Author's Note: Apologies for the double update alert. The latest update kept showing up on the wrong day and I had to take the chapter down while I figured out there was time window for updates on ffnet, and consequently forgot all about it. Sorry, sorry, bash me on the head with a shield if you want to.


Chapter 3: Elementary Magicology, And Then Some


Tony spent the next day exploring the castle.

The seventh floor of the castle, to be exact, which held his new living quarters. The suite here was less airy than Dumbledore's, courtesy of a lower ceiling; Tony knew that the headmaster's office led into a separate tower, which should have been architecturally impossible, but he was willing to keep his whining quiet. For now.

He was getting his hands on a blueprint if it was the last thing he did.

The suite itself was large and comfortable, if a bit (okay, extremely) medieval for his taste, decked with a cluster of smaller rooms that folded into each other. There was a private bathroom with a real bathtub, too, which Tony took advantage of at the earliest opportunity. When he came out with his hair wet and dripping, there was a fresh change of clothes for him folded on the bedsheets. He wasn't complaining about his suit or glasses, but it did feel good to change out of them after spending a day stuck in Mirror Limbo and detention.

He shrugged on the loose black garment over his shirt, only then realizing that they were robes. Wizard robes.

Fetchy. If Pepper could see him right now.

Tony had been left with instructions not to wander about the castle, but Dumbledore had sent him a dozen books or so on magical history to occupy his time. As there was no AI or bot here to keep track of his sleep deprivation, he immediately sat himself down at his new desk, studying the worn leather spines one by one.

There was a square piece of parchment folded inside one of the more rudimentary volumes, on which Dumbledore assured him that the Hogwarts library was quite magnificent, possibly the best in the country. (As if they could hold a candle to FRIDAY's archives, hah!) Tony would be free to visit and check out anything at his leisure. He was free to ignore curfew, and meals would be brought up to him for the time being.

By eight thirty in the morning, Tony had paged through all thirteen tomes with an enthusiasm he usually reserved for board of directors meetings. He then spent the next half-hour chewing on eggs and bacon that, again, seemed to have appeared out of thin air. He digested his breakfast along with the texts, storing the latter far, far away from anything that even touched upon the scientific.

There were three sentences that summed up his orientation on the wizarding world.

Firstly: they were outdated.

Secondly: they were outdated.

Thirdly: no one, no one ever properly studied the logic behind Muggle technology and its so-called incompatibility, and Tony was pissed to infinity and beyond by their ignorance. The most he could find on the subject was a single paragraph describing something called a Chizpurfle, which were nasty creatures that attacked electrical items when it had nothing better to do. He was fuming by the time the empty breakfast plates disappeared from his vision with a muted pop.

At least he knew now that the plates were being summoned from somewhere in the castle, not compressed out of thin air. It was good to know there were certain laws around this place, even if they weren't about physics.

He was going to ransack the damn library.

The painting on his door let him out easily. When he looked up at it, he noticed that the frame was no longer empty. A small brunette girl sat inside an antique cottage overlooking the grassy hill, and she was brushing the hairs of a calico cat purring in her lap.

"Hello," she said.

He stared. As he did, he noticed a tiny grass snake slither close to the cat, probably hoping to bite its teeth into warm, furry flesh.

"Um, hi," Tony said. "Do you have a name?"

The girl tilted her head. (The cat did, too.) "I don't think so."

"O-kay," he said. "Then what should I call you?"

The girl thought about it for a few minutes, shooing the snake away in a sibilant hiss while brushing her cat. The cat yawned and fell asleep. The snake wandered off in search of other warm-blooded rugs. Kids worked miracles even while they were trapped as paintings, go figure.

"People don't really talk to me," she admitted, eyes shying down to the folds of her crisp white apron. "I hung in the Astronomy Tower for years and years before somebody moved me to the dungeons. That was almost fifty years ago. I spent a lot of time visiting the Fat Lady and her friends, because it's more sunny on this floor, and I really like it."

So portraits weren't bound to the wall they were put into. No, he was not going to tackle that problem mathematically.

"Okay," he said again. "How about I give you a name. How about . . . Maya."

