A/N: Sorry about the wait. To answer a question I got after the last chapter, the tunnel that Harry and Ron went down in COS completely collapsed after Ron, Lockhart, and Ginny escaped. It's unusable so Harry had to go through the forest.

UPDATE: I'm reposting this chapter so many times because it is apparently having a problem where people can't see the update. Somebody let me know if it eventually goes through.

Chapter 11:

The air stung Harry's eyes as he plummeted towards his death.

He could see the hard stone floor at the bottom of the staircase race closer and closer every second in the receding light of the trapdoor. Pure blind panic consumed him as he flailed and tried to move closer to a wall and grab on to something. Anything at all. There was nothing, only smooth stone sliding beneath his fingers.

Suddenly, his mind cleared as the adrenaline took over. He could still see the ground rushing towards him, but it was more distant now, as if he were watching it happen to someone else. His mind frantically sped through some of the spells he had learned, searching for something, anything that could save him. He seized on a spell that he found during one of his late-night study sessions, in a book on magical cattle ranching.

Without thinking, Harry rolled onto his back and pointed his wand towards the ceiling. "Laqueus" he bellowed.

A thick rope with a loop on the end shot out of his wand and quickly traveled up and out of sight into the darkness.

Still he fell ever faster towards the ground. Harry risked a glance over his shoulder and saw he was less than 100 feet from the ground. He closed his eyes and braced himself for a lot of pain.

The rope caught on something high above him and slammed Harry to a forceful stop. His left shoulder let out a howl of pain as it separated. The agony washed over him in waves, almost causing him to black out.

Slowly, he managed to overcome the pain enough to look around. He was dangling 50 feet in the air, directly above the hole at the bottom of the stairs.

For the first time in his life, Harry was glad that he was so skinny. If he had been any heavier, either the rope or his wand might have snapped and sent him to his death.

He gripped the rope with both hands and began to slowly and painfully swing himself towards the stairs. Unfortunately, it took longer than he would have liked. With each swing, he let out a low moan of agony as his shoulder screamed at him.

Finally, he managed to swing enough to get a grip on the staircase and pull himself up to a hunched over position on the wall. For a few minutes, all Harry did was crouch and try to get his heart rate under control.

He stumbled as best he could in the darkness to the bottom of the stairs and sat with his back to the smooth wall.

"Bloody hell" He swore.

He took stock of his condition. He had a multitude of bruises all over his body, a couple of his teeth were missing, and his shoulder was dislocated. The palms of his hands were covered in painful red rope burns. But nothing vitally important felt like it had broken besides his shoulder. He rummaged around in his bag and, to his great relief, saw that nothing had broken due to the cushioning charm he had placed on the bag this morning.

Harry let out a shaky breath. "Bloody hell" he repeated softly.

The minutes stretched on as he sat against the wall. The darkness was oppressive and pressed against him like a physical force. Slowly he felt the fear and self-pity inside of him harden into to annoyance and anger.

He had been so close; less than 20 feet from the Time Stone. That first trap had caught him off guard and caused him to forget all the spells he had memorized. What was worse was that he was defeated by books. Bloody books! Harry felt a scrap of indignation ignite in his chest. Books had almost killed him! Harry had been expecting dangerous magical creatures or spells that would cause his brain to explode and leak out of his ears. Those he could handle potentially dying against. But dying against the equivalent of the Hogwarts library? That he could not allow, would not allow.

Before he could stop himself, Harry jumped to his feet, gathered his bag and walked up the stairs once again.

"Books!" he shouted angrily into the darkness as he rose, his wand shining brightly. "Fucking books will not be the death of me!" He let out a cry that sounded half mad, even to his ears.

As he got closer and closer to the top again, Harry forcibly calmed himself down and began to review the spells he would need. Last time he had been to hasty, this time he was going to win. Harry began to review spells in his head for the upcoming battle. Impedimenta, Incendio, some kind of slowing or shredding charm? Something to prevent the books from ganging up on him again. He would not be caught off guard this time.

Finally, the trapdoor came into view. It had closed again and, as Harry discovered when he pushed against it, it had locked itself tight.

Harry cast the Unlocking charm on it. Nothing happened. He cast it again. Nothing happened. He sweated and shoved and rattled the handle for all it was worth. Nothing happened.

The anger returned in a white-hot wave, crashing through him. He had not come this far, spent weeks and a hundred galleons preparing, and been almost killed by a stack of books to be stopped by a locked door.

Screw careful, it was time for the hammer.

