Diagon Alley stood before her yet again, colours still muted and somewhat dim compared to what she was used to. Harriet sucked in a sharp, shaky breath, fingers still clamped around the bag containing her money. Inside her robes, the envelope she had slid her key into – the same one with that damning name written on the front – felt as though it was burning a hole in her pocket as she walked along. Shacklebolt walked beside her, casting an assessing gaze her way with dark eyes.
"We should head to Madam Malkin's first," Shacklebolt informed her, and Harriet blinked before almost tripping over the hem of her robes. "We can walk a bit slower, if you would like," he said, and Harriet felt her cheeks and ears burn. It wasn't her fault she had been thrown into the past and summarily shrunk. It wasn't her fault that her clothes hadn't shrunk with her.
Harriet grunted in acknowledgement, slowing down as she let Shacklebolt lead her towards the familiar yet completely different store. Though that was only to be expected. She was, after all, however many years earlier than her last visit.
The storefront was painted a dark purple, silvery lettering declaring it to be Madam Malkin's Robes for all Occasions. Shacklebolt gestured for her to enter. "I will wait out here," he declared, and Harriet reminded herself she was in the past. Things were different there. Dutifully, Harriet wracked her brains, trying to remember what Hermione had mentioned about the history of the Wizarding World. "Though they're really backwards in some places, they were also quite progressive in other ways," Hermione's words echoed through her brain.
She couldn't really remember much else than that. Other than that when in doubt, and when Hermione wasn't there – Merlin she missed her best friend – the library was the next best place to go to try and find the answers to her queries. Good thing there was a bookshop close at hand, Harriet mused. Maybe she didn't have access to the Hogwarts Library just yet, but that didn't mean she couldn't start building up her own like a budding little raven.
Ravenclaw.
That sounded good. A smile more akin to a grimace curled at her lips, even as the thought of her supposed name and who the vault she had just procured her wealth from. Who was she kidding? Harriet mused, thinking on the sorting looming before her. Though she didn't feel like a Slytherin in the slightest, either in house or name, that was what she was going to have to be. It just didn't seem right to have a named Slytherin go into a different house.
Harriet closed her eyes, silently wishing all her headache-inducing problems could just up and vanish into smoke. As luck would have it, they didn't, and she silently resolved to sit down and write everything out. If she was going to flounder around in the past, then she was going to have a Merlin-damned plan, if only to keep her sanity intact. A long breath escaped her and she nodded at Shacklebolt, mental decision made of what to do with herself later. That was later though. She was currently in the past which had made itself her present, and Madam Malkin's awaited her.
A bell jingled as she entered the shop, and Harriet barely had to blink before she was assailed by who could only be Madam Malkin senior. She was a short witch who seemed to favour indigo robes, her hair a chestnut brown streaked with grey. Harriet didn't think she was the same Madam Malkin she had met all those years… ago? She frowned. Tenses became confusing when stuck in the past which was supposed to become her future. Or was it? She shook her head at that, pushing the thought in the 'to examine later' pile which was probably overflowing by that point.
"Hogwarts, dear?" the short witch asked, and Harriet nodded, not quite trusting her voice. Part of her almost expected Malfoy to be there. Only Draco wasn't born yet, and the shop felt eerily quiet without the nattering of the prideful pale blonde who had seemed so very entitled throughout all her time spent with the Malfoy. "Just perch on that stool right there, and I'll get you set up," Madam Malkin said, gesturing to the stool in the middle of the room.
A tape measure rose into the air, moving about as she remembered it doing vaguely the first time she had been in there. Then in her subsequent returns, since she had been a growing girl. Not that she had grown all that much. Years of malnutrition had seen to that.
Time seemed to fly by in the robe shop, with Madam Malkin taking pity on her and giving her a simple, casual, plain black robe to replace the ruined, oversized one she currently wore. Grateful, she ducked into the changing rooms in the back, old robes bagged up yet not discarded, and came out to pay the lady for her services. Her school robes were fortunately done by that time, and she left with the package of them clutched to her chest.
Porter's Cauldron Shop was next, a name she didn't recognise, and despite the different shop and layout, Harriet was quick to find the standard size cauldron she remembered brewing in for many a years while tormented by the evil potions master who didn't seem so evil in her memories anymore. Her fingers stilled on the pewter rim, abruptly reminded that Snape wouldn't be teaching her. He would never teach her again, no matter if she somehow made it back to the present. He was dead – yet another victim of the madman she had been prophesised to defeat or otherwise be defeated.
A soft huff of laughter escaped her. To think that one day she would be thinking about missing Severus Snape, the worst teacher to ever grace the hallowed halls of Hogwarts. The odd feeling of nostalgia and wistfulness followed her, gripping at her heart almost painfully. It probably said something about her life that she just about managed to ignore that pain. Rather, she continued in her shopping, letting Shacklebolt grab her only the required books and escaping from Flourish and Blott's as quickly as humanly possible.
