Dynamic Entry

She was the last and greatest Magus of the Age of the Gods, a relic out of time. Summoned from outside time and space from the Throne of Heroes to battle to the death as part of an enormous ritual encompassing an entire city, charged with the life force of its inhabitants and fueled by the souls of fallen.

And she was dying.

It had hurt at first. But she couldn't feel anything now. She couldn't hear anything but the sound of her own heart slowing and the patter of the rain. It seemed off to her that she wasn't trying harder to survive, but there wasn't really anything she could do. No magecraft lay within her meagre reserves, no muscles obeyed her mind. All she could do was twitch and stare into the dark. So much easier to just lay here.

It wasn't supposed to end like this. Most of her life, she had been a puppet for the Gods. She'd wanted a second chance. A chance for a life of her own.

But life wasn't fair like that, was it?

She could see her body start to shimmer out of the corner of her eye, losing coherency as the last of her prana bled out on to the road.

It is said that to be a magus was to walk with death. She had accepted that, so long ago. But it was just so monstrously unfair.

...What was that noise?

There was a deep hum, growing louder at an alarming rate. The road seemed to vibrate. Even in her numbed state, she could feel it. Something was reaching out to her -

if you will submit to this will and this reason... then answer

She accepted the pull.

Everything went black.

Medea opened her eyes to a dark room lit only by a red glow. The light flickered dimly from the runes engraved into every surface of the room, fading slowly. She was alone.

Her prana was full again. It took only a word to create a sphere of white light, revealing that the room was in terrible shape. The damage was extensive enough that she didn't see how the runes could even do any sort of thaumaturgy…

She peered at the runes. Most were unrecognizable, but the parts she could understand hinted at time manipulation, as well as the obvious references to souls and such.

Either it was meant to activate on its own, or the summoner was pulled away.

She could feel a connection, though. She had a Master again, or something similar. Hopefully this time it would be someone she could live with.

Medea looked for the exit, only to find there wasn't one. Suspicious. Magi could not teleport, was this intended as a trap?

She cast out her senses. The room was buried.

"Tροψα."

Space warped around her, moving her to the surface, though there was an alarming amount of resistance.

She appeared on a hill in the middle of a city. All it took was a glance to tell her she was in London. While she did not know it personally, Servants were granted any and all "common knowledge" they might need by the Grail, and she had not lost that information even after coming here. The home city of the Clocktower was among it.

"Hey!" someone shouted at her. Medea turned to see several figures in hooded cloaks, as well as a few men and women in archaic robes all pointing wands at her.

She was not stupid enough to wait for magi to attack her. She turned in her Master's direction and did a spatial transport to the limits of her sight. The strange resistance was still there.

Perhaps there was some sort of bounded field intended to stop teleportation?

She shook her head and continued to teleport, wasting prodigious amounts of prana. Finding her Master was important enough not to delay, and if he was unsuitable the heavy draw should make him easier to deal with. The resistance was gone. Definitely a bounded field before, then.

Medea arrived at the entrance to a small alley, where several overweight children were kicking a smaller boy, collapsed with obvious signs of circuit overuse.

"ύπνου," Medea whispered.

They all collapsed like puppets with the strings cut.

She walked up to the boy. Black hair, clearly not well fed, looked around ten. She didn't understand how or why he would be her Master, or even how he could support her and stay conscious. But she could see on his hand what could only be Command Seals.

Oh well, a mystery to figure out later.

Harry woke up to a glass of water being poured on him.

"So who are you?" the woman holding a glass over him said.

"Who are you! How did I get here…" Harry trailed off.

"I am Medea. I found you in an alley, being kicked. I knocked everyone all out and brought you here," she said blandly.

Even confused as he was, Harry didn't think that sounded very good at all. He looked at her.

Medea was sitting on the floor on front of him, legs folded delicately to one side. She was wearing a cloak over some sort of dress. It was all purple with bits of black and gold. Harry himself was also laying on the floor, except he lacked her grace and his clothing was faded and oversized. Her hood was laid back, revealing vibrant blue hair and pointed ears.

"What do you want with me?" he asked hesitantly. She looked nice, but so did a lot of people who weren't very nice at all.

"I want to know about you. What is your name, who are your parents, and so on." Medea looked at him curiously.

