A Mage's Guide To Trans-Temporal Adoption

*Years in the future, but not too many…*

Ryan Young—the Historian, hero of Halcyon City, bearer of the Gauntlets of Kairos and member of the Vanguard—shot awake at three in the morning to the feeling of the fabric of linear time losing its goddamn mind.

Their first instinct was to grab their phone and text the Time Powers Groupchat to ask who had fucked up at three in the morning, but they woke up slightly more and stopped. This wasn’t someone they knew. First of all, Ryan had gotten quite good at filtering out the garden-variety time bullshit each of their friends usually got up to; they knew what each person’s style felt like, and this wasn’t the offhand precision of Tiago or the slippery, coincidence-shifting sleight of hand that Serendipity was so good at. But, more importantly, most of the people they knew did time travel through science, and this was time *magic*.

Plenty of theorists said that the difference between time-travel science and time magic was purely academic. And in Ryan’s opinion, plenty of theorists who had never spent two weeks trying to translate a set of coordinates from one system into the other to feed a magical time vibe into a time machine should maybe shut up about things they didn’t know anything about.

There was a *huge* difference between time science and time magic, at least to their senses. Time science, no matter how experimental, always had a technical feeling to it. It was something that had to be planned and executed carefully. Time magic was harder to pin down; it was, instead of carefully navigating twists and turns, either breezing past them or accidentally getting hit in the face by them. The point was, Ryan could tell in a second if something was time science or time magic, and this was definitely time *magic*.

Which means Ryan didn’t really know who could have done it. They shook their head, pushing themself further out of bed and squinting into the gloom of their bedroom, trying to figure out what was happening. It was a significant disturbance—not an item, then, and not something going forward in time but rather something—*someone*—going backward in time, with no easy way of it fixing itself available.

Someone was lost, Ryan realized, and any idea of dealing with this in the morning vanished immediately.

They got up entirely, sliding out from their side of the bed and looking, still tired, over at their dresser—and then down at their pajamas, which were an old pair of sweatpants and a Cadenza tour T-shirt that was two sizes too large for them, and decided it was too early for them to bother changing. Anyway, the good thing about magical armor is that nobody had to know you were fighting crime and saving people in your pajamas.

Slipping into the Historian costume barely took a thought, these days, and they felt the familiar half-cowl settle on their shoulders as the belt settled onto their hips and the armor, cool and heavy, slid up their arms and down their fingers. Even their hair managed to settle into some form of order, braiding itself and tying itself off with a green hairtie that it had just started making when Ryan’s hair got long enough. It was a fast process—it always had been, even in the Rewind days. Unfortunately, Ryan remembered as they opened their eyes again, it also came with a bright flash of green light.

There was an answering grumble from the other side of the bed, which was mostly a mass of blankets, duvets, and pillows with barely any hint of a living being until the entire mass of it shifted to expose a bleary, iridescent eye blinking over in Ryan’s general direction.

“No,” Merlin said, muffled voice still audibly petulant. “Go back to sleep. What time is it?”

“Sorry, dear,” Ryan said, stifling a yawn of their own. “You know how it is. Duty calls.”

“Whichever of your friends fucked up can take care of themself until morning,” Merlin tried, although he clearly hadn’t expected it to work and was already positioning himself to take advantage of the new, warm spot still open on the bed. “It’s *cold* out there.”

“If it was one of my friends, I would agree with you,” Ryan said, deciding that they can spare the moment to lean over and kiss their fiance. “But it’s not, so I have to go help whoever it is. Don’t get too comfortable over there, I’ll only be gone a minute.”

“Mmhm. Be safe, tell me if it’s interesting,” Merlin managed, clearly already most of the way asleep again, and Ryan allowed themself a fond smile before focusing on the task at hand again.

Reaching out with their senses felt like being able to stretch after having to sit in one place all day; it was a relief, in a somewhat strained way. Ryan’s awareness of the world around them uncurled, expanding in detail and distance instantly. The city, the world, the entire present moment, all of the moments in the past—for a moment the scope was dizzying, but only a moment, before Ryan could focus in on what was actually the problem.

*There* it was, and no wonder. Someone—because this was the kind of disturbance a person, with all of their temporal weight and import, made when they were thrown into a time they didn’t belong in—had managed to land in the middle of the Late Triassic period, where *nothing* human should be. That was the kind of thing that could divert an entire timeline if it was left unchecked, and even more importantly, that wasn’t somewhere that someone unprepared could survive for long.