Harry retreated several steps downward, whipped his wand around and pointed it at the trap door. Harry forced all of his anger and pain out of his body, down his arm and into his wand. His wand grew to a blistering temperature in his hand and was vibrating madly.

"Bombarda." Harry hissed with all the force he could muster. For a moment, nothing happened.

Suddenly, the ancient and solid trap door split down the middle like a cheap toy. The entire doorframe and the stone surrounding it were demolished and blown upwards into the study. There was a massive boom and a cacophony of noises that echoed down to Harry. He could hear a rooster cry, wood breaking and crumbling, and the sound of heavy chains dragging across the floor. Slowly the noises grew quieter and quieter until they dwindled to nothing.

Harry poked his head through the now gaping hole and looked at his handwork. It appeared that pieces of the door had activated the rest of the traps when they had landed.

The entire study looked as it had been hit by an earthquake. Huge chunks were missing from the walls where pieces of metal shrapnel had come flying by. Bits of wood, metal and stone rained down from the ceiling like deadly confetti. The couch had gone flying and collided with a nearby wall, feathers spilling from the shredded pillows and cushions.

Heavy chains protruded from the inferno that was now the fireplace, clearly designed to drag an unsuspecting person into a fiery doom. One of the massive ceiling beams had sprouted teeth and dropped down obliterating the chairs and part of the desk. Spikes big enough to skewer Hagrid were jutting through the walls and floor. There were a multitude of shattered potion bottles that appeared to have rained down from the ceiling, spilled their multicolored contents across the floor, many of them eating through the wood. However, despite all this carnage, an ominous circle of undisturbed floor surrounded the cabinet holding the Time Stone.

Harry painfully climbed through the now gaping hole. From the rubble, several of the enchanted books rose, shook off their dust, and began to charge at him again. But he was ready for them this time.

Harry sidestepped the books and cast a bouncing hex on himself. He then sent out a barrage of cutting and blasting curses at the advancing army of literature. Any books that managed to reach him were simply reflected off his skin. It still hurt, but not nearly as much as it had before.

Soon Harry was surrounded by heaps of ashes and burning paper. He swept his wand across the room. Nothing else stirred.

He quickly made his way to the cabinet before anything else could happen, stepping around the spikes as he went.

He cast a diagnostic spell on the cabinet. It showed an absolute abundance of spells, most of which he did not recognize. If he cast anything more powerful than Lumos at this thing, it would fight back. Harry frowned and tried the handle, just to see if it would work. Not surprisingly, it remained locked.

From his bag, Harry pulled out his trump card: the vial of hydrofluoric acid that had been delivered to him that morning during breakfast. Carefully, Harry opened the vial and levitated some of the contents. He moved the mixture to each of the hinges and the lock itself.

"Well" he reflected to himself as he watched the acid eat through the front of the cabinet. "it's not just acid." He had wanted to be sure it would react, so he had the apothecary mix hydrofluoric acid together with Basilisk venom to create a super acid. It had cost him a lot more, but the salesperson had told that the mixture could eat through anything, Muggle or magical. And results were worth every knut. Hermione had given him the idea that day in the library. An ancient pureblood like Salazar Slytherin would have prepared for every kind of magical situation but probably hadn't even though of someone using a muggle solution to get past his traps.

Sure enough, the acid had soon done its job and the cabinet doors had fallen with a great crash.

Harry reached his hand into the cabinet, trying his best not to touch anything. This was harder than it seemed as the cabinet was stuffed to the brim with objects of all shapes and sizes. Shells, dolls, pictures, rocks, and scraps of cloth were just some of the hundreds of objects crowding the shelves. The dagger was sitting in the far back next to the skull and a set of delicately carved wooden figurines.

His fingertips were brushing the handle of the dagger, but his good arm was extended to its limit, all the way to the shoulder. He couldn't get it. Harry shifted his good arm reaching further and further into the cabinet. He stood on his tip toes, trying to give it an extra inch. He almost had it, almost, almost…

His arm brushed a small tripwire, no thicker than a spiderweb. Harry felt it give way and almost immediately a thick pink smoke began pouring out of the depths of the cabinet. Harry jerked himself back out of the cabinet and tried to put some distance between himself and the cloud. But it was too late. The smoke overwhelmed him, and everything went white.

Harry found himself laying on his back in a place that definitely wasn't the study. For one thing, the ground was solid dark wood, not carpeted, and there was no furniture around. For another thing, Harry couldn't remember the study containing a massive ink bottle and quill in the middle of the room.

He scrambled to his feet and craned his neck in an attempt to take in the full size of it. It stretched up and up, almost passing out of his view. It would take 4 or 5 of him holding hands in order to fully encircle it.

