Chapter Two: A Growing Witch
Garrick Ollivander's Diary
I am keeping a record of my daughter's early years, how she grows and changes as a person and a personality. My sole focus will be on who she is as an individual. How eager I am to see which individual wand chooses her!
This time I am writing at the time of her second birthday.
Melody is a tiny little thing, a little pixie-like creature with brilliant, bright green almond-shaped eyes. She has a thin face filled out by the wild, thick, shiny jet-black curls that grow all around her head. Her lightning bolt forehead scar is often hidden behind a fringe.
We keep her hair in long curls, and her clothes are all fanciful girl's clothes in brilliant, jewel-like Winter color shades with an occasional splash of snow-white or deep-black. She looks especially good in anything that sparkles. We decided not to name her like a fairy, but indeed as a little girl she does look a bit like a tiny, colorful little fairy.
She calls her four parents "uncles" and "aunts." She has also been taught that it is okay to play with the house-elves.
So on to who Melody first is as a growing witch, then. Onward and upward.
Melody is snuggly, affectionate, and cuddly, particularly sweet and easygoing for a small child. She smiles a lot, she is easy to please. She loves physical affection, being held, being rocked and sung to - and she does get plenty of that, I can tell you! She is happiest when in one of our sets of arms. As long as she is close to a loving family, she is what might be called "a greeting card baby." But when she is not close to loving family, she cries a lot. She needs close, affectionate parents and so it has ended up being a lucky thing that we decided to raise her. With an unloving family such as her Muggle relatives, I do not know how she would have fared in her early years.
But with us, at least one person is always around. She is given constant affection, security, and love.
We try to encourage her open, loving affection, as well as her communication and her ability to read emotions in others. She will sometimes pull a parent closer with accidental magic if they move away from her and she isn't ready for them to leave yet. What a feat that is in a toddler!
It may also be a good thing she does not have countless siblings. In a harassed household, she might have come across as a very needy baby. Here, in a wealthy home with four parents and no other children, she doesn't have that problem as a tiny girl.
At the same time, while she will play with her parents, even at this early age she also spends a lot of time playing on her own. She touches everything - even the things she shouldn't - and she loves taking things apart - even when she isn't supposed to be taking them apart! She silently discovers how the world works through physical experimentation.
We are already trying to encourage this in her with her magic. We will show her something, then leave her alone and let her experiment and try to copy it magically on her own. She loves this and can spend silent hours working away at it!
Melody is a curious explorer. This sometimes gets her into trouble. She has a terrible habit of being found in exactly the places she is not supposed to be. She seems to have an especial emphasis on needing to learn to do things by herself. She seems to understand learning best by working by herself on a physical experimentation level.
No one is sure what to do with this in a little girl - it is not exactly polite little girl behavior, any of it - which seems to have mostly just meant that Melody has already internalized herself as a girl who never exactly follows the rules. She takes everything apart, is found exploring places she isn't supposed to know about, and weathers the scoldings that inevitably result in the same silent way she made the trouble in the first place.
The one real good point in this, from a parent's perspective, is again that we are trying to teach her physical experimentation on a magical level. We are encouraging that as much as possible, and it does help. It is already obvious that Melody will not be the rote learning and memorization kind of powerful witch.
But she has good instincts, and she loves using magic to explore and "play." She will, I think, prove to be excellent at mastering physical magic quickly or at discovering new ways of doing things.
There is more to Melody than this, however. She is also positive, buoyant, warm, loving - especially cute and sweet. She gets lots of attention, especially also being a "greeting card baby," and she loves the attention that she gets. She can tantrum when deprived of such attention - we are attempting to ignore her tantrums and cure her of this instinct. She is a bit of a show-off, already knowing she is pretty and talented - an instinct we are also trying to curb.
At the same time: She is spirited and strong-willed, but also warm, affectionate, and open-hearted. A natural leader, she respects everyone and is always honest and warm - refreshingly in a small child, I cannot remember a single occasion where I have ever seen her lie about anything. Not even about the things in the house she has accidentally broken.
She already loves luxury and beauty, for a curious reason - making a good impression on others is important to her. She has natural pride and seems to care a lot about her self image. We try to make sure she has a good one, as we feel that in this area that can only be a positive.
