August 1993
The last week of August turned the Alley properly chaotic — the specific, cheerful crush of families who’d all decided, apparently by unspoken agreement, that the final days before term were the correct time to buy absolutely everything at once.
I liked it more than I’d expected to.
Busy days meant new faces, and new faces, I was learning, meant more interesting conversations than I’d had any right to expect from a shop selling glasses and rings.
Wand holsters had quietly become the third leg of the business by then, alongside the two products that had started it all.
It hadn’t been a planned addition so much as an inevitable one — between Neville’s and Harry’s custom orders, and my own habit of wearing one on delivery runs, enough people had asked whether I sold them outright that I’d finally given in and stocked a proper display: plain leather in a handful of sizes, unenchanted as sold, with a card explaining that any of them could be fitted with a stabilizing charm, a quick-draw enchantment, or a discretion layer like Augusta’s, priced and added on the spot rather than requiring a week’s wait the way the more ambitious custom pieces did.
Simple leatherwork paired with a single, well-practiced enchantment turned out to be exactly the kind of product I could finish while a customer waited, which made it, in its own quiet way, the most efficient thing on my shelves.
I’d also, that same week, finally put the steady-hand device out for proper sale — the one I’d built back in my very first month, at Mirabel’s suggestion, for the old man who could no longer hold a quill steady.
It had taken this long to feel confident enough in its reliability to trust it to strangers, and I marked the occasion by writing Mirabel a short note along with it, tucked into an envelope I dropped at her counter myself.
Thought you should know — the shaking-hand piece is finally on the shelf, properly tested and ready for real customers.
It wouldn’t exist at all if you hadn’t pointed out the actual need for it rather than just the one man’s request.
Credit where it’s due.
— M.
She’d only grunted something noncommittal when I handed it over, but I caught her rereading it twice before she set it aside, and decided that counted as thanks enough from a woman who treated compliments the way most people treated unexploded ordnance.
..
The woman who knocked over my entire display of wand holsters within four seconds of entering the shop turned out to be one of the more interesting customers of the week.
“Sorry — sorry, I’ll fix it, hang on—” She was already crouched, scooping leather back onto the shelf with more enthusiasm than precision, hair shifting from a startled pink to an embarrassed red as she worked, which told me everything I needed to know about what she was before she’d said a single further word.
“Tonks.
Nymphadora Tonks, but if you call me Nymphadora I will hex you, I don’t care how nice your shop is.”
“Marcus Hale.
And no judgment on the holsters — sturdier than they look, honestly, they’ll survive worse than that.”
“Everything’s sturdier than it looks around me, eventually, or it doesn’t survive long.” She straightened up, considerably more composed once the display was sorted, and I got a proper look at her — young, sharp-eyed despite the chaos, wearing Auror-trainee robes with the slightly rumpled look of someone who’d been on her feet since dawn.
Her eyes drifted back to the holsters, genuine interest replacing the embarrassment.
“Actually — these might solve a problem for me.
I’m forever fumbling my wand out of my sleeve at exactly the wrong moment, which is not an ideal trait in my line of work.”
“Design’s up to you — plain, or dyed, wrist or forearm.
What matters more is the enchantment underneath.
Quick-draw’s the obvious one for what you’re describing, keyed to intent so it releases the instant you actually want it rather than at every stray movement.”
She picked out a plain forearm style within a minute, entirely unfussy about it, and I talked her through the quick-draw enchantment while I worked — a short, practiced piece of spellwork I could layer into the leather in a few careful minutes rather than the days a custom commission usually took.
She watched, fascinated, as the stitching along the inner strap took on a faint, momentary shimmer and settled.
“That’s it?
Actually done, right now?”
“Simple enchantment, well-practiced hands.
Doesn’t need to be complicated to be good.” I handed it across, and she strapped it on immediately, testing the draw with an expression of open delight.
“Brilliant.
Genuinely — how much?”
I quoted her a fair number, and she paid without argument, still turning her wrist to admire the fit.
“I don’t suppose,” she said, glancing back toward the rest of the shop with the same open interest, “you do anything for—” she gestured vaguely at herself, at the general radius of destruction she’d just caused before that, “—this.
The falling-over-my-own-feet part of my personality.”
“Balance and coordination enchantments exist,” I said carefully.
“I haven’t built one myself yet, but it’s a real category, not something I’d be inventing from nothing.
Could be worth trying, if you wanted to be my first attempt at it.”
“Depends how badly your first attempts usually go.”
“Badly, generally, before they go well.
I lost a sock permanently to my first storage ring.”
