章 2242: 2
Intercession by VigoGrimborne
Chapter 2
Notes:
I did say three days, but actually, while I love the insane amount of feedback, I'm starting to think leaving it there on that ending to the first chapter might be giving people the wrong idea about what kind of tone this story is going to take.
Also, people were so enthusiastic even putting that aside, and I've already got this written anyway , so it's not like I can't oblige… Have an encore chapter! I'll not be making a habit of this, though; 3-day interval from here on out.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The Leaky Cauldron was a grimy magical pub. It hosted all manner of interesting humans and plausibly-human creatures, and acted as an airlock of sorts between the magical world and the mundane world. Taylor had been there before, with Harry and Dumbledore, and she knew that a wand was necessary to open the brickwork to enter Diagon Alley.
When she set out in the morning, armed with a simmering rage, a mental passenger, and several tens of thousands of insect footsoldiers in the trunk of her car, she had expected the first major roadblock to be the need for a wand.
As it turned out, the first roadblock was that she wasn't magical.
She strode down the sidewalk, walking the walk of an average passerby, facing forward. Five times, she had walked this path, and her memory could be trusted now. The Leaky Cauldron was here, on this street.
She couldn't find it, though.
There were thirteen buildings between the two intersections marking off this particular block. Seven on the right, six on the left. She knew every single one, and she was certain that there were supposed to be seven on each side.
More than that, she knew which two buildings had somehow picked up and moved into the space the Leaky Cauldron was supposed to occupy. She distinctly remembered the red sign one of them was sporting, and the Leaky Cauldron had been to its right. Now a cheap restaurant named 'Just Chips' abutted the red-sign store, not even an alleyway between them.
She had known, going in, that it wouldn't be obvious. Dumbledore told her as much when he took them in. 'Muggles, nonmagical people, cannot see it,' he had said. She had expected her eyes to deceive her.
But it wasn't just her eyes. Her insects were everywhere, and she could feel their relative locations. None were in the Leaky Cauldron, but there was no empty space her insects could not penetrate, either.
She continued to circle the block, working at her senses and brainstorming ways to get around the magical Stranger effect. The obvious plan was to pick out some wizard or witch on the street outside, somehow, and follow them in. That required a target, though, and so far nobody on the sidewalk with her stood out as magical. Until she found someone to trail, she could stare at it all sorts of ways, try and catch things in her peripheral vision… She had already let her hand run across the brickwork of the two buildings, and she didn't feel a gap, but there had to be something.
The headache behind her right eye made a resurgence as she walked, but she was no stranger to ignoring pain. Dozens of cockroaches and flies crawled around the brickwork and slime and unmentionable nastiness in the walls of the two old buildings, searching for cracks. If they could pass from the wall of one mundane building to the wall of the next… It would seem totally normal, because according to her mental topographical map those two walls were right next to each other, but she knew a whole building was magically nestled so that it let out there for those who could see it.
If it was a pocket dimension without physical dimensions here, she was going to have to follow someone in, but if her inability to perceive the entrance was purely sensory, running her mental, alien-provided sensors – the most flattering description anyone had ever applied to cockroaches – might reveal a crack.
She was not magical. A Muggle, in their terms. The only thing extra she brought to the table was her connection to her power, so if there was no mundane means to bypass their protection, it would have to be something exploiting that.
Her headache grew worse as she circled around for her sixth pass. Her passenger radiated determination. A prompt, as Taylor interpreted it. To keep going, to ignore the pain. Having her memories restored had hurt, and much in the same way.
This was not how it had been, back before Scion. Her power didn't give her headaches, not like this, not when she was barely utilizing the bugs. It didn't send emotions over to her, not so clearly she could identify them as separate to her own. Then there was restoring her memory, which it also had never done before.
But that was before Scion's death. Before her restoration at Contessa's guided hands, and who knew what else. Before coming to this world with magic, before having her mind twisted and then untwisted…
It would have been more surprising for the balance between them to come back exactly the same. This, at least, allowed some rudimentary communication.
Her awareness cracked in time with the throbs. Little flashes of light in her vision, in her senses. Bugs popping in and out of existence, shifting back and forth. A seventh storefront flashing in and out of sight when she looked to the right place.
Like a radio being tuned, her fluctuating perceptions flickered more to the knowing side than to the unknowing over the course of several minutes. She circled around again, feeling nauseous from looking at the flickering too long, and by the time she came back around once more, the Leaky Cauldron was there like it had never disappeared at all. New insects skittered around under the floor and in the back room, and in the massive space that had opened up beyond the magical pub.
Her power felt satisfied, immensely so.
Never before had her power actively worked to bypass other powers… But this wasn't another power. Scion was dead. This was something else entirely.
"Bending the rules for me?" she murmured as she approached the Leaky Cauldron.
'Solidarity' was the closest match to the emotional response she received. A heady mix of companionship and determination.
"Us against the world." She would take whatever allies she could get.