Hopefully, it wasn't too creepy a tribute. The girl in the painting blinked.

"Okay." Her answering smile was slow and hesitant, but just as shy. She reached down to tickle the nose of her slumbering cat. "Are you going out, mister?"

"Eh, just Tony. I'll be back in a couple hours."

"See you later, Mister Tony."

He sauntered down the hall, whistling "God Bless America".


An hour later, he was forced to admit that he was utterly and hopelessly lost.

Really, what was it with magical castles and constructions? The staircases were moving, if he wasn't blind, a few walls tricking him with fake doorknobs on purpose, and the railings switched sides when he tried keeping his hand on them. There had been a dangerous moment when a step below him disappeared on the stairs, which he leaped over thanks to some quick thinking and agility. He was cursing the castle into smithereens as soon as he built himself a voice amplifier.

"Follow the wall far enough and there will be a door in it, they said," he muttered. He wanted to stomp his feet like an angry teenager, but stopped short before the idea became too tempting.

He tried applying logic. This was a school. Sooner or later, some wandering kid either ditching or taking a stroll was bound to come up the steps and find him stranded here. Except . . . this section of the castle felt oddly empty, as though the entire student population had migrated elsewhere to enjoy sunlight and warmth.

Did classes always finish this early?

You wouldn't know, a voice whispered in his mind, which sounded nothing at all like his normal internal Pepper. Never got around to sending your kid to school, hmm? You promised her ice cream when you got back.

Shut up, he told it.

He could have spent all his day pacing up and down the corridors muttering like a madman, but his rescuer came in the form of a bushy-haired girl carrying stacks of library books in her arms. She looked to be a few years older than the girl in his painting, and a lot less keen to live as one.

"Oh, hello!" she said. "I didn't . . . I mean, I thought I knew all the professors who taught at Hogwarts."

Tony rolled his eyes. "That's because I don't teach here, kid. Can I help you with those?"

He gestured toward her books, which were beginning to resemble the marbles of a dilapidated Tower of Pisa.

Bushy flushed, nodding. "Thank you," she squeaked.

Tony took the topmost five books away from her. He observed with a note of surprise that the books were pretty heavy, heavier than anyone her age should have been permitted to hold. A quick glance at the titles proved him right; there was Hogwarts, A History (the most boring book Tony had ever had the misfortune to come across, and he'd been forced to recite Tolstoy at dinners), One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, and Defensive Magical Theory. Quidditch Through the Ages and Voyages with Vampires sounded innocent enough, so he let them be.

"Not going outside to enjoy the sun, are you?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I, um, was taking these to a friend. And doing some personal research."

"Oh, yeah?" He raised an eyebrow. "And why couldn't this friend come to get these books themselves?"

The girl looked affronted. "Excuse me, sir, but Harry's sick!"

Oh. "Relax, kid. I'm just taking a jab at you."

They walked in silence together, the girl huffing under the weight of her books. Tony was incredibly relieved that she seemed to know the layout of the castle far better than him, or he might have ended up lost with a crying teenager to boot. He shuddered at the thought. Which reminded him . . .

"What grade are you in?"

"Grade—? Er, I'm a first year. I turn thirteen in three months."

Not quite yet a teenager. Smart for her age, too. Tony shifted the books in his arms, reminded of another curly-headed kid who loved to hit the books. At least Peter knew how to balance academics and the outdoors, and had the muscle strength to prove it.

"Cool," he said. "Name for a name, then. I'm Tony Stark."

"Hermione Granger." It had been years since nobody gave a damn about his name, but he got that reaction now. Bushy only wore a look on her face that said she wished she could have stuck her hand out for him to shake like a well-mannered girl. Completely see-through, all of them. "Are you a visitor here, sir?"

"Mr. Stark is fine. Visitor, yeah, you could say that . . ." He trailed off. "I've talked a lot to Albus Dumbledore, anyway."

Hermione's eyes widened. "Oh? What about?"

They had climbed down several flights of stairs by this point. There was more activity on this floor, a rumble of voices rising from the hallway and rooms, though the corridor they were headed for was mostly quiet; Hermione had said that she was visiting a friend who was sick, and Tony guessed that was why. Why all this property if you had to be stuck in a sickbed that people could jump on every other minute?