While finding where the disturbance was felt like stretching, traveling took a little more effort. Ryan could see the lines on their gauntlets begin to glow with their familiar, warm green light, and they stepped forward—

—and their foot hit the earth somewhere in Laurasia, before Pangaea had fully broken apart. They were on the edge of a vast fern prairie, the waist-high foliage like nothing in the world when Ryan lived. They were slightly out of breath, as though winded; even these days and only sliding along one timeline, two hundred million years wasn’t an easy gulf of time to step across.

Still, that wasn’t important. Somewhere around here—and Ryan could feel it, now that they were here, the beginnings of a headache at the back of their skull that always heralded *bad time vibes*—was someone who didn’t belong in this time. Ryan spotted the beginnings of a vast conifer forest, with the smaller Triassic pterosaurs flitting about its lower branches, and headed in that direction.

The trees were enormous, the tallest of them easily a hundred feet tall, and the undercanopy was full of unfamiliar brush and foliage. There wasn’t a physically disturbed track—one point in favor of whoever was stuck here, they knew not to leave many traces—but their temporal trail was clear as day. Ryan hopped a fallen log, brushed dirt off of their outfit, and hurried to the end of the trail.

It ended in a bush—one of the very large ones that Ryan kept seeing around here, a thick exterior of leaves and spines giving way to a sparser interior, almost like a box made out of needles. And curled up in that interior, a little worse for wear and definitely exhausted, was a child.

That had not been what Ryan was expecting, but from their frame—out of the chubby toddler stage, but still small, still extremely young—that was clearly what they were. Ryan could barely see their head or face, just some of their legs—in what looked like loose, baggy pants—and the end of a staff, which they were presumably holding. Ryan wasn’t sure if the kid was asleep or not—hell, they weren’t sure how a child had gotten here in the first place—so they waited for a moment or two before clearing their throat.

“Hello?” they asked, startling a jump out of the kid.

“Why are *you* here?” A petulant voice answered, and the bush started rustling. “Who *are* you?”

“My name is the Historian, and you can call me Ryan,” Ryan said, hoping that their tone was somewhere in the neighborhood of calming. “I’m here because I could tell something was wrong in time, and I wanted to fix it.”

There was a slight pause in the rustling, and then a gust of wind blew branches out of the way so the kid could scramble out of the bush, their staff—a long, knobbly section of polished white ash—appearing before their head did. And when their head did appear, Ryan blinked and took another long look at it, because it was…familiar.

Grey hair, long and slightly unkempt in the manner of someone who forgot haircuts were a thing people needed occasionally; pale skin, the kind that would burn easily in any sunlight at all; slightly curved ears, and—the real tell—iridescent eyes that shimmered in the Triassic sunlight. No robes, but a tunic that was belted at the waist and a long scarf that seemed like it could work to wrap around and hide his ears if he needed it to. It was like looking at a slight distortion of Ryan’s Merlin—different, much younger, but only a slight variation on the same theme. *Definitely* the same glint in his eyes that Merlin got when he had found a new topic to interest him.

“You can do time magic, then?” The child—the Merlin, although that felt weird to say—in front of Ryan asked, all tiredness gone despite the fact that he still seemed shaky on his feet. “What am I saying, of course you can do time magic. Teach me.”

“…what?” Ryan blinked.

“Teach me!” The kid repeated, thumping the end of the comically large staff on the ground for emphasis. It was easily a foot and a half taller than he was, although that wasn’t hard; he was a particularly scrawny kid. “You look like a powerful mage, and you could come here which means you know what you’re doing, which means you definitely know enough time magic to teach someone else. And I can learn it *all*.” The self-assured confidence he added the last part made Ryan smile, even despite the confusion, because that was familiar—not only from their own Merlin, but from *themself* as a child.

“I’m sure you can,” they said, wondering where to go from here, “but the middle of the Triassic is *really* not a good teaching environment. Also, you haven’t even introduced yourself yet.” Not that Ryan thought that he needed to, really, but it was good to be sure. And besides, Ryan wasn’t sure they wanted to open the can of worms that was “and I’m engaged to an alternate version of you when I come from” right now with what appeared to be a five-year-old.

“What are you talking about, I’m Merlin. Obviously.” The boy said, with all the hauteur that Ryan had come to expect. It was much funnier when the speaker was five, however. “Or. I will be Merlin. I’m Emrys, but I’m *pretty much* Merlin, and I’m *gonna* be Merlin, and that’s what matters.” He crossed his arms with an air of finality and nearly whacked himself in the face with his staff before Ryan, seeing that that was about to happen, reached out to catch it before it could hit.

