Before you read this - there's something you have to understand. It wasn't about the power. I don't care about the power, no matter what you hear those oh-so-righteous purebloods mutter.

It wasn't about the old glory of my family either. Glory these days seems to be measured in the length of your family tree and the power you have to call upon, and while my family tree is as long as any respectable pureblood's, it's been ten generations since my family had enough magic to be called proper wizards. I've seen muggles walking around that have more power in their bones than I do - I have no illusions about my magic.

It wasn't about any of that - it was about the world. Once you've seen it, you can't stop thinking of it. Be a part of it, and you can't give it up.

I've often wondered if we shouldn't be looking to see if magic is addictive, because it would be so much easier for so many if they could give up the Wizarding World, drop it like the bad habit it is. For all that there are times where I can't breathe from the restrictions, I can't give it up. And that's just me - they go easy on squibs.

Alright, now that's out of the way, let's get on with this. Where to start, where to start . . .

Yes, yes, I know I'm supposed to start at the beginning, people are always saying that, but they never give you any good advice about where exactly the beginning is, do you really want to hear about how my favorite baby mush was carrots- and I'll stop myself right there because that's not where I want to start.

I suppose you could say it started when I was five. Or earlier, depending on where you count from-

Do you remember what I said about the length of my family tree? Well, despite that fact that we've had less and less magic over the past few generations, my parents still did care about the fact that we're purebloods, so by the time I was five, I could read well enough to get by, and while my writing wasn't the neatest in the world, I could write anything I could read.

After my lessons were done for the day, my parents let me out of the cramped apartment and into the tangle of alleyways that were the center of life for magical Britain. I ran about with all of the other street kids - some of them orphans the Ministry didn't bother to place because there was no profit, some of them the children of people who worked in the maze of alleyways.

As you might suspect, some of the older kids got into Hogwarts, and the other reputable schools. Mostly, they were the orphan kids that the Ministry had dumped here because while there was nothing wrong with their magic, they weren't considered important enough to place. (Most of the kids whose parents work in the alleyways aren't as lucky. While most of them have more magic than a muggle, many don't have enough to be considered a wizard.)

The thing is, according to the Ministry, those kids don't exist. Oh, they keep the records of them that they can dig up if anyone comes around comes around to adopt them, or if they need to punish us, but they aren't going to admit to their lies for something that will benefit us.

So, beyond working together to keep the orphans fed and clothed and sheltered for the night, a little forgery business springs up in the alleyways, with the sole purpose of creating wizards who come out of nowhere to adopt the alley orphans, and disappear when their adoptee turns seventeen.

And when I'm five, I get invited to join the team.

It's not like this is any big deal. Like, I said, I'm starting from the beginning, and not all beginnings are interesting. For all that this sounds like some big dramatic opposing the government deal, to my knowledge, it had been going on for at least a century without a hitch, and it's not like we make the false identities for criminals or anything.

As for why they recruited me at five years old - I could write, and that was about the only requirement they had. There were enough Hogwarts students who needed letters written that they took everyone who would.

Initially, I tried it because was bored, and I'd heard that sometimes the Hogwarts students would put spells on their reponses to make them more interesting.

Then, I was fascinated by the responses I got from the kids. Hogwarts had always been a place of wonder for us, and while talking with students had demystified it somewhat, I found myself absolutely fascinated with the inter-house politics. I took more and more projects over the years, hoping to get more perspectives on this place I sure as hell wasn't going to get to visit.

When I was eight, the former head of the little forgery group dumped the job on me because he'd been offered an actual job and I was apparently the most organized. He'd danced away laughing after he ruffled my hair, and I'd found myself standing in front of the room with all the eyes on me.

I had to let others take on almost all of the students I'd been responsible for to keep up with the entire operation, but luckily Lukas - the second in command - was still there to help me figure it all out. The identity forgeries happened all year round so that the ministry didn't get suspicious over a rush of people showing up to adopt kids just in time for the kids to get their Hogwarts letters. Those were the hardest work we had, so I'd never worked on them before, but with my sudden rise to the top, I found myself suddenly almost buried in them.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with one hundred and thirteen individual names every year? I mean, we can and do reuse first names, but the family names need to be more individual. I have to cross check all of our records for at least the past fifty years to make sure we haven't repeated ourselves. And when I wasn't checking the names names, I was working with Teagan - our one metamorphmagus - on appearances for when they went into the ministry to adopt a kid. Even with Lukas's help and near memorization of parts of the records, it's rather a lot to go through.

When I wasn't working on any of that, I was practicing what little magic I had access to. I brewed potions from the books in my parents house, tried to figure out the whys of each ingredient. I learned how to make runes from Romulus, the one Hogwarts student I kept writing to, and figured out on my own how to add another layer to the matrices so they'd activate by snapped twigs and folded paper and pinched skin.

