in rooster's blood, were left dripping on the Hogwarts walls warning castle denizens to, 'Beware the heir' and that 'the chamber is now open'. This, of course, being a reference to the fifty-year old tragedy surrounding the petrification of numerous students and the death of one muggleborn student Myrtle Warren, instigated by none other than Hogwarts Groundskeeper Rubeus Hagrid and his pet acromantula."

Morgan glanced up from the article to spy Wizard Trotsky, now laughing at the wizards and witches passing them by, an amused almost hysterical laugh as if he was only now remembering exactly what they were, and that it was unbelievably funny that even for a moment he had forgotten.

Deciding she didn't want to go there she looked back down at the paper, picking up where she left off, "Did Dumbledore and company warn parents then? No, of course not! As with the year before and the hidden third corridor housing such deadly terrors as a Cerberus the staff merely told children to exercise caution while Groundskeeper Hagrid continued to perform his everyday functions unchecked on schoolgrounds.

As always, Dumbledore's Hogwarts has prioritized the children!

Thus follows, with an unusual influx of Albania refugee students, weeks of petrifications and terror as muggleborn students wonder which of them will be next.

Muggleborn student Hermione Jean Granger tells all as she, with stoic features for a twelve-year old girl stated, 'It was terrible… Somehow not surprising though, isn't this always what happens to muggleborn students? I think that there are reasons, that in these kinds of situations, it's only Ellie Potter that we can rely on."

Morgan's concentration broke as she glanced up at a particularly loud laugh, Wizard Trotsky crowing, "You're all fools!"

"Petrifications weren't the end either, Rubeus Hagrid wouldn't stop there, no, only a few weeks ago, four Hogwarts second year and two Hogwarts first year female students showed signs of possession, Eleanor Lily Potter along with her Albanian refugee friends disappeared from Hogwarts entirely and are presumed kidnapped by unknown associates of Hagrid's, and beloved Defense professor and national hero Gilderoy Lockhart was found drained of all life in the Dungeon bathroom. No doubt, brave, valiant, heroic Gilderoy sought to defend the school from Hagrid, only just now arrested once again as he was in 1943, sacrificing his life in the struggle to foul and unspeakable magic.

How it must have tortured him, to fail to save Ellie Potter once again, to allow this beast to roam free and out of aurors' clutches! How easily this all could have been avoided if Dumbledore had merely acted and arrested Rubeus Hagrid from the start!

Meanwhile students, dazed and horrified, resume their daily lives and try their best not to grieve for injured and missing students, particularly beloved Ellie Potter. Neville Longbottom, Gryffindor second year and friend of the girl who lived, had this to say, with tears welling at the corner of his eyes at the mere thought of his missing friend, 'She never talked about Albania much. She… I can't talk about this now.'

Draco Malfoy, second year Slytherin, spiteful and betrayed, proclaimed, 'It just goes to show what a shame headmaster Dumbledore really is! When I told my father, he couldn't believe what was going on inside Hogwarts!'

Though perhaps it was Luna Lovegood, first year member of the newly minted Default house, who said it best when, with ultimate faith in the girl who lived, she stated, 'Ellie will come back, she always will. Even the greatest and most daunting of obstacles, the tallest of mountains and widest of seas, are nothing to her in the end. Ultimately, she is without care for the heir, because to her he is a mere speck of dust. Ellie is made for greater challenges than these."

Skimming through, the article then went on to reference Lucius Malfoy, member of the Hogwarts board of directors, who noted that this, more than anything else, proved that Albus Dumbledore was not fit to be headmaster Rita Skeeter giving her hearty approval of this idea.

On the side were several pictures, one of Hogwarts itself, one of a grim Albus Dumbledore at a press conference in the ministry, and one of Eleanor Potter herself. Looking at her, indeed, she looked alarmingly like Morgan, eerily identical in every conceivable way from the curls of her red hair to the luminosity of her green eyes.

She stood on a quidditch pitch in black and white quidditch robes, the caption under the picture remarking her as Default quidditch captain, while beside her, looking ranges from unimpressed and disinterested to cheerfully gleeful were her Default companions and quidditch teammates Daphne Greengrass, Blaise Zabini, Luna Lovegood, Hermione Granger, and Lepur and Lenin Rabbitson. Standing behind them, off to side, was a flock of Weasleys, the youngest boy with an absurdly fat three-toed rat on his shoulder, as well as Neville Longbottom.