The interior of the Leaky Cauldron was exactly as she remembered it, down to some of the same patrons frequenting the same booths. A few looked at her as she walked through, and some continued to stare, but none stopped her.
As far as she knew, the only thing that visibly marked her as a Muggle was her clothing. That was the first thing she was going to fix if she ended up having to spend any time in Diagon Alley.
As she walked, she continued to run insect exploratory expeditions through the pub and beyond. Most bars had some form of a lost and found box, and if every Witch and Wizard carried a wand, there was a chance–
Yes, there were two smoothed sticks nestled among a few coin purses and other anachronistic detritus in a box behind the bar. Neither was very big, so she had her bugs take them both, conveying them like tiny pallbearers down under the bar.
"Buying or just passing through?" the bartender asked her as she loitered, waiting for her delivery.
"Passing through," she said. "I'm new to these parts."
"That you are, with an accent like that," he agreed. "Passage is there," he pointed to the blank brick wall in the back of the pub. "You tap your wand on it."
"Thanks." Her roaches deposited her new wands under an unused table, and she feigned tripping over herself when she walked by it, deftly snatching both with her hand and slipping one into the pocket of her jeans without looking at it. The other was a dark oak thing, with little runes carved over one half. She held it by the non-rune end, though for all she knew that was the wrong way around.
Unbridled curiosity radiated from her power's little corner of her mind. She agreed, somewhat, but for now the wand was just a potentially dangerous tool. One she raised to the brickwork and tapped around with, searching for the trigger.
Hopefully it only needed a wand. If it also needed a magical person to be holding the wand, she was going to have some explaining to do to whoever happened to be watching.
Her headache spiked, and the bricks folded away.
"So that's how it is?" she asked as she stepped into Diagon Alley.
Maybe she wasn't magical… But either her power was, or was smart enough to brute-force a way for her to fake it. She wouldn't put it past her power to be capable of such a thing.
Curiosity continued to be the dominant emotion sent her way, entirely failing to explain the inner workings of aliens attempting to wield magic.
So long as the end result worked for her, she could deal with not knowing the specifics.
She walked among the magical denizens of the alley, mostly unnoticed. The shops almost universally called to her, each one advertising a glimpse of culture and power that she knew next to nothing about. Magical clothing, magical potions, magical artifacts, magical food, magical books and books about magic…
'Potions, real potions,' she remembered Harry exclaiming as they looked over his new textbooks the night before he was set to leave. 'Do you think it's like cooking?'
'Cooking explosives, maybe,' she had said, running her finger over a warning in the textbook about concussive shockwaves if one stirred Popcap Shrooms too roughly under a full moon.
The books about magic were probably her best bet for learning quickly. She would have to look for a magical library here in the Alley. There were bookstores, she had passed two already, but she didn't have that much money to spend and none of it in magical currency.
The bank might be a place to stop soon, but she was looking for something else first. An Auror, the magical police. She couldn't imagine that what had been done to her was legal, and Contessa's forged documentation had never let her down before, giving her no reason to fear legal scrutiny. She wasn't a criminal in this world, she was an upstanding citizen without a single mark on her record.
She found an Auror outside the big marble pillars of the bank, standing a good distance from the armed and armored goblin guards but obviously keeping watch on the entrance.
"You're an Auror, are you not?" she asked politely, stopping in front of him.
"Yes. What do you need?" He graveled like an old, grizzled chainsmoker despite his young, clean-shaven face, which threw her off a bit.
"Where do I go to report a crime committed against me?"
"I can take a statement," he exhaled, pulling a roll of parchment and what looked like a self-inking quill from somewhere in his robes. "What's the crime?"
She quickly explained her situation; mother of a child with magic, visited by a man claiming to be Albus Dumbledore, obliviated of all memory of her son and left to wallow for years before she finally remembered what she had been made to forget.
"... I have to assume that is some sort of crime," she concluded. "Kidnapping at the very least."
"Kid's name?" the Auror asked, still sounding utterly disinterested as he scratched down her testimony.
"Harry Hebert."
"I'll kick it up the chain." The Auror waved dismissively and folded up the parchment, tucking it into his robes. "Rest assured."
Taylor was not assured. Not at all. But it was one approach. She could check back in with the magical police in a few days if nobody followed up.
In the meantime… She spent the rest of the day scoping out Diagon Alley. What the shops were, where they were, who tended to go into which places to buy what things, and a heaping helping of as much gossip as she could eavesdrop. Much of it might as well have been in a foreign language for how little she understood the context, but they were still speaking English and even nonsensical statements might be made retroactively important once she knew more.
Over the following weeks, Taylor learned three very important things.
First, that the magical police were either disinterested, bribed to look the other way, or otherwise ignoring her case. One Auror had shown up at her home to ask her questions, but she was told after he was done that her son would 'probably be on the Express' and that she must be mistaken about something.
