~oo00oo~
Chapter 3
Metamorphosis
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It was hours after I woke that first time and started plotting that another healer entered my hospital room. I had spent the time trying to organize the memories and knowledge of a young woman born in the 21st century with an older woman born almost a hundred years before her. What comparisons I could make between the history that the young woman remembered and the time that the old woman had lived showed no significant differences with one exception, of course.
Magic.
In this world magic was real. I did pause, though, to think that perhaps the young woman was simply a muggle and had not known magic existed. It hardly mattered. The world I would live in, and the society I existed within, had magic and that was what really mattered.
I tried to sleep in fits and starts, each time it seemed that I dreamt of impactful moments of my past lives. I was both of these people, but I was me and me was not one of them alone. This was not a meeting of water and oil, I was a whole new person made up from their lives. The old woman was prepared to allow a child to be raised in abuse and die in a war most thought was over because Albus had told her to do so. The young woman would never have allowed such a thing. Child abuse to raise a child soldier? There was no way that was acceptable. The lives of the many could be saved in a different way than deciding to sacrifice someone molded to die. I was of the same mind as the young woman, there was no reason to allow such a thing to happen. But I was also tempered by the older woman who understood the cost of war with a closeness the young woman had never known. Something had to be done and during these fitful hours I had started a vague plan of how to do it.
I was more alert with this healer, and more knowledgeable about what was going on, I asked questions and prodded them for information. I knew that most magic and potions worked on muggles and squibs just fine, but not nearly as well as they worked for people who could actively use their magic with a wand. I wanted some recommendations for who to see or what to take to help my aging body, it wasn't that long ago that I remembered being a healthy 25 year old and now I was dealing with the difficulties of an under cared for 45 year old body. I received a list of things that would be useful and a list of people to seek out for help. I wouldn't be able to make my body younger, but I would be able to patch it up better with magic. At that moment I felt as though I was closer to 80 than 50 and it was caused by the older woman's emotional issues more than anything else.
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The older woman hadn't truly lived a desperately hard life. Her family would be considered upper middle class in the magical world. She had lived through depressions, wars and attacks, but her body hadn't taken much more damage than stress. She hadn't been cast out when she didn't receive her letter to Hogwarts. It had been a surprise, to be sure, as she had been helping her mother with common potions for the house and gardens since she was nine. She had tried a few spells with a family wand and completely failed to produce any magic, but they had thought that was perhaps because it wasn't a wand of her own. Some magic could be temperamental like that, needing a properly matched wand to channel it into anything of use. After the shock had worn off her parents had decided that she would find her place in the world regardless of how much magic she did or didn't have and they started her working with animals and plants right away.
It's a little acknowledged fact that many squibs live on the fringes of magical society. They usually work in the fields of magizoology or herbology. As they still have passive magic, they can work with a great many varieties as long as they don't mind the danger. She had found that her magic reacted strongest while working with a litter of kneazles that had made their home in the family barn. It was an amazing warmth that filled her as she bonded with the kittens. She imagined that must be how people felt when they find the right wand. It was this that had started her journey in becoming a specialist breeder of kneazles. It was an acceptably profitable endeavor and helped her feel more magical when she was surrounded by her darlings.
During the time before the war she had become quite well known in the squib circles for her abilities with kneazles. She could, to some degree, communicate with them and that was a rare gift. There were animal speakers out there, the most famous being a Hogwarts founder, but there had never been a known squib who could communicate the way that she could. It gave her a sense of pride that she had this ability even if she would never use a wand. Before she had reached twenty she had a fairly well built business and a reputation that proceeded her. Her breeds were always more intelligent than the already smart kneazles that were on the market and she always had a contract going with the various menageries in Britain to be filled during the summer months. This allowed new students their choice of smart familiars before going off to school. She had even started branching out into European markets just before the war began in earnest.
Later on though, during the war, she had been asked to use her abilities with kneazles to find information. She had struck on the fact that she appeared to be a harmless middle aged woman with a large fondness for cats. She used this as a mask as she drifted between the muggle and magical worlds. No one paid attention to the cat lady. And if the old maid cat lady act in the muggle world was enough to render her invisible, just being a squib in the magical world was enough for her to fade into the background. Throughout the seventies she had spied and kept watch, and no one knew what was going on like she did. Her connections and her ability to act to the point of social invisibility was unmatched.