He was contemplating how much to tell her when they rounded a corner, coming into view of what could only be the nurse's office. The doors were shut."This and that, but mainly Muggle tech." Tony made a face. "I'm hoping to do a proper study on it. Too much magic burns out batteries? What a load of, bull, um. Pretend you didn't hear that."

He was handing the first book back to her when he noticed her abrupt stillness. "Miss Granger?"

Hermione's face was going through a rapid array of expressions, moving from befuddlement, denial, more confusion, and finally settling on pure, unadulterated excitement. "Sorry, sir," she let out in a single breath. "It's just—of course I've read Hogwarts, A History, but it's just about the most well-researched book out there that actually bothers to quote numbers other than Arithmancy theories, I mean, and nobody's ever told me otherwise—I could never have considered—" She cut herself off mid-sentence to calm her breathing. "You're American, aren't you? Are you Muggle-born as well?"

Tony was leaning toward the idea that Howard had some goblin blood in him, and therefore no, but he wasn't going to ruin the mood by saying something as brutal as that. The girl was obviously having a field day.

"Uh . . . yes to both questions."

"It's just," her breath caught again. "I am, too. The Muggle-born part, I mean. My parents are dentists, they're good, but in the wizarding world they have potions for anything teeth related. And there are detection charms for just about any common disease, so nobody sees the value of annual checkups. Which is hardly fair, but nobody lets me say otherwise!"

She said this all very fast.

And Tony couldn't help it. He was grinning for the first time that day, ever since he'd stumbled out of a mirror without a Widow to kick him black and blue. He wasn't doing the kid any justice by thinking of her as a mini-clone of Peter, but she would never have to know that, would she? (Although they really were that similar.)

Peter had the tendency to drone on and on about his faves. He'd just unearthed the same trait in Hermione.

The girl was hesitating at the doors, obviously torn between loyalty to her friend and an interesting conversation. It was that more than anything that made her the likeness of one Peter Parker, and Tony beckoned her forward.

"Tell you what," he said. "Go talk to your friend, give him his books, take your time in the kiss and cry zone. I needed someone to show me to the library, anyway. Be my savior next time, yeah?

"And give me those."

He snatched the pile of books away from her in a surprising burst of strength and reflexes. Hermione sputtered in mortification, almost making a move to snatch them back, but seemed to remember at the last moment that it was an adult standing in front of her, so instead opted to seethe silently.

Tony tutted. Sometimes being a kid sucked, and he was drilling that lesson into her early.

"Hey, Miss Granger, hey. Don't give me that look." She stopped seething. "Is this Harry a lot like you?"

That sapped the anger out of her fast. "No . . ."

"As his friend, do you think Harry would enjoy being crushed to death by books? Wait, don't answer that." And then, because he'd spent enough time brooding in boarding school to know exactly how it felt like to be young, brilliant, and completely isolated, "Not that I wouldn't love to be, though. It would make a cool epitaph. Right?"

A smile was creeping onto her face. "Yes. I mean, no to the first question. But you told me not to answer, so yes."

"Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we have to live with what we're given. Life's charming that way." He tapped her twice on the shoulder with Hogwarts, A History. Oh, God. He was knighting another overeager, studious teenager. He willed away the lump in his throat. "Let's leave all the reading to you, shall we? Now shoo, your friend's waiting."

She gave him a strange little curtsy before disappearing out of sight, the mane of her hair bouncing eagerly.

He noticed that she still took Quidditch Through the Ages and Defensive Magical Theory with her, though. Fine. But nobody was going to struggle through something as horrible as One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi in their sickbeds if he had anything to say about it. Nobody.

He walked over to a tall, bespectacled boy who was pacing the corridor, planning to threaten his way into the library.

I'm always a lifesaver.


"Tell me why Quidditch sucks again, Maya."

The girl in question sat in her grassy pasture, this time sans the snake, brushing her calico cat like it was the only thing she knew how to do (and Tony was seriously hoping this wasn't the case). She was starting to grow on him, and he considered naming the coat of armor at the end of the hall Killian for her sake. It was loud and it was annoying. He saw no difference.

