ATTENTION, ATTENTION!

This is not a normal chapter! I posted three chapters at once because none of them belong to this story directly! These are the beginnings to the sequels I talked about like, in February, I think?

So, why do I post those? Because I am officially setting this fic under construction for the foreseeable future. I'll stop posting on this one for a while, until I get it to a state that I can comfortably reread it without pulling my hair out. It may take a bit. (It's mostly grammar bits.)

Which means, as a consolation, you get these first chapters. More or less proof that I won't abandon this fic, if purely so that I can start writing the sequels.

Spoilers should be relatively minimal. Like, it should be no surprise that there won't be any big character deaths or anything.

The first one, the DC one, I'd recommend you read first. It is the saddest though. The second one is a Naruto one. I wrote it before and totally separate from my other story (Of Seals, Traitors and the Pursuit of Safety) but the parallels are definitely there, and it was kind of fun to compare. Third one is Harry Potter. So, all pretty much classic fandoms. I am a basic bitch that way, lol.

If none of these are your thing, welp, sorry.

Chapter 1: Of New Beginnings with Dragons and Goblins

I woke up to a small finger poking my arm. Having stayed up way too long while painting, I wasn't that interested in waking up, so I ignored the poking and tried to get back to sleep.

"Um, Sir?" a quiet voice asked.

"Sir!"

Now a little hand was shaking my shoulder. I grumbled and shifted around trying to find another comfortable spot in the grass while being turned around.

Wait.

Grass?

The last I remembered I was in my little hermit hole, I mean vacation house in Iceland. My next-door neighbors were more than 10 km away from there. Not to mention it was winter and the snow reached to my knees just yesterday.

I opened my eyes and slowly sat up.

I seemed to be in a park. Not the prettiest one, but it had trees and a swing and everything. The sky was clear and the sun shining. By the heat I could tell that it was summer here. The kid, that had woken me, shuffled from one foot to another, oddly shy now that the weird man sleeping in the park was responsive, I guessed.

He was tiny. It didn't help that his clothes were clearly too big for him. My guess put his age at about 9. The boy was a scrawny one with a bird's nest as hair and the classic Harry Potter glasses on his nose.

He looked at me with big eyes.

"Thanks for waking me, little one," I said with a friendly smile.

I couldn't resist, I reached out a hand, slowly, and dropped it on his head. He flinched for a moment and froze up.

My stomach was in knots over how scared the boy became, my smile getting more strained. I made sure to act like nothing had happened. I wasn't the most knowledgeable about the behavior of abused kids, but I wasn't blind.

After making his hair even more of a mess, I took my hand back and leant forward while crossing my legs. That way I was making myself smaller.

It took a second, but the kid got his bravado back. He looked around the empty park before he mustered me again.

"What are you doing here?" the boy asked.

I wrinkled my nose. Wouldn't I like to know that.

"Sleeping, apparently," I answered and waited long enough for the kid to pout before continuing. "I don't really know, I just woke up here."

The kid was cute. Needling the children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of my friends had become one of my favorite pastimes in the last dozen decades. As Uncle Al it was my duty to be as annoying to them as they were to their parents, while still being the coolest member of the family.

The little man's eyes started to sparkle (figuratively) in excitement. He started bouncing.

"Are you a wizard?" he whispered, again looking around like he was telling me a secret.

I frowned. I wasn't as well-known as I had been in my prime, but still. Only then did I notice that I was in my uniform. Weird.

"A sorcerer," I corrected.

"Are they the same as Wizards? Do you not have a wand?" the boy asked curiously as he looked at my costume.

I blinked. A wand, okay. I would say someone had read Harry Potter a bit too recently, but those books were pretty old by now.

"No, sorcerer don't use wands. Basically, we channel energy from another dimension. The only really common type of magic that requires a focal point is making portals," I explained patiently.

Speaking of, I didn't have mine on me. I didn't have one in a stasis dimension for easy access either. The different magicks always interfered with each other. I could make one right now, but I refrained. I had a whole drawer of them at home because I always forgot them. Bad habit.

To entertain the kid, I made a small mandala of eldritch magic. Those looked always pretty and got the children to ooh and aah. The adults too to be honest.

As expected, the mini got wide eyes.

"So, do sorcerers wear suits like that, just like wizards wear robes?" he asked.

I snorted, thinking of Strange and Wong in Green Lantern costumes.

