wand-charming
“Curious indeed how these things happen. The wand chooses the wizard, remember...I think we must expect great things from you, Mr. Potter... After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things — terrible, yes, but great.”
Garrick Olivander, The Philosopher's Stone
The night before we were set to visit Diagon Alley, I struggled to fall asleep. It was a mixture of excitement, dread, and plain old misery.
I wasn’t doing so hot.
See, for the duration of my new life, I had accepted many things. Mostly, I accepted through blaring denial, but still. Acceptance. I am a boy. (Screech.) I am a werewolf. (Screech.) I am destined for a shitty life full of violence and literally no bath bombs. (The biggest screech.)
But even if I was regularly put in painful situations (ie lunar transformations) or daily discomforts (health potions galore), a part of me refused to accept that all of this was real. Part of me wondered when I would wake up in my bed, or in the hospital, or in the asylum. Part of me wondered if this was a mass mental construct and I was laying in a coma while my family and friends cried over me. I wondered when they would pull the plug and all of this would fade, and I’d die for real.
I was used to doubting my sanity, but never on this scale.
But some part of me wanted it to be real. Wanted my presence to make a change, wanted to be alive and real even if I wasn’t really whole, even if I was certifiably mad on the inside, I just wanted…I just wanted to play my part with relish. I wanted things to be simple.
So why was I dreading Diagon Alley? Because that part of me would finally realise that magic, that this world was real in all it’s ugly glory, and I would somewhat be able to trust my head, but then all the heartache I’d been shoving down would tear open like a gaping wound again. I’d have to mourn all my friends and family and the injustice and the exhaustion of it all. I’d have to square up and work through my issues and that…that would be hard.
Like, if I accepted wholeheartedly that this was real, then.
Then I’d have to accept other things.
Like the fact that one day I’d probably have to kill.
Or the fact that my new parents would someday die.
Or the fact that my old life was entirely gone.
Or that if I couldn’t change anything, I would die. Again.
(The last part provoked mixed feelings within me, but anyway.)
And I don’t know.
I was just bone-achingly lonely sometimes, and my request for friends wasn’t just an attempt to alleviate boredom, but really, I just wanted someone to talk to even if I’d never be able to tell them my biggest secret of all.
And I loved Hope and Lyall, and it was easy to love them. They were unlike my previous parents but that just made it easier, because I had two sets and I loved both but-
There was never a point in my life where I’d be able to call them up and be like, “remember that time I was a grown woman who was assaulted who wound up in the body of your original son by accident?”
That would never be a thing, not at all. There would always be a distance, always be secrets.
It was odd. I’d never kept something big from my parents before.
But for the rest of this life, I’d have to keep my mouth shut on the whole idea of reincarnation/transmigration unless I wanted to end up in a psych ward.
“Troublesome,” I whispered, before laughing softly.
It sounds like a sob.
☾
The thing about enhanced senses it the fact they’re functionally useless in most situations. My enhanced senses were no different because all they did for me was give me crippling migraines and varied bouts of nausea.
My new body was literally so fragile, and it was kind of annoying (and concerning).
But I was stuck with it, so I decided I would actually develop my senses. It seemed wasteful to not use them, and surely they would only be advantageous later on, what with the fighting and the wars.
The major hiccup in this was the whole part where I had no idea what I was doing, but hey. That’s kind of my default mode anyway.
I recognised early on that smell depended on how much I could process and how much I could distinguish between the scents. The first part involved dealing with the constant stimulation I’d have to face in crowds and the like, and the second focused on finding the actual important smells I’d need to track someone.
In a way, the fact that we lived in such an isolated space worked out for me. It took a little while, but the background scents dulled enough that I could parse through the information I wanted, like how my parents smelled.
Don’t look at me like that! It’s weird but it’s important.
My mother, I found, smells like dirt from the garden, kitchen herbs, blood (from cutting herself with a knife), a little bit of perfume, and then what I liked to call our family scent.
Every human has a base scent, the smell of carbon and oxygen and numerous bodily processes at once, but then there’s the scent of all the people you regularly associate with. Associate is a generous word because my mother smelled like my father (for, ahem. Obvious reasons.) and like myself (because I was a momma’s boy regardless of which life I was living).