“Well, nice to meet you, Emrys,” Ryan said, trying to figure out where to go from here. This definitely wasn’t their Merlin, at any point in time—first of all, their Merlin had never been a five-year-old, and second of all, if he’d been to the Triassic as a child, Ryan is pretty sure he would have mentioned it. “How did you get here, by the way?”

“Time magic. I thought you *knew* about this,” Emrys executed an impressive eye-roll for someone who was dwarfed by the bush he had been hiding in.

“I know it was time magic,” Ryan clarified. “I mean, was this on purpose or an accident? Did someone else send you here?” It didn’t feel very intentional, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t; it could just have been someone brute-forcing Emrys back approximately 200 million years, punching a hole in the timeline in the process. Ryan had seen stranger.

“It wasn’t an accident, I did it on purpose!” Emrys said, and the instant defensiveness said more clearly than any words could that yes, it was an accident. “I wanted to go back in time to see if I could do it, and I did, so it’s not an accident.”

“Alright,” Ryan said, raising an eyebrow to let the kid know that they don’t believe him for a second, although it was probably true that the start of the spell was intentional. And if he was—as he so clearly was—a version of Merlin, that explained the raw power needed to send yourself back hundreds of millions of years as an *accident*, from *overshooting*. “Well, let’s get you back home, first, because this isn’t a safe place for either of us or time in general. It doesn’t like when people from the future go this far in the past, it causes problems—”

And then Ryan trailed off, because at the words “get you back home,” Emrys had gone tense and still in a way that Ryan really didn’t like. They frowned, reaching out with their senses to get a sense of when, exactly, this kid was from—because if it was from an alternate timeline that Ryan knew, one of the bad ones, then they’d have some Words for whoever caused Emrys to have that reaction.

But where most people had a trace of their home timeline, a sense of where and when they belonged that would cling to them through any transformation or travelling, Ryan just found…nothing. Not a natural nothing, either—a void, like someone had taken steel wool to that part of Emrys’s identity and scrubbed until it all vanished.

“—did you…remove your origins from your magical signature?” Ryan asked, confusion overwhelming the desire to look like they had this situation under control. Emrys blinked, eyes shimmering in the light.

“Uh? Not…on purpose?” He stammered, the tips of his ears going pink in embarrassment. “I—wait. What do you mean by that?”

“Most people have…like a fingerprint, magically, that contains some information about them. It’s not super easy to sense, and the only bit I can reliably figure out is when people

come from. Their timeline remembers. Yours…doesn’t.” Another, worse, thought hit Ryan. “Wait, do you remember where you came from?”

“Yeah, duh,” Emrys says, rolling his eyes again. “Wait. If I did something to make sure people wouldn’t follow me would that do it?”

It shouldn’t, Ryan thinks, but then reconsiders in light of a spell so overloaded with power that it shot someone *200,000,000 years into the past*. That…might, actually, take a nondetection spell and cause it to pour metaphorical bleach over someone’s temporal positioning. It was almost like how Tiago had felt, for the period he was just back from being unstuck in time.

“It might,” Ryan said. “Well. Let’s get you somewhere that isn’t the Triassic, and then we can get you back home. If you want to go,” they add, as they always do when someone is stuck somewhere. “People are probably missing you, but in the end the choice is yours.”

They focused back on Halcyon City in their time, moving where specifically they were going over to the Vanguard base. That would probably be a good place to put the kid, right? They weren’t going to dump a five-year-old unattended at the Big Team Base, not that they didn’t trust the team, but because that would be overwhelming as hell. But the Vanguard base might work. If nothing else, Gwen would come in at some point and she could help figuring this problem out, right?

They focused on that, and pretended they didn’t hear Emrys mutter “I doubt it” to Ryan’s statement. They didn’t particularly want to ask if it was about people missing them, or about the choice being theirs, because neither answer was great. After a moment, they brought their hands apart, carefully parting time until there was a portal into the Vanguard base.

“There we go,” they said, turning to see that Emrys was watching them with wide eyes. “…what?”

“You need to teach me how you do that,” Emrys said, staring at the portal in a manner that Ryan could only describe as “starry-eyed.” “You *need* to.”

“We’ll talk about it when we’re not in the Triassic,” Ryan said, mentally adding *and when I’ve had a full night of sleep.*

And then they realized that they were thinking about legitimately teaching a child, even a child Merlin, time magic and tried to snap themself out of it. This kid had somewhere to go back to, and if that place was shitty—which it was sort of sounding like—there were so many people in Halcyon who would be much better at looking after a kid. And time magic was *dangerous*. And even if their original timeline was bad, Emrys would probably want to be in Avalon anyway, not Halcyon City.