I got my first tattoo over the summer I turned ten, a rune matrix that would send sparks flying from my fingertips if I dug my finger into the palm of my other hand hard enough, and a demiguise to hide it.

When I was eleven, about a week before Hogwarts letters were to be distributed, three weeks after he came home from Hogwarts, Romulus took me out of the warren of alleyways and to a park in the muggle work for an ice cream cone.

He watched me with silver eyes for a long moment as we sat on the park bench. I flinched at the occasional loud noise, my free hand flying to the line of potion vials on my belt. His eyes lingered on the clear patch of skin where the demiguise hid my spark runes. And he asked me if I was going to Hogwarts.

I froze.

"You've got sparks at your fingertips," he told me, leaning forwards to tap the back of my hand. "And potions on your belt. I don't think that the magic in your bones really matters."

Getting back to the forging rooms is a blur. The next thing I remember clearly is asking the room in general if anyone thought they could forge a Hogwarts acceptance letter. The scratching of quills quieted, and heads popped up. We've been forging ministry letters for years now, but the other way around . . . my heart sank as sends turned into a minute, and no one raised a hand. Then suddenly, in the back of the room, one of the squibs I'd personally found raised a hand.

Avis was a tiny little thing, about the same age as I was when I was first recruited, and she quails under the the sudden weight of the twenty active forgers, but she raises her chin defiant, and declared that she'll try, if only to test her forging skills.

The one of the guys who had worked as a forger on and off longer than I'd been alive raised a hand and volunteered.

More and more hands raised, and while not everyone was willing to try in the end, it was still a good eleven more forged letters than I would have had otherwise.

Lukas caught wind of the attempt about an hour after I asked for letter as, and he sat me down in the office to talk. My heart sank as I watched him shut the door with a click. He was probably going to tell me a story of someone else who had tried, and failed before.

"Alright," Lukas says as he turned around. "Do you have a plan for telling Hogwarts you got accepted?"

What? Then, just in case my expression wasn't clear enough - "What?"

"Hogwarts," Lukas repeated patiently, like this was just another part of our operation I hadn't learned about yet. "An acceptance letter is all well and good, but how are you going to get Hogwarts to accept you?"

I eyed Lukas. "You've tried this before, haven't you?"

"And this is where I messed up. So?"

I hesitated for a long moment, but the answer is the same thing it always is. "The ministry. They have to confirm that all of their . . . remembered candidates get accepted. My family's pure enough that if they confirm that I have magic, they'll insist I get somewhere. All I'd need to do is activate a rune somewhere outside the allays."

"And Hogwarts specifically?"

The clock in the corner of the room ticked. Then I grin. "Albus Dumbledore is only human. He can forget to write down a name after Rowena's quill pens the address."

Lukas's face was blank. The he ran a hand through his hair. "Well kid, there's the proof that you're smarter than me."

"What?" I asked, startled. "Lukas, no-"

"Briar, I've been thinking about this for the past ten years. You've had what - two hours? Take a compliment." He pulled me to my feet and opened the door. "Come on. I'll tell them to give me the acceptance letters so I can mail the best one to you."

The next day, I sent sparks into the sand of the playground at the park that Romulus took me to to get ice cream. I watch sparks fly from my fingertips time and time again. By the time I emerge from under the slide, there are bruises all over my palm, and the back of my thumb is bloody from pressing my nail too hard one time. The demiguise that normally covered the tattooed runes on the back of my hand had climbed up my arm in protest, and was hanging around my neck. I got some odd looks for it as I look Romulus's hand, but nothing as bad as the disapproving looks all the mothers give him.

Teagan confirmed that I was on the ministry's list for education after the next time I send them to the Ministry to 'adopt' another kid. Three days past that, and there was an extra owl at the table when I sat down for breakfast. My parents pretended it was nothing, but I saw them flash smiles at each other as I sat down.

It was easy enough to pretend surprise when the owl hopped over to me, and joy when I saw the green ink on the envelope.

When I was done dancing for joy, my parents pulled down the box of old wands that our family had been passing down for ages in the hopes that someone would have enough magic in their bones to use one. I picked the second wand they hand me to try - one long, roughly carved piece of wood, with nothing to differentiate the handle from the tip, that smells like the bees wax rubbed into the surface and the lavender sprigs that had surrounded the wands.

I mailed the letter thanking Hogwarts for my acceptance later that night, and in the morning I got a reply from the deputy headmaster. It was almost as good as confirmation.

