He had lived for birthdays, they shaped his being and more importantly, his business. He hadn't forgotten what he had lived for before being taken, still would live for if he ever got out of this hell hole. He wondered would he be able to live life as he had before now, before here. He would hardly be allowed to serve customers in his current condition, pale and utterly skeletal. He would make the children cry, and most likely send people to Gregorovitch.
Not that he minded the competition (that also was good for business), but he would rather like to keep his shop open. If he lived that long. If even Gregorovitch was still alive after what he had had to tell that...him yesterday. The house was uncharacteristically quiet today he suddenly noticed, he must be gone away. All he could hear were the creaks of floorboards above and the odd scuffle of rodents that they liked to let loose in his prison cell to intimidate him. He rarely even noticed them anymore.
His mind fell short of what he had been thinking of for a moment, and then he remembered. Birthdays. He'd had quite a few himself, one hundred and ninety nine to be exact. Bordering on two hundred, if he managed to get to it. His own sixteenth birthday was probably his fondest memory. It was the same day he got a detention for not complying with his professor of Transfiguration, a bald man with an unturned nose and the name of Timothy Pepper.
He had simply asked when the man was introducing himself if he could have salt instead. It had been a stupid thought that had fashioned the outburst (he was normally a very polite student), but it inspired enough snickers to earn him a night in the forbidden forest with the school caretaker Hugh Bonner. You can imagine the taunts that came with such a name, and the man felt himself smile despite his condition.
Thinking back to that night, he had been in the woods helping the Care of Magical Creatures Professor, a young woman named Carney, to search for Bowtruckles, under the supervision of Hugh. He had found one, nursing a twig of an Oak tree beneath its skinny arms. He could tell that the stick was quite a marvellous piece of wood, at a proper eleven and a half inches. It just needed a bit of TLC and a magical core, and then it would be a most amazing wand.
Somehow, he got the Oak into his pocket after the Bowtruckle had been caught and sedated. Fate had intervened greatly that twilight, when he stumbled on the way back to school and found a silvery hair on the roots that had tripped him. When he had finally gotten to sleep, he lay with his fingers clasped around a new wand, eleven and a half inches, oak and unicorn hair core. Something he could present to his father. A masterpiece. A key to a legacy, the one that ran in his family for generations.
A creak in the floor brought him out of his reminiscing thoughts, and he strained his ears to hear something, anything at all. But it was still silent on the floor above. He shook his head, knowing captivity was slowly making him lose his mind. (More than usual if one listened to the Press, which he didn't.)
Few people knew it but he had once had a wife. His dear Marybeth, the girl he watched from afar in school, in turn the person he had been trying to impress that one time he had received a detention. He hadn't had the courage to ask her out until she had arrived at his shop looking for a new wand. Her old one, Thirteen inches, Ash and Phoenix feather had snapped when she had fallen down some stairs at the ministry, where she was training as a Magical Law Enforcer.
Surprisingly, the wand she bonded was the first he'd ever made. And also the one that now adorned his shop window. He and Marybeth had spent many happy days together but then she had contracted a severe form of dragon pox following a holiday at the age of fifty, one the killed her quickly and painfully. Tears filled his eyes as he croaked her name. They had been soulmates, really and truly. But, she had never borne a child and that hurt them both deeply. Her for the loss of a dream she'd expressed since their early courting, and he that he would have to find an heir outside of his family, to carry on his name and purpose. Adoption in the Ollivander family wasn't something done at that time.
He heard a chime of a grandfather clock, signalling midnight. If his dates were right, he was now a year older. Wiser? He doubted it. Frail? He was the epitome of the word. Alone? Completely and utterly.
He wondered now, if he could make it to two hundred and one. What would he do during the year? Rebuild his shop, find an heir, make wands until his hands wouldn't move and there was no magic in his bones. In all his years, he had never had reason to not live, even after Marybeth. His shop had kept him going. The constant demand for magic creators, all given as presents on the day, week, month or year a child turned eleven, when another birthday marked the beginning of a new dawn for that person. The first true makings of a wizard.
He sighed, turning on his side in the dark, his eyes so familiar to the dimness; he could almost see the wall opposite. Though maybe that was his imagination acting up, even a hallucination. Either way he closed his flowing eyes and let himself dream of happiness. Of the day he would see the sign above him, hear the gasp when a wand chose its wizard once again in his store:
Ollivanders, Makers of Fine Wands since 382Bc.