"I wouldn't know," she said. "I have no memories of playing Quidditch. But when I used to stay down in the dungeons, most people who couldn't make the team would have bad words to say. They said they were too good for it, and that it was a complete waste of their time."

In other words, she was telling him that he was fussing more than a soccer mom over a kid's sport. Tony, the founding (and only) member of the Quidditch Sux Club of Hogwarts, was not amused.

He'd spent the entire day in the library reading before being kicked out when the clock struck eight. Then he'd checked out a disappointing total of sixty-four books, even with Dumbledore's note of trust . . . and might have made a mortal enemy out of the librarian in the process.

Madam Pince had looked livid as she placed a Feather-Light Charm on his newfound collection, glaring at him like he'd been caught stealing her newborn baby out the crib. If that wasn't the creepiest metaphor he'd ever come up with for a librarian, he was eating his robes.

Oh, well. He could always just bribe a student to sneak back in there for him.

"I mean, really." He made an odd, strangled sort of noise, flipping through the pages of another book. The Philosophy of the Mundane: Why the Muggles Prefer Not to Know. Yeah, right. "How could there be more books on a sport that's nothing more than soccer on broomsticks than on Muggle tech? Do these people not appreciate the advancements of the 21st century, or whatever? Oh, wait, it's still the 20th . . . forget that. Fine, the World Wide Web?"

Maya hummed. Her cat meowed in answer.

He was sitting down on the floor below her frame, one elbow propped on a cushion that held the doorway to his rooms open for easy access. Every half hour or so, a pair of older kids (including the redhead who had taken him to the library) would come around the corner, jump a foot into the air, before going on as if they had been specifically instructed to ignore his presence. Even those had trickled to a stop when the hour was well past midnight. It was just him in the far end of the seventh-floor corridor, reading by candlelight.

He was taking the medieval role-play thing far more literally than he had first intended to.

"I'm not getting anything out of these." He threw The Philosophy of the Mundane across the room, where it lay among other books in a discarded heap. (Pince was going to pitch a fit.) He now had a solid idea where Muggles and Muggle-borns ranked in the pyramid of magical society, thanks to some extremely strong-worded writers, but was no more intelligent on ways that would send him back home.

Maya was silent as she put her cat down from her lap. "Maybe you should go to bed, Mister Tony."

"I don't need bed," he snapped. Oh, God, he had a sentient portrait of an eight-year-old acting as his personal assistant. "Only if I had all my readings! And access to a semi-decent lab, it doesn't matter what century it's from. If I hadn't lucked out enough to land in a damn magical castle of all places in the continent, and if—"

He let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. Breathe, Tony.

"I'm going for a walk."

"Don't get lost," Maya called after him. "I won't know where to find you."

Nice of her to remind him that she was nothing more than an animate object placed on the wall, but he was letting it slide.

Tony spent a few minutes measuring the front of Maya's wall in angry, hurried footsteps, cooling his head and blowing off some steam. He was not going to let himself get lost again, no matter how frustrated he was. Magic or not, the castle was too huge to go wandering about without a proper guide. It was pathetic.

He'd read about the disappearances; kids vanishing inside solid walls and hidden passageways, only to show up months later with their lives intact but half their memories missing. It was small wonder the Hogwarts death toll wasn't any higher, freak accidents accumulated during the Late Middle Ages notwithstanding, of course. But then again, the castle itself was probably sentient, which he was not eager to prove.

At least the students and teachers were under its warped wing of protection. He, a stranger to the world and foreigner in the castle, would be eaten alive by who-know-whats in a matter of minutes.

Tony felt a bit creeped out after that.

He considered visiting the headmaster's office just for the sake of some intelligent human conversation, but hesitated. The single stone gargoyle guarding the entrance was still as ugly as shit when he peered at it.

"Password?" it asked.

"Stark Raving Hazelnuts," he said. "But I'm not heading in."

He left the gargoyle spewing in indignity as he turned on his heels and walked down toward the other end of the corridor. Dumbledore had been so motivated by their late-night conversation that he'd changed the password to his super-secret lair into an ice cream flavor that came from the otherworld, as was noted in a second piece of parchment tucked into his books. Go figure.

