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Sean, at Hogwarts

Date not measurable in relative time

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The first month at Hufflepuff House passed in relative comfort, blessed silence, and deep, intense frustration. Oh, the basement where they stashed the ‘puffs was nice enough- round and earthy, with a broad low ceiling, but with bright sunny windows. It was a bit of a hobbit-hole, truth be told. There were a great many flowerpots with unnameable flora and perhaps some things more easily classed as fauna scattered about, courtesy of Professor Sprout, the head of the household. I worked by the light of the sun during the day, and copper lamps at night. It was an exceedingly cozy space, though I didn’t relish the thought of sharing it with hundreds of unsupervised wizard children. To avoid that end, I worked as quickly as I could. Perhaps if I had enough magic by the time they arrived, I’d be able to wand myself up a study space. There was always the Room of Requirement in a pinch for the first few years, though any step outside of Hufflepuff might put me straight in the path of Harriet’s speeding train of a narrative.

I used Dumbledore’s funds to purchase a copy of every book that Hogwarts used to teach charms, hexes, curses, transfiguration, or any other castable spell across all 7 years. The herbology, potions, history, and other miscellaneous dross of their educational system I abandoned- I had a feeling I wouldn’t be finding many mandrakes or powdered bicorn horn where I’d be going, which strictly limited their usefulness. Still, it made quite the pile of literature. At first I found it a bit daunting, until I began to crack the first year textbooks.

…Drivel. It was drivel. I don’t mean that it was meaningless gibberish, no- far worse. It was a textbook written for 11-year-old children who had, until then, not received any kind of standardized education. It was a book written about the most complicated subject conceivable, from the perspective of a pre-scientific society. It was utter garbage. To give a real-world example: if the person writing these had instead spent their time delivering a book on meteorology, they would have ended up drawing 600 pages of cloud formations, some doubled many times over, with vaguely superstitious scribblings in the margins about how the one that looked like a rabbit probably meant good luck. The advanced textbook would have explained that a dark rumbling cloud would sometimes strike the ground with lightning to show the gods’ displeasure.

In short it was page after page of rote memorization, often of pure bullshit, with no explanation- without even an attempt at taxonomy or classification or theory. The books often launched directly into spells, often ludicrously over-specified and useless ones. In the first day of reading I found two different ways to produce a jet of water from the wand, another that made snowballs pelt themselves at a target, and one whose sole entire use was to replace the Heimlich maneuver. There were hundreds of these- thousands, and they were all over the map. Things were listed as charms when they were clearly hexes by the book’s own definition. “Curse” mostly just seemed to mean “Charm, but bad” except there were plenty of cases of quite nasty charms not receiving that classification.

Within a couple of days I’d skimmed through most of the books, and thrown most of them out. I’d known I would have to do some of this, but I was beginning to suspect I’d let childhood fandom get the better of my judgement, in picking Hogwarts to learn from. Even their books on theory were wildly wrong. They said Evanesco didn’t violate mass-energy conservation because the object vanished “Into everything!” Were they sincerely suggesting that everything in the universe gained a slight bit of mass when an object disappeared, and then going on to suggest that didn’t violate the laws of thermodynamics ? It was clear that wizards had an extremely poor understanding of basic physics, and most of their theories of magic were more akin to wild guesses. Then I got into their musings on “5 exceptions to Gamp’s law of elemental transfiguration” as though there was some fundamental force in the universe beyond authorial fiat that prevented the magical creation of food? Money? How would it even quantify those?

I was not an idiot- I realized that a lot of this was simply Rowling playing fast and loose with magic as she wrote her stories. But this was the world that sprang from those stories. Or inspired them? It was still difficult to understand that relationship. Whatever her intent, here and now where I was sitting there was a physical law behind magic, some underlying force, and the wizarding world was either blind to it… or being purposefully misled. Given the more recent movies where the early-1930’s wizards had clearly had their shit together with regard to modernity, it felt like something far more sinister was at play. For one thing- mental modification was one of the first paths of research I went down. There were spells to cause fear, and pain, and courage, and read a mind, or overwrite one’s own in defense, or even view and alter memories. But not a single spell for focus, or improvement of one’s mental faculties. It was a particularly glaring hole in an otherwise fairly complete lexicon of mind-control. It looked an awful lot like a deliberate omission.

