July 31, 1991
England, London — Little Whinging
"See yeh, Harry!" Hagrid waved an enormous hand at me from the platform. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket that looked more like a tablecloth and blew his nose so loudly that passersby actually ducked. Then he folded his snot-covered parachute and shoved it back somewhere beside 'my' cake.
I forced myself to give the gamekeeper a crooked smile. Apparently he saw nothing wrong with sending what was supposedly an eleven-year-old boy home alone on a suburban train with a huge wooden trunk and a bulky cage containing a white owl. Yeah, right, I'm his friend. They took a child away from home, but when it was time to bring him back, everyone suddenly developed urgent business?
By the time I'd bought stationery, school equipment, and even collected my robes and cloak, which Madam Malkin had somehow finished in record time, Minerva McGonagall had suddenly become very busy. 'Conveniently', Hagrid found us after calming himself with a couple of drinks, and the professor handed me over to the gamekeeper, apologizing and citing a mountain of school business. Especially since all I had left to buy was a wand.
The doors closed after a brief announcement by the driver. It took about an hour to travel from London to Little Whinging. We'd gone on school trips a few times, including on this type of train. We'd finished all the magical-school shopping by about three. At that hour the train was nearly empty, so I took a free seat and placed my trunk and the cage containing the professor's gift on the seats beside me.
"I'll call you Uragi," I informed the owl.
She narrowed her yellow eyes slyly and amusingly rotated her white, fluffy-feathered 'face' ninety degrees. Maybe naming an owl after words meaning 'betrayal' and 'treachery' wasn't exactly appropriate, but it would help me always remember who I was dealing with and stay cautious. Besides, only Snape-sensei would probably understand that particular abbreviation. The last two times, my 'payment for August' had consisted of helping him improve his Japanese. I'd even left him a shinobi cipher to study, just in case. We weren't necessarily the only two people who knew Japanese, but a cipher from another world was a different matter. I hadn't even needed to lie and say I'd invented it myself. I merely neglected to mention that I'd come up with it roughly eight years ago as part of a standard Academy assignment. They made us learn ciphers and entered them into special files in the encryption department. They collected statistics there, developed each person's individual 'handwriting', and selected material for adult reports. It was considered more convenient, though there was also a general cipher, plus separate ciphers for correspondence with different countries. Truthfully, the only one I remembered well was my own childhood cipher, the key to which you exchanged with your first teammates. Sasuke and Sakura had terribly complicated systems based on manuals, but for some reason they both decided that mine was impossible to crack at first glance, so we used it as our shared one. Or maybe they simply understood that there was no way I'd memorize their keys easily? Not that we ever ended up writing much to each other...
In some ways I was lucky here: the adults around me considered me a child who understood nothing. In my own world I'd spent a very long time perfecting that mask. There, you could expect a trap from a six-year-old, because shinobi training started at a very early age, especially in clans. Adults dealing with someone like me now would already be cautious. But this was simply a country of unworried idi... wizards.
Their Statute of Secrecy and magical districts vaguely resembled our hidden villages — gakurezato. But everything about them felt somehow wrong. Then again, perhaps I'd never fully understand how their society worked because I was literally from another world. A great deal of it looked wild to me.
As far as I could gather from Snape-sensei's restrained explanations, most wizards never studied anything after finishing magical school. Civilians. They knew how to wave a wand to wash dishes and then reveled in their supposed superiority over Muggles for no real reason. But there would always be someone stronger than you. Even a Muggle could fight back against a wizard one-on-one. Not to mention that there were simply far more Muggles, while wizards could only theoretically cast spells for as long as they remained standing. And that 'as long as' always eventually ended. Even the enormous, nearly inexhaustible chakra of a bijuu could run out. I knew that.
The main thing was to deprive a wizard of their wand, and half the job was already done. Most spells, as far as I understood, also required relatively short range. More precisely, the overwhelming majority of wizards could only affect targets a few meters away, and they had to be able to see their target in order to concentrate.