A great bonus: When encouraged - and especially in magic, we are always encouraging her - she works harder than anyone else I have ever met. But not for hard work and accomplishment for its own sake. You have to hit her in that same matter of pride and self image. Step one is to instill in her a strong belief that she is capable of such a self image. Step two is encouraging her to work hard to achieve it. We have already taken these two steps, all four of her parents, hoping to encourage in her an early instinct for hard work and achievement.
This is also helping her physical magical experimentation and instincts. Yes, the part of her that is an experimenter also needs to be encouraged. But the part of her that wants to look talented to the people around her and believes she can achieve that needs to be encouraged just as much so.
Even with our disciplinary tactics, what all this means is that Melody is a bit of a tiny diva but is also a natural and cheerful "leader" girl. She cares a lot about feminine appearance, as well as feminine fanciful luxury. She does sometimes seem to use her magic to make herself look prettier, an amusing quirk in a tiny girl. Under our tutelage, she has been taught to particularly value honesty.
Since we have trained her to work hard and excel in performance, she has internalized herself as a high achieving if also mischievous girl. As her tantrums and showing off are ignored, they seem to become less frequent as time passes. This is a lucky thing, for her accidental magic during tantrums has been particularly explosive.
Overall, she seems to have internalized herself as a fiery, confident, and temperamental young girl, vain but with enormous and positive spirit and great leadership qualities. She is deepened with a great capability for love, cheerful affection, and compassion. She is made more complex by an instinct for silent, curious exploring and experimenting.
There is one more part to her growing personality that is worth discussing, and this is that most of her more tender or vulnerable or troubling emotions she seems not to talk about. On this level, with the things that matter to her or trouble her, she can be surprisingly hard to read. However, she is very secretly emotional on all subjects. We try to shower her with love and compassion in this arena, for she has difficulty expressing more secret feelings and we have understood by now that she needs parents who truly listen, and without ridicule.
Deep down, when she does speak of them, her deepest emotions prove to be all or nothing and incredibly stubborn. We have been trying to teach her emotional self-discipline and the value of moderation - a kind of curbing of extremes - but considering she doesn't like to show, talk about, or admit to such feelings, it is slow going. Such a cheerful, fiery, and friendly leader, it can take a long time for a person to figure out that Melody feels so much more than she lets on.
And so we listen, and we try to encourage her to verbalize how she feels - instead of ridiculing her and encouraging her to lock all those feelings away inside her. A great emphasis is placed on helping her move past her more stoical inner emotions in order to try to voice them. I cannot even imagine how terrible at this she would have been without loving parents. Our Melody is stoical, but as she grows we are trying to teach her how to push past that in order to recognize and admit how she is truly feeling when she needs to.
Particularly internalized emotions can make the walls around her shake in accidental magic and suppressed emotion. I often worry for any alternate selves she may possess in other timelines. As she grows, those tell-tale signs will stop being there, and her talent for repressing her darker emotions will be locked into place - at least, until they finally release themselves in particularly explosive ways.
"If you get upset," we try to tell her, "it is okay to cry and get frustrated. Feelings must come out somehow. It's better than the alternative."
And so she is slowly learning how to quietly and in a troubled way voice bad emotions… instead of repressing them…
But I have the feeling it will always take a long time to break past Melody's fearless, warm, friendly, and daringly curious leadership walls.
Perenelle Flamel's Diary
I am keeping a diary of my daughter as she grows into a child - all her baby milestones, how she grows and changes in learning and memory. I am an experimenter first and foremost, as an alchemist, and also as a mother I want to show how the baby girl I wanted so badly grows and changes.
This time I am writing at the time of her second birthday.
Melody did a lot of changing leading up to this. It all started with a lot of tantrums and a paralyzing, crying fear of loud noises. She had nap times, and formed warm milk and story and bath time bedtime routines with us.
It was difficult because we got her at the hardest part of her toddler years. It is a lucky thing there were four of us, and we were so loving and patient. Right away we had to start disciplining her against spurts of angry accidental magic and intentional defiance. Ignoring her tantrums and, past a certain point, her screams for attention also had to be started right away.
But it wasn't all bad. She dropped the morning nap and by now only has one nap time a day, in addition to her bedtime. She formed a love for doing things by herself, even when she did them wrong - putting on the wrong shoes, trying to brush her hair herself - which ended up being rather adorable. Potty training came rather quickly, as did big kid clothes.