What’s more the early lessons contained in the books were clearly, painfully wrong. I tried a few of the spells, the lessons intended for very young and undisciplined minds. They were nearly impossible to cast! It didn’t make sense- I mapped the gestures precisely, repeated the incantations word for word. I could feel my magic trying to surge out and lift my textbook. But it felt like I was trying to squeeze the torrent of a river through a pipe the size of a straw. This was not a matter of poor study or lack of intent- there was something very clearly off about the way the spells interacted with my natural magic. After a day of trying I had such a splitting headache that it felt like I was mutilating myself. I resolved to stop trying, until the other students came and I could observe them in action. It was clear that the solution to this mystery did not lay in mulishly hammering away at these books until I could cast spells the ass-backwards way. The textbook version clearly wasn’t what Dumbledore or Voldemort did, anyway.

It wasn’t like I lacked for magic, regardless. My wild magic was going absolutely monkeyshit- it felt at times like a second puberty, or having some kind of bipolar disorder. My slightest mood swing could cause a window to burst or a couch to fold itself inside out. I once spent a few minutes lost in reminiscence about time spent with Haley, and looked up to find that every flower in the room had come to full bloom at once. It was like a comforting old cloak and a malicious imp on your back, simultaneously, and I couldn’t imagine having more than one kid with this problem running around your damn house. No wonder they shipped them all off.

“Oh, it’s not so bad as all that” said Professor Sprout, when I had occasion to ask her as she puttered about the common room, tending her plants. Self-watering charms were easy to come by but many of the more exotic strains needed… strange kinds of care. She spent several minutes per day singing to a kind of lily that actually danced, and several minutes hurling abuse at a variant cactus that really seemed to get off on it. “I remember it being quite an exciting time, when my own little ones were coming up. You never know what wild magic will do- it’s quite unrestrained and quite powerful, but it never seems to mean any real harm. Well, unless the wielder means it. But you so rarely meet an 11 year old capable of that level of hate.” She shuddered, lost in some private memory. Tom Riddle, perhaps? I’m not sure when she began to teach here, honestly.

There was one dog-eared old book that I discovered in the back of the Hogsmeade bookstore, and half-ashamedly snuck home. Most precious of all of my finds- a dog eared and ancient copy of Dragon Wife, my very own origin story. We really did exist in the worlds of others, if you knew where to look. It wasn’t even that bad- a little pervy, I thought, and Haley and I had certainly never done that with her shape changing ability, but- it was a lot like reading a diary from another version of my life. I liked the Sean in the story- he was more adventurous than me, more attentive. I resolved to be more like him. One interesting deviation- Haley’s origin was not Pathfinder in nature, in the original story she had been transformed by an ancient family heirloom from some long-lost great granduncle who had, one assumed, gotten busy with a tribe of dragons. Fairly tropey but far more in character for a romance story. So where had Pathfinder come from? It still puzzled me, given what we knew about stories- she had part of a rule set for storytelling, rather than a story itself. That had implications, if I could only puzzle them out.

Finally the first day of school came, and with it, the children. I filed into the great hall at roughly the same time as the other non-first year students, nodding at Professor Sprout sitting among the staff at the headmaster’s table. I hadn’t met many of the other staff, though I was given to understand that all who needed to be read in on my status had been. Except, apparently, for the students. “Ey, shouldn’t you be out in the boats with the other firsties?” asked a gentleman who, I was reliably informed by others at the table, was named Newt Inkwell. His question captured the sentiment of the local student population though. Many of my gold-and-black clad colleagues had been giving me curious stares, though none had picked up the courage to talk to me so far.

“Leave off, Newt, he’ll be here for a reason and he can speak if he wants,” said the world’s most handsome back-bencher who I could only assume was Cedric Diggory. His faith that Dumbledore’s operations would not end up with a random first-year out of place was pretty misplaced, I thought, given pretty much everything that had ever happened at Hogwarts, but I appreciated it in the moment.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m Sean. I’m uh, an orphan from out of country. Dumbledore brought me here and sorted me a while ago. After… the incident.” That was the story we’d agreed on. A little dark, a little mysterious- it left room for growth but also inspired a bit of sympathy. Hufflepuffs were suckers for solidarity as it turned out, something I really admired about them as they spent several minutes making a big to-do about welcoming me to the fold.