But there was never any true call for her to fight or to heal the wounded in the battles between the acolytes of Voldemort and Dumbledore. She did not have the power to do so, it was her ability to garner information that kept her in a high place at the Order table. The physicality of the spying had not done this harshness to her body. It was the emotional consequences of the war that had worn her body down. The sadness of loss that stopped her from taking care of herself. The push to continue on through grief that had set into her bones. The prejudice that she faced, both real and perhaps imagined, that had kept her from seeking out magical help for issues easily cared for with a potion or a wave of a healer's wand. There was an aspect of her grief here too. A mistrust of healer's magics, because it couldn't always heal that which had been harmed.
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After retrieving my things, a bundle of packages and a handbag, I used the floo to get back to my house. There was very little that was magical in the house. This was for the best as I lived in a muggle area and had to play sitter to many of the children around me. As part of my cover I had offered to be a sitter to the many young parents of the neighborhood. It was a young, up-and-coming type of place and there were quite a number of boys and girls that might need a sitter at a moment's notice. I was the harmless old cat lady down the way that could fill in when needed.
There were 17 cats and kittens in total right now and they all gathered around me as I stepped out of the fireplace, one of the few concessions to magic that was out in the open. They seemed wary of me at first. They definitely recognized that I was a new person, but at the same time I was the older woman too. I spent a few minutes cooing over them and easing their worries. I hadn't lost the ability to communicate with them after I had merged into a new person, that was a good thing. It would be very difficult to explain how I had suddenly lost that ability.
After the cats had been soothed, I put the packages away in the expanded linen closet that was hidden from view. It was a place for me to hide most of the magical items that I had. Everything from moving photographs and books on magical history to an old cauldron I couldn't let go of and a set of enchanted baskets for new kittens. The packages were Christmas presents I had found at Al Farooq Alley. They had wonderful secondhand shops along the alley as well as good quality but inexpensive wares. I had been able to purchase a present for the last people on my list there before I had gotten caught in that fight the day before Christmas. I had missed the holiday itself, having spent it in St Mungo's, but I was sure that my friends would understand the late gifts. For now, I simply stacked them in a little shelving unit and went back to my kitchen.
I needed to make lists and plans. That was definitely the influence of the younger woman. She loved lists. She had a near unnatural fondness for bullet points and sticky notes. The younger woman thrived in an organized environment and so made sure her environment was as orderly as she could make it. She was the type of person that scheduled out cleaning and did chores like grocery shopping with a planned precision that may have bordered on a compulsive disorder, but was more likely to be part of an autistic spectrum. As I settled in with paper and pen at the kitchen table, I turned my mind to the younger woman's memories.
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There had never been a time without the world of Harry Potter for the young woman. Her parents, Christopher and Sarah Harrison, couldn't have remembered a time without the story either. She was the child of two people who had lucked out in finding someone just as nerdy and geeky as themselves and had gone on to raise her with those same interests. Her father was a math teacher who loved all things scifi and fantasy. Her mother was an estate agent with a national company who had a passion for old school tv shows like the original Buffy and books like Harry Potter.
The younger woman grew up watching the various Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter shows and movies. Marvel movies were being rebooted again too, not that her father cared for these new takes on his old favorites. She was definitely named after the character on Buffy, Willow, and her mother found it especially funny given how close their last name was to another character. She had read all of the Harry Potter books, as well as Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and Narnia before she even finished primary school as her parents had taken to reading them as bedtime stories.
After school she did a tech program and got a data entry job fairly quickly. She used the money to rent a nice sized place for herself and her two cats, Mr Fuzzybottom and Mr Twinkletoes. Often just referred to as Fuzzy and Twinkle. She had adopted them from the shelter together as they were adorably attached to each other.
Her paycheck also fueled her hobby of building computers. She had built a number already. Most of them were just tricked out as far as color and lighting went, but she'd been able to customize them for higher level graphics that gamers needed.
Her life had been rather ordinary really. She had traveled outside of the country a bit, but only far enough for a beach break with her friends. She had an online book club that she enjoyed a lot as it introduced her to works that are old enough to be in the public domain. But she had never done anything truly exciting, especially not when compared to the life of a spy in a magical world.
What she did have, though, was a sharp and well organized mind filled with knowledge about Harry Potter and the bigger picture that Albus often kept to himself. The problem with that knowledge was that some of it was contradictory. There had been the books, then the movies, then the play, then more movies, and then a reboot, then the tv series. All of which added more and more to the wonderful world, but didn't all work well together. And what about all of the games? Did those count as canon? The problem of how much of her knowledge was canon and how much was fanon was difficult to get passed. There was also just so much fanfiction that she had read that could be influencing how she remembered things.
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