Second, that there were two factors that likely went a long way to explaining why she was getting nowhere with the Aurors. Dumbledore occupied a position of fame bordering on hero worship in the British wizarding society. Worse, his only detractors were a rather large faction of magicals with magical heritage who despised anything to do with those outside their little bubble, the nonmagical most of all.
So the only political faction inclined to question – or, more cynically, to throw mud at – Dumbledore was also the one that at best didn't like Muggles like her. At worst, she might be made to 'disappear' if they could get away with it. The laws and possibly the magical police force would be biased against her, as a Muggle. It was possible that also influenced the lack of interest in her claims.
The easy, legal way was out, at least until she knew a lot more about the underlying structures and politics behind it all. Wizarding government was much more chaotic than anything she knew from this world or Earth Bet.
The third thing she had learned, though, gave her some hope. All Hogwarts students, it was said, came home for the holidays on the Hogwarts Express, regardless of where they were going afterward. It was a tradition, and it meant Harry was going to be in London, on platform nine and three-quarters, at a certain date and time.
That magically hidden train platform was open to Muggles in the know, and Dumbledore had obliviated her, so he wouldn't expect her to be there.
So long as news of her trying to get Aurors involved didn't reach him, that was. Taylor decided to let the legal route drop to keep her head down, in the hopes that she could just physically take her son back. The school term's end was not far off, less than a month from the day she finalized her plan, so she spent that time preparing.
Her house needed to be put back into shape; nineteen months of wallowing in a forgetful haze had taken its toll on the place she spent most of her alcohol-fueled blackouts. There were bottles to throw out, walls to patch over, and other little things, like cleaning Harry's room of more than a year's worth of dust. She left all his things exactly where they were, though. He would be home soon to make his bed himself.
Then there was weaning herself off alcohol. She had never wanted to become her father, and truthfully while Danny drank, he only really tried to drown himself in alcohol in the months immediately after Annette's death. Taylor didn't like that she had fallen to the same vice, even if she could blame it on outside influence affecting her thoughts. So she emptied the house of alcohol, sat on her hands, and forced her way through several weeks of tired, irritable suffering. It helped that the last few years didn't properly feel real in retrospect, so any habits she had developed under the influence weren't hard to shake.
She still went to work, of course. Rebuilding the fraying relationships with her coworkers was a task and a half, though telling them that she was going cold turkey, and then following through, worked wonders in reassuring them.
On the weekends and in the evenings, she went to Diagon Alley. Magic was an unknown, and she worked to build a basic understanding of what was and was not possible. Her funds weren't limitless, so she couldn't buy any book she liked, but the bookstores didn't discourage lengthy browsing sessions. As public libraries were not, it seemed, a thing in the wizarding world, that was the next best way to read to her heart's content. Aside from reading, a lot could be learned just by walking into random shops and letting the old-timey salesmen tell her about things she didn't actually end up buying.
There was, of course, one expensive item she absolutely had to have, even if she had to buy it for herself. The two wands she had taken from the pub were mostly useless in her hand, but that might only be because they weren't hers. She also learned that they might have magical tracking on them if they had belonged to children, which could call unwanted attention if she or her power ever managed to do something with them, and that wands were personalized enough that it was possible somebody would realize they were stolen if she was seen using them.
So, she went to the one source of personalized wands in Diagon Alley. The same shop Dumbledore had kept her out of the first time around.
It was a gloomy place, putting her in mind of a photography darkroom but with more light and more wooden sticks. The old man who greeted her gave her a piercing look that went on for long enough that she blinked first.
"I'm here to see if you can match me with a wand," she supplied, hoping to jump-start the process.
"Yes, yes… I don't know you." He squinted at her arm, then waved his hand in front of her, like he was feeling something invisible. "I would say you are a Muggle. But that's not right. You know I cannot legally sell wands to non-humans?"
"Is that something that often comes up?" she asked.
"No, most don't want wands and those who do don't come to me…" He shuffled into a back room, then quickly returned with a gnarled old oaken staff right out of a fantasy book. "This is an amplifier. No good for directing magic, but it will tell me whether you are wasting my time or not. Push magic into it."
She held the staff loosely and tried to concentrate on it, but so far as she knew she wasn't magic at all. The localized headache she had come to associate with her power working with magic rose from a background throb to a near-migraine, but nothing happened at first.
Ollivander reached out to take the staff back, but Taylor moved it away. It had taken time to let her see the Leaky Cauldron. This might be the same.
And indeed, the gnarled rounded top of the staff eventually began to glow. The light was… Not light, not that Taylor understood it. It didn't cast shadows, and it was a silvery red that dripped and flowed like a slow, liquid bubble of glass lit from behind.
"That…" Ollivander breathed. "That is magic, all right, but so dim and sluggish you might as well be a Muggle for all the good it does you. What bloodline curse are you suffering from?"
"Couldn't say," Taylor answered as she handed the staff back. "It's so bad I didn't know I was magic at all until very recently." It wasn't the truth, but it matched the outward look of the truth quite nicely for her purposes, so she resolved to remember this particular excuse for future use.
