Chapter 2: Yer a... wait, already made this joke
.Chapter Text
Yer the wizard, Harry.
Or something. You have that fanfic 'Potter' look—eyes as green as a fresh pickled toad and hair as dark as a blackboard—but no scar or glasses. Your hair's neither curly nor frizzy, but the frequently-used descriptor of 'windswept' mostly fits. If it was swept into an entire herd of cowlicks that is. You can see why so many versions of Harry end up growing their hair out if only to contain it in a ponytail.
You flinch away from looking at your eyes closer and decide to check the rest of your body out. You lack the nasty scars that Harry would have picked up—the more famous being the ones on his head, arm, and chest, but do have something like faded birthmark versions of them. Does that mark you as a spiritual successor to Harry? Made from the same mold, but the knock-off unbranded version?
Anyhow, some further poking at yourself and you seem to be much more book-Harry (skinny, pale) than movie-Harry (short, nuggety, Daniel Radcliffe). Despite your waifish build, you do have some muscle tone under the skin including some beefy forearms which you assume comes from Quiddich. That probably means you'd have awesome broom-handling skills. If you had one.
You finally look at yourself directly in the mirror and consider your eyes. Of all of the ink spilled about Harry's eyes, you have one word that occurs to you:
Unnerving.
There's something strange about your eyes. You don't exactly keep Pantone swatches in your pocket, so sure you can call the color 'emerald'. You're not sure that it's the same color every time you look though. Just looking at yourself they seem to shift shades even when you try to stay still. But the most unnerving part is how they react when you actually move. When you flick your eyes away and then back to the mirror they got unnaturally bright and staring out of the corner of your eye made them dark, mysterious pools. There's something not really hypnotic, but alternately eye-catching when you smile and unfriendly when you narrow them. At one point you even turn out the lights and levitate the toiletries just to make sure you don't have the 'lambent aura of power' thing going on. You don't—for now.
After finally getting that drink of water, you wander back and stare at the packets. Everything is weird enough at the moment, but you know somehow that dealing with those papers starts the crazy train a-rollin'. Squaring your shoulders, you pick up both envelopes, note that neither are sealed, and pull everything out into separate piles.
It's not really as bad as you expected. Both are sets of ID and various background papers and records. In one you're 17, mysteriously emancipated because of the deaths of both parents in gang-related violence (thanks fanfiction!), and enrolled in Winslow; the other set has you as 19 and about to start Brockton Bay University after a gap year. A gap year caused by the death of your parents, of course. Can't have any irritating parental units around, dealing with longstanding familial relationships would be too irritating to write.
Each comes with an apartment, and it looks like your parents' life insurance has been set up in a very basic investment account. You have social security cards, driver's licenses, lease paperwork for the apartments, really anything that might be needed to slip into life with nary a ripple…
Except for the names.
You have your choice of being Hauchings Cockworth Honeybottom IV, or Leslie Swaetball Handcock Jr.
What the fuck-oh thank God, poking the name field of the driver's license with your wand (you were considering setting fire to all of it and letting the chips fall where they may) allows you to change the name. Granted, you've changed your name to 'What the fuck', but introducing yourself as Mr. Fuck would still be loads better than Mr. Handcock. You suppose there's always the option of choosing neither and being an illegal alien, too. You could always claim to be a dimensional traveller from a different Earth- it even happens to be true! Or you could just memory charm anyone who ever asked and not have to worry about it. If you, y'know, had any practice on how to Obliviate someone.
Looking over the letter again, you do catch that you can't have both sets of ID- you'll need to choose. It really boils down to…
[X ][ID] Age 19, College student, super tragic dead parent backstory.
Also, these names are horrible. You appreciate dick jokes, but not as a name. Well, no, that's not right. You don't appreciate dick jokes as your name. What little memory you seem to have from before you woke up had you being addressed as something, but that something was less like a name and more like a concept you don't have words for. Instead, you settle for calling yourself:
[X ][Name] James Peverell
You forcibly put those choices out of your mind and take some time to figure out when you are. Your free copy of USA Today tells you it's Friday, January 14th, 2011, which means that Taylor has already triggered. Of course. You don't remember if she's coming back to school this coming week or the next, but there's no way to prevent the locker incident assuming Taylor exists in this reality. At least it's not the day she flexes on Lung, you'd be way behind the power curve. Hopefully by that point you have better anti-dragon measures than flying on a Firebolt you don't have.
Discarding all of those pre-trigger possibilities as a lost cause, you instead pull out your wand and try a few more spells as knowledge seems to slowly filter in to the back of your mind. After a bit of experimentation, you lay back on the bed and consider your more esoteric magical options. In a way, this feels like hoping that somewhere, in all of the crazy amounts of fanfic you've read, you'll get useful iteration out of it and not weird teen girl yaoific versions of stuff.
If you pick parseltongue for example, you can try to spin it so that parselmouths are all masters of secret snake magic, or that parseltongue helps healing, or wards, or just makes snakes more intelligent. Ritual magic would be the same- no two authors treat it the same, it could range between naked-under-the-moon frolicking that ends up merely supercharging normal spells, to a sacrifice-the-goat bloody mess that splits your soul, rendering you immortal. Or maybe it's a nice medium that'll allow you to find a ritual that allows you to sacrifice a ton of rubber bands and chant naked under the moon for the ability to extend your tongue for use in sex magic, that'd be nice. You've read a lot of fanfic, not all of it well-written or competently plotted after all. The possibilities are endless, and that's not always a good thing.
In the end, you decide to focus on a phrase to see what bubbles up, then you can start the assimilation of your magical memories from there. The phrase you focus on is:
[X][Magic] The Mind Arts