In the beginning, she did know words but she mostly babbled. We had to teach her, through her screeching, about inside versus outside voices. We had to deal with her picky eating. She formed security blankets and stuffed animals, and for a long time she still used a pacifier.
Her accidental magic saved her from things like falls, but we had to specialty-lock all the cupboard and doors against accidental poisoning.
She loved bath-time and we had a tiny pool for her that she played around in out in the back garden. Soon enough she was a climber, she became surer on her feet, and she loved playing hide and seek. At the same time, she still liked being carried, or walking hand in hand with her parents - we took her on long walks in the gardens or around her homes - and she became fast friends with all four of us, very attached as she grew old enough to understand who we were.
She moved fast into a four-poster purple big kid bed, in her gold-laden wizarding Paris themed bedroom that moved magically with us. She also formed a growing vocabulary and habit for talking.
She went through a phase where she hated going to bed, and woke everyone else in the house up at dawn. She went through a phase of overwhelmed crying fits.
At the same time, there was again good. We loved playtime with her, putting on magical puppet shows and gifting her with magical, fanciful doll houses. We played ball with her and bought her a tiny toy broomstick. She began trying to "help" us with whatever we were working on around the house. She wasn't any help at all, but she was very cute while she was trying.
And then she took to running and climbing staircases. We had to discipline her against doing things like hitting or shoving. She became a very active toddler. This period is actually the "terrible twos" period for any child, so we read. We tried to raise her to be a good girl - a disciplined child.
We comforted and soothed nightmares with fanciful displays of magic and Dream-healing treatments. We taught her lessons in sharing, even if it was just with us and the elves, and lessons in table manners at our big dining room tables. She quickly formed a kind of confident willfulness, a burgeoning independence and series of demands. It was complicated - we had to find complex ways of disciplining that and encouraging it at the same time. It was around this period that she even began trying new foods.
The more independently she could play, the more we let her. We bought her toy wands to play pretend with, dolls to manipulate, tiny toy flying sets (from brooms to carpets), musical toys, and countless books that we read to her. We tried to instill in her a love of stories and reading.
In language, she mastered two and four word sentences, followed by simple songs, an ability to follow simple instructions, use of pronouns, and recognizing things by words. She took to often repeating words she heard in conversation - on amusing occasions, the inappropriate ones and the oaths included.
By the time of this writing, she can pull toys behind her, carry things while she walks, can run, and moves and talks and dresses and sleeps more like a child and less like a toddler. She even uses the toilet like a child. She has completely given up her pacifier.
We have just recently bought her a tricycle and a regular kid's broom, and she is practicing on those. In flying, she is a complete and breath-taking natural, graceful and small and quick. We are also giving her swimming lessons on our private grounds. Her accidental and even purposeful magic is already quite pronounced.
We have taken countless individual and family photos both, many of them including all five of us and all of them moving in the wizarding way.
On her second birthday, Melody is a full-on young child wearing her heart on her sleeve. Everything about her is open and dramatic, and we're trying to learn not to placate her at the very first sign of sniffling. The little thing is willful and fiery and primadonna diva enough as it is!
We've all had different ways of interacting with and dealing with the first several months of Melody's toddler years.
Her Uncle Garrick is the calm, matter of fact, and sarcastic one full of wild-eyed stories. Her Uncle Nicolas is bright, cheerful, loving, and hopelessly never the bad guy. Both men are also hopelessly fond of her, Garrick Ollivander unwilling to admit Melody has him wrapped around her little finger. They are supportive, Nicolas with an endless stream of delighted patience and Garrick pretending at distance and exasperation. They are the ones she turns to when she needs something, or when she is feeling vulnerable, and I privately envy them.
Her Aunt Sybil is dry, fond of Melody, and prone to highly eccentric declarations, but she is also surprisingly good at stern discipline. I am loving but dignified and reserved, so together her Aunt Sybil and her Aunt Perenelle are actually the ones to watch out for. I am frigid and fearsome when I am displeased, but her Aunt Sybil can think of some very creative and crafty punishments that teach good life lessons while letting the lessons do our work for us.
It has been a hard several months, but she has come out intact from our mistakes a relatively healthy, loved, and good-spirited little girl. I believe the worst in terms of toddler punishment may in fact be behind us.
