Prologue
As the cloaked young man stepped into the quiet tavern, the bartender looked up from his work. "Garrick!," he exclaimed! "Where the hell have you been?" "Sorry Jacob," the one called Garrick replied. He had been late, of course for the third day in a row. Something about time and how it just kept slipping by him. "If you're late again, you're fired. And I mean it this time."
Garrick wasn't quite so sure of this, as Jacob had been threatening to fire him for the past six months, essentially the length of his entire career at the Leaky Cauldron. However, he didn't feel like testing his luck right now and made a mental note to try and be early the next day. He was working here part time, after all so that he could afford to study abroad, which wasn't cheap. He couldn't expect any help from his family either as his father was expecting him to stay home and man the family business. But there was no way he was going to do that, at least not with how things are currently.
"If you expect to get paid for today, you're staying late and cleaning the tables," the older man shouted at Garrick from across the bar. "Yea, yea…" he replied somewhat exasperated. Not that he actually minded. The work he did here was dull and repetitive and allowed him to divert his attention to a more pressing matter, the very reason why he was late. His research.
He was a wand-maker, or rather, a wand-maker's apprentice. The shop he worked in was the best in all of Britain, a fact of which he was most proud. The problem, however, was that the shop was owned by his father, Gervaise Ollivander, a rather unambitious man who likes to focus only in the hard work and technique of crafting these most valued tools of wizards and witches, as opposed to what actually makes wands reliable and strong. The reason that the shop had done so well for so long was because they had been the first true wand-makers around, in 328 B.C. As such, the Ollivander name has been the first one to come to the minds of the vast majority of the Wizarding community for the past twenty two centuries, to which a large portion of their success can be accredited.
But what Garrick longed for was to travel around the world and study under the wand-makers at Ilvermorny, the American Wizarding school. No other school in the world contained teachings from more cultures than that. The school's founders, Isolt Sayer and James Steward, were famous wand-maker and it was said that their methods are still taught to the apprentices there.
Being stuck here, working in his father's shop in Diagon Alley, he would never become exceptional. He would learn the craft and learn it well, but Garrick Ollivander would never be a master. That is why he was constantly studying. That is why he wished to travel. The young man wished to become a master.
Several hours later, after the last customer had left and the mops had been charmed to clean the floors, the young wizard headed back home. It was late at night and Diagon Alley was all but empty, say for a wandering drunk here, or a dark figure turning down Knockturn Alley there. It wasn't long until Garrick was climbing the staircase that led to his family's flat above the famed wand shop. Upon entering, Garrick found his father, asleep on the couch, as usual.
While his father's vision was limited, he was still a good man, and an extremely hard worker. It was all too likely that he had come up from the workshop and not had the energy to make it to the bedroom that he shared with Garrick's mother and instead collapsed on the couch.
Seeing this, Garrick went to the closet and, after grabbing a blanket, draped it over his father. He stood for a moment in thought, then proceed to his room. Most of his former classmates from Hogwarts were living on their own now, two years after completing school, but Garrick was still here, learning what he must in order to take over the family business. But not for long, he thought to himself. Soon I will be on a boat to America. With that in mind, he grabbed the book he had been reading before work, and picked up where he left off.
When he woke up the next morning, Garrick immediately got dressed and ready for the day, ate a quick breakfast, and hurried down to the workshop to begin the day's work. He began by sweeping out the shavings from the previous day's wand carvings and then sorting the various substances that his father used for wand cores, such as Kelpie hair and Kneazle whiskers.
By the time the clock reached five o'clock, Garrick was praying for a break in the monotony of such mundane and boring tasks. When at last he was free, he went up to read for the hour before he had to get to the Leaky Cauldron, to repeat the tasks from the days before, in a never ending cycle of his two jobs, his research, and sleep, with an occasional day off that he would just spend studying and reading more about wand-crafting.
He was just returning home from his shift at the Leaky Cauldron one night, when he noticed something was different. Well, perhaps noticed is the wrong word as he would have to be blind and deaf to miss it. There was a man sitting at the table in the kitchen, and it wasn't his father. In fact, Garrick had never seen this man before in his life. "Hello Mr. Ollivander."