All too soon the sun was a glistening amber on the horizon, and Harriet was stood before a familiar shop named with peeling golden letters. Her thoughts drifted to her destroyed wand whose remnants were still stuck in one of the pockets of her old, now over-sized robe.
"This is the last stop on our list, Evans," Shacklebolt informed her, gesturing once more for her to enter before him. "Then I'll get you set up in the Gryphon's Roost until it's time for the Hogwarts Express to take you to school."
Harriet nodded, presuming that to be an inn of description. One which hopefully had some amount of soundproofing charms to cover up the sounds of her screaming as she tried to process the sheer chaos which was the situation she found herself in. A soft sigh escaped her, even as she pushed the thought away for what had to be the thousandth time that day. She did not want to think about it. Not until she could scream or melt down in private. That was how those sorts of things had to be done – in secrecy, under the cover of nightfall when people were less likely to be watching.
"Ah, Miss Evans, it must be…" Garrick Ollivander looked at her, pale blue eyes as unearthly and creepy as ever. Shivers rolled down her spine, but Harriet hadn't been a Gryffindor for nothing. Was she still even a Gryffindor, what with her newfound Slytherin heritage? Harriet closed her eyes, willing her courage back to life from the embers it had been snuffed down into after the madness which was her current life.
"Yes," she said, summoning a smile to her lips. "That would be me."
"Which is your dominant hand?" Ollivander asked, peering at her then, a familiar tape measure floating across the room to start taking measurements of her. Measurements Ollivander didn't seem to pay the slightest bit of attention to as he started going through the many racks of wands lining the shelves.
"Ebony and unicorn hair, eleven inches," came the wandmaker's voice, and Harriet blinked as she picked up the wand, only for a familiar hand to snatch it away. "No. Definitely not."
A smile curled at her lips at the familiarity of it all, as more wands came, like beech with a dragon heartstring which exploded the lights, much to Shacklebolt's hum of amusement behind her. But as the wands began to pile up, and the light faded from the window, Harriet began to frown. When a familiar combination of holly and phoenix feather emerged, her smile reappeared, only for her heart to sink when nothing happened.
Abruptly, she was reminded that it wasn't her wand. It hadn't battled Quirrell for the Philosopher's Stone. It hadn't gotten her through the Triwizard Tournament. It hadn't faced down Voldemort in the graveyard in Little Hangleton.
Ollivander's face grew grave. "Could it be—?" he muttered, looking both intrigued and yet terrified in the same breath. He turned, vanishing deep into his shop, and for a few silent moments he didn't return. The sound of his footsteps returned, and it brought Ollivander's frown with it. In his hands was a black box which looked like it had been made out of ebony and polished to perfection. He opened the box, and Harriet felt her heart drop to her toes. She knew that wand.
It had been Dumbledore's. Then it had been Voldemort's.
The Elder Wand.
Harriet sucked in a sharp breath, hating the way those blue eyes looked at her at the blatant recognition she knew was scrawled across her face. "I see," she muttered, praying that Ollivander wouldn't say anything. As per usual, though, her luck didn't hold.
"It's odd, isn't it?" he murmured, voice perilously soft. "I had heard that it was in another's possession… and yet it appeared on my shelves earlier today, and I knew what wand this was in a heartbeat." Harriet had the strangest feeling she didn't need to guess exactly when it had appeared. Her eyes narrowed, and Ollivander held out the box pointedly.
Sucking in another shallow breath, she reached out, hating the way she could feel the wand almost purr beneath her fingertips as they brushed against its bobbled hilt. Gingerly, she lifted the wand from its cushioning on the inky pillow. She lifted it then, wondering whether it would show some form of acceptance, or whether it was only the eerie feeling of rightness which she had to go off.
The shop exploded in white light, the thunderous sounds of lightning following as the white bolt tore through the ceiling of Ollivander's shop to reach the skies above. Blue eyes never left her own, curious and wary, even as his shop was somewhat ruined in spell fire and magic, and Ollivander only nodded and told her he could not accept payment – for he had not made the wand.
So it was with a sinking feeling in her gut that she left the shop, a new, deadly wand in her hand. Shacklebolt was quick to escort her to the Gryphon's Roost on Horizont Alley and pay for her stay before he left her to her own devices. He probably wanted to get away from her weirdness, or so Harriet mused to herself in the silence of his departure.
Harriet could only find her way to her new room, trunk and newest purchases following behind her, still numbly reeling in shock at having the Elder Wand suddenly come into her possession like a stray cat nipping at its master's heels.
She pressed her face down into her pillow and let out a muffled yelp as the weight of everything which had happened that very day came to press down on her small shoulders.