One part of wizard society, as I understood it, fought to preserve magical traditions. Some were neither one thing nor the other. Then there were Muggle-borns, who constantly stirred up magical society and tried either to remake it or introduce something new from the Muggle world. As far as I could tell, they had never managed to find a healthy, sensible balance. At that point Snape-sensei would usually go quiet and tell me I was still too young to understand everything properly. But I thought the real issue was that to be a spy, you had to live in two camps. And nothing about that was straightforward, especially for child-Harry, whose parents had been murdered by the Dark Lord — a man Severus Snape had, at one time, served. Yes, he'd also been on 'our' side, but for a child-Harry the first thought would still be, 'You were on the side of my parents' murderer.' So I understood why he didn't want to dump all that information on me, and I didn't push. It would actually be interesting to see who eventually told me, when, and what sort of sauce they served it with.
After the professor had gracefully disappeared and handed me over to the giant, Hagrid and I headed to the shop of the wandmaker, Ollivander. While shopping with McGonagall, I'd noticed a sign near a second-hand dealer and the 'Second-Hand Robes' shop: 'Jimmy Kiddell's Wonderful Wands'. They probably sold the main weapon of wizardkind there as well, but I didn't draw Hagrid's attention to it.
Ollivander's shop was strangely empty. We entered a gloomy, dusty, dark room, and there was only a single high-legged chair in it. Hagrid lowered himself onto that chair. The unusual piece of furniture gave a pitiful creak, but somehow supported a weight that, by my estimate, had to be around four hundred kilograms. If that entire hairy mountain was muscle, maybe closer to five hundred. Once my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I realized the walls weren't covered in geometric-patterned wallpaper at all. Narrow boxes were stacked around the entire room from floor to ceiling. You couldn't help believing the shop sign claiming that the Ollivander family had been making wands since three-hundred-and-something BC. The strange way people counted years here was something I'd already accepted. At school I'd learned that counting from the birth of the local god, Jesus Christ, wasn't the only system. Everything before his birth was counted backwards. In my opinion, very inconvenient, but what could you do? I immediately calculated that some of these wands could theoretically be more than two thousand years old.
Master Ollivander was a short old man only half a head taller than me. His eyes reminded me of the Hyuga Byakugan. His memory blew me away when he immediately announced which wands he'd sold twenty years ago to Lily Evans and James Potter — Harry's parents — and more than fifty years ago to Hagrid.
"A fine wand it was: oak, sixteen inches, rather bendy. But I understand it was snapped in two when you were expelled?" Ollivander reminded the giant, looking up at him.
"So Hagrid studied at magical school too, and he was expelled?" I latched onto the information. The gamekeeper twitched and began trying to explain something, managing to collapse the chair in the process. "Are they actually allowed to break someone's wand?" I asked the master with perfectly honest eyes, immediately pelting him with more questions. "Isn't a wand the wizard's property? And don't wands ever have problems? Do they never break on their own? Couldn't he just buy another one?"
Then what exactly had I broken during the nighttime attack, if Hagrid officially had no wand and was apparently forbidden from owning one?
"What a curious young man you are, Mr. Potter," Ollivander smiled. "All sorts of things happen. But let's choose a wand for you first, shall we?" He neatly dodged the question. "Which hand do you prefer to use?"
"Left," I answered, deciding not to shock the master with the fact that both my hands were almost equally developed. A shinobi couldn't afford to be truly 'one-handed', even though both I and Harry had originally favored the right. The master measured me almost the same way Madam Malkin had, starting with the length of my fingers and ending with the circumference of my head.
Then came an exhausting sequence of wand 'fittings'. They kept handing me one stick after another, listing characteristics, lengths, and whatever was stuffed inside them. Ollivander explained that no two wands were identical, and that the substance inside usually came from some magical creature: unicorn, phoenix, dragon, and so on. Apparently that was supposed to concentrate magic. He also said using someone else's wand was a bad idea.
Now, replaying it all in my head, the manipulation was obvious. Wear the customer down, and once he no longer cared so long as he got something, hand him the one you wanted him to take. Because when they brought out 'that wand', just before I received it, I felt a faint surge of magic. The owner of a shop containing that many wands had to know how to protect himself and his merchandise. Otherwise some enterprising thief could steal the whole stockpile of wizards' main artifacts and tools, then sell them or use them for their own purposes. It was entirely possible that the wandmaker somehow 'activated' his wands, while without an 'access code' all those things were just pieces of wood containing incomprehensible magical stuff. There was no way I could have felt absolutely nothing from nearly fifty wands. I'd touched Snape-sensei's wand and had definitely sensed a certain kind of power from it.