I had to basically dump the business onto Lukas because my parents took up all of my time, making me memorize family trees and my relationship to each and every person in society they thought I might meet at Hogwarts, and manners and customs. They took me to parties and dinners that I know they weren't able to get into before, to Gringotts, where vaults willed to the next family member to go to school, flashing my Hogwarts acceptance letter with sharp grins. They were drunk off the thrill of relevance, and for all that they were smart about it, I know all of the Gringotts money didn't go towards my school supplies.

To get away from them, and just to spend some time with them, I started spending my nights at Lukas and Romulus's place. Romulus's muggleborn girlfriend Pallas visited often, and the couch was home to an ever changing selection of people who just needed homes for the night before Lukas sent them off to one of the halfway houses or free shelters.

Romulus was the one to apparate me to Platform 9 and ¾ , where Pallas was waiting with my trunk. Pallas floated my trunk up onto one of the overhead racks, and swatted Romulus's hands away from her trunk with a laugh as he tried to pick it up. They left me alone in that compartment with a bottle of ink stuck to the window sill with a sticking rune, and my runes journal spread over the seat beside me, the demiguise peering down at my work from my thumb as I tap an inconsistent pattern against my knee.

The compartment door didn't open again until after the train had started rolling. The girl's eyes were a red to match her short hair, and she sniffled as she opened the door. Her face fell when she saw me, and she muttered a quick apology as she moved to close the door.

"No, no, it's alright," I reassured her quickly. "You're the first person who's tried the door. I was getting a bit lonely."

"Oh," she said quietly. She hesitated in the doorway, her eyes flicking between me and the empty seat opposite me.

"Do you want to sit with me?" I asked before she could lose her courage and leave. I hadn't been lying about being a little lonely.

"If you don't mind?" Her voice came out as a question, and she hiccuped at the end.

"Not at all!" I exclaimed. "Do you want help with your trunk?"

"Please," she said, blinking at me as I gently pulled the door open and stepped aside to let her in before I stepped out into the hallway to grab her trunk and manhandle it up onto the luggage rack.

"I'm Alicia Smith," she said as I turned around. Her nose was still running slightly as I turned around, but she looked determined as she held her hand out. "I'm a first year and a . . . um, mug-magleborn?"

There's a world in those two sentences, and I ignored it all as I reached out to shake her hand. "I'm Briar Moor, first year, pureblood. Pureblood means-" My voice breaks off as I think. "Well, technically it's supposed to mean that all of your grandparents were magical, but in my case, it simply means that all of them were of magical lineage."

"Oh," Alicia said. "Thank you. Could you tell me what, um . . ."

"Muggleborn means?" I asked as I sat down across from her and picked up my runes journal and my quill. "It means that none of your grandparents were magical. There's also the term half blood, which is someone who had both magical and non-magical grandparents."

"Thank you," Alicia repeated, looking relieved. "Professor Dumbledore kept telling me it was important that I mention I was a ma-muggleborn, but he didn't tell me what one was, and then the girls I sat with - um. Nevermind."

"They teased you, didn't they?" I asked, tapping the quill against the inside of my inkwell. I sigh. "Well, the professor was wrong. It might gain you sympathy points with some people, but in many circles, mentioning that you're a muggleborn is more like to to earn you scorn."

Then I frowned. "Unless you need to explain why you don't understand a custom. Damn, why haven't I thought about this before?" I scowled at the marked-up page in front of me, and glanced up at at Alicia. "Hey, if anyone ever asks you why you're doing something weird, tell them you're under my protection alright?"

"Won't that get you in trouble?" Alicia asked, looking a little startled.

"Not nearly as much as you could be in," I grumble, then wave the hand holding the quill at her, careful not to drip ink. "Don't worry about it."

Alicia stared at me for a moment then asked, "Do you go to all this trouble for every person you've just met?"

I opened my mouth to refute that - then I thought of Mark, the original leader of the forging group, before he dumped it on me to work. Sure, he'd lured me in with stories of spells that Hogwarts student put on their letter, but still, defying the government and learning how to make okay letter forgeries at five is a bit much. Then I think of Lukas. I could have dumped everything on him from the beginning despite Mark's instruction for me to take over. Making up the identities was a lot harder than just writing letters, even if I wasn't the the actual forging nearly as much anymore. It wasn't like I'd known Lukas that well when Mark bailed. And I think of Romulus telling me that I could go to Hogwarts. I knew him, but getting into hogwarts was supposed to be impossible.

I pressed my lips back together again, and maybe pouted a little, and Alicia laughed at me. Her voice was still a bit watery from her running nose, but she sounded genuinely happy. Even though I didn't really know her that well, it was still nice to see her happy.

The conversation moved on after that as she asked about my runes, curious because she'd apparently already skimmed through a large part of our text books and hadn't seen them. The rest of the train ride north is spent explaining the principles of runes to her. I use up nearly five pages of my journal as scratch paper, and the scratch'n'dry runes I'd placed at the corner of each page get a lot of use as I flip quickly to the next page to illustrate new points.