"Not really," I answered. "Sorcerers look more like Buddhist monks, you know? This is my work costume as a hero."

If at all possible, the boy's eyes got even wider.

"Hero? Like in the comics?" he questioned.

The kid started frowning and glared at me with suspicion.

"You are making fun of me, heroes don't exist," he accused me.

I sighed. Well, if that didn't confirm it… I wasn't in the same world anymore. Or this kid grew up under a rock. If I had been transported again…

At least the kid didn't know any superheroes at all, that meant this wasn't DC. Thank fuck.

I hummed in thought.

"You don't know a Tony Stark, do you?" I asked with little hope.

Kiddo, I really should ask his name, crumpled up his nose in confusion.

"Like the comic-book character? My cousin has some comics about that guy. He prefers DC though. Hey, you look kind of like a Green Lantern, just more blue!" he said excitedly.

Huh, good to know.

"My cousin always argues with his friends about who is the best superhero, Polkins thinks it's Bluelight, a Marvel one, but Dudley says that he is just a Green Lantern rip-off."

And that, Ladies and Gentlefolk, was how a 9-year-old gave me an identity crisis. It was like Deadpool all over again.

My head was spinning so hard, I didn't even notice the obvious.

After taking the sudden feelings of "What even is my life?" and putting them in a box to never be opened again, I returned to the present. The boy was watching me worriedly.

"Are you ok?" he asked hesitantly.

I waved off his concerns.

"Don't worry, just questioning my life," I sighed. "You see, I came from a different universe, I fear. Finding out my life is apparently a comic book here, is a bit, well, new. For me."

Now the boy looked skeptical again. Without another word I produced a teal construct, my signature bo-staff.

"So, you are really a hero?" he asked, back to his excitement.

I just nodded. He seemed to think for moment before he gasped.

"But how will you get back?"

His worry made me smile.

"Doesn't look like there is a way back," I shrugged. Before he could get upset, I continued: "No need to be sad about it, my old world is going to be ok and I have done this before."

"You have done this before? But what about your family?" he asked, still concerned.

"Hm, yes, I've done this before. And I didn't have any family anymore. I had a lot of friends, though most of them died of old age already. I made new ones of course, but I can do that here too," I explained.

Heavy stuff. I didn't want him to think about that too much. A 9-year-old had a very different perspective from a, eh, how old was again?

"Anyway, enough about me!" I declared and clapped my hands.

"Little one, what about you? What's your name? And what is that about wizards?" I asked.

He pouted a bit more at being called little, before peeking up again.

"I'm a wizard! I even have a wand, my relatives are so scared of it that they leave me alone. It's awesome! Oh, and my name is Harry Potter," Harry fucking Potter replied.

I stared at him in mute horror. Of course, so many red flags in our conversation up to this point. I looked a bit closer at his eyes. Green. Thanks to his wild hair and thick glasses, I hadn't noticed it.

God fucking dammit.

And I stumbled directly into him as well. Well, he stumbled into me, but semantics.

My brain rebooted.

"Ah," I said intelligently.

Under Harry's confused stare, I laid back down in the shadow of the tree I was under and stared at the sky.

Good thing I landed in the shadow, I get sunburned so easily.

Oh, look a cloud!

It looked kind of like a scythe.

"Er, Mr. Bluelight? Are you alright?" Harry asked nervously.

I sighed.

"Yes, Harry, I'm alright."

Well, I would be.

Any minute now.

How can you leave a little 11-year-old orphan alone with his abusive relatives when you know about all the suffering in his future?

Clearly, I didn't know.

Which was why I determinedly declared that I would start looking out for Harry. Said Harry was a bit confused about that development.

I explained to him that, similar to the comic-books about me, there had been stories about his world back in mine. To be fair, I wasn't even lying for once.

Harry accepted it mainly because there had been a lot more weird things aside from that, I think. Still, he got a bit stuck on why I wanted to help him. I said: "Because it is obvious that there aren't any adults who look out for you. So, why not me." And that was that.

My next goal was Diagon Alley.

But first, clothes! The good thing about being a forgetful sorcerer was that I had everything on me all the time to avoid losing things. I pulled out a simple T-Shirt/Jeans combo with some teal sneakers.

Then I went to the street and made Harry stand at the curbside with his wand out. I actually flinched just as much as Harry when the Knight Bus crashed onto the street in front of us with a loud noise.

I grimaced. This would be interesting.

