Chapter Text
Chapter One: The Stick in the Garden
The summer Harry Potter turned eleven was, by all measurable standards, the worst summer of his life — and given the competition, that was saying something considerable. The Dursleys had perfected the art of making every moment of his existence feel like an imposition, a miscalculation of the universe, a rounding error in the great ledger of people who deserved to exist comfortably. Harry had grown used to this in the way that a person grows used to a persistent ache: not fondly, not without noticing, but with the numb resignation of someone who cannot imagine things being otherwise.
He slept in the cupboard under the stairs, a space so narrow that he had to turn sideways to change his shirt, and where the slanted ceiling left a permanent red mark on his forehead whenever he forgot to duck upon waking — which was often, because Harry was perpetually groggy, surviving on whatever scraps Aunt Petunia deemed insufficient for the family bin. Dudley's cast-off clothes hung off his thin frame in swathes of fabric two sizes too large. His round glasses, broken once and repaired with Sellotape, sat crookedly on his nose, one arm slightly longer than the other, so that they tilted to the left no matter how often he pushed them straight.
It was a Tuesday in late June when it happened. Not a particularly special Tuesday. The kind of Tuesday that smelled of cut grass and petrol fumes from next door's lawnmower, with a flat grey sky that couldn't commit to either sun or rain. Aunt Petunia had sent Harry to the garden to pull weeds from the flower beds — a task which she always assigned him, never Dudley, because Dudley was "sensitive to pollen," a claim which had never once been verified but which Aunt Petunia stated with the conviction of scripture.
Harry knelt in the dirt between the rose bushes and the fence, his hands already brown at the knuckles, methodically extracting dandelions by the root and tossing them into the rusted bucket beside him. The garden backed onto a narrow lane, and beyond the fence, the lane opened onto a small scrubby bit of wasteland that nobody had ever bothered to develop. Harry had sometimes watched cats crossing it from his bedroom window — or rather, from Dudley's second bedroom window, which he was occasionally permitted to use when his cupboard was being used for storage, which was most of the time. He was pulling out a particularly stubborn clump of grass from along the fence line when his fingers closed around something that was not grass and not root and not stone. It was smooth, for one thing. Smoother than anything had a right to be in a garden that hadn't been properly tended in years. Harry's fingers traced along it before he even pulled it free, feeling the way it narrowed slightly at one end and curved just the faintest amount, like a very gentle parenthesis. He dug around it with his fingers, loosening the soil, and when he finally pulled it out and held it up, he sat back on his heels and just stared. It was a stick. Or it looked like a stick. About thirty centimetres long, dark in colour — very dark, nearly black, with a grain that caught the light strangely, almost like it had been oiled. One end was slightly thicker than the other, and it was that end which fit, Harry noticed with a peculiar satisfaction, almost perfectly into the cup of his right hand.
The weight of it was strange too, not heavy, but present. He could feel it in a way he couldn't quite explain, the way you feel the weight of a coin in your pocket even when you're not thinking about it. "Weird," Harry said to no one. He turned it over. There were markings carved into the surface — not letters exactly, not anything he recognised from school, but patterns that looped and intersected in a way that felt meaningful. He traced one with his thumbnail, and for a moment — just a moment — he thought he felt something hum. A vibration, deep and low, like someone had struck a tuning fork somewhere far away and the sound had finally arrived. Harry told himself it was a stick. A very nice stick, unusually smooth, possibly old. Someone had probably dropped it over the fence. He should probably put it down.
He didn't put it down. He carried it inside, tucked along his forearm under his sleeve, and hid it in the toe of the left trainer he'd outgrown two years ago and kept under his cot. He didn't tell the Dursleys. He didn't know why he felt so certain he shouldn't — only that the feeling of the stick in his hand was the first thing in as long as he could remember that had felt, in some profound and inexplicable way, like it was his. Over the next two weeks, Harry took the stick out every night after he was sure the household had gone to sleep. He'd sit with it in the dark of his cupboard, turning it in his hands, trying to understand what it was about it that felt so different. He'd point it at things — at the door of the cupboard, at the small spider who lived in the corner of the ceiling (Harry had named her Minerva, because she seemed very stern and intelligent), at the single weak light bulb above his cot. Nothing happened. Except that sometimes, late at night when he was half asleep, his fingers felt warm around it. And twice he'd woken from dreams he couldn't remember with the stick already in his hand, though he'd been sure he left it in the trainer.
On the fifteenth day, something strange happened. Harry had been staring at the broken arm of his glasses — the one he'd mended with Sellotape that had since dried out and was beginning to peel away — and he'd thought, very clearly and somewhat desperately, fixed. Just the word. The concept. He was so tired of things being broken and staying broken. The glasses repaired themselves. The Sellotape fell away in a single strip, and the arm was whole again. Not just mended — perfect. Both arms the same length. The lenses, which had been slightly scratched, were clear. Harry sat absolutely still for thirty full seconds, then put the glasses on, and everything was sharp.
