A/N: This chapter is actually terrible. I'm so sorry. But I just need to post it and get over this block.


I never explained how I came to practice magic without a wand, did I?

There's not much to explain.

Inexplicable things going wrong. After-school detentions. Silent, strained hours stretching on. Increasingly frantic notes home to Mother. Setting them alight with a borrowed box of matches and watching them curl into black ash, knowing it won't change a thing. It doesn't stop the calls home, doesn't stop the unexplainable 'incidents', doesn't keep her face from graying with undeserved stress.

A final, inexplicable occurrence, this time involving a miniature thunderstorm above the head of the girl cheating off me in math class, sends law enforcement to the front office. I nearly snap under sheer force of irony.

"Thought you'd have better things to do."

A helpless smile on the kind, familiar face. Too kind for police work, I sometimes think. Should've chosen a gentler career, like raising kittens.

"I was going off duty when the call came in, and, well…I just knew."

Ten minutes of babbling assistant principals later, I open the police car door and fling myself inside. Not the back—we haven't descended to that level of irony yet. From the smile lingering around the corners of the officer's mouth, he's thinking exactly the same thing.

"You know, the first time I met your dad…"

"Don't." I hold up a hand. "Just…don't. Please."

The rest of the drive home is silent.

After this incident, I see little reason to set foot outside my bedroom door. The school leaves unenthusiastic voicemail messages that go unanswered. Mother cajoles, threatens, leaves pleading notes under the door and meals in the hallway, with much the same result. I eat a little because her sobs would be worse than the quiet. Uncle John, who has some innate gift for sensing distress and usually drops by at least twice a week, is nowhere.

So I sleep. Stroll through my mind because there is nowhere else to go. Sleep again because there is nothing else to do.

On the fifth day, nothing is too much.

I have never encountered true silence. I don't know anyone who has. Rarely even what passes for it—I live in London, after all. There is always the hum of automobiles and appliances. Beneath that, a hundred buzzing frequencies almost too high to sense.

Almost.

Or is that the blood pulsing in my ears? Either way it hovers constantly at the edge of consciousness, driving me to distraction when there is nothing else to think of. Silence is, at best, an overly optimistic term for white noise.

And there's too much of it.

Darkness too is a fantasy. In this city, the lights never go out, and no curtain has ever been made that will completely shut out their intrusions. I stare in fascination at the tiny patches of light checkering the thick fabric, imagine the photons crawling about like hedgehogs on little legs, piercing my brain until I bury my head in agony. I wonder how a thing can be particle and tidal wave all at once, how the details of our lives can destroy us. And a throb starts to build at the base of my skull.

The sheets are finer in texture than the curtains, and yet they grate ceaselessly across my crawling skin. My eyelids are filled with an inescapable red-grey glow. Muted traffic roars outside. Downstairs, the refrigerator hums loudly. On and on. Then a neighbor next door turns on her ancient telly.

I try to ignore it, but the mosquito whine sets my teeth on edge. Grinding, vibrating, shrilling through glowing dust motes in the still air.

Eeeeeeee….

A minor annoyance, I tell myself. Catalogue it, let it go.

Eeeeeeeeeeeiii…..

The pitch escalates, scratching, scraping through my body, falling into rhythm with the pounding in my head. I want to tear it to shreds between my teeth.

Eeeeeeeiiiiiii…

The worst sort of pain is the shuddering, helpless kind, where there is nowhere and no one to go to. All you can do is breathe while your nerves are laid raw.

...eeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…..

Pain? Stupid. It's just a bloody noise for crying out loud, and it needs to stop, halt, desist, just make it end…

iiiii—

Scraping threads. Unraveling, unprotected dendrites axons synapses that never shut off, that don't stand a chance beneath the assault of pitch rising higher and higher…outside on the street, the vibrating hack of automobiles inhale exhale poison sunlight razor patterns scorched eyelids pressure building skull piercing whine on and on can't think can't stop white red on and on and on…

iiiiiiiiiiiiiii…

An explosion, a shriek, the discord of breaking glass. Then silence.

And at last, at long last, tension drains from my arched back and tightly wound muscles. Silence, silence, blessed glorious silence.

(Is it real this time? It feels real)

I raise my head and sit up.

Empty quiet filters through my head and I gasp with the respite, the release.

Then the muffled intrusion of engines starts again, creeping slowly through my mind. It doesn't penetrate as before. The shrilling has stopped. Cursing next door. A television set that won't be working for a while.

I glance downward.

My nails are dark crescents, sticky, and my scored forearms drip scarlet onto the pale sheets. The vibrant color is nearly black in the fading light. I let out a breath. Then another. After a few moments, my fingers start to unclench.

The silence lingers. It stings with relief. I can think. I can think.

I think of the chime of glass, shattering. The piercing next-door mosquito whine, vanished.

Coincidence?

The universe is rarely so lazy.


McGonagall comes soon afterward. And after she leaves, I practice.


Much later in Diagon Alley, when at last I hold my wand in my hand, there is the rush of warmth, the tingle racing up and down my spine, the undeniable feeling of rightness in running my fingers up its smooth grain.

It feels right in my hand, but my brain accepts it as a blip on a hard drive.

Phoenix feather and yew. Unusual.

Illustrious.

For a moment the piercing, moonlit eyes fix on me, and then their fading gaze shifts toward the window. When they return, they carry as nonchalant an expression as can be imagined upon that ancient, suffering-lined face.

More flexible than appearances might lead one to believe.

Again and again I trace the grain of pale wood. But my mind is already fallen into other patterns.