It was a picture aimed to endear despite the eccentricities of its subjects, and it worked, even now as Morgan looked at it she was gripped by overwhelming bittersweet nostalgia.

However, aside from lingering on Ellie Potter, her eerily familiar mannerisms, she found her eyes drifting to the white haired Albanian boys, one, an almost exact replica of Wizard Trotsky, and the other…

It was the boy from the arcade, staring blankly, without expression once again into the camera. Except, no, Morgan had the feeling that he was somehow looking through time and space itself to Morgan in this exact moment, dark eyes boring into hers as they had in the arcade.

"Lily."

Morgan looked up, found Wizard Trotsky staring down at her with pursed lips and a completely unamused expression on his face. Morgan quickly discarded the Prophet, bunching it into a ball and hurling it into the mob of pedestrians with an awkward grin, even as Wizard Trotsky said, "These people are ungrateful idiots, we're done here."

"Oh, already?" Morgan asked, looking around, wondering if they'd even spent that much time here. Sure, it'd been a few hours, but then he'd spent just as much time staring at a bunch of run down flats the day before.

"I'm not wasting my time on these people," Wizard Trotsky said with an insulted sniff, crossing his arms and sticking his pale hands underneath them for warmth, "If they want to go and make the same mistakes they made a decade ago and end up with a dark lord ruling their country then far be it from me to stop them."

Morgan herself had thought that this very quality was somewhat the point, but if Wizard Trotsky was done sitting out in the cold then she wasn't going to complain. Still, it was almost pathetically short lived for a revolution. She supposed that Wizard Trotsky just didn't have the patience for the proletariat.

He was looking at her again, his eyes softening and impatience drifting away as he took in her ridiculous get up, that fond look taking its place without warning or any apparent cause, "Lily, let's get ice cream."

"Ice cream?" Morgan asked, eyebrows raising as she glanced at the sky again, where, yes, it did still look like snow, "Isn't it a bit cold for that?"

"I haven't had ice cream in over fifty years," he remarked before blinking with surprise and stating, "I think I'm craving it, actually."

Morgan would personally rather have warmed butterbeer, but she supposed she didn't have much of a choice as Wizard Trotsky vanished his soap box then took her hand in his, pulling her down the crowded and tense swarm of shoppers to the ice cream shop.

At least it was warm on the inside, though Morgan, mostly to humor him, kept her sunglasses and hat firmly on. Nobody seemed to mind though, the shop mostly empty, Wizard Trotsky and Morgan the only real customers as the rest hurried about their necessary business as quickly as possible.

Today was not a day for ice cream.

Wizard Trotsky seemed unnaturally in awe of his double chocolate frog mint ice cream, digging into it slowly, relishing every taste while Morgan's eyes drifted to her own reflection in the window, barely tasting her own sundae.

Finally, seeing past the dark lenses of her glasses to the pale green of her eyes in the reflected window, Morgan said, "I dreamed about Mars."

"What?" Wizard Trotsky asked, distracted by his own sense of taste, newly discovered after fifty years of being nothing more than paper.

"I dreamed about Mars," Morgan repeated, sounding distant even to herself, "Secret agents on Mars, mutants, a blue sky, and a woman who was both sleazy and demure somehow…"

"Ah," Wizard Trotsky seemed at a loss for words at the moment, setting down his spoon to stare at her, as if merely by looking her in the eye he could dissect exactly what this meant, "Was it a good dream?"

Morgan thought about it, thought about how brightly the stars had shone, how they had almost been blinding, screaming at her, "No."

Then, looking at him, she asked, "What did you dream about when you were in the diary?"

He stilled, unnaturally so, so that it looked like he wasn't even breathing for a moment as he stared at her. Then, with reluctance, life and movement returned to him and he said softly, raggedly, "Many things."

"What kind of things?"

"Myself, mainly," he said, looking away from her to his own reflection and his fierce blue eyes, "And you, you showed up quite often."

To that they both said nothing, there was too much of an undertow to those words, enough to pull them both under and drown them if they weren't careful. For a moment then there was an awkward and tense silence, the only sound the music coming from outside and the movement of the cashier.