"My usual selection will do nothing for you," Ollivander informed her. "A custom fit would be little better. No wand can fix this. I can make you a wand as attuned to you as magically possible, but it will be little more than an exorbitantly expensive stick, and it would be so customized no other Wizard or Witch could use it either."
"If I grew more adept at using my magic despite the curse?" Taylor asked. "Would it be useful then?"
"No," Ollivander said flatly. "Be thankful you have enough innate magic to see through the anti-muggle charms on this Alley. I have never seen magic so mangled and weak. That amplifier staff is strong enough to blind when in the hands of the most depressingly pathetic wizards. You let off less light than a proper Squib, even if yours does flow."
Taylor got the distinct impression that her power was disgruntled. She didn't know what she had expected, herself.
"How much are we talking?" she asked. Ollivander was working on incomplete information; her power had gone from not knowing about magic at all to breaking obliviations and other magical enchantments in a few years. It was possible the wand could end up useful to her, if not immediately than in the future.
"Thrice my usual charge," Ollivander said flatly. "And you must pay up front. It will take me months to source the most matching possible exterior and core. Be warned, your wand may be made from extremely unusual components. Perhaps even… distasteful ones." He frowned at her. "Are you fully human?"
"Yes, I'm certain of it." That, at least, was nothing but the truth.
"Then this will not be illegal. Just a waste of your money."
"And your time?" she guessed.
He shook his head. "Crafting wands is never a waste of time. Yours will be a masterwork. But the blind cannot appreciate masterful paintings, and such will you be with your wand. Twenty-one Galleons."
She did the math in her head to convert that to pounds. Then did it again, just to be sure. That was a lot of money. Not out of her reach… But she would be exclusively eating cheap pasta for a few weeks to compensate.
"I'll go exchange some money at Gringotts and be right back to pay." Wands were weapons in this world. Weapons, identification, and status symbols. She would need at least one of those before she was done, even if it was just a fancy stick for her.
Her wand wasn't finished by the day of the Hogwarts Express' arrival, so she ventured out to the train station without it. The station was busy, and finding platform nine and three-quarters was laughably easy; she just followed the people in robes through the invisible wall.
The other side looked fairly mundane, save for the oddness of the people standing around waiting. Some were Muggles, like herself; their clothing set them apart at a glance, and the way they watched the magical parents was very much like normal people watched parahumans back home.
The train arrived exactly on schedule, a red beast of a machine that surely hadn't been built with that particular color in mind. It slowed to a stop at the station, and robed children disembarked in droves, hauling trunks, bookbags, cat crates and owl cages in a big, tumultuous mass headed by the more composed upper years and steadily falling into disarray from there as the younger children got off.
It was chaos, but Taylor was uniquely suited to keeping track of many individuals. Her insects scoured the platform and then the train itself, searching for any sign of her son even as she steadily eliminated individuals from the search by visually confirming that they weren't him before planting a bug on each of them to keep track.
A family of redheads embraced four of their members, the mother's strident voice rising above the crowd, saying something about a Mungo and visiting… Probably a grandparent. A bushy-haired girl had her face buried in a book her parents had presented her, even as she was led out off the platform by a guiding hand on her shoulder. A pale-haired boy with a very cultured look spoke urgently to his pristine wizard father, and two bulky goons – however unfavorable it was to say that about preteens, it was nevertheless obviously true – met with their carbon-copy fathers nearby.
It was chaos, but the chaos cleared out surprisingly quickly. The magical families apparated away or walked out as they willed, while the mundane parents escorted their children back out into the station to begin the walk back to their cars.
Nowhere in the press of chaotic reunion was her Harry. He wasn't meeting another family, he wasn't on the platform, and he wasn't on the train.
So much for finding him on the sly. There were Aurors stationed along the platform, and she thought that it was time for some strategic hysterics. If she made a scene of it, they couldn't possibly ignore her. Refuge in audacity; if she was lucky it would get her answers and her son.
The abominable headache that had plagued Taylor all morning finally receded, just before she sent out her application for a passport.
Memories of the last two days fell into place like puzzle pieces.
She was no actor, but she didn't have to fake any of the worry or 'take me to your superior' attitude she unleashed on the unwitting Aurors at platform nine and three-quarters. It worked at first. Got her an interview with someone who seemed to be taking her seriously.
Then they stepped out for a moment, and Taylor heard Dumbledore's soothing voice from the other side of the door. Not soothing to her, though, especially not as she couldn't make out what he was saying, even with bugs all over the room.
She had tried to leave, but one of the Aurors caught up to her and pointed his wand, and that was that. She woke up in her bed with no memory of the last day, her son, or magic. Also, as best she could tell, she had been compelled to move back to America, ignoring the fact that she didn't have a passport or any setup to immigrate, which thankfully delayed her from just hopping on a plane and going.