"I'm Harry. My parents died in a car crash, I live with my relatives…" Harry told her.

"You don't sound very fond, there," Medea mused.

"Well…" Harry knew better than to go into detail. People either didn't believe him or became uncomfortable. If they did take him seriously, it never lasted very long.

"What are you avoiding telling me," Medea said firmly. She gazed at him.

Harry started feeling hazy. "My relatives don't like me because I'm a freak, I don't like them either, they make me do everything and punish me for anything that goes wrong—" Harry said before freezing. He felt like something washed over him for a moment.

"What just happened," he said in alarm.

Medea laughed lightly. "For one such as you to shake off hypnosis from me… I suppose I should not be surprised, with you being my Master."

"What?"

"Nothing important," Medea deflected. "Clearly, there is something wrong with your relatives. As for you, I see nothing freakish at all."

Medea murmured something and a sphere of light appeared above her palm. Harry stared.

"I imagine they'd call me much the same, hm? In fact, I think I'm going to keep you, since your relatives can't see quality when its right in front of them."

Harry looked at her worriedly. "Can you even do that?" Medea looked back at him amusedly.

"Ah, I'm sure someone would object, but it doesn't sound like your relatives would, no? And even if they did, it's not like I care what they think," she said. "Not that I'm giving you any choice in the matter, but can you honestly tell me you'd prefer to stay with boring, normal people who treat you like trash?"

"...I suppose not," Harry said slowly.

"Good," she said. "There are strange people sniffing about. I've, ah, borrowed this penthouse for the night. Barring new trouble, we'll go collect your things from your relatives tomorrow."

Harry was momentarily torn, but she was right. Even her questioning was far kinder than the Dursleys ever treated him. He could always try to run later if she was truly crazy.

Medea woke. She did not need to sleep, but the entirety of her time in the Grail war she had not slept. So she slept anyway. The bounded fields she put up over the co-opted apartment would have alerted her in time if something happened.

She had dreamed of a cupboard. More importantly, Harry probably dreamed of her. She would need to fix that before they slept again; it shouldn't be difficult.

She could smell food.

Medea got up and entered the kitchen to find Harry cooking.

"Not that I disapprove, but I'm pretty sure it isn't normal in this era for children your age to be cooking," she said, stretching. She sat at the table and watched him, head resting on her hand.

"I always cook breakfast for the Dursleys," Harry said quietly. Medea frowned. She didn't have a problem with that, but with what she had already heard...

"Hmph. I'm seeing a pattern here. But no matter. I wasn't planning to eat, but I can see you prepared food for more than yourself. I suppose it can't hurt."

After they ate, she teleported Harry to the alley where she found him. She caught him as he stumbled. "Heh. In case you didn't catch on with my little light last night, I suspect to your relatives I'm more of a 'freak' than you've ever been. Can you lead me to their house from here?"

Harry nodded shakily.

It was a moderate walk to #4 Privet Drive. Harry seemed used to it, though.

Medea knocked on the door. After a moment, it opened, revealing a disgustingly overweight man. He eyed her for a moment. "What do you want?" Then he noticed Harry. "...You're one of those freaks, aren't you? We don't want your kind here!"

"I don't particularly want to be here. But surely you don't want to have this conversation in public," she said smoothly.

Vernon hesitated. "Fine, get in here so you can get out."

Medea stepped inside with Harry.

Petunia walked into the room just in time to be caught in her spell.

"Ατλας." The air seemed to freeze.

"I'm going to ask you questions, and you are going to answer," Medea said flatly.

The Dursleys were offensive to even deal with. They insulted her, they insulted Harry. They did not even have the decency to admit they were afraid, as Creon did in Corinth. Instead they ranted that they were 'freaks', as though they were somehow lesser. They disgusted her.

But that was the end of that. She had gotten everything they knew that was worth anything, and finished by hypnotizing them and telling them that Harry had gone to live with a distant relative on his father's side. She also took what money and jewelry they had in the house. She could put it to better use, after all. After experiencing them first hand, she even took some pleasure in it.

She stood outside the house, now. Harry seemed a bit shocked. Understandable, what with learning his parents were actually wizards and were murdered, rather than drunks.

"Harry?"

"Hm?" He didn't look at her.

"...If you like, I could get rid of the Dursleys."