*Don’t get attached,* Ryan thought to themself, as if thinking that to themself had ever worked.

“Alright, you first and I’ll go through after to make sure it doesn’t fail,” they said, standing back. Emrys seemed equally intrigued by the fact that the portal was self-sustaining—it would be for a while, although Ryan couldn’t hold it up indefinitely. But at the moment, they could spare a moment to glance around the area and make sure Emrys didn’t leave any lasting harm on the area, which it didn’t seem he had. There might be a few shreds of white ash on the ground, or hair from a human (or, half-human) child, but the timeline could be awfully resilient when left to its own devices as long as the primary irritant was removed.

They watched as Emrys headed through, still staring at the portal in awe, and then stepped through the portal and let it close right on their heels, the familiar and comforting sensation of time righting itself settling into place in the back of their head as they entered the familiar Vanguard office.

It was closed for the moment, of course, but Ryan didn’t doubt that someone would be around. It was like the Big Base in that way; someone was *always* around.

“Alright, we’re at the base of some of my friends,” Ryan explained to Emrys, before reaching out to snag the back of his tunic before he could get all the way to the computers, “and those are not something you should just start pushing unless you really like getting an entire computer’s opinions, at top volume, at—” they pause for half a second “—three thirty-four in the morning, which I don’t, so we’re not doing that.”

“But—” Emrys started, and Ryan valiantly tried to continue what they were originally saying. They had a feeling that Emrys was about to start onto what he believed was a rational, well-thought-out argument for why he should be able to hit every button on that computer, and if he started doing that, Ryan would never know peace.

“I was thinking we could set you up in one of the rooms here for tonight, and then once more people get in and we’re all awake, we can talk and figure out what you want to do next. Some of the people who work here are from Avalon as well, so they should be able to help with that part of what’s going on, or find somewhere for you in Avalon if that’s where you want to go next…” Ryan trailed off, because Emrys had gone still in the same way that he had when Ryan mentioned taking him home. *Something about Avalon?* They wondered, concerned, *or—*

“You’re leaving.” Emrys didn’t even sound offended, which was somehow worse. He sounded…resigned. You didn’t need retrocognition to know that this wasn’t the first time an adult had left him. “Right. Well, don’t wait around.”

The wide, starry-eyed look from the portal was gone. So was the awe that he’d looked at the Vanguard base with, and Ryan knew why. It didn’t matter how nice the place you were shoved into was, when it was your only option and you didn’t know anyone there. It didn’t matter if people smiled and said things were going to be alright but walked away from you, because you didn’t have any guarantee they were coming back. Ryan’s father had, once, smiled and told them everything would be alright and they’d talk more about it in the morning, and in the morning what he’d said was “I’m leaving.”

When you didn’t trust someone to come back, the second they said they were leaving became the moment you had to close yourself off or you’d be hurt again.

Ryan sighed, pulled out one of the swivel chairs from in front of the computer, and pushed it over in Emrys’s direction before grabbing another to sit in themself. This wasn’t something that could wait until morning; it wasn’t something that could wait at all. Ryan refused to be another person in a list of people who had abandoned this child.

“Emrys,” they said, making sure their voice was the same level, even tone they used when trying to wrangle Big Team members. “I’m a time mage. I can wait around as long as I want. And I’m not going to leave if you don’t want me to.”

“I don’t care,” Emrys said, arms still folded across his chest. He did sink into the chair, though, and there was a brief second of wide-eyed joy at discovering that it could be swiveled around before the sullen expression—far too sullen for a five-year-old—returned. “Do whatever you want.”

“I want to stay here, then,” Ryan said, still keeping their voice level. “And I want to make something very clear, right now. I’m not going to make you go anywhere you don’t want to go. If you don’t want to stay here, you don’t have to stay here. If you don’t want to go back to your time, you don’t have to go back to your time. If you want to go to Avalon, in the morning I’ll talk with someone who can get you to Avalon. If you really want to go back to the Triassic Period, I guess I’ll put you back there, although I’ll probably stick around to make sure you don’t die, because it’s very dangerous there. But I’m not going to make you go somewhere you don’t want to go. That’s not how I do things.”

Emrys gave them a long look, a look that seemed too old for their young face. It was a look that said, *I don’t know if I can trust you to do that.* It was a look that meant that other people had, frequently, not given him a choice of where he could and could not go. Enough of *that*, Ryan thought grimly, and *anyone* would risk blasting themself into the Triassic period. So they didn’t look away, they kept themself relaxed, and they waited, because this was the kind of thing that would require patience above all else.