Before I knew it, we were climbing off the train to follow the short and bright groundskeeper down a dark trail. My first glimpse of Hogwarts was everything Romulus described it as five years before, when he first started writing to me, and Alicia had to tug at me several times before I remembered that I needed to keep moving. I can barely remember the minutes before I carefully sat down on the wobbly stool and the brim of the Sorting Hat came down over my eyes.

Well, what have we here?

I had a forged acceptance letter, a misleading letter to the deputy headmaster. I had the vicious approval of parents that always wanted to be more than they were told they could never amount to, the encouragement of someone who had failed at this very task, the hopes of a hundred kids with what-ifs. I had thousands of forged letters from 'parents', thousands of names at the tip of my tongue. I had runes drawn on parchment up my sleeves, sewn into my clothing, inked on my skin, potion lined up in neat rows on my belt, all of them ready to aid me in every way I could need. I had ten different arguments, four frantic pleas, and a single threat smothered under my tongue as I wait.

I had a litany of lies and a network of allies, and there were 42 people in the room that might not have been there if it weren't for me.

Well, the hat said, sounding positively gleeful, better be Slytherin.

Only the Slytherin table clapped for me, but I caught the eyes of people from all four houses. In the line to get sorted, Alicia looked to be clapping clapping softly. I sat down on the side of the table against the wall so that I didn't have to strain to see the rest of the hall, and I watch as the rest of the alphabet gets sorted. Most of the rest of the first years chose to sit on the side of the bench closer to the hat, so it wasn't until 'Riddle, Tom' that someone else sat next to me.

Riddle was small, with bird-thin wrists, and he looked even smaller huddled in his oversized robes. I spare him only a glance before I Alicia's name is called, and my attention is dragged back up to the stool. She goes to Hufflepuff after only a moment of deliberation and I catch her eye to give her a smile as she goes to sit down, and she looks relieved.

When the last couple dozen kids are all sorted and the food is on the table, I turn to Riddle. "Hello. I'm Briar Moore."

Riddle opens his mouth, a haughty expression on his face that I recognise from a lifetime of being thought a squib, and especially from over the last summer as my parents pushed their way into pureblood society. The Hogwarts acceptance letter and the fact that my family was still pure didn't negate the fact that my line had only produced squibs for generations. Then Riddle's eyes flicker to the floating candles, and briefly to the teacher's table. The haughty expression slid off his face like he'd just had a bucket of water dumped over him, and for a brief moment, he looks scared.

"Riddle," he muttered, stabbing the mashed potatoes in from of him suspiciously with his fork. "Tom Riddle."

Normally, with that kind of response, I'd turn away and make conversation with someone else. He seemed determined to push me away with one word responses. But every time I was about to turn to, I remembered the way his expression slipped so quickly to scared, and how easily he'd hid it. That wasn't right.

Finally, as deserts started to appear on the table, he snapped.

"I'm an orphan. Does that satisfy you?" His voice was cold like a storm in early winter, but it was nothing compared to Romulus early in the morning.

Then his words registered, and I wanted nothing more than to laugh.

"Is that all?" I asked before I could stop myself.

Is that all? because I didn't know anyone who could be described with a single word. The ice cream in front of me when I looked down reminded me of the cone Romulus bought me when he came home. It reminded me of the long bitter years of helping him, and looking, and knowing I'll never be able to - I pushed away the bowl, quickly deciding I'm not that hungry after all.

"Oh, leave him alone, Moore. Riddle isn't a pureblood name, so he's probably nothing."

"Shut up, Black," I snapped, slouching as best I can on the bench. He was right, partially. I should leave Riddle alone, if that's all that's bothering him.

I should be happy, I thought as I stared at the ice cream bowl. I got into Hogwarts. I got sorted even!

The thought made me scrunch my nose. I didn't feel happy. Looking at the ice cream bowl, mostly full, I just wanted to go home to Lukas's apartment and curl up under my blankets in his closet. I was probably just tired - a lot of things had happened. I left the alleys for the first time and snuck into the famously elitist school on the strength on lies and a forged letter.

I glanced at Riddle again. He was watching me - though he glanced away quickly when I met his eyes.

Later that night, after everyone else in my dorm room was asleep, I got up and wandered down to the common room. I paused when I saw Riddle there, curled up on one of the couches. He had twisted awkwardly to watch me, broken light from the windows to the lake reflecting over his face. I quietly moved so he didn't have to twist halfway around to watch me and sat down on a couch facing one of the windows.

AN: This is the rewrite of Sparks at My Fingertips. I don't own HP. The old version can be found in Dribbles 2.