Tony was in the middle of wearing out his legs before he realized something else.

"I am not lost," he announced loudly.

A snoozing portrait on the wall woke up at his voice. It was a picture of an old lady dressed in a shade of blue that was so hideous it would have offended Captain America's mother. "Of course you aren't, dear," she said. "Now, if you'd let us all go back to sleep . . ."

The snores and murmurs resumed filling the halls.

Even buried in his thoughts, Tony had taken special care not to venture down any unassuming staircases, because what was the point of being a genius if you couldn't multitask on your feet? He couldn't be lost, well, not yet. He took a glance around the hall, making sure to keep his toes angled in one direction. He thought he could make out the shapes of the familiar suit of armor somewhere in the distance, the one he'd dubbed Killian, so he could creep back into his rooms without screaming for help. Probably.

"Oh, what the hell," he muttered. This time, no portraits woke.

Tony Stark, hero of Earth and defender of worlds, was reduced into a man who couldn't find his own way around a school full of pubescent kids. He could have cried, it was that funny (except it wasn't).

I just need to find myself a way back home, he thought. A way back home . . . tools . . . a lab. Yeah, that's a good place to start. A lab. AIs and my bots, sitting in a tree, W-O-R-K-I-N-G . . . The rhyme was a stretch, and definitely not one of his better creations. Nothing fancy, I'm not even asking for an Infinity Stone, just a lab where I can do some research . . .

Tony groaned. Why couldn't life be easy for him? Why?

He'd done maybe three laps around the corridor, bemoaning his luck when his eye caught on something that hadn't been there five minutes ago.

A door in the wall.

All that time he spent quoting Marguerite de Angeli, and it decided to appear now.

Trick door, sentient walls, rooms that read your mind; do I hear an alarm blaring somewhere, hello? He knew he was an impulsive brat, which was why he'd tried so hard all these years to snuff the trait out of himself, but . . .

Tony swallowed. The shiny brass doorknob gleamed invitingly under faint candlelight. His heart was hammering in his ears as he weighed the pros against the cons as per his mental protocol when a solid stone slid into the first tray, destroying any possibilities of sensible thought entirely.

This could be my ride home.

He seized the doorknob and pulled. And the dingy lights, the dark stone ceiling were somehow arching higher to disappear into—

"What."

He was in the basement of his mansion in Malibu.

His very, very burnt mansion and his very, very gone workshop, pale moonlight streaming through the windows. He stepped into the room as though in a trance, running his hands along the concrete walls.

There was the glass case where his oldest armor stood, systemized inactive, and all his collection of vintage sports cars, untarnished in their glory. The lights flickered on in perfect synchronization with each step that took him further into the lab. The test platform in the center was raising itself, emitting a soft blue glow that was too familiar.

He would have barely noticed when the door clicked shut behind him, if not for a crisp British voice ringing in the air.

"Good morning, sir. It is now twelve minutes past five. Hopefully the weather in Scotland will be pleasant and clear today, without the abundance of clouds most associate with the general area. If I may say so," here, the voice took on a displeased tone, "you seem to have kept to the horrible pattern of working yourself through days and nights during the extended period of my incapacitation."

Tony blinked.

And blinked some more.

"JARVIS?" he breathed. He didn't dare speak in anything louder than a whisper, lest he broke himself free from whatever illusion this was. He'd thought the room itself was impossible. It, this, couldn't be.

Just when he thought his day couldn't get any crazier, two arm robots wheeled into his line of sight.

"For you, sir," JARVIS intoned. "Always."


Notes: A quick note to clarify things before I confuse anyone other than myself. In COS, the entrance to Dumbledore's office is located on the second floor. In HBP, it's on the seventh. Here the headmaster's office will always be on the seventh floor, accessible through the gargoyle.

Harry and Ron are good friends to Hermione, but it's my little headcanon that she is terribly lonely in her intelligence. Hopefully this relationship is a breath of fresh air to both Tony and her.

Thanks to everyone who followed, favorited, or reviewed! You guys make my day.