1 A Promise Of Fire

The first sensation I could feel, was a constant throbbing at the back of my head. It wasn't painful, per se, but it was annoying just enough to grab my attention, and just like that, as I instinctively moved my hand to cover the building pain at the base of my head, I discovered that I had a body.

With the sense of touch and self-awareness, came the distant but persistent, throbbing pain in the back of my head, where, by touch alone, I found something that felt like a splinter.

I hissed in pain as my fingers found the offending appendage, and I started pulling it out of my skin, methodically so that it wouldn't break further and leave behind other pieces of wood.

"-beus! Rubeus! Are you well, my son?" my hearing returned fuzzily as the splinter that I was holding between my nails finally abandoned the wound. Even so, I blinked heavily a couple of times as I forced myself to stand, my hands failing to find purchase on the minute shoulder of a child that was busy hollering in my ear with a voice deeper than I would have imagined a child capable of.

Once I was to my feet, I eyed with a frown the child dressing up as a wizard that barely reached above my elbow: "Rubeus!" he called... me?

"Rubeus are you well?" the child dressing up as a cheap Gandalf spoke.

Who the fuck is... I opened my mouth to try and calm down the child in the scary good wizard costume, when another voice made my eyes snap up.

"Oh, my, such a reaction from a wand I didn't expect, oh no. I'm terribly sorry Mr. Hagrid, but wands not always follow our expectations."

It was a voice I knew well. I voice that I heard endless times both as a kid and as an adult, John Hurt's voice: the actor that spoke as a dragon in Merlin, as head of the dictatorship in V for Vendetta, and the actor that had been... Ollivander.

My eyes bulged out as a Jhon Hurt that didn't look one day older than 25, and that to be truthful didn't resemble the actor I had seen him as, but the voice, oh, that was the same. Then the words he spoke hit me.

"Wands?" I repeated, feeling a deep baritone voice I was utterly unfamiliar with leave my lips as I studied the room I was in.

It was a tiny place, empty except for a feel of importance that I couldn't really grasp. I felt somewhat as though I had entered a very strict library. I forced myself to swallow a lot of questions which had just occurred to me, which ranged from what the hell was happening to what kind of wands he did have in store, and looked instead at the thousands of narrow boxes piled neatly right up to the ceiling.

As I watched transfixed at the countless lines of wands, I felt a whisper of wind against the back of my neck, the very dust and silence in there seemed to tingle with some secret magic. I felt almost like I was underwater, like I had corked ears due to the shift in pressure, but it wasn't it. I raised one hand and dragged it in front of my face, expecting to feel some kind of resistance, so I frowned when it moved normally trough the air.

Ollivander busied himself around me to pick up the mess that I had made when I fell, likely before my awakening with hat now I realized had been a broken wand embedded in my head.

Ollivander was holding the snapped pieces of bloodied wood in his hands with a sorrowful look on his face, all the while the... not a child. I stopped myself, returning my attention to the concerned... actual wizard? Is this real? Who was busy tugging at my sleeve: "Rubeus, answer me! Are you well?"

I nodded gruffly: "It's nothing." I replied, with my voice still deeper than the one I was used to, and as I spoke I noticed how the man had been calling me, along with the Mr. Hagrid that the young Ollivander had offered. Does this mean?

I looked myself over, realizing that it wasn't the small man to my side that was under dimensioned, but that I was at least two meters tall, maybe with something to spare.

I took a deep breath, trying to not freak out. Rubeus Hagrid, the half-giant that never tried to do magic since he got expelled? The one that went to school with Riddle but never managed to learn stuff? Oh shit...

"Well, Mr. Hagrid, you're still alive, and welcome surprise as it is, perhaps we should return to matching you with your wand, shouldn't we?" Ollivander's voice made itself known after he deposited the pieces of the broken wand on one side of his desk.

Then I started trying wands, first with my left, then with my right, as to be truthful, I had no idea which arm would be better for casting magic in a fictional world while I overtook the body of one of the more iconic characters.

"Pine, with a very old Ukrainian Ironbelly heartstring, exactly 13 inches, stiff."

I slowly raised it with my left, feeling a tingle from my wrist to my elbow, encouraged, I waved it toward my left: boom, and gone was the vase in the corner.

The flowers inside were dead anyway. Even while thinking that, I put down my wand feeling a bit guilty: what if I simply wasn't worthy of a wand? Hagrid clearly hadn't needed one to live happily, but I wasn't exactly as simple-minded as the half-giant of the books had been.

What if being... what the fuck am I?... what if my presence would prevent me from using a wand?

"Whistlethorn, with a Snidget tail feather, ten and a quarter inches, rather bendy." I felt a zap stopping at my fingers there and waving it again towards the vase' shards I caused them to embed themselves into the wooden wall. This answers my question on the materials he uses, I thought belatedly, even if he can't have that much experience now, can he? Hagrid went to school with Voldemort, and Riddle was around 50 years before canon, wasn't he?