"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…"

"I… would graduate Hogwarts, often, top of my class of course, O's in every subject. I'd travel the world for a few years, see anything and everything I had ever imagined, was capable of imagining. I'd come back to England and become a king, just as I had always predicted and thought, and I'd find you or sometimes you would find me and…" he trailed off, looking back at her and there was such desperate and fierce longing in his eyes as he looked at her, that Morgan could easily read what he wasn't saying.

That his dreams weren't merely dreams, they were all the lives he'd never lived, over and over and over again inside his head with only the slightest variations, Morgan herself as his bride or his something.

However, Morgan couldn't ask about that, didn't want to. No, there was only one reason, looking at him now, that she had asked him in the first place, "How did you know they weren't real?"

This time there was a flicker of something sharp, something apprehensive and dark, within his pale eyes, "With great difficulty."

She kept looking, searching his face for more. He hesitated again, looking at her and through her, and finally he elaborated with a pained look on his face, "The last time, when I stopped playing house with myself I… I was in so deep, deeper than I'd ever been, that even I didn't know it wasn't real.

But why would I doubt it? I had everything I had ever wanted. I was a king, all nations bowing before me and I was so tired of only being a memory…

We had children, Lily, and I…

At some point, I think I wanted it to be real, and so I forgot how to doubt."

He rubbed a hand over his face, sighed, his breath louder than it should have been, "One day you came in, but you were different, for that moment you weren't mine. You were dressed like a man, a dark and worn leather coat on, tall boots and for that single instant, in the twilight in the palace, you were utterly alien and ineffable.

This didn't bother me like it should have, there is no true reality in dreams, Lily. You could be both my wife and a stranger in the same instant, standing in two places at once with ease, and my mind would never balk at it.

So, you were Lily but you weren't my Lily, and as you walked, taller and older yet wholly yourself, I did not blink.

There was smoke in the room, but no one was smoking, the light was caught in it as an orange haze, reflected in your eyes as you looked across at me. You set up a machine, put it up to my eye, and you told me that you had come to administer the Voight-Kampff test, a type of Turing test."

He paused, quirked a smile at her, and said, "Only later did I remember that you had been the one to tell me about…"

He stopped, paled, shook his head, then continued, "You asked, first, reading the machine and not looking at me at all, a very strange question about a tortoise in a desert. You asked, 'You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise, Tom. It's crawling towards you, you reach down and you flip the tortoise on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping, why is that, Tom?'

Of course, I didn't know, but you didn't let me answer, barely let me open my mouth as my heart raced without my control or without even knowing what it was I was so very afraid of only that I was paralyzed with fear of something."

Tom's hands clenched, knuckles white as he rung them, even now anxiety bled into his voice as he remembered the dream world that had been anything but, his words resonating inside of Morgan's mind with more force than they should have been capable of.

"Then you asked me to, 'Describe in single words only the good things that come into mind about your mother'

I failed to answer, there were no single words for my mother, and good words, what are good words, what good words could I possibly have for her, and you knew it before you even asked. And you grinned at my failure, you put your machine away, and announced, 'There, see, you aren't human after all.'

I paused, blinked, and asked, 'Pardon?'

'You're under the illusion that your human, a common misconception, but you're really little more than a replication a… memory, as it were,' you were all business, utterly indifferent to my terror and rage as you announced, 'You have prescribed false memories to yourself, that was clever, but not good enough.'

And suddenly I remembered, I remembered that I wasn't real, that none of it was.

And you said to me, a look of pity in your eyes as the world ended, as everything shattered, 'It's too bad you won't live, but then again, who does?"

They both fell silent again at that, unspoken was that this was the last dream for Wizard Trotsky, and after that no doubt he had been too afraid to ever let himself sink so deep again. Instead Morgan ate her ice cream, the flavor flat and unrecognizable, unimportant.

Wizard Trotsky stood, reached out a hand towards hers and pulled her out of the booth, "Let's go to Hyde Park."

They took the long way, through the streets of muggle London, the atmosphere far more cheery and typical of the usual holidays than inside the wizarding counterpart and as they did the shadows grew longer, twilight approached, and just as Morgan had predicted small flakes of snow began to fall.

As they walked, past double decker buses and red telephone booths, Wizard Trotsky with his hands in his pockets, he said, "I… Sometimes, Lily, I think you don't know how I feel."