Harry couldn't comprehend why he was looking at a office supply the size of a skyscraper or why on he was here. But this ink bottle was much too big to be even magically expanded. It was almost like…

BOOM

Harry was knocked off his feet yet again by a wave of force. A wave of agony shot down his arm as he landed heavily on his injured shoulder. A muffled scream tore from his throat.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Three more crashes caused Harry to whip his head around. Forgetting his pain, he rose to a tight crouch. Rising above him in a loose semi-circle were the carved wooden warriors that had been sitting next to the dagger. They all towered over him, each bigger than the mountain troll that had attacked them during his first year. All four clutched weapons in their hands: One had a scythe, another a , a third gripped a longbow and the final figure was holding a wand.

Each statute had a large forced grin painted on their face, like the kind a person would wear when they were forced to take a picture that they did not want to be a part of. Their eyes were painted on and stared blankly forward, somewhere above Harry's head.

Nothing moved, the air still. Harry didn't even trust himself to breathe. The statutes stared straight ahead with their lifeless eyes. Harry balanced on the balls of his feet. Years and years of Harry Hunting had taught him exactly what was going to happen next.

Harry took off at a dead sprint, hoping that he could find someplace to hide before the statutes got to him. Harry threw a glance over his shoulder and saw that the statues had not moved. He slowed and came to a stop.

They weren't chasing him, and they weren't attacking him yet. Huh, unexpected.

"This is a first for me. I don't know what to do when weird magical things don't attack me." He gave the closest statute a light kick.

A male voice sounded right in Harry's ear. "I have been expecting you.

Harry, who at this point in the day was starting to become immune to surprises, merely took a few steps back and gazed at the statues. They were emitting a brilliant light out of their eyes, which condensed into an image of a man in front of him. He was incredibly old and stooped, with his back bent like he was carrying a heavy box on his shoulders. He was completely bald, with liver spots dotting his scalp and neck. His eyes were clouded over with age, but still stared intently at Harry. He had a walking stick, that he was holding like a weapon. The man was dressed in extravagant robes of a brilliant dark green, with the insignia of Slytherin house stitched over his heart.

"Lord Slytherin." Harry muttered softly.

The image let out a scoff. "Hardly, boy. The real Slytherin died long ago. I am merely am imprint, left behind long ago in this place. Waiting."

"Waiting for what?" Harry asked.

Slytherin fixed him with a hard stare. "Waiting for you apparently."

"Me?"

"Not you specifically, you ignorant child. I was waiting for a seeker of the Stones to come to this place and claim the Time Stone. I must admit though, in all the times I pictured a seeker, I did not picture a child. You don't look like more than a third year. You found the Chamber and defeated my Basilisk? But here we are, despite the odds. You must have used some sort of reflection spell..."

Harry wasn't really listening to the apparition's rant. He was trying to process everything, and kept coming back to a stumbling block "How are you so alive? You're like a painting right?"

"Excuse me?! A what?!" Slytherin looked affronted. "I didn't mean to offend you!" Harry said quickly "But you seem to be a lot like a magical painting, that has the personality of a person. Your so much more like a real person than a painting though." Harry stepped forward without thinking and prodded the images stomach. Amazingly, it was solid

Slytherin swatted away his hand with a furious expression. "Slytherin imparted a small sliver of him soul into my construction. Much like a Horcrux, it leaves me as close to a living being as I can be without actually being alive. I was left here to serve as a guardian of this final trial."

"Trial? What trial?"

"You have proven your courage by slaying my Basilisk, your mind and your magic just by surviving to be here. Especially one so young. But these things do not equate with a person who is worthy, and an Infinity Stone cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of a person who will misuse it. The consequences of such an action would be unthinkable."

"And what happens if I'm not worthy?"

Slytherin simply inclined his head towards the massive statutes behind him, each with their own massive weapons ready to swing.

Harry swallowed hard. "Oh."

The older man gave him a sad smile. "Unfortunately, you appear to be worthy. While we have been talking, I have been investigating the recesses of your mind. Despite, your upbringing, your mind appears to be free of any evil intentions with the Stones. For now. Thus, by the rules of my creation, I must declare you worthy."

"But isn't that good?"

"This is not a happy day child!" he snapped at Harry "Gifting an Infinity Stone on anyone is an incredible burden, much less on a child. It is not a path that should be embarked upon lightly. It is a life of darkness and pain, where only the strong could survive. If you were smart, you would leave this place and never speak of it again."

He regarded Harry with a look of unmistakable pity.