Harry looked torn for a moment, then his face firmed. "No… there's no point. Even if it doesn't matter to you, it would make trouble. I'll never see them again anyway, right?"

Medea sighed. "True enough. It was a bad idea anyway."

She wrapped her cloak around them and they teleported back to London.

After he had shaken off the teleport, Harry just sat there.

"What's on your mind?" Medea asked idly. She pondered what to do next. Petunia had given her a place to start on locating the local magi, but they clearly were not magi as she knew them. If Petunia had not been under the effects of hypnosis, perhaps she would have written it off, but that was not the case. Magic only through wands, spells that could essentially rewind damage to repair objects, and so on. She would need to be cautious.

"I dunno," Harry said. "They always told me my parents were drunks, that they died in a car wreck, but… everything I knew was wrong."

"I know what that it is like," Medea said. "Once, I believed in many things as surely as you believe in the sun, and then everything was revealed to be a terrible lie. It destroyed me, for a time."

She paused.

"You should not let it destroy you. Clearly, the Dursleys meant you to suffer. The best way to spite them is, well… there is a saying, that the best revenge is living well. I won't claim that I'll treat you like some prince, but I can't imagine I could fail to treat you better than they did."

After a moment, Harry nodded. "Yeah."

"So… You've seen me do things you were taught were impossible, fanciful. That was magic. Magic is real, and you have the potential for it. It is what led me to you in that alley."

Harry looked at her. "...Can you teach me? Teach me to be like you."

Medea slowly smiled. For a moment, she seemed almost predatory. "Oh, I think I can do that."

Medea finally sat down and leaned into her new couch.

It had been a tiring week. Despite her indulgences the first night she knew just enough to know she knew nothing. There were magic users about, that could do things she could not, and she didn't know all they could do. The borrowed penthouse was not safe, and she couldn't make it safe.

Even had she magically secured it, it was not hers, and if she just stayed there someone, somewhere would be hit by the dangling loose ends, no matter how many people she hypnotized. That could lead right back to her.

So she went apartment hunting. Using the money from the Dursleys to start with and a bit of hypnosis to fudge identification, she rented a disappointingly small one bedroom apartment. Still, even a one bedroom apartment was far superior to the lodging from her era, and Harry seemed to think it was luxurious. Then again, he had been kept in a cupboard.

The rest of the week she had spent layering powerful bounded fields in and over the apartment, binding them to a moderately powerful ley line running under Islington. It had been a major reason for her choice.

She now felt like she could take her eyes off her Master for at least a short time. She was confident in her ability to defend herself, but Harry was a human child, and it would take only a single hit to kill him from a serious enemy.

She sighed and relaxed into the cushions.

So far, what she knew was that Petunia's sister, Harry's mother, was a member of a community of magic users that referred to themselves as wizards and witches. They were absolutely dependent on wands to do magic. Their magic's limitations did not seem consistent with either modern magecraft or even the thaumaturgy of her era; there were things it could do they could not, and things they could do that Petunia had never heard of it doing.

At least one gathering place could be found on Charing Cross Road, Petunia did not know exactly where, that was some sort of pub, which led to a business district.

They did not use normal money, though you could exchange it for theirs.

Medea was not sure what to make of the secondhand stories of magic castles and talking hats and the like. It sound like some sort of modern white-washed fairy tale.

Harry had adapted well to the new home, despite its limitations and her keeping him inside all week. She had explained to him that she could not teach him anything until she finished placing protective magic on the apartment, and he accepted it quietly. He mostly watched her as she worked, sometimes cooking food that always ended up distracting her till she gave in and ate.

"Harry," she called out.

"What?" he said, coming into the room. Medea was curling up on the couch. She glanced up.

"The protections I've set up on the apartment are barely acceptable, now. I'm going to be going out and investigating the magic community your parents belonged to. Once I've gotten information from there, things will be more relaxed. Then we can start working on you."

"Alright," Harry said. He sat down on the other end of the couch silently.

She didn't mind it, but it was odd, dealing with a child for whom almost no attention was better than he was used to. He was unfailingly compliant, though to be fair she hadn't really asked him to do anything other than not leave the apartment. Still, no doubt he would be more troublesome once he got used to someone who wouldn't yell at him.

Medea stood outside of a pub. The Leaky Cauldron reeked of strangely wrought prana to her senses, and no one but her seemed to even see it, their eyes slipping from one side to the other.