And why measure me at all? A master like Ollivander should have been able to tell immediately what would suit me and hand it over. Two or three options, maybe. Not fifty. Draco had even said in the robe shop that his mother had gone to choose a wand for him.
As the final touch for the 'Chosen One', I was informed that my wand wasn't merely a wand, but 'very curious'. Ollivander said, word for word:
"I remember every wand I have ever sold. This wand has an unusual combination: holly and phoenix feather. A phoenix normally gives only a single feather from its tail, but in your case it gave two. It is therefore very curious that this wand should choose you, because its brother, which received the other feather from that phoenix..." He looked at me meaningfully and paused for effect. "I will not conceal it... Its brother belonged to You-Know-Who. Yes: yew, thirteen inches. It was that wand which left the famous scar upon your forehead... So we expect great things from you, Mr. Potter, because You-Know-Who also did many great things — terrible, yes, but nonetheless great."
I looked at the gamekeeper, who had puffed up with blissful pride, then at Ollivander, who seemed inspired by his own speech, and couldn't resist politely asking:
"What 'famous scar' are you talking about, Mr. Ollivander? I don't quite understand."
My fringe covered the place on my forehead where the 'lightning bolt' was supposed to be, and the shop was dark. I had actually been very surprised when Ollivander addressed me by full name. I was leaning toward the idea that Hagrid had somehow signaled to the wandmaker that I was 'that Harry Potter'. I didn't really believe you could learn a person's name merely by looking at them.
"But... you have a lightning-bolt-shaped scar on your forehead, left by You-Know-Who's Unforgivable Curse!" the wandmaker exclaimed, unceremoniously brushing my hair away from my forehead.
"Oh, that one..." I nodded, barely keeping myself from laughing at the utterly idiotic expressions on both of their bulging-eyed faces. "It faded away. Scars do that sometimes. I had one on my knee too, and that disappeared later. How much for the wand?"
"Seven Galleons," Ollivander muttered, wrapping the box containing that very special wand in paper.
When we left the shop, I told the stunned gamekeeper that I wanted to go buy my textbooks and that he could wait for me in the Leaky Cauldron. The news that the 'famous scar' had disappeared seemed to make him eager for another 'little drink', so he was actually pleased by the suggestion.
I calmly walked into Jimmy Kiddell's shop, and with no excessive pomp, mysterious flashes in anyone's eyes, or prophecies about my heroic destiny, I was sold a cherry-and-dragon-horn wand for three Galleons. For my right hand. It suited me immediately. I also bought four spatially expanded wand holsters for ten Sickles, no questions asked. As Mr. Kiddell explained, the less magic and the lower the expansion ratio involved, the longer the charms on the holster would last.
I asked him how wands were made. He said it was a trade secret, but the basic idea was that a magical catalyst was placed into the core without damaging the integrity of the wooden body. For another two Sickles I bought an eleven-inch holly 'blank' from him — outwardly, an exact copy of the magical wand I'd bought from Ollivander.
'Next stop, Little Whinging,' came the announcement over the train. I stirred and felt someone's gaze on my back. I'd sensed something odd even before then, but now the stare practically burned.
Maybe someone really had decided to follow me and make sure I got home safely? I turned and surveyed the almost empty carriage. A woman with a child. A man reading a book. A couple occupied with each other. There was no one at all sitting where I'd felt the attention coming from. Interesting.
"Time to go, Uragi," I told the owl and began dragging down my trunk. It was clearly lightened by magic, but it was awkward in shape, and the corners were reinforced with iron besides.
The train stopped at an empty platform, and I stepped out. My invisible observer apparently came out with me, giving a quiet yelp and clearly being startled when the door slammed shut with a metallic clang.
"Who's there?" I asked.
"Minnie, let go," came a somehow familiar voice.
And beside me appeared... Draco Malfoy.