And as I said, now she is turning two!
Melody got early visits to each and every office or study of her parents in their homes.
Nicolas and Perenelle would lift her up into the air and show her their alchemy lab tables. She was taught to identify bubbling potions and plant and creature potion ingredients, was shown vials and vats full of elements like dragon's blood, was handed crystals and little insects caught in resin, learned her way around a metallic alchemy lab full of old steam-powered instruments.
And she was shown, she with a kind of wonder, the materials and treatments and ointments that came out at the end, smooth and rippling colorful liquid out of a long metal tube connected to the lab table. She watched as it fell into a bin below, for selling and material use.
Sybil would take her into her room full of poufs and chairs, always warm with a heavily perfumed fire that made Melody feel sleepy. Sometimes Sybil would let her fall asleep. Melody would have strange, vivid, symbolic dreams and she and Sybil would try to analyze them together.
Other times, Sybil showed her things like tea leaf construction, or star chart studies and algorithms, or would teach her how to channel her magic into scrying crystals and try to make sense of the shadowy shapes she saw within.
Garrick took her into the place where he constructed wands. He would show her how he would close his eyes and put his hands over his materials. He could channel something from the materials - then his eyes would fly open and he would know magically which wands he wanted to build. He showed her how he measured and carved out wood, fitted magical creature part cores neatly inside.
"Someday," he said, "you can help me collect these ingredients on my travels with me." He beamed, his eyes gleaming in excitement, and Melody thought even as a little girl that this sounded like a terrific adventure.
She was let walk around his dusty little office full of wand boxes, brushing her hands against the dust and feeling the secret, silent tingle of heavy magic.
One thing she was taught very early on was what magic felt like - whether it was through these visits or through Dream-healing treatments. As she noticed it, that pleasant tingling sensation that meant magic became ever keener to her.
She didn't understand much of it yet, but they let her play with little things in their labs or offices under supervision. These became some of her earliest foundational memories.
Meanwhile, they each started her on little hobbies. The Flamels encouraged an interest in artistic crafts. They often had story times involving popular and famous plays. They showed her records and radios featuring wizarding music of all kinds and eccentric varieties. Melody learned that wizards wore a blend of ancient and modern clothes and robes, and that their music usually featured new sounds with old instruments. A kind of breathy gentleness in music characterized her earliest childhood memories.
One of her earliest big memories involved a joint trip to wizarding Paris and wizarding Egypt. She remembered old cobblestone paths with colorful crystalline storefronts filled with flowers and fantastical baked treats. She remembered the dark underground dust of old wizarding Egyptian tombs, their carvings and cobwebs, shadows and secrets. The Flamels tried to teach her how to say the basics of what she wanted in both French and Arabic.
Sybil took her star-gazing out in the fields surrounding their houses at night. They would go out with magically ever-warm mugs of pumpkin juice or hot cocoa, lay down in fields, and point out stars to each other. Sybil would teach her about cosmic astronomical placement and would show her constellations.
Sybil also let her "help" in her own Potions laboratory. "Potions is a bit like cooking - mixing ingredients together in new and creative ways for a set result," she would say. And she would show Melody the basics of potion-brewing, hoisting her up and letting her throw ingredients in the cauldron.
Sybil also used Dream-healing to help Melody get to sleep every night. The stone carving basin, the Pensieve full of swirling silvery memories, would be set up, a silencing spell would be placed outside the room, and then Sybil would show her beautiful images and sounds floating out of the Pensieve. Melody would feel that tingle of magic, and then slowly and warmly fall asleep in her big Parisian purple and gold bedroom lit with candles or fairy lights.
Garrick would regale her with fabulous tales of harrowing escapades and travels to find new wand-parts. It was always fun when Uncle Garrick came back from a long trip, because he would be brim-full of exciting stories to tell her. He also impressed her with little "inner mind magic trips."
He would look into her eyes - and then all of a sudden she would be standing with him in a room inside her own mind. He showed her how to walk through the halls and access memories in different rooms, how to remember countless things better, how to decorate and arrange her inner mind in any way she pleased. And he taught her how to clear out her frontal mind room in the first step to Occlumency.