She laughed, delighted despite herself.
“Honestly?
That’s reassuring.
I’d rather someone honest about the risk than someone who promises it’ll work perfectly and then I end up walking into a wall sideways instead of forwards.” She perched on the edge of my counter, entirely at ease, the way I was starting to notice certain people simply were around shops that didn’t perform anything at them.
“I’ll think about it properly.
Come back once I’m not late for a shift.”
“Auror, I take it?”
“Trainee, technically, though most days I feel like the department’s unofficial cautionary tale.” She said it lightly, but there was real pride underneath the self-deprecation.
“Busy summer for it, too.
Everyone’s still tearing their hair out over the Black situation.”
I kept my tone easy, curious rather than pointed. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Sirius Black?
I’ve seen the Wanted posters.
Can’t say I know much more than that.”
“Nobody does, that’s half the problem.
Man escaped Azkaban — first person ever, properly, which is its own nightmare for the department to explain — and everyone’s running around like he’s got some grand plan, when honestly, we don’t even know that much about him beyond the conviction.” She frowned, the particular frown of someone turning over a detail that had never quite sat right.
“That’s what gets me, actually.
I was reading through the file properly last week, first time I’d had reason to, and there’s no trial record.
Just straight to Azkaban, right after You-Know-Who fell.
No transcript, no witness list, nothing.
Which is bizarre, procedurally — everyone gets a trial, that’s not optional, but there’s just…
nothing on file for him.
I asked my supervisor about it and got a very quick change of subject for my trouble.”
Something in me went very still, filing that detail away with a great deal more care than the rest of the conversation.
“That does sound odd.”
“It’s probably nothing.
Wartime paperwork, chaos, records lost — plenty of ordinary explanations.” She shrugged, already moving past it, the way people do with things that unsettle them but don’t yet feel urgent.
“Anyway.
Not really shop conversation, is it.
Sorry — I do that, talk about work to strangers who didn’t ask.”
“I did ask, technically,” I said, and meant the words more seriously than she probably registered.
She slid off the counter, holster catching the light as she moved, and made it almost to the door before I heard myself speak again, faster than I’d actually decided to.
“Tonks.”
She turned back, eyebrow raised.
“If you’re ever not in a hurry — properly not in a hurry, not just between shifts — I’d be glad to get a coffee sometime.
No particular occasion.
Just conversation, the sort that doesn’t involve Wanted posters or missing paperwork.”
For a moment she looked genuinely thrown, hair flickering through two quick shades of pink before settling on something closer to her own embarrassed flush, and I had the rare, satisfying experience of watching Nymphadora Tonks visibly fail to find a smooth response.
“I — right.
Yeah.
That’d be — yeah, I’d like that, actually.” She recovered enough to grin, lopsided and real.
“You’ll have to catch me on an actual day off, though.
Might take some doing.”
“I’m patient,” I said.
“It’s mostly what this whole year’s been teaching me.”
“I’ll hold you to the coffee, then, same as the balance charm,” she said, and left in considerably more of a hurry than she’d arrived, nearly upending the holster display a second time on her way out — though this time she caught it herself, laughing at her own expense before the door had even swung shut behind her.
I stood there a moment after she’d gone, turning over both halves of the conversation with equal care — the missing trial record, filed away in the section of my book that mattered more than it first appeared to, and the rather more pleasant, rather more distracting fact that I’d just asked someone to coffee for the first time since I’d woken up in this life at all.
I made the note about Black first, because it felt like the more urgent of the two.
Sirius Black.
No trial on record, per Tonks.
Worth watching.
Say nothing yet.
And then, underneath it, smaller, and with an honesty I didn’t examine too closely:
Asked Tonks to coffee.
She said yes.
Don’t overthink this one.
..
Harry came in an hour later, still faintly pink from whatever conversation he’d been having outside, trailing a tall, broad-shouldered young man in Gryffindor colors who had the unmistakable, restless energy of someone who talked with his whole body.
“This is Oliver,” Harry said, by way of introduction, sitting down at his table with the easy familiarity of someone who’d stopped needing an invitation weeks ago.
“Quidditch captain.
He’s been talking my ear off about tactics since we ran into each other outside Quality Quidditch Supplies.”
“Not tactics,” Oliver said, with the particular offended dignity of a man who took the distinction seriously.
“Strategy.
There’s a difference, and Potter here still hasn’t properly grasped it, which is going to cost us against Ravenclaw if he doesn’t sort himself out before September.”
That’s the job.”