"But that decision lies with you. My job is finally done, and I may rest at last. I reluctantly declare you WORTHY."

His last word seemed to echo around the space. Around Harry, the world began to dissipate into smoke once again. Slytherin locked eyes with Harry, even as they both began to dissolve. His face contained an unreadable expression. When he finally spoke, his voice was so low that Harry almost missed what he said.

"Good luck Harry Potter. You're going to need it."

When Harry could see again, he was once again standing in the middle of the destroyed study.

He peered down at the desk, and could see the ring of soldiers, once again the size of toys. Predictably, there was no sign of the imprint of Slytherin anywhere.

He looked to the cabinet which was now entirely empty aside from the brightly glowing Time Stone, sitting alone on the middlemost shelf.

It couldn't be that easy could it? Harry reached a hand towards it and was almost pushed back by the intense energy coming off of it. It was like he was putting his through a pane of glass.

Finally, Harry placed his hand around the Time Stone and picked it up.

For the rest of his life, Harry would never be ever to accurately describe what it was like to touch an Infinity Stone for the first time.

Power, pure raw power, shot out of the stone, down his arm and into his chest. Green lighting poured out of his body, striking the already heavily damaged walls and floor. The desk was reduced to splinters as it was shoved against the far wall by the force of the shock wave emanating from the stone.

Harry felt as if every cell in body was draining away, as if the Time Stone was literally wiping him out of existence. His entire being was reduced to the Stone and the pain from the hand that was connected to it. Harry wasn't aware he was screaming.

A series of images from a thousand different futures struck Harry's mind like a thunderclap, driving him to his knees. He saw himself standing in a ruined courtyard, locked into a duel with a pale figure with a slit for a nose. A large gathering of goblins gathered on the front steps of Gringotts in front of a massive crowd of kneeling children. An older Percy Weasley walking alone among the rows of a weathered graveyard, silently placing flowers on graves that bore his family name.

The images got faster and faster. Harry was sitting on a mountain of uprooted pine trees in the middle of a valley. A man with one arm faced off with against an army of masked men armed with crossbows. A version of Hermione with glowing scars across her face lugged a corpse down a dark city street.

It was too much. Harry's brain felt like it was pushing against the inside of his head, straining to get out. He literally had no coherent thoughts, his brain far too abused to do anything.

"No" a small voice that almost did not feel like his own, nearly silent against the pain, spoke up in the back of Harry's head. "You will not die this way." Something sparked deep in Harry's chest, his magic straining against the power of an Infinity Stone.

"No." It repeated the word again, a little louder this time. The pain reduced a little bit.

"NO." Harry screamed along with the voice. Suddenly, all at once, the stone stopped. The power retreated flowed back into the stone like water retreating down a drain. Harry slipped to the floor in a boneless heap, one hand clutched around the Time Stone.

Slowly, Harry began to take stock of what hurt. Everything from his head to the bottom of his feet felt like it had been deep fried and then run over by a herd of centaurs. Even his hair ached, although he couldn't figure out how that one worked.

But despite the pain in his entire body, Harry only had eyes for the tiny green stone nestled safely in his palm. Whereas before the energy coming off it had felt hostile to him, now it felt warm and safe to him.

A smile crossed Harry's face.

One down, five to go.

In another time and place…

Deep within the heart of the Avengers compound, Natasha was asleep in her chair. This was not unusual, because she slept in this chair more often than she slept in her own bed three floors above. It was not a uncommon sight to see one of the other members of the team carrying her up to bed after another long night of lookout. Although, there were not many members of the team anymore. Not since the Infinity War.

If someone were to compare two pictures of Natasha before and after the Infinity War, they would see a woman who had been through hell and back. Even in her sleep, she looked to be expecting a blow. There were deep bag permanently etched below her eyes. Her shoulders had a permeant slump to them that had not been there before like she had a rock on her shoulders. Her once vibrant red hair was now streaked with gray.

Six years ago, the Avengers had thought they had won. Although Thanos had united all the Stones, Thor had struck a fatal blow. The Mad Titan was prevented from snapping his fingers, and thus trillions of lives were saved across the universe. It was a complete victory. The celebrations had lasted for weeks across every major city on earth and on planets across the Universe.

The only sticking point was Thanos's corpse had vanished, and with it the Infinity Stones on his wrist. Dr. Strange had determined that Thanos had accidently transported himself and the stones to another dimension in the moments before his death but was unable to determine which one it was due to the random nature of dimensional travel. After an intensive investigation, he declared the Stones to be completely gone from their universe.