There was even more to Melody's early childhood than this. She would be regaled with ancient stories of her wizarding Wiccan Pagan religion. She was taught early on a belief in alternate relationships, alternate races, and all kinds of love. She was taught how to light candles in front of an altar, decorate it with branches, and pray to the God and Goddess before it. She was taught that powerful wizards and witches were seen as a kind of minor god, and she loved tales of the first wand-makers and Druids.
She had two homes with two sets of grounds, and her family regularly moved from one to the other. The Potter Manor was a rustic place with high mahogany ceilings and great stone fireplaces and warm colors. Out on the grounds was a small field for flying, a broom shed, and then a forest. The Flamel Chateaux was sophisticated and cultured, European in style, with lots of lovely silk and gold trimmings in fantastical colors. Out back was a series of interconnecting, hedged-in gardens and a big stone fountain in the center.
Slowly, Melody explored more and more of her homes and their grounds. Her goal was eventual complete independence in these places - to know them in and out and be able to go anywhere all on her own.
Her purple and gold wizarding Parisian bedroom with its four poster bed was slowly filled with all the fantastical things she was gifted as a little girl. The colorful walls were painted with moving decals, and a big indoor swing was placed in the center of the bedroom. When they moved houses, all of her bedroom was sucked up inside a little box and then spat back out at a bedroom in the other house. The house-elves always moved with them, and they were some of tiny Melody's closest friends, always delighted and patient with her.
Melody was slowly forming her own fantastical, private little world.
The family celebrated Winter Solstice together over a series of days. That first year was all about establishing family traditions.
Their first ritual was a Candlelight Circle. The family gathered around the dining table, Melody trying not to squirm. An unlit new red taper candle in a candleholder was placed before each family member, then a larger pillar candle in a candleholder to represent the family as a whole and the Solstice Sun.
One of Melody's parents would begin an old story about Winter Solstice, how it had been celebrated across wizarding time, and its connection to modern Christmas celebrations. Then they would talk about attuning themselves to the ways of the ancestors and Nature.
The lights were extinguished. There were a few moments of silence. Then the central candle was lit with a brief wish for a blessing, followed by the lighting of all the other candles. The family would finish by sitting around the dark, candle-lit, warm table and singing songs together.
Their second ritual was a Yule Log. An oak log decorated with red ribbons and holly leaves was put in the fireplace. An old story would be told by one parent about the Oak King and the Holly King from sacred Celtic mythology - the same mythology that decided Hogwarts being built on ancient Celtic ground. There were another few moments of darkness and silence. Then the Yule Log was lit. As it burned, everyone took turns throwing dried holly sprigs into the fire and saying farewell to the old calendar year. The burning bonfire in the fireplace always smelled wonderful, and the Potter Manor was perfect for it.
Once more, the family would sing old songs gathering around the fire together as the wonderful-smelling Yule Log burned.
Of course, there would always be a massive Yule tree. They would decorate the tree with candles, red ribbons, shimmering tinsel, and magically non-popping golden bubbles. One of their favorite traditions was to litter crackers among the leaves to be popped on what might be called Christmas Day. Clouds of blue smoke erupted from the crackers and all sorts of fantastical things came out, from silly hats to live animals. Sometimes they hired tiny, colorful fairies to decorate their tree as lights during the season. Melody loved talking to the fairies, borrowing their tiny, colorful silk books.
In general, Melody had an early childhood fascination with any book she didn't immediately understood - from runic texts to fairy books, monster books, and books written with invisible ink. She loved unicorn horns, too, and colorful ink, and any kind of potion ingredient that glittered. She could be endlessly fascinated by the look of the gold her alchemist parents could produce - not even understanding or caring about its true value. She already knew she looked best in rich, jewel-like shades. Sometimes she had conversations about fashion with her mirror.
On what was often called Christmas Day, while the house-elves made the feast, Melody's family sat around the fire and opened gifts. Melody's parents told Solstice Stories, usually old favorites. Some of them were personal family and ancestor stories, and Melody was told on these occasions stories of her own birth parents while they were alive as well. It was on these occasions that she was always handed her first precious moving photographs of her parents, that she learned their names, that she learned they had died.
This was all she understood as a little girl, the most that they told her. She never read the Daily Prophet that came by owl every morning. She knew that there was a Ministry of Magic, that there were other wizarding countries, but she understood very little about them.