"Welcome to the Knight Bus- ", Stan Something-or-other began his usual spiel.

"Yeah, I get the gist," I waved the introduction off. "Listen, we don't have sickles right now, but I do have a 5-gram bar of pure gold here. I trust this will suffice to get my ward and me to the Leaky Cauldron?"

I took out a small gold bar and pushed it at the sputtering conductor. I knew I was being rude, but that gold bar was worth a whole lot more than the few sickles for the fare.

I waved at Harry to get in before me. After an unsure look in my direction, he jumped on and made his way to the back with me in tow. I explained to him what the purpose of the Bus was and how it worked while tuning out Stan's bustling in the front.

Harry told me he had Wizard money at his relatives, enough to pay for the fare. I told him that I was rich as fuck anyway and he let it drop. Well, he might have just been baffled by my cursing. Meh.

When Stan called our stop, we got off as fast as possible. It wasn't a long drive but my stomach was already protesting. We entered the pub to get immediately called out.

"Ah! Harry, already back?" Tom called out, drying a glass with his towel rag. I studied him incredulously. Was he trying to occupy himself? He sure wasn't cleaning the poor glass.

Harry was shuffling from one foot to another again, clearly not used to being in the spotlight. It was made worse when a slightly buzzed wizard sitting at the bar turned around to see who Tom was talking about.

"Mr. Potter! Nice to see again so fast!" he shouted and stood up. He walked towards us, or rather Harry and drew the attention of the rest of the pub. When the drunk reached out to put a hand on Harry's shoulder.

I growled. As if. I caught the wayward hand in an iron grip and decided to test something. I started to channel a huge amount of dimensional energies without using them. They wayed down the atmosphere as if my anger had a physical presence.

It was a trick I learned a couple of decades ago out of fun. It wasn't that useful in battle, especially because you had to be attuned to magic or sorcery in some kind of way for it to have an effect at all.

The chatter in the bar stilled, Tom stopped uselessly cleaning that one glass and everyone stared at me with wide eyes. The drunk looked remarkably sober all of a sudden, just close to collapse.

I was a bit surprised at how extreme the reactions were. Presumably it had to do with the differences in the way wizards perceived magic. Or maybe my sorcery just felt very foreign to them.

Not letting the surprise show on my face, I told the wizard off: "Do not touch my ward."

He scampered off.

Harry led me to the entry in the back hurriedly.

"That felt so weird!" he whispered to me, the timidness from before forgotten in favor of the new weird thing I did.

I shrugged and urged him to open up the doorway. The wizard in training took a second to remember which stone he had to tap. When the wall folded itself away, I couldn't help but feel giddy.

The magic in itself wasn't all that special. I had seen way more impressive stuff with the Masters of the Mystic Arts. This was all about childhood nostalgia.

The Alley was reasonably full. It was summer after all. There were a lot of families, clearly doing the school shopping.

As much as I wanted to join in the fun, and going by the sparkle in Harry's eyes I wasn't the only one, Gringotts came first.

We wandered through the street until we came to the very impressive bank. Going in, I tried not to look at the Goblins too closely. While they surely were used to being ogled at by clueless first years, I didn't need to join the illustrious group.

I spotted a free bank teller and walked over fast before someone else got there, Harry jogging after me.

"Hello- ," I read the plaque on his desk, "Grindaxe. I have several matters to discuss. First, I would like to open an account. Second, what kinds of rare metals do you take?"

Short and to the point. I wasn't going to be overly friendly if it meant drawing out business discussions. Goblins always struck me as a no-nonsense kind of people.

The slightly horrifying grin on Grindaxe's face validated that hunch. Turned out Goblins didn't just like Gold. I had all sorts of rare metals with me, mainly so I could trade them with alien stragglers; if you always have a variety of metals with you, you will have something any random alien would want. It came in handy more than once.

In the end, I was officially rich again and had very giddy Goblin on hand.

"Right," I cleared my throat, wishing Grindaxe would go back to glaring. "Now, my young friend here has just recently learned about his magical heritance. Which is curious, considering he supposedly has a Magical Guardian. One he has never met."

The Goblin just raised an eyebrow.

"Take your complains about the Guardian up with the Ministry."

I rolled my eyes. I hadn't expected the Goblins to be as helpful as in Fanon, but still. He had to have deliberately misunderstood my point.

"I want to check that his Guardian hasn't taken advantage of the Potter wealth while Harry is too young to object," I explained.