My father, if you’re curious, smells like ink, dusty books, what I think might be magic, and the smell of crowds and rich mahogany (the ministry?). Oh, and us.
I’ve been practising tracking them, just for fun, but I was also playing this fun game called “let's smell everything!” And it was super weird, and at times disturbing, but my idea behind this was- if I got used to how everything smelled, then I’d know when something smelled weird. Magic is great, but most wizards are stupid, so how cool would it be if I could just scent dark magic from a mile away and run?
So cool. It would be so, so cool, don’t even deny it.
But I regretted all of this as soon as we flooed into Diagon Alley.
It was, hands down, one of the worst experiences in my life, ever.
It was terrible for me, one Remus Lupin, and my father, who was rushing through the crowd of people because I was sobbing into his shoulder, bawling in pain. He was alarmed, I was alarmed, the crowd of shoppers might’ve been concerned (I’ve no clue, really. This was a society where beheading your house-elves was a normal thing to do).
The thing about living alone is that I regularly interact with two people who I’m extremely comfortable with. Throwing me into a crowd of magic-wielding maniacs who manned insane stores with magic of all different scents and smells means that I was overwhelmed, so overwhelmed that you could say we’d crossed the border for overwhelmed a while back and were now solidly in the nation of being terrified.
I don’t know how to describe it, because it’s not really a mundane sort of experience, but it’s a bit like entering a candle shop, except half the smells are odorous and sharp and magnified thousandfold.
The smells twist up under my nose, hurting my head and my nose, and I whimper, nearly in tears as the sounds overwhelm me.
It’s too much.
I was sobbing in his arms by the time we entered Ollivanders, and I could tell he was silently freaking out by how tense his shoulders were. But I couldn’t calm down, couldn’t even focus on the fact that I was here, in the Diagon Alley, buying a real, real wand that would make me capable of extraordinary spells. It didn’t matter because everything hurt and my eyes hurt from scrunching so tightly but I couldn’t-
could not
filter-
pain-
I couldn’t breathe-
My father pressed closer, and I heard the sound of a bell (the type that announces the fact that you’ve entered a shop), ring, and it clanged around in my head, vibrating faster and harder-
and my father smelled like ink and dusty old books but there was also the smell of someone else’s sweat and the robemaker’s fabrics and the scent of ink and wooden brooms and above all-
wands, wands everywhere, chestnut and cherry wood and unicorn hairs and phoenix feathers and dragon scales and-
lights and magic and spells and magicmagicmagic untouched magicmagicmagical strings-
It was a mercy when someone finally knocked me out, the sharp scent of a spell hitting me before everything went dark.
I woke up with a gasp, face sticky from the tears. My father was sitting on a chair, and my head was pillowed on his lap. His glasses were precariously perched on his nose, his eyes worried.
“Remus. Are you…” he trailed off, unsure as to ask me if I was better or not, or to ask me what happened.
I saw something (someone?) moving on the side, and I tilted my head to see a blonde-haired man watch me carefully. He was middle-aged, lean and lithe, and the most uncomfortable part was his silvery-white eyes that observed me with piercing clarity.
You’d expect someone with white eyes to be a little off-balance. You don’t expect them to stare at you like that. I curled closer to my father, afraid of what the man would notice.
How many secrets can a person carry? Werewolf, female, adult, dead-
“Remus?” My father asked once more. I turned back to him, trying to plaster a smile on my face. I probably looked ghastly, but I had to try.
“I’m fine, dad.” This only deepened his frown, stress lines accentuated. He gently brushed my hair off my face, but I flinched a little, and he pulled back.
I felt bad, but all smells, all sounds…even the muffled sounds from outside the shop grated on my senses.
“Overstimulation, wasn’t it?” The blonde man said, and I stiffened again. I’d forgotten he was there.
How strange. It wasn’t like me to just…forget about a person. My muddled mind could barely parse through all the noises in my head. I curled up into myself, flinching as my fingernails scraped against my skin.
“…yes.” I finally said, voice small. Everything still hurt and my ears rang, but I managed to sit upright with my father’s assistance. I swayed a bit, but my father somehow steadies me with minimal touching.
“It happens.” The man turned to father, silvery eyes strangely calm. “You might want to buy him earplugs and a mask to filter everything out until he gets used to it all. My father frowned but nodded.