It had taken her a few hours to find it. In the end, she had simply paid a taxi to cruise down Charing Cross Road slowly from end to end while she cast her senses out for any source of prana.

Her cloak was reasonably similar to the attire of the wizards she saw on the surface after her summoning, but she was not wearing it. Instead, she was wearing a hooded robe she had projected that looked exactly like ones the wizards would wear. Ideally, though, her appearance would not matter at all.

Medea astralized, shifting into spiritual form. Magi could not visually perceive Servants when they were astralized, even their own. Hopefully, this would hold true for wizards as well.

She moved into the pub, reinforced her hearing, and listened.

Medea was there for several hours, making mental notes. She noticed a number of people going in and out the back, but she was not quite ready to abandon her spot. It was then that she heard it.

"Eh, Tom, you think you could open Diagon for me? I lost my wand last night." Medea focused her attention on the speaker. Short man, mostly bald, seedy look to him.

"Ooh, that must hurt. Sure, I'll let you through, but you'd best replace it. A wizards no wizard at all without his wand."

"I'm headed straight to Ollivander's, trust me."

Medea followed the men silently out the back. Tom, the bartender, pulls out a wand and taps the bricks, only for them to fold into themselves, revealing a bustling alley. The alley looked like it belonged in a scene taken from at least a hundred years ago.

Despite her surprise, she trailed behind the wizard, as he led her directly to a small shop, bare of anything but a simple sign, declaring "Ollivander's: Makers of Fine Wands since 382 B.C."

She followed him inside, and watched as an eerie old man had him test dozens of wands. She suspected the old man knew she was there, but he gave no indications.

After he bought the wand, Medea abandoned the wizard and wandered the alley, listening and collating random facts from conversations she passed by.

Eventually, she slipped out of sight and de-astralized while summoning British pounds from a circle back in the apartment. Walking back out like nothing had happened, she walked back down the alley to the bank. The goblins looked at her suspiciously, but they changed her money. From there she went straight to Ollivanders again.

"Back so soon?"

Medea watched warily as the old man walked up to her.

"You aren't from around here, are you… It has been a very, very long time since I met someone I could not name. Don't worry, though. I sell wands, nothing more. Here, try this."

Ollivander suddenly handed her a wand, only to snatch it back.

"No, no… Perhaps this would have been your wand, had things gone differently."

He hesitated, then handed it back to her. "I won't waste your time with a routine meant to entertain children. That wand is both a poor match for you, and the best match you'll likely ever get. It is about as old as Ollivander's itself, no small thing, that. Stocked some wands crafted by others back then. I'd say sometimes we just aren't meant to wield magic, but I think there is more to you than meets the eye."

"I'm afraid I have no idea what you are talking about," Medea demurred.

"Of course, of course… yew, thirteen inches, core of dittany; that will be eight galleons," Ollivander said.

She paid the disturbingly perceptive man and left. She considered hypnotizing him, but her track record of hypnotizing wizards was about one long and failed in less than ten seconds.

The wand seemed to hum faintly, fitting in her hand like it was made for it.

Better to just walk away.

chapter end

A/N:

I know how it is to be looking for a story. Sometimes we want to know certain things beforehand. So for this fic...

Relationships can fail, or at least end. So if someone hooks up with somebody, they might not stay there. Life is a journey, and it rarely has one stop.

Definitely no slash. Femslash isn't planned, but I dunno.

No improbable shit:

- No Harry basically tripping one morning and falling into a pile of 6-12 girls who want to all marry him and insist. On the other hand, Harry may end up involved with more than one person. Don't know yet. The golden rule is "can I see this actually happening".

- That also means no cardboard cutout Ron/Draco/Dumbledore/etc acting like some kind of NPC that vomits fanon bashbait, can't adjust its lines to what is actually happening, and is immune to realistic consequences of that.

- Harry doesn't get special treatment by the universe. If he can do something, so can his enemies, though obviously they don't have the opportunity to learn what Medea has to teach.

On the subject of Harry/Medea: People seem divided on this. I like the idea, but like I said above, I won't write what I can't believe. I can see ways it could happen, but I'm not going to bend the plot into a pretzel to make it happen.

If you got an opinion on this, I absolutely want to hear it. PM, review, whatever.