Their shadows behind them were long and dark, trailing off towards the horizon as the sun slunk down into the earth.

"It's understandable, even I'm uncertain of myself to tell the truth. The diary never did any of us any favors. Still, I feel so much, too much at times. However, I have always known, that ultimately, whatever it is I feel for you is what matters to me most. More than power, kingship, money, or women."

He glanced at her, the light caught in his eyes, painting that pale blue shades of orange, magenta, and gold as if his eyes were twin suns as well, rising in a pale blue sky. He ruefully smiled, looking away from her for a moment, "I was never this fragmented before, when were one Tom Riddle. I feel constantly on edge, high then low, I hate it. I hate… how out of control I am, how fragmented my thoughts are! I hate that I can't make them listen or care and that I don't even care if they do!"

He stopped abruptly, listening to his words echo, watching them go almost with fascination as if he hadn't realized the strength of his own frustration and anger. He sighed then looked down at her again, conflicted once more as they stepped into the park itself, past carolers and ice skaters, "And I am sorry, Lily, for everything, but… You have to understand that there was no way out. You left me no other choice. Because I can't…"

He looked down at his hands, pale even against their faded winter backdrop, and with a wry smile he said, "I'm not what I was, I can't persuade like I used to. Ginny Weasley, Pansy Parkinson, even Gilderoy Lockhart perhaps. But you? Even then I couldn't, how could I hope to now?"

He moved towards an empty bench, sat down and stared at her, framing her with his hands as if they were a camera with which to take her picture. With a smile he stated, "I always envied you, you were so… Powerful, even then, even when I had no idea what the depths of that power could possibly be. At first, I was rather bitter about it, then I coveted, but then… Even now, I wouldn't take that away from you any more than I would your hair or your eyes or anything about you. You have always been quintessentially yourself, Lily."

That remark seemed to reassure him, he dropped his hands back into his lap, still smiling softly, staring out at the park and at Morgan herself while Morgan stared back at this strange young man that was her cousin.

"We are not," Wizard Trotsky stated with confidence and a grin, "Two ships passing in the night, Lily. One way or another, we were destined to meet. That, beyond everything, I know."

It was almost twilight now, somewhere in the park, a recording of a Ray Charles' song was playing, strangely not holiday themed. Trotsky stood, held his hand out to her with a slight bow, and waited until she took his hand for him to pull her towards him.

"You give your hand to me and then you say hello."

The snow was falling harder, the sun just now setting fully, as with their woefully mismatched heights they stepped awkwardly into a slow swing. His lips stretched into a smile, one without malice or bitterness as white flakes caught in his dark hair.

Staring up at him, one hand on his waist the other in his hand, Lily wondered if it was the day of Christmas Present or Christmas Future, and that she couldn't quite tell, that somehow her second and third day seemed to be blurring into one so that its theme was lost entirely in something she herself could only barely understand.

"And I can hardly speak, my heart is beating so."

Only, she knew even as she looked at him, at the light framing his face like a halo, that she was haunted by puzzle pieces of a reality she was finding difficult to believe in. The rabbit with the face of a boy, fathers with crows' feathers, Christmas with the scent of blood, Wizard Trotsky her fragmented cousin, Lenin Rabbitson who wore his face with paler hair, Hogwarts, and Ellie Potter at the center of it all. All these things wrapped together into something that made her head and heart ache desperately, though she didn't have the name for what that was.

"And anyone could tell, you think you know me well, but you don't know me."

And that, when she looked up at Wizard Trotsky, just for this moment, and he smiled down at her with his joyful passionate desperation, and yes, even love, she couldn't help but both pity him and love him in return. Only for a second, because even when she looked at him, she felt something even though…

"No, you don't know the one who dreams of you at night, and longs to kiss your lips, and longs to hold you tight."

Even though, well, she didn't know, except that he wasn't in her dream. She was in his, perhaps, or some conglomeration of her was but…

"I'm just a friend, that's all I've ever been, but you don't know me."

But in some sense, they were ships passing in the night.

Even now, her hand in his, they weren't really touching one another.

The song faded, the lyrics passing through unheard in the air, the sun set, and the air grew dark and cold as the snow fell thicker. Soon, all Morgan could see in the light of the streetlamps were the white flakes swiftly falling to the earth. He kept gripping her hand tightly, as if sensing that Morgan was miles and miles from this place.