He looked down at the stick in his hand. The stick looked back at him — or that's what it felt like, the ridiculous sense of being regarded. "Right," Harry said softly, to the stick, to himself, to the dark. "Right, then." He pointed the stick at Minerva's web and thought very carefully: better. The web, which had had a large hole in it for three days, was suddenly whole and rather magnificently constructed, with geometric precision that made it look architectural. Minerva walked across her repaired web with what Harry chose to interpret as satisfaction. Harry sat in the dark with the stick in his hand and the understanding that something very unusual was happening to him — something that was, for the first time in his life, good. The changes started small. So small that at first Harry didn't connect them to the stick at all.
On the first Monday of July, he noticed that his hair, which had always refused to be tamed and always would, seemed somehow softer. It still did what it wanted, but it was shinier, and when he pushed it out of his eyes, it fell more gracefully. He filed this under "inexplicable" and moved on. By the second week of July, he noticed his hands. Harry had always had small hands for a boy — Dudley made sure he knew this — but now they seemed even finer, the fingers more tapered, the skin smoother. He'd been pulling weeds every other day, and his hands should by rights have been rough and dirty, but they looked almost — he searched for the word — delicate.
The third week, Aunt Petunia looked at him strangely over breakfast. Harry had gotten up before anyone else and was eating his small allocated portion of toast when she came into the kitchen, and she stopped in the doorway with her mug halfway to her mouth and stared at him with an expression he could not read. "Did you do something to your hair?" she said. Harry touched his hair. "No." "Hmm," said Aunt Petunia, in the tone she used when she'd caught Dudley lying and was deciding whether to pursue it. But she went to her chair and opened her magazine, and didn't say anything else. Harry thought about this later, in his cupboard, stick in hand. Something was happening. He wasn't sure what. He looked at his reflection in the back of the one bent spoon he'd managed to sneak out of the kitchen drawer — the Dursleys, for reasons of domestic economy, kept all proper mirrors out of Harry's reach.
His face was blurry in the curved metal, but he could see — or thought he could see — that something had changed. His jaw seemed to have softened somehow. His eyes, always quite large behind his glasses, seemed even larger. His lashes, always unusually thick for a boy (another of Dudley's preferred targets), seemed — longer? He put the spoon away and tried not to think about it.
August arrived, and with it, the letter. Harry was in the garden again when Aunt Petunia came to the back door with an envelope in her hand and an expression like someone had posted her a dead pigeon. She held it away from her body as though it might be contagious. "This came for you," she said. Harry took it. His name was on the front in green ink, in a hand he'd never seen before: Mr H. Potter, The Cupboard Under the Stairs, 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey. He opened it. By the time he'd finished reading — "We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" — his hands were shaking slightly, and the stick, which he'd been keeping in his sleeve on the theory that he might need it quickly, was warm against his wrist. Magic, he thought. There was a word for what he could do. There were other people. There was a school. He read the letter four times in the garden, while the weeds grew back and Aunt Petunia watched from the window, and by the end of the fourth reading, he was sure of one thing: he was going.
Whatever else was happening to him — the hair, the hands, the strangeness in his face when he glimpsed himself in the spoon — whatever was happening, he was going to this school. He looked down at the stick in his hand. "You're magic," he said to it. "Aren't you." The stick hummed. Definitely. Unmistakably. "Right," said Harry. "We'll sort it out."
Diagon Alley was the most extraordinary place Harry had ever been, and the bar had been low enough that this was saying something truly substantial. Hagrid — who had arrived like a warm and enormous weather event, taken up most of the doorway, and then peeled Dudley's arm off Harry's shoulder with the casual ease of someone removing a Post-it note — had taken him through London and through the Leaky Cauldron and through a wall, and into a cobbled street packed with more magic than Harry had yet known existed.
He got his robes first, at Madam Malkin's. He was standing on a fitting stool, arms out, while the enchanted pins worked their way around his hem, when he noticed the other child on the stool to his right — a pale boy with neat blond hair — looking at him with an expression of mild puzzlement. "Hogwarts too?" the boy said. "Yes," said Harry. "You're a girl, are you? Not that it matters, I suppose, Hogwarts takes both." The boy said this with the casual authority of someone who had grown up knowing exactly what Hogwarts was and precisely where he stood relative to it. Harry blinked. "What? No. I'm — no." The boy looked at him for a moment with pale grey eyes. "Sorry. My mistake." He didn't sound particularly sorry. He sounded like someone who was rarely wrong about things and was filing this away as a statistical anomaly. Harry said nothing, because there was a pin near his armpit that required attention, and also because he was thinking about the word "girl" and why someone had said it and what, exactly, that meant about what he looked like. He tried to glimpse himself in the long mirror at the front of the shop, but from this angle he could only see his robe, not his face.