“You’re gonna fit right in, don’t you worry.” said Newt, now apparently my best buddy. “I’ll tell you all the tricks, which profs to butter up, which to watch out for. Like, watch out for old Professor Snape, see him up there? He’s as nasty as they come and he loves to score points off the ‘Puffs.” He pointed at the headmaster’s table but then seemed struck by some incongruity. “Say, what’s got into ol’ greasy-locks?” Some of the others turned and murmurs ran around the table.

In-character, I had no idea what they were on about. Out of character, I felt like I was probably witnessing the unsubtle pen of Harriet in action. It was a bit like actually seeing god’s hand at work- it was unnerving. Severus Snape was immediately recognizable- tall, pale, pursed lips and deep black eyes, unkempt oily black hair and general dress and appearance of old money fallen on hard times. What was less common about him was how nervous he appeared. He was actually pacing, up at the table, and Dumbledore had to stand up and put out a hand to intercept him. “I wonder if it’s Lapsus Libidine ? I’d heard you can feel it before it happens.” Said Heather Ferlet from further down the table, and there was a round of general groaning from the boys and longing sighs from the girls.

It wasn’t a term I’d heard before- an invention of Harriet’s, maybe- so I elbowed Newt and asked. “Oh, it’s hogwash,” he said. “Predestined souls, eternal romance, that sort of thing. Once your eyes meet your partner’s you’re bound together- no barrier can keep you apart. The girls love it. We think it’s a bunch of squidgy nonsense, don’t we boys?” He raised his voice and there was a bunch of harrumphing. My mind was racing, though.

I asked innocently, “Well have you ever seen it happen? Lapis Lazuli, I mean, or whatever she said. Between a student and a professor?”

He scoffed. “Never!” But then Hyman Crane from down the table threw something at him and he coughed. “Well, okay, just the once. Trelawney and that girl Bridget a few years afore I got here, but she graduated! Now they live in the tower together.” Cedric threw a roll at him. “Oh yeah, and Finch had that thing with the ghost of his mentor, last year. But that wasn’t like, romance, or-” the girls cut him off with a chorus of shouts and boos and he changed course- “oh, fine! It was romance but it wasn’t predestined, they were just a good match!”

Dumbledore’s warning, and now this? Hogwarts was awash in student-teacher relationships and forbidden love. I suddenly had an extremely good idea exactly what kind of fanfic I had stumbled into. I shouldn’t be panicking- after all, this is like my home territory, in a way. Just stick to the background and try not to have any weird outbursts about what people get up to in their bedrooms… with eleven-year-olds. My stomach was churning a bit at the thought.

As I sat and stewed, the doors of the great hall opened and the rest of the “Firsties” joined us. It was the usual lot, from what I could see. Except for one fairly large kid, crammed in awkwardly among the rest. A ripple went through the room and a whispered name. Harry Potter. Why was he so big? I turned to my reliable informant. “Oh I heard he got aged a few years when he beat Voldemort as a baby. Still his first year but he’s more like 14 or 15 physically. Gonna be a real advantage in quidditch!” I just about facepalmed myself off the bench, then. Harriet, did you age him up just for your fucking story? What kind of hackneyed operation am I taking part in here? Even as I slapped myself in vicarious embarrassment the whispers redoubled. The other students had filed in, but Harry had stopped- staring, unblinking and slack-jawed, at someone at the headmaster’s table. The room went dead quiet as Severus Snape stared back, like a deer caught in the headlights. Everyone heard what he said as the shock caught up to him.

“ Her eyes… he’s got…” and then he dead-ass fainted right there, smacking his head on the table on the way down. There was a general rush as Madame Pomfrey ran over to tend to him, and Harry shook his head in bewilderment but rejoined the other kids who all wanted to speak to him suddenly. Meanwhile I was sinking lower and lower into my robes, willing the floor to rise up and fucking claim me from what was looking a hell of a lot like a Snape x Harry Potter slashfic. One thing served to distract me- I could feel that magic should be running rampant in the room as the unrestrained emotions of all the students clashed and fought, yet nothing untoward happened- the million tiny candles floating in the air remained upright, not a single table levitated, not a portrait twisted out of place. If I weren’t so mortified I’d be intrigued. Was Hogwarts actively suppressing the wild magic? Had a ward been activated when the students got here?