"Are we going back to the brothel?" Morgan finally asked, her words a white fog in front of her from the cold.

"For now," he said, "Well leave though, soon, I don't know where yet but…"

Morgan nodded, extracting her hand from his and shoving it into her pocket, that moment now lost in time like a tree falling unnoticed in the woods, "Right, we should head back then."

They walked in silence, Wizard Trotsky contemplative, clearly forgetting that he had an appointment with Mustard Seed again, or perhaps merely indifferent to the idea of it as he could probably just confound her and send her on her merry way. Either way, when they entered, Morgan veered off towards the bar and left Wizard Trotsky to his own sordid affairs, him sparing her a pair of somewhat affronted raised eyebrows before stalking upstairs with a shake of her head, leaving Morgan with her butterbeer and the quiet.

Or at least, until the chime of a bell sounded as the door opened, and an early evening customer walked in. Morgan's head turned almost without her consent, as if the mere sound of his footsteps were enough to draw her attention, and when she looked everything stopped.

There, taller, older, filled out into the body of a man while Wizard Trotsky's still wavered in adolescence, was Tom Marvolo Riddle. A man wearing Tom Riddle's face, his eyes, his legs, and even his hands as he slowly surveyed the room, eyes, eventually, finding Morgan's.

Walking past the madam, dozing, he came towards her, sat in the booth across from her, folding his hands on the table and just staring at her while she stared transfixed back. Slowly, carefully, she removed her hat and her glasses, but he had recognized her even with them.

Quietly, in an older Tom Riddle's voice, he said, "You didn't keep your promise."

There were tears, unexplainable tears, in the corners of her eyes. She blinked against this, grimacing, trying to keep her bearings even as she said, "I think I dreamed about you."

She shook her head, held at her hand, tried to see past the Tom Riddle in his eyes as she held out her hand towards him so he could shake it, "Sorry, I'm Morgan Gaunt, recently recovered from a fifty year coma."

He said nothing, didn't move either of his hands towards her, just frowned. Only, only it was deeper than he was allowing his expression to show, this wasn't mild disapproval, in his eyes there was an unfathomable rage burning there, as if he saw far more in her than she ever could.

And she found she somehow couldn't blame him for it.

Except, her mind told her, except it hadn't been three days, or had it? She didn't know when the days started, and he could be Voldemort, very likely was Voldemort. But no, no somehow, she knew that wasn't it, that he wasn't Voldemort as she knew him but something else entirely.

She knew in the way that in dreams you always unexplainably knew.

"I need to talk to you," he finally said, calmly, politely, as if there were no tension in the room at all, "It's about Tom Riddle."

"Who are you?" she asked instead, eyes pouring over his familiar features, that were more familiar even than the fact that they belonged to Wizard Trotsky. As if Wizard Trotsky looked familiar because he looked like a younger version of this man.

He smiled, a wry amused thing, and announced a name that echoed so loudly inside her own head, "Lenin."

"How did you find me?"

The smile stayed, small, and reminiscent of Wizard Trotsky's, "That's a little hard to explain."

Then, motioning towards himself, placing a wand, a wand that hummed with familiarity on the table, he noted, "I'm not armed."

Then, catching Morgan's glance behind him, for the white-haired boy that wasn't a boy at all he added, "Don't worry, I came alone."

Except… Except Morgan knew these words, this had been in her dream, yes, yes she remembered this or something in her did. The words tumbled out of her mouth, the words she'd heard asked or had asked herself before, and yet she still meant every one of them as she stared across at him, "What do you want?"

She wasn't sure she wanted this scene to end.

He leaned back, his smile twisting into a rueful grin as he examined her, until it disappeared at the sight of her own trepidation, her fear, dashed his mirth entirely. Finally, he said, "This is going to be very difficult for you to accept, Lily."

"I'm listening."

And then she was Doug Quaid, in a hotel room on the run, reeling from memories she did not have, as a man in a suit and glasses looked across from her and echoed this doppelganger's, Wizard Lenin's, words, "I'm afraid you're not really standing here right now."

She grit her teeth, leaned back, and said, "You know, Doc, you could have fooled me."