After Madam Malkin's, Hagrid bought him ice cream and they walked the alley. Harry couldn't entirely enjoy it — he was thinking about the boy in the robe shop, and about Aunt Petunia's look over breakfast, and about the hands, the hair, the lashes. He was thinking about all these things and adding them up in a sum he didn't like. He got his books from Flourish and Blotts, his cauldron and scales and telescope from various shops along the way, and then they came to Gringotts, and then the wand shop.
Ollivander's. The shop was narrow and dusty and felt very old, and Mr Ollivander, who appeared out of the shadows like something that had always been there and was only now revealing itself, looked at Harry with eyes that gleamed like moons. "Ah," said Mr Ollivander. "Mr Potter. I wondered when I'd be seeing you." They tried wands. Holly and phoenix feather, eleven inches. Maple and dragon heartstring, seven inches. Ebony and unicorn hair, ten inches. Harry waved each one and something either happened or didn't — something wrong, something that felt like trying to shake hands with someone who was already reaching for someone else. After the fifteenth wand, Mr Ollivander was moving very quickly, pulling boxes from very high shelves. It was on the twenty-first wand that something changed. But not in the way Harry expected. Mr Ollivander had paused, a long rectangular box in his hands, and was looking at Harry with an expression that Harry would later think of as "calculating uncertainty." "May I ask," Mr Ollivander said slowly, "what that is on your wrist?" Harry had the stick tucked up his sleeve, as usual. He'd stopped thinking of it as something to explain. It had become, in the two months since he'd found it, simply part of him, the way his glasses were. He hesitated, then drew it out and showed it to the wandmaker. Mr Ollivander set down the rectangular box.
He took the stick from Harry with both hands, very carefully, and held it up to the light. Something happened to his expression that Harry couldn't categorise. "Where," said Mr Ollivander, very quietly, "did you find this?" "In a garden," Harry said. "My aunt and uncle's garden. I thought it was just — I thought it was a stick." "It is a wand," said Mr Ollivander. "Or rather — it is something that predates what we would conventionally call a wand. The wood is blackthorn, and it is very, very old." He turned it in his hands. Harry noticed that Mr Ollivander's hands were not quite steady. "The carvings are runic. Old runic. I would need to examine them properly, but I believe — I believe this is a wand that predates Ollivander's founding by several hundred years." He looked at Harry. "May I ask — has it responded to you?" "Yes," Harry said. "Has it done things you didn't intend?" Harry thought about his hair. His hands. His face. "I think so. Yes." Mr Ollivander set the wand on the glass counter very slowly, as though placing a sleeping animal down without waking it. "Some old wands," he said, "particularly those of significant power, have what we might call — a secondary effect. A consequence of their use. They were not made according to modern specifications. They were made by — by wandmakers of a different era, with different intentions. Some such wands were made specifically for certain users, and when an unintended user — even a very compatible, very powerful user — employs them, the wand —" He stopped. Looked at Harry for a long moment. "Are you experiencing any physical changes you can't explain?" The silence was very specific. "Some," Harry said. Mr Ollivander nodded slowly. "This wand was likely made for a witch," he said. "A very powerful witch, from the style of the runes. And it has clearly chosen you, Mr Potter — the question is that its magic does not entirely distinguish between what it was made for and what it has found. It will give you extraordinary power." He paused. "But it will also — adapt you. To what it expects its wielder to be." Harry looked at the stick on the counter.
The stick that hummed. The stick he'd slept with in his fist, that had fixed his glasses and repaired a spider's web and done things he hadn't asked it to do. "Can it be — undone?" he asked. "I honestly don't know," said Mr Ollivander. "I have never seen one of these outside of a textbook. You could keep it and try to research the reversal. You could leave it here with me for study." He met Harry's eyes. "Or you could take it and let it do what it was made to do, while I endeavour to learn more, and write to you at Hogwarts." Harry looked at the stick. He thought about the first night he'd held it in his dark cupboard and felt, for the first time, like something belonged to him. He picked it up. "I'll take it," he said. "And I'll also take —" He gestured at the boxes. "Something for school."
In the end, he also purchased holly and phoenix feather, eleven inches, which had sent a shower of red and gold sparks cascading over Mr Ollivander's bookshelves and made even the old wandmaker smile. He'd use that one at school. The other one — the old one, the blackthorn one — he'd keep close, and private, and he would work out what to do with it. It was only as he was leaving the shop, Hagrid waiting on the pavement, that Harry stopped and looked down at his hands in the afternoon light. The hands that were too smooth and too fine and too — He shoved the thought away. He'd deal with it. He'd deal with all of it. He was a wizard, wasn't he? He'd just found that out today, along with a great many other things. He could deal with one more. He squared his shoulders — narrower shoulders than he'd started the summer with, but shoulders nonetheless — and walked out into Diagon Alley, into the noise and the magic and the bewildering, dazzling strangeness of a world that was, it turned out, his.