The gifts were always placed in a big cauldron, and they were not usually the kinds of gifts most people thought of, the kind she got in everyday life or on her birthdays. Much more often, they were agate and quartz crystals, animal figurines and exotic seashells, candles, bells, and sweets. The wrapping paper always moved and shimmered with real, colorful figures.
At one point during every Christmas Day, Uncle Albus would Floo in using the main fireplace. Uncle Albus was the fun one, so Melody would fly forward and squeal in delight as he lifted her up beaming. He would tell her an entire new kind of interesting stories, the kind she didn't usually hear, and he would gift her with eccentric little pieces of clothing and with moving picture books about fascinating and rare magical artifacts. He always wanted to hear all about how she was getting on. He would ask her about the latest things she had learned from her parents, and add in little teaching details himself. Uncle Albus and Uncle Nicolas would play wizard's chess and talk alchemy.
Samhain, or Halloween, was a different matter. Melody would get to bob for apples, and she would do crafts like make door wreaths or jack-o-lanterns filled with candles with her parents. One thing they would always do is take her on Samhain afternoon to a wizarding bat retreat, so she could walk among the dark caverns full of dripping water and softly fluttering bats. Another thing they would always do is hire dancing skeletons to accompany their main nighttime Samhain feast with the bobbing for apples. Baking pumpkin and pumpkin juice and wizarding-themed sweets were always included at these feasts. Butterbeer, elderflower wine, and Firewhiskey were added for the adults. Ghost and ghoul stories, tales of dark magical creatures, were always prevalent.
"Darkness is a part of ancient history. We all used to be rather Dark," Uncle Nicolas admitted. "The modern Dark just hasn't let go of the past - nor of all their resentment over all the wizarding children who died during the witch hunts, nor of their distrust of Muggles who used to despise wizards so much. Add in their love for the Old Ways, and you have the Dark in a nutshell.
"The problem is, they use all this to justify killing innocent people. This explains some of our greatest rebels and uprisers."
Valentine's Day was a different matter. Aunt Sybil, Uncle Garrick, and Melody would spend all morning crafting and baking gifts for Nicolas and Perenelle. Then Nicolas and Perenelle would sit around and have story time, smiling at each other full of fond romantic memories.
Finally, the family would go out onto the still-icy pond on the grounds, the same one Melody learned to swim in during the summertime - and they would all go ice skating together. Ice skating and baking and romance became indelibly imprinted in Melody's mind as all going hand in hand. She began dreaming of and imagining her own romance, or romances, that would last hundreds of years when she herself learned alchemy. She didn't mind if it was a girl or a boy, one person or more than one, but she wanted that - wanted it so badly.
Melody's second birthday was on July 31st, and the only person there besides her four parents was again Uncle Albus Dumbledore. For her birthday, her family established yet another tradition and had a fantastical tea and garden party out on the grounds.
There was a sweets shoppe them, a woodland owl theme, a donuts and daisies theme, and an Alice in Wonderland garden inspired theme with real fairies again as lights - all going hand in hand.
As Melody ran shrieking and laughing around the splendor, long curls and colorful dress in place - she had somehow found a way to be chased by the house-elves, the garden gnomes, and the fairies all at the same time - the five adults smiled fondly and watched her.
"She really has adjusted quite well, hasn't she?" Dumbledore said quietly, watching Melody closely. "I was afraid she would adjust poorly to being a girl…"
"Well, she won't even remember being a boy, will she?" said Sybil rhetorically. "We've already told her, in addition to her parents and that they've passed, about Shifting and that she used to be a boy… It's like alternate relationships and our special kind of spirituality for her. She's growing up with it, so she's just accepted it as a part of our world."
"She is really quite a marvelously adaptable young girl," said Nicolas, pleased. "She seems to love it here -"
"Safe and enclosed and protected," said Garrick quietly, for he knew the real point to Albus Dumbledore.
"I am glad she is with us. And loved. The more I learn about that aunt of hers, the less I trust her," said Perenelle stiffly, displeased.
"Yes," said Albus, watching Melody play. "How different her life might have been…
"But no. She is a wonderfully spirited young girl, and changed forever. This is who she is now.
"Though I do wonder what will happen as she grows older… and as she starts to want to know what the world and people her own age look like outside this enchanted little place…"