The sorting hat ceremony got underway. For the most part it was about as interesting as watching paint dry- I knew the destinies of every one of these characters, and not a one seemed out of place. We welcomed Susan Bones and Hannah Abbott and Justin Finch-Fletchly and many many others to our table. Hufflepuff was the biggest house because it got pretty much everyone who wasn’t going to be plot relevant, at any point- I figured that could only help my background status. I kept on figuring that, right up until another young boy was called to the hat.

“Draco Malfoy!” called Professor McGonagal and my eyes passed over the kid, and stuck. There was something about him. It was… undefinable. On the surface, he looked like the template from which every spoiled rich failson with slicked-back hair had sprung. He preened as he walked down the hall, enjoying the attention. But I could… feel something, some pull. A vulnerability, a desperate desire to be loved. Like Aimer. Like Haley. My heart was reaching out to him.

Now wait a god damn minute, said the sane part of my brain. Since when did you get infatuated with prepubescent boys? But I was a young boy, wasn’t I? Maybe this was destiny. He sat in the chair and the hat was just about to touch his head, when our eyes met. Sparks like I’d never felt before flew between us, and my heart jumped like I’d been hit with a defibrillator. In an instant everything negative about him fell away. He was… an angel, sent here just for me and-

HOLD THE FUCK UP shouted my sanity. At the same time, the hat shouted “SLYTHERPUFF- wait, no, that’s not right! HUFFLEPUFF!” The crowd went wild. Nobody had caught the glance between us, but I knew what had just happened. His entire fucking brain had just been overwritten by this plot device. Overwritten so hard it altered the trajectory of his entire life. Just for me. NO. NO NO NO. He walked over to our table, and for once the Hufflepuffs did not cheer and clap and try to welcome him- not even Cedric. This particular iteration of Malfoy hadn’t had enough time to piss everyone off, but his family had quite a reputation and everyone knew that whatever was happening, it was going to be trouble.

He didn’t care. He sat down right across from me, bright and sunny as could be, and held out a hand. “Draco Malfoy! What’s your name?” I reached out without thinking and shook it, still open-mouthed, still fighting the most titanic battle of my life internally. I do not love you. I know who I love and not Harriet, or God Himself, can change that about me. This isn’t me. Why can’t I love more than one person? There’s enough of me to go around. Look at you. Your hands are so soft. WHAT THE FUCK YOU ARE ELEVEN. I could help you, you’re going to be so lost . HALEY HALEY HALEY HELP ME.

What actually escaped my mouth was “ Meep!” and then I pelted for the exit to the hall as fast as my legs could carry me. Up on the staff platform they were still gathered around a recovering Snape, and only one man’s eyes tracked me as I went. Dumbledore nodded approvingly.

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My legs didn’t stop moving until I was halfway to the Forbidden Forest. Outside the castle proper, that sense of oppressive numbness in my magic seemed to ease off, and I eventually settled into something like a meditative state, not really considering that anyone might have come out looking for me. I couldn’t think about what was happening with Draco- literally could not, it was like I had had a stroke and some part of my brain wasn’t mine right now. Is this what happens when narration and character are incompatible? I walled the entire topic off and focused on the other subject at hand. In my manic state, one insight occurred to me.

Wild magic. That was my clue. This thing that every wizard was born with. Look at the evidence, I said to myself. Wild magic was powerful, wandless, wordless, it was governed primarily by emotion and will. It seemed capable of effects both vast and varied. But it wasn’t directed. Wizards spent nearly a decade of their lives suppressing it, learning to channel it through wand and word into a variety of, frankly, tiny side-effects. Yet everything they did was still influenced by emotional state- witness Avada Kedavra which required hatred, or Expecto Patronum which was a “Projection of all the wizard’s most positive feelings.” And the more powerful they became… the more their casting looked like wild magic again. Wandless, wordless. But directed, effect with intent.

So what’s the point of the intermediate step? Why go through 7 years of self-mutilation only to arrive back where one started, at best, with a little more control? “ Is there a purpose to it?” I muttered to myself, and nearly jumped out of my skin when another damn magical person answered my rhetorical question from behind.