"Should never have bothered with the legal system," she groused, more upset with herself than the obviously corrupt workings of the magical police. It stank of systematic apathy, to her. The Aurors all seemed interested in her story in theory, but the moment she said 'Dumbledore' they discounted her as unreliable or just crazy. Dumbledore was famous and could do no wrong, and she was a Muggle for all they knew. If he told them she was just a nutter with no kid to speak of, they would probably believe him.
Thankfully, their 'permanent' solution to the problem she posed wasn't lethal. Her stupid, naive attempts to get her son back would have been her only attempts if they were more violent in dealing with her.
She truly had grown soft and trusting. Too trusting. The repeated memory wipes probably weren't helping.
She was done with the Aurors and reporting the crime. It didn't work. Dumbledore had too much influence, and she had less than none. If she got caught again, they were going to start wondering how the hell she kept losing their memory wipes, and they might do something her power couldn't fix.
Taylor had no idea where Dumbledore was keeping Harry over the summer, but she managed to listen in on enough conversations between school-age children and their parents in Diagon Alley to confirm that 'Harry Hebert, who looks like Harry Potter but always says he isn't' had attended Hogwarts the last two years and would be going back for a third. Meaning that Dumbledore for some unknown reason hadn't taken the obvious precautionary step of erasing Harry's memories of her.
She gleaned a few other things about Harry, too. He was in the Hufflepuff house. He was 'definitely not Slytherin's heir', which seemed to be considered a good thing. He was smart, and spent a lot of time with a Ravenclaw girl who was known for being brainy even by their standards, and pushy to go along with it.
All of that was filtered by the mouths and minds of unwitting children, so it was undoubtedly a warped accounting of some version of the truth as they saw it, but the bare facts were enough to paint a very vague picture of the son she so desperately missed.
She spent the three months of summer preparing. She had never infiltrated a magical castle before, and it wouldn't be easy.
"Wingardium Leviosa." She waved her borrowed wand, going through the motions.
The apple on her table in the Leaky Cauldron didn't move.
Her headache pounded fiercely.
"Magical tracking methods?" the shopkeep asked. "Living or an object?"
"Either. Living, preferably. Doesn't have to work on humans." She shrugged. "I have a dog who keeps getting away…"
"Aye, I know the feeling… My Kneazle is the same." The woman led Taylor down the crowded shelves of the magical artifact shop. "Live in a high-magic area?"
"Yes, and I'd like it to work at Hogwarts in case my son wants to bring the dog," she said.
"That'll limit your options, but we can see what's in stock…"
"Wingardium Leviosa." She knew she had the wand movements down perfectly. The pronunciation, too. Willpower couldn't possibly be the sticking point.
The apple stubbornly refused to move.
"Oy, lassie, you hit your head?" a gruff man called out from the bar, apparently considering her worthy entertainment to go with his flaming drink. "Squibs don't use wands!"
Her headache was fast approaching migraine levels.
'Hogwarts is protected by ancient wards, and the exact specifics of the ward scheme are a closely-guarded secret.'
She reshelved the book on magical warding and took down another. Hogwarts was at least mentioned in most of them, but from what she could tell most of the authors knew nothing about its warding scheme except that it was old and strong.
'Wards are, by definition, an incomplete art,' the next began, managing to capture her attention where the previous half-dozen had not. 'Wards cannot be both effective and unassailable. Any effective ward will be visible to the trained eye and specialized too narrowly to provide an unbreachable defense. As such, the true art of defense treats wards as a delaying tactic and a deterrent, not a defense system. The strongest wards are the most cumbersome.'
Interesting, but not what she was looking for. She took down another book and flipped to a relevant passage.
'The Hogwarts wards are shrouded in mystery, but it is agreed upon that they do not forbid entrance to any individual. As of the 1931 Wizengamot ruling, no lethal wards can be raised on the grounds except in the case of an announced lockdown. That Hogwarts has optional lethal wards can thus be inferred, but nothing more is known.'
"That's good to know," she said to herself.
Her power radiated agreement.
"You don't want me fried by a magic fence either." She took down another book. This was going to take time. A lot of time.
"Wingardium Leviosa, you fucking fruit," she gritted out between clenched teeth.
The apple shuddered.
Suddenly, the migraine pounding behind her eyes was worth every agonizing moment.
"Pathetic," someone in the small crowd of onlookers crowed.
"Oy, she moved it!" another yelled. "I want my money!"
"Pretty girl comes looking for blood?" the hunched old woman crooned from her place tucked away behind a bubbling pot. The liquid was alarmingly black, the color of dried blood but with the consistency of mud.
Taylor crouched in front of her to look her in the eye. "Can you sell me a blood charm or not?"
"Too pretty to buy such things," the crone warned. "Pretty gets its throat slit here in Knockturn Alley." Her long fingernails glistened with an unknown liquid, and they twitched menacingly.
Taylor smiled. A long, brown centipede worked its way out of her hair to crawl across her face, wrapping across her neck and up her left cheek to twitch its antenna in front of her left eye.