“The job is winning the match, and sometimes that means knowing when not to catch it yet, which we’ve discussed at length, repeatedly, and which you keep ignoring in favor of just diving at shiny things.” Oliver turned to me, apparently deciding a shopkeeper was fair game for recruitment into his ongoing campaign.
“You seem sensible.
Back me up here.”
“I know approximately nothing about Quidditch tactics,” I admitted, “but I’m happy to referee the argument on principle, if that helps.”
Oliver laughed, easy and loud, and dropped into the chair beside Harry’s without being asked, the whole conversation sliding naturally into Quidditch the way conversations apparently always did once he was in the room.
I found myself half-listening while restocking a shelf, genuinely charmed by the sheer, uncomplicated enthusiasm of it — formations, near-misses, a truly dramatic account of a Bludger incident from the previous season that had, by Oliver’s telling, nearly ended his career and definitely ended someone’s eyebrows.
“The worst part,” Oliver said, gesturing broadly enough to nearly upset a display, “is you can never actually review it properly afterward.
Everyone remembers the match differently — I say the Chaser was doing one thing, they swears blind they wasn’t, and there’s no way to actually check, because nobody’s found a decent way to record an entire match properly.
Wizarding photographs move, sure, but they’re tiny, and they only capture whatever the photographer happened to be pointing at.
You can’t rewatch an entire game from start to finish.
It just — happens, once, and then it’s gone, and everyone argues about what they remember instead.”
I stopped restocking.
“That’s an actual problem, then,” I said slowly, half to myself.
“Not a nice-to-have.
An actual, real gap.”
Oliver blinked at me, apparently not used to being taken quite this seriously about something he’d offered as a passing complaint.
“I mean — yeah.
Coaches would kill for it.
Referees too, probably, settle half the arguments after every match.”
Harry, watching my expression, grinned.
“You’ve got that look.
The one you get right before you disappear into the workshop for three days.”
“I might,” I admitted, already turning the shape of the problem over, feeling that same itching, delighted pull I’d felt every time a genuinely interesting puzzle landed in front of me since I’d first picked up a wand in this life.
A way to capture an entire match — not a photograph, not a single frozen frame, but the whole thing, replayable properly, start to finish, from whatever angle a person wanted to review it from.
I didn’t have the faintest idea yet how to build it.
But I had, I realized, a very good idea of where to start looking.
I closed the shop that evening later than usual, the day’s conversations still sitting with me in the particular way that meant my brain wasn’t going to let me rest until I’d at least tried to make sense of them.
Sirius Black’s missing trial.
Neville’s frustration with memory that wouldn’t hold still.
Oliver’s Quidditch match that vanished the moment it ended, leaving nothing behind but competing, unreliable versions of what everyone thought they’d seen.
Three different problems.
One shape underneath all of them, if I looked at it properly — memory, evidence, experience, none of it staying put long enough to actually examine once the moment had passed.
I thought, sitting at my workbench with a cup of tea gone cold beside me, about Pensieves — real ones, rare and expensive and, as far as I understood it, restricted almost entirely to a handful of very old families and the occasional Ministry office, extracting and storing memories for later, careful viewing.
Nobody ordinary had ever had real access to one.
Nobody ordinary had ever needed to, I supposed, until you actually thought about how many ordinary problems a device like that could quietly solve — a shaking witness who couldn’t quite trust her own account under oath, a boy who wanted proof his memory wasn’t as unreliable as everyone told him, a Quidditch captain who wanted to know, definitively, whether his Chaser had really been in the wrong.
I went to the ledger that night, later than I usually let myself, and sat with the question for a long while before I actually asked it, because I suspected, even before the price arrived, that this one was going to cost me considerably more than a pair of glasses ever had.
I want to know how to build a more accessible version of a Pensieve — something that can capture and store a memory or a witnessed event for later viewing, without requiring the rare materials or specialized skill a true Pensieve demands.
Doesn’t need to be as refined.
Just needs to actually work, reliably, for an ordinary witch or wizard.
The price was significant.
I decided to have a go at it myself first before bying the knowledge from the shop.
I could take it up as a challenge.
This wasn’t a project for next week.
Realistically, it wasn’t a project I’d finish before Christmas, let alone September if the work load stayed like in august.
But sitting there with ideas for the design already taking shape in my head, I felt something settle into place, quiet joy of having found a problem worth spending the next couple months of my life solving properly.
Realistically: not ready by September.
Start now anyway.
Call it a Memory Basin, until I think of something better.
Could help a lot of people if I build it right and don’t rush it.
I closed the book, banked the fire in the workshop, and went up to bed later than I meant to, already half-designing in my sleep.
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