"I'm quite serious," he responded, and indeed, his face was grim, grimmer than Wizard Trotsky's had ever been, "You're not here, and neither am I."

"That's amazing," Morgan drily remarked, "Where are we?"

"At Rekall," he said simply, but behind this was some other darker truth, that this was the metaphor he had simply chosen to use but the meaning remained the same, the meaning that had been haunting Morgan for days now, "You were strapped to an implant chair, and I'm monitoring you from a psychic probe console."

She laughed, a bitter thing, wondering if this was what Wizard Trotsky had felt, confronted by his own Morgan, his own older Lily in his dream world. Faced with the unbearable reality that reality itself simply wasn't, "Oh, I get it. I'm dreaming, and this is part of the delightful vacation package your company has sold me."

"Not exactly," he responded grimly, and it was amazing, that out of context he played the context so well, that these jarring words that she had no right to know, that he had no right to know, flowed so well, "What you're experiencing is a freeform delusion based on our memory tapes, but you're inventing it yourself as you go along."

She grit her teeth, as she had as Doug Quaid in her dream on Mars, and asked with a shaking voice, "If this is my delusion, then who the hell invited you?"

"I've been artificially implanted as an emergency measure," he noted before expanding, looking her directly in the eye to the very heart of her, "I'm sorry to tell you this, Lily, but you have suffered a schizoid embolism, we can't snap you out of your fantasy, and I've been sent in to try to talk you down."

The words, at this point, were almost horrified rote, "How much is Cohaagen paying you for this?"

None the less he played his part, and there was something tender and terrifying in that, that he would quote words back to her that he had no business having memorized. And his words, the implications, were truly terrible, "Think about it."

He gestured towards her, towards the brothel, towards everything that made Morgan Lily Gaunt what she was, "Your dream begins in the middle of the implant procedure. Everything after that, the chases, the trip to Mars, the suite at the Hilton, are all elements of your Rekall holiday and ego trip."

Then eyeing her, looking at her directly, he noted, "You paid to be a secret agent."

If he had said it directly, that she was not really Morgan Lily Gaunt, that she was someone else, possibly Ellie Potter, possibly some girl named Lily, would she have listened. Would she have shook in terror as she realized that everything she had ever counted on, everything she knew, was nothing more than an illusion?

She didn't know, she only knew that even now she didn't truly want to know, that for all she could dismiss reality as a great fickle machine, it was one thing to know it, and another to embrace it without hesitation, "Bullshit. It's coincidence."

"What about the girl?" he asked instead, of course, meaning, what about Tom, what about cousin Tom, cousin Trotsky?

"Brunette, athletic, sleazy, and demure just as you specified, is that a coincidence?"

Did Wizard Trotsky really come for you after fifty years in a coma? And if not, where were you before then? Where did he find you and what did he fashion into your current image?

She shook her head, looking down at her reflection in the butterbeer, "No, she's real. I dreamt about her before I even went to Rekall."

Strange, was she dreaming now, because the conversation flowed like a river. Flowed and flowed where it shouldn't, where it didn't make sense, and yet it did and she accepted it for what it was.

"Lily, can you hear yourself?" he asked, and he meant these words or he was a profound actor, his eyes, Wizard Trotsky and Lenin's shared eyes, burned, "She's real because you dreamt her."

She swallowed, closed her eyes and opened them, forcing herself into stoicism, "Who am I really then, Lenin, if not Morgan Gaunt?"

"Eleanor Lily Potter," he said with ease, reaching across the table to take her hand in his, his hands slightly larger than Wizard Trotsky's had been, "Lily, the destroyer of this world and the girl who lived, and my only friend."

"And you, Lenin?"

A smile, that damn smile that she had seen too few times in her life but did not wish to see now, "The peculiar man who once lived inside your head."

"And do you have any proof?" she asked.

"Only Total Recall," he said, because he couldn't offer more, to dispute the whole nature of reality there could be no evidence, only inconsistencies.

And so, it was Morgan who picked up the scene, as if Doug Quaid's wife had walked into the room, demure and grieving, so different than the homicidal cold woman he had seen prior, "If I wanted to return, then what?"

And as she said it she realized she faced the same dilemma ad Doug Quaid, worse perhaps, she must actively choose, without evidence, with only nagging suspicions and apparent coincidences, the reality she preferred to live in. Because that's what it was, ultimately, nothing was certain, his world or Morgan's, instead it was a preference.