"I can be ugly too," she whispered as more insects rustled through her hair and peeked up from the collar of her robes, twitchy and numerous and just barely obscured from view. "Do you want to see?"
The crone cringed away from her. "You hide it well," she said. "What kind of charm?"
"Magical sight."
"Wingardium Leviosa!" Her hand trembled and her head throbbed abominably, but the apple lifted to exactly the height she imagined when she cast.
"Now you can settle your bets," she told her spectators, as she took the apple in hand and stood. "I did it."
"Never seen a Squib will her way to magic before," one of the grimy men whispered to another.
"She's just a weak hedge witch, idiot," his companion snarled. "So poor she just got her first wand, probably."
Taylor ignored them. They were as right as she could expect them to be, and having witnesses to her 'beating her blood curse' could come in handy in the future. Magic was status in this world.
The moment she stepped out into the mundane street, she pitched the apple under the tires of the nearest automobile, where it was instantly turned into muddy applesauce.
"Miss blood curse," Ollivander greeted her. "How do you fare?"
"I think I'm beating my blood curse, little by little," she told him.
"I highly doubt that," he sighed. "But your wand is ready. It is some of my best work, and I do thank you for providing a commission for one of my most unique pieces to date."
He rummaged around under the counter and brought out a padded black box. "Before I show it to you… What do you want from it? What was it you imagined yourself accomplishing with it?"
"I want a wand that can maximize my capabilities. Nothing more, nothing less." She wanted a wand her power could use, but the line between her power and her when it came to magic was blurry and confused, and she doubted Ollivander could make a wand for a shard of an alien entity if he tried.
"You are a curious one," Ollivander said. "Your wand is curiouser. Your magic does not resonate with normal wood. It will be a reservoir maximizing the little sustenance it is given from a provider that is mostly barren. As such, the exterior is a cactus wood, harvested from a desert under the full moon."
Cactus wood… She wished she had the money to buy up an entire bookstore, and the time to read through everything in it. Wandmaking seemed like a very interesting subject. "With the needles stripped off, I assume?" she asked.
"Inverted, facing inward to fix the core in place." He eyed her, his stare no less piercing than she remembered. "You would have resonated well with the unwillingly taken blood of an old high elf, but I am not willing to have this be my last piece. The best attainable core was a strip of Hydra vocal cord. Hydra are nigh-unkillable beasts, sporting many heads and persistence outstripping all that oppose them. Strike them down, and they will return twice as fierce."
"Sounds right." She would be sure not to face any real Hydras if she could avoid it. Britain probably didn't have any; they weren't in the 'local dangerous beasts' books she had skimmed.
"My wandmaking colleagues all want to meet you," Ollivander concluded as he opened the case to reveal her wand. "You are world famous within our small circle, though they do not know your name. Yours is a wand that will never pass for normal."
Her wand did not, she agreed, look anything like the other wands she had seen. The cactus wood was a dark stained brown, but while it held the shape of a cylinder, it was not solid. The wood itself was formed into a lattice shape, either by the natural growth of the cactus or Ollivander's work, and a wet, red strip of flesh was visible through the holes, pierced by little cactus needles.
She reached out to touch it, careful not to slip her fingers into any of the holes, and found that they were lacquered over, filled but perfectly translucent.
She felt nothing when she took her wand up for the first time. There was no resonance, no surge of magical energy. She was a Muggle.
Her power sent her a powerful flash of satisfaction.
"It does nothing," Ollivander sighed. "As I told you. It is but a macabre stick for you, and if others wield it they will never be able to concentrate their magic into anything useful. It is tuned to be as sensitive as possible where most wands must be dulled to fit their wielders. Any successful magic from another, however unlikely, would see them losing their hand and possibly their life."
He sounded genuinely disappointed, and she couldn't resist showing him that his work wasn't for nothing. "Wingardium Leviosa," she said, waving her wand.
Several boxes of premade wands floated up to the ceiling. It was no easier or more powerful than her work with her stolen, unmatched wands…
But her headache barely intensified at all.
"Worth every Galleon," was her verdict.
Three months of preparation was a long time. Taylor didn't feel ready, but she had a good plan, all the magical aid she needed to carry it out, and a rudimentary grasp of a few basic wand magics.
When it came time for the children to board the Hogwarts Express to begin their next year of schooling, Taylor was as ready as she could be.
She went to the platform, this time outfitted in practical witch robes. Her hair was tied back, and she wore enough makeup to make herself look completely different than normal. A mundane false arm hung from her stump, filling out her left sleeve and terminating in a gloved fake hand. It was little more than a crude shape to fill the space, but it would do. She looked nothing like the Muggle Taylor Hebert who had made a scene three months ago in this very spot.
"Visio," she subvocalized. Her blood charm activated, a creepy little chunk of cauterized flesh in her pocket, and she saw magic. Lines, shapes, waves of color, all awash and ever-shifting in the magical environment. It was all completely useless to her… Save for the pulsing yellow lines that stretched from her other pocket, terminating all over the station as her insects transported little tracking tags the size of raisins.