"Mr. Potter can access the inventory of his vaults when he completes a blood test to confirm his identity."

"Vaults? Like multiple?" Harry joined in for the first time.

"Of course," Grindaxe snarled. "The Potters have had their family vault with Gringotts for hundreds of years. James Potter's and Lily Potter's vaults were joined with the main vault upon their death."

Harry's eyes were as wide as saucers at the mention of his parents. I reached out my hand to rest it atop of his head, satisfied that he barely flinched this time.

"We will see if we can get in there, okay buddy?"

We were led to a separate room. As Harry let a few drops of his blood far into a cup, I asked Grindaxe if there was such a thing as inheritance tests. He confirmed that they existed, although not commonly used as they were extremely expensive (100 Galleons per test) and all pureblood families had extensive knowledge of their genealogy.

I thought to myself why not and purchased tests for both me and Harry. The little one was protesting quite loudly to the cost; I waved his worries away. In the end I bribed him with the idea that he would have a full family tree.

To my disappointment Harry's test wasn't all that surprising. Heir Potter, Black and technically Peverell.

But Al, you might say, that was still a lot! Well, not really. I was surprised that Black was already on the list but apparently being Sirius's Godson was an automatic Heir position until Sirius would get around to either having kids of his own or appoint another someone else with Black blood. And Peverell, Peverell didn't mean anything really. The House was extinct for too long, their title was defunct, their vault has long since claimed by daughters that married into other families.

Still, Harry was happy to have the names of generations of ancestors after not knowing his parents' names for years.

Now, my test was a surprise. I just wanted to see what the test would spit out. Would it explode? Would it show me something other than human?

Myrddin.

Huh. Merlin?

My first thought was that this was some Fanon bullshit. My second was that this could actually make sense. See, the ritual also took into account "family magicks", clearly Merlin and I weren't actually related, but there was a Merlin as Sorcerer Supreme back in my old world – the test saw us as related because we drew magic from outside this dimension in the same way!

It was quite funny when you thought about it that way.

Even funnier was Grindaxe's face.

"Wicked!" Harry whispered as he was hunching over my parchment.

I coughed into my fist to cover up my laugh.

"So… Do I actually get something with this?" I asked.

Sadly, mostly bragging rights and political cloud. And I had enough politics for a lifetime. Just thinking about the state of equality in the Wizarding World gave me a migraine. I had a seat on the Board of Governors for Hogwarts, in the Wizengamot and some nebulous position in the IWC.

Of course, all these things were supposed to be honorary. Nobody had expected that suddenly some distant descendant of Merlin showed up. Heh, served them right.

When scouring in the index of Harry's belongings, we had some good finds and some bad. Good news: Dumbledore did not outright steal from Harry. He had taken out an invisibility cloak, which made my inner Dumbledore basher cry out in triumph, but the only money that went out was a monthly stipend to the Dursleys.

I didn't who was more enraged by that, Harry or me.

At the same time, I took a look at Potter properties. No way would I let Harry alone with his relatives for one more moment.

There were a few but they were mostly rented out, as they had been for years. One stood out. Potter manor. After a bit of prodding, I learned that Potter Manor hadn't been put under the Fidelius because Harry's grandparents had been killed there in an attack, so James decided on the Cottage to avoid the bad memories.

Fanon proved to be very unreliable. Kind of like Canon actually.

Our planning for the day hit a snag when we wanted to visit the Potter vault. Apparently, Harry could only enter when he was of age or when he was with his Magical Guardian. Cue another 11-year-old-throwing-a-tantrum.

"Can't we do anything about this?" I asked Grindaxe frustrated.

The ministry sure as hell wouldn't side with Harry over Dumbledore.

"Hm," the Goblin hummed with a shrewd expression.

I sighed.

Five minutes and 500 Galleons later, I swore to take responsibility for Harry and Harry accepted that vow under the purview of another Goblin. Basically, a Goblin version of an Unbreakable Vow.

A legal loophole allowed for changes in custody out of ministry control if certain magical bindings were in place. And a legal loophole the Goblins sure as hell wouldn't have used if I had been any less liberal with my minerals.

"Come on, let's go to my vault!" Harry exclaimed excitedly, practically vibrating in place.

He ran out of the room and in the direction of the carts.

"Harry, wait for me- Harry!"

I hurried after him.

Was this what it felt like to have a kid?

Oh shit, I had a kid now.