Did she choose the strange half familiar world of Wizard Trotsky's or swallow the red pill and reject reality, truly reject it, altogether?

In front of her he placed a red pill on the table, the pill she had known he would place before her, "Swallow this."

"What is it?"

"It's a symbol of your desire to return to reality," he answered, his hand warm against hers, as real as it had seemed fifty years ago in a life she might not have lived, "In your dreams you'll fall asleep."

"Alright," she said swallowing staring directly at him, perhaps in warning, her last desperate warning that she was not helpless here, "Let's say you're telling the truth and this is all a dream. I could pull this trigger and it won't matter."

"It won't make the slightest difference to me, Lily, but the consequences to you will be devastating," and he almost didn't seem like he was parroting lines here, the words burned, the depths of his rage bleeding through into his words, "In your mind, I'll be dead, and with no one to guide you out, you'll be stuck in here in permanent psychosis. The walls of reality will come crashing down around you. One minute, you're the savior of the rebel cause; next thing you know, you'll be Cohaagen's bosom buddy. You'll even have fantasies about alien civilizations as you requested; but in the end, back on Earth, you'll be lobotomized! So, get a grip on yourself, Lily!"

He leaned forward, placed the pill into her hands, and hissed out, "Take the pill and put it into your mouth. Swallow it."

She looked down at it, this red pill, her fingers shaking as the philosophical magnitude of it sunk in. To take this pill, to reject this reality was in some way to reject every reality. It was to irrevocably stake her claim that reality, that the world she inhabited, was lacking to the point that it must be abandoned entirely…

Wizard Lenin suddenly leapt from the booth, pulling her down with him to the floor as a bolt of light struck where he had just been sitting, leaving a smoldering scorch mark where his head had been. Morgan glanced up and saw Wizard Trotsky now entering the bar, wand out and breathing heavily, people fleeing past him as he glared across at Wizard Lenin, the madam rushing out of the building as the fire from the spell began to spread across the walls.

Suddenly, Morgan remembered, that to meet your doppelganger was an omen of death.

"You," he said, in clear horrified recognition, not even sparing a glance for Morgan, "What do you think you're doing here?"

Wizard Lenin picked himself up off the floor, summoning the wand he'd left on the table back into his hand, and dully asked, "What do you think I'm doing here?"

It was an unnecessary question, it seemed that Wizard Trotsky knew the answer without even having to think. Shaking his head he stated, "You can't honestly imagine I'd let you take her."

"It has nothing to do with your permission," Wizard Lenin scoffed before turning towards Morgan, motioning to her, and crying out, "Besides, look what you've done to her! Morgan Gaunt, what is she, our sister, our cousin?!"

"I did what I had to!"

"You had to make this…" Wizard Lenin motioned around them, to their absurd surroundings, "This cheap charade, this sordid attempt to play house in a brothel of all places? To what end? Surely, you can't imagine that she, that I, would be grateful for this."

"You have no right to call me on cheap charades!" Trotsky spat, pale eyes burning as light began to spark out of his wand, "You're no more real than I am, and here you are picking up his mantle as if you have any more right to it than the rest of us!"

"And you think you have a right to it?" Wizard Lenin asked, stalking forward, wand gripped tightly in his hand as he approached his younger doppelganger, "Tell me, Snowball, where exactly would you go, what contacts would you use, how would your dear cousin factor into your endgame? What exactly is it that you were planning to do next, or are you even capable of planning at all?"

Wizard Lenin then stopped, fully looked at Wizard Trotsky, at everything he was, and it was in a pitying tone that he said, "I never imagined meeting you, but I expected you to be… so much more than you are."

Wizard Trotsky shot out a spell, immediately deflected by his older counterpart, and barked out a laugh, "You think I'm looking for your approval? Because I can tell you, Lenin, that I've found you lacking from the start."

Wizard Trotsky, grinning his mad grin, began to list off Wizard Lenin's flaws upon one hand, "Let's see, first, your disastrous failure with Eleanor Potter eleven years ago, well done there. Second, the fact that you yourself weren't even meant to exist, you were an accident, a mistake, a glaring stain upon our reputation that will haunt us for eternity."