Some tags, she left on the train. In the undercarriage, buried in the cushions of the seats, stuck to the top in clandestine locations, each one was placed by insect, the automatic sticking charm activated, and subsequently abandoned.
Other tags went to the children themselves. Their sticking charms had been altered by a grumpy charmsmaster who worked in Diagon Alley, intentionally sabotaged to fall off after twelve hours. They were clipped to the hems of robes, the undersides of shoes, and other places where they wouldn't be noticed before they fell.
Each and every tag drew a yellow line from itself to her master key. The line had a range of a hundred kilometers before it broke, and if she got within a hundred kilometers of the tag at any time after such a separation it would reestablish itself. Ward interference cut down on that range by more than half, but it was better than nothing.
Hogwarts itself might not have a publicly known physical location, and she didn't know how to get to Hogsmeade – neither of them being on any Muggle maps, and magical maps not being a thing so far as she could tell – or what security there might be between Hogsmeade and Hogwarts, but she was entirely capable of following a magic line through any part of Britain. She would have snuck on the train, but she was certain there were security measures in place to prevent such an obvious ploy. Magical trackers were far more likely to escape notice, being a ruse only someone like her could benefit from. Best-case scenario, she could follow them right to the castle and could then scope it out without anyone knowing she was even in the area.
The deployment went off without a hitch, leaving Taylor free to think of other things. Harry wasn't in the crowd; she had her bugs checking everyone who got into the train. Dumbledore wasn't here either, though she hadn't expected him to be.
The train whistle blew once, the five minute warning, and Taylor considered her work to be done. She left through the invisible wall–
And smacked right into a gaggle of redheads. "Oh, sorry dear," the matriarch said, sounding incredibly put-upon. "Must hurry though, children, through now!"
"Into the unknown!" two identical teens said in unison, before turning to walk backwards into the wall. A slightly younger boy moved to follow, clutching a rat of all things in his hands.
Taylor had just turned away from the mildly amusing sight when a boy yelled, a rat squealed, and a dog snarled right behind her. She whipped back around to see a big black labrador or similar pouncing on the boy, and his parents pulling their wands out.
Hers was already out, clutched the moment she felt threatened, but she found herself stepping forward to drive her shoe into the dog's ribcage instead of using it. Her kick sent the canine sprawling with a yelp, and the rat disappeared among the carts and startled Muggle passerby.
"Oh, for– Accio Scabbers!" the man yelled, flourishing his wand. The rat came flying to his hand, and half a dozen Muggles shouted or screamed.
Taylor noticed the men moving before the Muggles did; half a dozen plainclothes Aurors broke cover and started pointing their wands at faces, while another three set up a barricade of shimmering opaque light. It all had the feel of a well-practiced routine, and the redhead parents barely looked back as they ushered their children through the wall.
"Miss?" one of the Aurors came up to her. "You can go, we've got this covered."
"Looks like it." She much preferred being on the privileged, presumed-magical side of the mental fiddling this time around. Her wand was worth the price for that alone.
"We always stick around to keep an eye on Arthur, he's a good bloke but his family is conspicuous at the best of times," the Auror confided. "Nice kick. No idea what the Muggles are doing, letting dogs into the station."
"Yes, it is odd." The dog didn't have any fleas or intestinal worms, but she'd managed to stow a few big horseflies on his shaggy coat as he fled. He had made good on his escape, and was currently creeping under a row of plastic chairs. "Are you going to track it down?"
"Dog's not our concern," the Auror shrugged. "Probably some pet off a leash, anyway. The Muggles will find it." He wandered off, checking the very confused people who had just had their memories tampered with, and the opaque barrier disappeared, leaving the station just as it had been a few minutes ago.
Only one loose end remained. The Muggles wouldn't find the dog; Taylor only still knew where it was because she had a superpower. The dog was a keen hider and seemed to know exactly how to avoid notice. It had just snuck into bathroom of all places–
Taylor's jaw dropped as the dog disappeared, stretching out to form a man in the toilet stall. A ragged, robed man who definitely had seen better days.
She set out at a fast walk, moving to intercept the man as he left the bathroom and slipped away. Turning into an animal, that was useful, and the Aurors hadn't even suspected he was anything more than a dog.
She turned a corner and caught sight of the man her bugs proved had been a dog moments ago.
His face was shadowed by the ballcap he wore, but there was no mistaking him. His picture had been plastered on the front of the magic newspapers for weeks.
Sirius Black. Famed betrayer of the Potters, escaped convict, assumed armed and dangerous.
A criminal on the run, sneaking around a guarded area to assault schoolchildren.
She could take him down. Just to do a good deed. It would be easy.
But she had spent too long as a criminal and a warlord to think that was the only opportunity this chance encounter offered.