After a few minutes, Emrys started wiggling on the chair. Ryan stayed where they were, letting their eyes close in a sad approximation of sleep. Eventually, Emrys got off the chair and started poking around the Vanguard base, and Ryan kept their additional senses sharp and on just to make sure he wasn’t getting into anything he wasn’t supposed to. In general, he wasn’t—he was just looking. Scoping out the place Ryan had offered as a place for him to stay.

And then he came back, collapsing back down into the swivel chair with an audible sigh. Of course he would; he was probably exhausted. It was a miracle he’d managed to shoot himself that far back in time and remain conscious. Ryan opened their eyes again, wondering what Emrys would do next.

“…what if I said I wanted to stay with you?” He asked, and Ryan was pretty sure this question was doing two things. The first, of course, was pushing Ryan’s boundaries, trying to see if they really meant what they said or were just softening the blow of leaving him. The second Ryan was less sure about, but they thought it was Emrys genuinely asking for what he wanted, which was something Ryan wanted to encourage. They pushed the question of how to explain this to Merlin into the “later” section of their mind and shrugged.

“Then you can come with me, we’ve got a guest room in the apartment. I should be able to make sure it’s comfortable enough for you.” Mentally, they reached out to the guest room and rewound it to the last time they’d bothered to clean it, which was longer ago than they’d have liked. *Whoops*.

Emrys gave them another of those long, too-old looks, but when Ryan didn’t seem to be lying or joking, he hopped off the chair, still clinging to the white-ash staff he’d had with him the entire time.

“Okay. Let’s do that, then,” he said, looking up at Ryan. “And in the morning, you can start teaching me time magic.”

“In the morning, we can *talk about* if I’m going to start teaching you time magic,” Ryan said, “and about what, if anything, you want to do next.” They were pretty sure that if Emrys figured out this Avalon wouldn’t be as shitty to him as his apparently was, he would want to go back there, but that was something Emrys himself could figure out later. While he needed it, the room would be his, Ryan decided to themself.

They opened another portal, this one slightly easier, to the main room of the apartment and gestured toward it. “You first. Are you hungry, or do you just want to sleep? You must be tired.”

“I’m fine,” Emrys, who had been mid-yawn, said unconvincingly. “I’ll just. Make sure the room is good enough.”

“Alright,” Ryan said, stifling their smile as Emrys stumbled through the portal in front of them. “The room right ahead of you is the right one. Wait—” they paused, realizing that Emrys’s clothes were muddy, and gestured toward them with a hand. The tunic and pants restored themselves to pristine condition, and Ryan nodded. “There you go, that should make them more comfortable. I should be awake when you wake up in the morning, but in case I’m not, there’s plenty of food in the kitchen. I’ll be in that room over there, knock before you come in or if you need anything. I’m a light enough sleeper I’ll probably wake up just from that.”

“Mmhm,” Emrys said, looking as though he’d only processed maybe half of that information, and Ryan decided to take pity

on him.

“We’ll talk about other rules in the morning, go get some sleep.”

“I’m not tired,” Emrys said, although he must have known it was a losing battle because he was already heading toward the room. “I’ll just. Go check it. I’ll be right back.” He gave Ryan one last, long look before ducking into the room, as though expecting them to vanish in the meantime, and Ryan stayed in the main room, idly tidying things with a couple flicks of their fingers.

Sure enough, after a few moments Emrys’s head popped back out of the door, eyes widening when he saw that Ryan was, indeed, still there and hadn’t bailed instantly. Ryan waved at him, amused, and he flushed and instantly slammed the door closed. Another few moments later and the light went out, and Ryan was fairly sure the kid had passed out immediately.

So. That had happened. Ryan looked longingly at the couch—it was really tempting to just collapse there—but the bed was more comfortable, and they’d have to at least tell Merlin *something* in the rare but possible chance he woke up first.

“Something” ended up being “I’ll explain in the morning, wake me up and talk to me before you leave the room, I’m going to pass out,” as Ryan was gently shoving Merlin back onto his own side of the bed, but hey, that was what Ryan had the brainpower for.

They also pulled out their phone, shooting off a couple of texts—to Lily, obviously, so the Knights knew something was going on, and then one each to Boon, Atlanta, Kurt, Ernest, and their mom, because Ryan needed some people in their corner who actually knew how to handle five-year-olds, and then a last one to Nat, because sometimes you just needed to yell at someone you knew about a very, very weird night.