A Good Year

by Argenteus Draco

2017 was a particularly good year for wands.

For many years, Garrick Ollivander had been promising to retire and turn the shop over to his son Sebastian, but something had always gotten in the way. He was an old man, born nearly a century ago, and very set in his habits. It just so happened that his habits included getting up in the morning and making his way from his bed to his breakfast and down the creaking old stairs to the workbench at the end of his shop. Maybe he was a bit slower in finishing a wand than he had been in his youth, but it was work he loved. It was the only life he knew.

Garrick was working with a particularly stubborn piece of juniper wood — gnarled, dry, and refusing to marry with any of the phoenix feathers he had laid out for it — when the bell rang at the front of the shop. He pushed his chair back and got slowly to his feet, feeling very much like the wood of the stairs. He heard voices before he rounded the last shelf, one of them familiar.

"Bet your wand is made of hawthorn."

"No it won't."

"Hawthorn's bad luck!"

"Shut up, James!"

"Now, come on. I once used a very good hawthorn wand. Please don't touch anything, Al."

"Ah, let him touch," Garrick remarked in answer, smiling warmly at the boy — well, man, but he was a boy compared to Garrick — with the remarkable eyes and the even more remarkable holly-and-phoenix-feather wand. "How will he find if he does not touch?"

Harry Potter smiled back and shook his head. There were two much younger boys on either side of him. One of them Ollivander had seen before, though he'd been shorter at the time. James Sirius Potter had come to the shop with his parents on his eleventh birthday, just a little over two years before. He had not tried many wands; just two before Garrick had stepped in and rescued the appointment (and the lamp on the counter). Perhaps Sebastian had expected James to favor a wand like his father's, but Garrick had taken one look at the light in the boy's brown eyes and known which wand to give him; dogwood, phoenix feather, twelve inches, springy. A playful wand for a boy with a mischievous streak and a loving heart.

His younger brother proved more difficult to read. He had been, until his father's reprimand, reaching for the bell on the counter, no doubt impatient and ready to ring it again. Now he looked back at Garrick Ollivander with a calm and steady gaze, waiting for… he didn't know what. There was curiosity behind his eyes. Perhaps his brother had told him one too many fantastic stories. Perhaps he would prove to be more like his father.

Garrick fingered several boxes before choosing one and holding it out to the youngest boy. "Well, we might as well get the hawthorn out of the way. Give it a wave, go on."

Hesitantly, the dark haired boy took the wand and gave it an experimental flick. Nothing happened, not even the tell-tale misfires that so often caused things to fly around Ollivander's shop. Well, no great surprise there. Hawthorn was notoriously difficult to master; it almost never did as expected, and Garrick had seen more than one good example of that.

He scanned the shelves and picked several more boxes, nearly tumbling a few older ones in his search. First a few phoenix feather — but cores were more difficult to match than woods, and both of the boy's parents had favored wands made of their birth wood. Though with Harry, it had most definitely been the core which decided it, and Garrick suspected that the wood was merely a coincidence.

He'd need some measurements, and while Al waved a short wand of alder and unicorn hair, Garrick ducked behind his counter for his measuring tape. "All right," he said, straightening up again and approaching the boy. "Give me that back. It's old fashioned methods from here."

The boy looked at the measuring tape with a raised eyebrow. It must have seemed so mundane to him. The numbered markings were common enough, though the intervals they came in were unique, a system Garrick had developed in his youth. He measured the length of the boy's arms from shoulder to fingertip, from elbow to shoulder, the distance between his fingers; he lifted the boy's arm so that it stretched straight out to his side, and measured the distance between his wrist and his hips. James fidgeted.

"Dad, I'm bored."

"Your aunt offered to take you to Florish and Blott's."

"That's boring, too." He cast his brother a scathing look. "How much longer?"

Harry Potter shrugged. James threw himself into the chair by the door. Al stuck his tongue out at his brother until Garrick pulled his head around to measure the line from his eye to his palm, held open in front of him. He scribbled that number down and looked over his other figures, tapping his quill idly against the parchment as he considered. Then he went to get more boxes. Aspen and phoenix feather. Hornbeam and dragon heartstring. Cedar and sycamore, each with unicorn hair. He was walking back toward the front of his shop when he paused over a final alternative. It had fallen, perhaps earlier that day, perhaps a few days before, he couldn't be sure. He bent to pick it up and add it to the pile in his arms. "Maybe," he said aloud, more to himself than his visitors. Maybe it had fallen for a reason.

He deposited the boxes on the counter and lifted the lid off the topmost one. He handed the wand inside to Al, and knew even before the boy had had a chance to wave it. He could see it in the way the green eyes lit up when he wrapped his fingers around the haft. "Birch and dragon heartstring," he said quietly, as Al raised it above his head. "Twelve and a half inches, rather swishy."

White sparks shot from the end as the boy swung it down, coming close to setting his father's jacket on fire. He flushed but looked at his father with unbridled excitement.

"How much?" Harry Potter asked, but Garrick simply waved his question away.

"I have told you before, Harry Potter, that I would not charge for you and yours." He smiled. "I wouldn't say no though, if your wife wanted to send me another box of those toffees."

Harry Potter laughed, left a generous tip in the box despite Garrick's protestations, and herded his boys out of the shop. Garrick watched them head toward Quality Quidditch Supplies, the younger now waving his wand around and pointing it at his brother. Probably harmless, but Harry Potter was quick to step between them and take the wand, placing it delicately into its box. It was a shame he'd chosen a career at the ministry. The boy had shown such interest in wandlore, and Garrick had been sure that he would have made a fine apprentice.

He turned back to his counter, saw the myriad of boxes he would now need to put away.

He could do it later. He went back to the workbench.