"Visio," she murmured, activating her blood charm once more.
Not a single yellow line sprang from her pocket, though the train had only left a few minutes ago.
Well, that made her decision for her, didn't it?
"He's at Hogwarts," Sirius told himself, over and over again as he waited for his cheap Muggle food. The waitress kept looking at him like he was going to pull a knife on her – which he wasn't. He must still look like a crazy homeless man. A good cover.
He'd missed the rat by a hairsbreadth. Peter definitely knew he was being hunted now. The train, the school, there would be Dementors. But he had to get the rat!
The waiter brought his sandwich and chips on a tray. He gave her muggle money, more than enough – he didn't have the time to count it out – and took the food and the tray, ignoring her protests as he left the shoddy restaurant.
"Hogwarts," he said again, a mantra, a promise. He had to get there, to get in, to get Peter and gut him and swing his gutted corpse at every witch and wizard who came around to prove he wasn't supposed to be in Azkaban, and he had to do it before–
The alleyway he'd been absently walking through ended in a wall. A shuddering, moving wall composed of thousands of little spindly things and round shells and clicking limbs and wings.
A living wall of insects.
He dropped his food and whipped his stolen wand out, but his fingers shook and he dropped it too. A veritable carpet of cockroaches flooded out from all sides to cover it.
"Bloody bleeding fuck!" he chanted, stomping his thankfully sturdy boots to a cacophony of cracks. That bug wall was taller than he was, there was another one behind him – he hadn't looked but he knew there would be – and he had to be hallucinating but it definitely felt and sounded real.
"Sirius Black." A figure walked through the bug wall, their body carpeted in a layer of all manner of insects. "Death Eater."
Sirius was not his happy pre-Azkaban self, and he might be more than a little unhinged, but it didn't take a stable genius to know that anyone commanding dark magic of the caliber needed to do this wanted a Death Eater even if he wasn't actually one. "Yeah?" he rasped, hoping to any higher power that would listen that this wasn't the dark tosser himself back from the dead… Or worse, only mostly back.
"You seek Hogwarts," the figure said, their voice obscured by the chitter and gnashing claws of the insects all over their body and face.
"Yeah," he grunted.
"Why?"
Why, why could he be going to Hogwarts, the papers all seemed to think he was after Harry which would make sense if he was what they thought he was, but he was after Pettigrew, but if this was a Death Eater or their master they wouldn't want him to kill the traitor that Pettigrew surely was, so "Potter," he lied. "I want Potter."
The figure hesitated. At his feet the bugs scurried away, revealing his wand.
"I want Potter," it said. "We have a common interest."
Sirius envisioned a rat skeleton, stripped to the bone by thousands of insects. Then he envisioned himself suffering the same fate if he refused. Then little baby Harry if he wasn't around to intervene.
"I could do with a team up," he rasped, his mouth dry as a bone.
"So could I." The insects fled, flying and scuttling and crawling into the cracks and shadows of the alleyway. The bugs on the dark witch's body fled last, many crawling under feminine robes to hide.
The woman the insects left behind was an unassuming witch, but Sirius knew better. He didn't think he could ever forget. Something terrifying lurked behind those eyes, ready to come out the moment it thought he was crossing it.
Taylor regarded the ragged Death Eater with suspicion, even as she offered to work together. He didn't look like much, but he wanted Harry and was a trained wizard.
"Do you know how to get to Hogwarts?" she asked. The tone of her voice implied that she would have no use for him if he didn't, which was entirely true.
"Yeah, that's the easy part," the Death Eater assured her.
Easy? Not for her. He would be useful. Once he outlived his usefulness, she could throw him to the Aurors. So long as he thought she wanted Harry for the same vaguely nefarious purposes he did, he wouldn't turn on her.
Notes:
If last chapter sets the motivations and conflict, this one sets the world in which these things will take place, and the relative power levels you can expect. This ain't A Wand For Skitter. (Which I quite enjoyed in a popcorn-fic sort of way, for the record.) Taylor has had a decade to become a less damaged person, and magic isn't going to come easily to her or her power. It would be too easy and stomp-festy otherwise. (See her 'custom wand', the sole functional advantage to it over any other wand being that she can use it without debilitating pain.)
She's the perpetual underdog; why would that change in a new dimension? Oh, she's still on the trail and far from helpless, but if you expect this to culminate in an Acromantula siege of Hogwarts with magical-exploit-wielding Taylor laying waste to the bumbling simpletons who oppose her, concluding with a one-on-one duel with Dumbledore that she handily wins with tricks pulled out of her shard's multidimensional ass while simultaneously breaking Horcruxes with her basilisk-venom-infused-teeth… Uh, sorry?
Though that specific hypothetical scenario does sound like a great parody.
On another note, It amuses me that Sirius and Taylor both have exactly the wrong idea about what the other wants, and are lying about their own motivation to fit with what they think the other wants. It's a self-sustaining loop of misunderstanding! Though for how long remains to be seen…
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