“Purpose to wha?” Rumbled the huge bassy voice of Hagrid the groundskeeper. I looked behind me- he’d ambled up while I was deep in thought, so deep I hadn’t noticed a nine foot tall giant. Got to be more careful.

I didn’t feel any need to lie to him though. “To all this- magical education. I’ve got perfectly good magic right here.”

His eyes lit up, at that. “Too right! I been askin’ that same question fer years! Never even finished me education- don’ make no diff’rence to the animals, does it? They smell magic on me jes’ the same. ‘Oo needs all ‘at...” he pantomimed waving a wand and jabbing to cast spells, “and such-like? Not me! I get on jes’ fine, thanks!” Then he realized he was probably ruining the educational prospects of some poor child. “Oh! But not you, marster Sean. You don’ listen to ol’ Hagrid’s ramblin’ now, you hear? Do them whole seven years, you’ll get on jes’ fine!”

I smiled and let him help me up with one hand so massive it engulfed my entire forearm. But as we walked back to the castle, my smile slipped and I fell into deeper thought once again. It never did matter, to Hagrid. Oh, it’s still his dream to use a wand, but he really does seem to have found a magical niche without any further effort. He’s simply… in tune, with the natural world. Maybe that was it. Maybe the difference between a mediocre wizard and a great one was tuning. Wizards were put in this intensely competitive environment with houses and points and tournaments, with their natural magic suppressed, and told they had to produce the effects described in their books, under great pressure. You could force a person into any sort of mold with that kind of environment.

And yet… I couldn’t recall a single instance of a student actually being removed from the school, for lack of ability! They all took such pains to stretch their magic in ways it didn’t want to go, to put restraints on it so they could drag it around like a mistreated pet, rather than listen to it. It was a very… British way of looking at the world, I thought. Is this Dumbledore’s game? Is the casting actually… necessary? Or is it truly something lost?

I took out my wand and stopped walking. Hagrid turned. “Now what’re ye doing, young marster? We gotta be gettin’ you to bed, like!”

I closed my eyes as I spoke to him. Ignored the swirling of the spheres that I could still see behind my eyelids, that picture-window into the vast multiverse. Instead I tried to think closer to home. Reached out and felt my magic around me, like a cloak. “Just one second, Hagrid. I have a theory, and I want to test it. Humor me, okay?” His kind were supposed to be resistant to magic. Dimly, at the barest edges of my awareness, I could feel the absence where my presence met his, and parted around it. But what if- I waved the wand in a perfect Wingardium Leviosa and spoke the words. In my awareness I could feel the pattern form, the template for my magic. It butted up against it but did not go through. I didn’t force it. Emotion, will, focus, restraint. I focused on my intent. My need for magic, for understanding, my desire to work with this force that was me-and-not-me, that I could just barely even feel but that I’d come to love like a dear old friend, in the last month. Like the presence in my mind that Sheriff used to represent. Like a night on the couch with Haley, watching old movies and laughing together.

“Wha- put me down! ‘Ow are you even doin’ tha’?” Shouted the rumbling baritone, and I opened my eyes. Hagrid was floating ten feet in the air, resistance be damned. In my mind’s eye the pattern I had made was still empty- but my magic ! It had built the same thing, the same metaphysical machinery on a scale a hundredfold grander than my crude sketching. You really are a separate part of my consciousness aren’t you. I grinned and felt it grinning back at me.

“Sorry, Hagrid.” I, or rather my magic, let him down and we walked into the castle. Entering the doors I felt that blanket of numbness, of disconnection, descend on me again. A sinister thought occurred to me. If this was my first day trying to cast spells indoors I’d never even have noticed the pain when I forced it, as heavy as this numbing ward appears to be. Didn’t they make it illegal to even try and cast spells outside of this school, if you’re underage? My suspicions about Hogwarts were deepening. But if I wanted to truly communicate with myself, I was going to need to get outside the wards, and then go inwards.

Hagrid let me go after I stepped through the portal to Hufflepuff’s common room. The others had already made their way deeper into the warren, heading to individual bedrooms. I stood in the grand chamber I’d had to myself for a month, and surveyed the flowers I’d made bloom so recently without even trying. To go deeper, to connect with a part of me half hidden from consciousness… “We’re going to need drugs,” I muttered. “ Lots of drugs.”

Luckily, I knew at least one alchemist who was going to need a couple of favors this year.