“I’ll buy him one.” He turns to me a little. “Are you feeling well enough? We can come back later…”
My gut instinct was to say no, because I was still flinching, and a very large part of me wanted to cry into my mother’s apron and never leave the house again, but...
I wasn’t quite sure I could do it again, coming back here. I knew that things would get better eventually, but still. I would be afraid of crowds for a while, so while I was here….
“I’m…fine. I’m okay. We can get my wand. We’ve come this far.” I tried to reassure my father, which only made him frown harder, but he eventually conceded with a sigh.
He turned to the man.
“Well, Garrick?” The man smiled vacantly before he snapped his fingers. Measuring tapes flew out of his pockets and my father helped me stand up. I stepped closer to the man, wondering why they even needed to measure me.
I didn’t have the energy to question it though, so I let the tapes swirl around my wrists and along my shoulders and down to my hips as the man made vaguely approving noises, silvery-white eyes looking past me as he murmured things to himself.
My muddled brain didn’t think to ask him questions when he asked for my wand hand- I just stared at him woozily. I didn’t want to explain the mess that was my head, how being right-handed in my last life and left-handed in this one made my ability to do anything difficult. A mental mess.
“Ambidextrous, then?” I nodded, relieved, and stuck out my left hand anyway. Might as well throw people off.
He placed a wand in my hand, a cherry one with unicorn hair. I’d barely flicked it when he snapped it away, depositing a darker hickory one with a phoenix feather. I swished this one and he grabbed it, placing it away, giving me a chestnut wand with demiguise hair, and so on, so forth.
Round and round we went, trying to find a wand. as my father sat back and watched as we went through the wands. Garrick was somehow both placid and manic in his attempts to pair me off, and as we went through wands of all sizes and compositions, he took notes on a small pad before pausing, rushing to the bag of the store.
I stood there, sweating. I was more than a little scared. Remus was a wizard, yes, but there was no guarantee I would be. Logically, only a wizard could be a werewolf, but my mind was muddled and panicked, and I wondered if I’d ruin the plot by being a goddamn squib instead of the wizard Remus was supposed to be.
Garrick eventually brought a dusty old box, and he picked out the wand inside. It was a light-coloured wood, and he gently placed it in my hand.
“Alder wood, dragon heartstring, 9 inches.” He sounded almost perturbed by it, but as I swished it, the entire room lit up. I gasped and stared at the tiny wand.
It was hard to describe the way I felt right then. It was a bit like trekking through the desert, having lost all hope, and then finding a fucking Starbucks with air conditioning and frappuccinos.
I was exhilarated.
My father looked happy about this until he turned to Garrick, who stared at me.
“What is it?” I clutched my wand tight, afraid that there was something wrong with, or maybe…something wrong with me.
“The wand,” Garrick said, slowly, “is out of projected proportion, and yet it works.” I didn’t really understand.
“I’m small, so the wand is too? Right?” I asked, voice childishly confused. I wasn’t even trying to be a kid, because I was genuinely boggled. He was saying that it was small for me, or that it would be small for me as an adult.
“It might be that you’re buying it so early.” Garrick paused in contemplation, eyeing me carefully before turning to my father. “If it causes problems, bring it back to me for a check-up. By the time he gets to Hogwarts, he might’ve outgrown it, so pay me a visit then.” My father agreed, and then the conversation drifted off to other things as I slumped into the cushioned chair again, clutching my wand in my soft, small hands.
A wand.
An actual, real wand that was mine.
I-
I was incredibly in awe because you have to understand, magic is entirely new to me. How many times in the past had I wondered what I would do with magic, what would I do if I could go to Hogwarts. How much times I’d use accio due to my laziness, how I’d jinx any bullies I’d come upon, how I’d charm my robes to glitter and shine. I’d imagined using magic a thousand times, in my fantasies, doing fancy spells, fighting evil with all my heart, but now-
Now I would actually be able to. And I sort of wanted to tear up, because look! Look at all the things I could learn to do, look how much amazing things I could become capable off.
I was astonished and stunned and overwhelmingly happy, and in my tired, tired head, I imagined doing the nox spell and blocking out all the light and noise and simply falling asleep.