Most of the Avengers, including Natasha herself, had thought this was a good thing. After all, the entire universe knew about the stones now and it was better that the temptation to use them be removed forever.

About six months passed, and life slowly began to return to what it was before. The team went their separate ways. Tony and Pepper announced that they were expecting a child to the delight of journalists around the world. Bruce left yet again this time to a gamma lab in order to "meet himself" whatever that meant, and Wanda disappeared off the coast of Africa after the death of Vision. It was not normal by any means, but it was her life.

And then it all started to come apart.

At first it started slowly. A few extra minutes in a day or maybe a street that was longer than it had a right to be. Small things that would have you shaking your head and promising to get more sleep at night. But they events kept happening. Slowly the oddities got larger and more dangerous. Entire city blocks in London and San Francisco had their populations age to death in a single afternoon. An outbreak of simultaneous seizures swept Australia and New Zealand, killing thousands and incapacitating thousands more. Whole towns just disappeared, to be replaced by empty fields or woods. Stories of the spirits of the dead rising in India.

Reports by the Guardians, and newly rediscovered ally Carol Danvers, claimed that the reports of oddities and disasters wasn't just confined to Earth but were being felt throughout the known Universe by every planet that they knew of.

And then Dr. Strange dropped the bomb shell at an emergency meeting. Their entire universe was slowly rotting around them because the Infinity Stones had been removed. They had acted as pillars to the very foundation of their reality, and had been suddenly yanked away leaving everything else to crumble to nothing.

Strange had started to talk them through his extremely complicated plan to save them all, but even as they began to prepare, it was too late.

New York was the first major city to be destroyed, the city crumbling into the sea after an earthquake and tsunami leveled everything in its path. They never recovered the body of Peter Parker, who was last seen trying to rescue civilians trapped on the roof of an apartment building in Harlem. Doctor Strange survived but Wong and his entire sanctum was wiped out.

Tony was never the same after New York.

Major volcanoes on every continent began to erupt continuously, rendering some coastal regions of the world uninhabitable. New Asgard was destroyed in one of these flash eruptions rending Thor once again homeless and without his people.

Late at night, muffled sobs and screams echoed from Thor's room to the entire compound.

A discolored fog rolled throughout San Francisco, rotting the flesh from random people's bones but somehow not killing them until days later. Hope had refused to leave Scott's side until the very end, even when he no longer had a hand to hold.

In the three years she had known her, Natasha had never seen Hope express even let out so much a chuckle or a smile.

And Clint… Clint was too painful to talk about. She would never forget the look on Laura's face when she heard about the news. Never.

During all of this horror, Natasha had been trapped inside uselessly reflecting on the bitter irony of their time: In the end Thanos may have given them a kinder end than what they had gotten. At least with his plan 50% of the population would have survived and it would have hopefully been painless for those who died. Now they had to slowly watch the Universe choke itself to death. And there was no cure for that.

Well, almost no cure. Strange, and to a lesser extent Tony, were obsessed with the idea that they could somehow find the stones and return them, and it would somehow fix everything. They spent weeks at a time locked away burning their ways though hundreds of plans that always failed. Always.

It was during one of these sessions that they had created the machine that Natasha was asleep in front of. Through a combination of magic and science that Natasha did not even pretend to understand, the machine was supposed to be a tracker that would locate the Stones in whatever other universe they were located in.

Each stone was represented by a different colored alert light and a readout on the main body of the machine. The idea was that the machine was supposed to light up and give them an idea of where exactly the stone was so they could go get it. Nobody had told her how exactly they were going to be able to cross into another universe so easily, but she was sure they were working on something.

The only problem was that the machines sensors picked up only worked whenever somebody used actively tried to use the Stones. And wherever they were, the damn things were dormant. So, for the past three years, the machine had remained stubbornly silent with not even so much as a peep being made from it.

Slowly, the other began to distance themselves from the experiment, deeming it a failure and moving onto other projects. The machine was banished to a dusty room in the sub-basement, destined to be forgotten.

Except Natasha hadn't forgotten it.

Every morning, she dragged herself in front of it, and stared at the dials until she fell asleep. She was determined to be useful in this one thing, to make sure she would never miss the lights if they ever activated.

Since the world had ended, there hadn't been a lot for her to do. She was not a genius, or a god or even a super solider. She was a spy in a world that no longer needed her skills. So this was how she felt like she was contributing. To make herself useful, she could watch a damn screen!

So, there she was, asleep after another long day of the apocalypse. She dreamed of nothing.

And then it happened. Across the room, the green light on the console suddenly blinked to life.