"Eleven inches of mahogany, with a single Nundu's whisker, very springy." That one burned my fingers before I could do anything with it.

What am I going to do? I grimaced inside the safe confines of my mind as I tried a wand after another, should I give up magic? Was I stuck inside Hagrid's body? It wouldn't make easy disappearing among Muggles, would it? What to do, what to do...?

Ollivander went on giving me sticks to wave around for a full half an hour with varying degrees of success, before humming some more as he returned to rummage through his endless aisles of magic sticks.

Without really realizing what was happening, and without hearing Ollivanders words, I grasped yet another wand, immediately feeling repulsed by it. It didn't even distract me from my funk, should I give it a try and assassinate Riddle while he was at school? But he hadn't done anything bad yet, had he? Would you kill Hitler if you met him as a child? Would you do in Cortés knowing that he would lead the extermination of the Aztec? I... I kind of would. I realized.

And right now Riddle wasn't a Dark Lord yet, merely a very squishy teenage wizard, and I was riding the body of a demi-giant, one that I remembered tanking stunners from the Harry Potter books.

Maybe I shouldn't take my situation as something bad. I thought as yet another wand failed to elicit a reaction out of me. I'm here, maybe Hagrid was shit at magic, and even somewhat insane, but I sure as hell am not.

As that last thought travelled through my mind, I managed to focus once more on the people and the events around me. If Hagrid managed to crossbreed whatever the fuck the Blast-Ended Skrewts were, without instruction and without a wand, what was to say I couldn't do much more? Who was to say I couldn't do every absurd thing that came to my mind? Who was to say that I couldn't manage to forge Narya inside a volcano? Or cross-breed a Venusaur out of nothing? Who was to say that I couldn't be the actual best thing happened to the world since sliced bread?

Another thought washed over me: what if I stop Hiroshima and Nagasaki? No, that would fuck up the war and maybe we would be ruled over by Nazi, but hiding the people? Helping them? Stop the attack on the World Trade Center? Maybe I'm still in time to save Gandhi.

I could do and become anything I wanted: there were potions to distil liquid luck, spells to call forth storms and create secret passages between walls, Faeries and Cerberi, secrets nobody knew anything about, and the future of the world to shape if a single man was in the position of doing something about it.

And I could. Given the longevity that Hagrid had shown in the books, I had a lot of time to become everything I could be.

To change the world for the better.

A smile blossomed on my face as I watched Ollivander go still for a moment before handing me a wand, his far too large eyes studied me for a couple of seconds before retreating the offering wand: "Very interesting Mr. Hagrid." he spoke softly, making me raise an eyebrow in expectation and the man that I supposed was my father sigh in exasperation as yet another wand was taken from my hands.

"Yes, I wonder..." the wand-maker walked back into his store: "I suspect that the best wands can be made only with the core of phoenix feathers, unicorn tail hair, and dragon heartstring. A few years ago I managed to secure a couple of Phoenix Feathers..."

Oh fuck. I thought as I imagined what was going to happen. C'mon, this cannot be actually happening, what about Potter?

"The wand chooses the wizard. That much has always been clear to those of us who have studied wandlore... These connections are complex. An initial attraction, and then a mutual quest for experience, the wand learning from the wizard, the wizard from the wand." Ollivander spoke softly, "But both the wands that I have crafted out of that particular Phoenix' Feathers seem to wish for a willful wielder..."

The wand-maker returned towards me with a shrewd gaze in his eyes: "Wands cannot choose if their wielder has no direction whatsoever, it is curious that you, Mr. Hagrid, appeared to both lose and find again your direction between the time you were blasted off your feet by that oak wand and this very moment."

"Holly is one of the rarer kinds of wand woods, you know. It is traditionally considered protective, and it works most happily for those who may need help overcoming a tendency to anger and impetuosity. At the same time, holly wands often choose owners who are engaged in some dangerous and often spiritual quest. Holly is one of those woods that varies most dramatically in performance depending on the wand core, and it is a notoriously difficult wood to team with phoenix feather, as the wood's volatility conflicts strangely with the phoenix's detachment." the wand-maker words spoke softly as he regarded the piece of holly in his hands.

He opened yet another case and held it expectantly towards me: "Holly and phoenix feather, eleven inches, nice and supple."

I only needed the first three fingers of my left hand to pick up the wand, and I decided, in that split-second, that I wouldn't care about my foreknowledge, that I would be the fucking best because I had the imagination necessary to be such a person, that I would fuck up the entire course of history in the hope of directing it on a better path, because I could, and because I wanted to.

As I raised my wand, something surged through me, and a spurt of golden flame blossomed from the tip of the holly lenght of wood, accompanied by the echo of a soft thrill in the distance.

And I felt alive.