Wizard Trotsky then motioned to Morgan herself, still on the floor looking up at them, desperately clutching the red pill in her hand, "And her, Lenin, you can't even seem to remember who she really is! You accuse me of playing house, look at you! I'm not even sure what you're playing but the denial, the dismissal, surely that is far more pathetic."

"You're mistaking her for someone else," Wizard Lenin insisted, again dully, almost impatiently, but Wizard Trotsky merely balked, barked out a short mad laugh at his counterpart's dismissal.

"For someone else, really, do you think there could be two? Even in fifty years?" Wizard Trotsky said, shaking his head with a smile, "That really is… so disappointing."

"It's an understandable mistake," Wizard Lenin said, and there was something in his voice, familiar and strange as it was, something that Morgan couldn't recognize except that somewhere in memories she could no longer recall, "After all, she looks almost exactly like her mother."

"Her mother?!" Wizard Trotsky cried, in a tone that played at amusement but was far more desperate and angry than that, "At least I only made her a cousin!"

Wizard Lenin sighed, looking irritated with the affair, pulling Morgan up from the floor to stand with him. Then, he addressed the boy version of himself, as if for the final time, "I won't deny it, what you've managed was clever, reckless, but clever. I doubt I'll ever be able to set foot inside Hogwarts again, perhaps even Lily won't be able to with the chaos you left in your wake. However, Trotsky, it was only ever clever, and ultimately, even you must know that it could never get you anywhere. This, I think, is all you'll ever be capable of."

And that, the sight of Morgan's hand in his, torn between two worlds, as well as his own dismissal was enough for Wizard Trotsky. His wand whipped out, with a great Latin cry a bolt of light shot towards them and they were off to the races.

And they were vicious, both of them, fire burning around them, people screaming as they fled down the stairs and into the street, some caught in the spell fire and their blood gushing out onto the staircase, walls twisting, both only just ducking out of the way of the other's spells.

It seemed to be about far more than their words, far more than Morgan, and maybe even far more than each other. No, both literally and metaphorically, Morgan imagined that they were seeking to destroy, in this one rage and hate filled moment, everything they loathed within themselves.

The brothel quickly began to collapse in on itself, not able to withstand the multiple fires now breaking loose, and Morgan herself found her attention drifting from them and to the red pill in her open hand.

A man stumbled, fell to the floor, dead, the left side of his chest missing as he ran into one of Wizard Lenin's spells. Blood spurted from his chest, his eyes were glazed, but neither seemed to notice as they kept going, Wizard Trotsky screaming his spells in rage even as his counterpart's eyes burned.

Then, with a single spell, a lucky shot, Morgan watched as Wizard Trotsky's wand clattered to the floor and out of his hand, he reached for it, even as Wizard Lenin towered above him, mouth already forming the first syllable that would spell his death.

And, for a moment, a perfectly surreal moment, she wondered how it had possibly come to this. How Tom Riddle, without hesitation, with no hint of doubt, could think to destroy Tom Riddle.

Morgan moved between the pair, holding down Wizard Lenin's hand in her own, and commanding, "Enough."

She glanced down at Wizard Trotsky, staring up at her in numb terror, as if he knew exactly what was coming next, perhaps had always known. And that this, in some ways, was worse for him than that.

("It's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?")

Never moving her eyes from him, throwing her hand to her mouth, Lily took the red pill.

And as she and Wizard Lenin teleported from the brothel, she could still hear the echoes of Wizard Trotsky's screaming.

Author's Note: You know how the first 24 chapters were essentially building to chapter 25? Well, we've had a lot of chapters building up to chapter 50. I hope you know that. Anyways, a note on Total Recall (a film I highly recommend, though I will warn you about exploding heads), watch the Arnold Schwarzenegger 1980's version, the reboot was awful.

Next up, a trip down memory lane and, I'm very very certain unless I change my mind last minute, some of the answers that you've been waiting for. But who knows, I guess we'll find out next time. But yes, we are, very very soon, if not at this chapter, moving into the next arc of the story.

New in the world of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus": "Wearing the Faces of Men" a crossover with Pokémon that blew up in popularity for reasons I don't quite understand even now (it's hilarious) and "Think About the Sun" a crossover with Pippin (though knowledge of Pippin is probably not required).

Thanks for reading and reviewing, reviews are much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter.