Soon the day arrived for Hannah to leave again, the Swayne household fell into a peculiar sort of silence. She was beginning her second year now. It wasn't a mournful stillness—rather, it was the odd quiet of a story that had momentarily lost one of its narrators. Without her laughter echoing through the halls, or her nightly complaints about the state of her hair, the world felt unnaturally spacious.
Renauld didn't cry.
He wasn't a crier, not in this life. Not in his last one either, save for a handful of private moments brought on by late-night nostalgia or particularly brutal onion-chopping sessions. But he did feel the absence, like a phantom limb. The air tasted different. The jokes died quicker in his throat. Even the sweets she sent weekly—Chocolate Frogs, Fizzing Whizzbees, and once a cauldron cake that arrived partially exploded—didn't fill the void.
He missed her in ways that surprised him.
With Hannah gone, Renauld took to exploring the house with renewed curiosity. Not childlike curiosity, but something closer to an archaeologist's precision. The attic became a particular source of fascination. There, in between moth-bitten trunks and dust-covered photo albums, lay the scattered remnants of his family's secrets.
He found, to his great amusement, his grandfather's old surgical tools stored beside a box of enchanted cutlery. There was a letter from Dumbledore addressed to Emma, written in that elegant, sweeping script, thanking her for her contributions to the Squib Support Initiative—a program he'd never heard of but now suddenly couldn't stop thinking about. And buried beneath some velvet robes was a faded photograph of Olenna Swayne, younger and smiling, flanked by two Hogwarts professors whose names Ren couldn't quite recall.
She had looked radiant. Dangerous. Almost... mythical.
That was the thing about Olenna. Even in absence, she was loud. She existed as a kind of ripple through their lives—never directly present, but always affecting the current. Yet, still she was a good parent he reckoned, she did well by them he would grudgingly admit.
Emma never spoke ill of her daughter. But her lips would pinch ever so slightly at the mention of her name. Thomas, too, had that same tell: a heavy pause, followed by a hollow chuckle.
"She's doing important work," they always said.
Important work with the Department of Mysteries, which only made things worse. The Unspeakables weren't just secretive—they were an enigma wrapped in a riddle baked into a particularly elusive soufflé. Renauld knew what the Harry Potter books had said about them, but that wasn't much.
In fact, when it came to the books... well, that was a strange relationship too.
He had read them long ago, in his former life—somewhere around secondary school. They had been fun, captivating, if occasionally frustrating. The writing got better over time, though he'd always felt the sixth book—The Half-Blood Prince—was his white whale. He never managed to finish it. Schoolwork, then a breakup, then exams... It simply never happened. And then, well, he died. Not much time for page-turning after that. Luckily, he was smart enough to have read the Deathly Hallows before, so no worries mostly. He is aware about the plot though, more or less. Like he remembered that Snape was actually the Half-blood prince, and Harry learned that cutting curse 'Sectusempra' then.
The films, though, he had watched all of them. More than once. Except, ironically, The Half-Blood Prince.
"I swear it's cursed," he muttered once, lying on the living room floor with a Chocolate Frog perched on his stomach. "Either that, or the universe is just really petty."
Despite the irony of reincarnating into the wizarding world, he wasn't panicked. Not really. Some folks might have spiralled into—existential dread, identity crises, the works. But Ren? He rolled with it. It was weird, yes. Occasionally intrusive. But, also kind of... neat.
Sure, he missed showers with steady water pressure and actual internet, but magic? Magic was cool. Even when it mostly fizzled out of his fingers like static electricity.
He wasn't particularly powerful—yet. But his awakening had given him... tics. He sometimes knew things he shouldn't. Sometimes he could feel emotions hovering around people like perfume. Once, during a school fight, he'd sent a chalkboard flying without lifting a finger. Another time, he'd caused a bully's trousers to vanish, when he got the wonderful idea to turn his attention to him , finding no other targets. He didn't even mean to, really didn't. But as it was, magic is magic.
"Totally justified," he told himself.
His grandparents noticed the changes, of course. Emma in particular had a wary eye.
"He's growing up fast," she told Thomas one evening, teacup trembling slightly in her hand.
"Too fast," Thomas murmured. "He's always watching. Like he knows things he shouldn't."
They weren't wrong.
Renauld had started practicing his own Legilimency. Not formally, not with training, but instinctively. Like brushing one's teeth. He didn't mean to pry—it just happened. Eyes were windows to the soul, and his kept peeking.
John, the neighbor's boy, was his unfortunate test subject. Kind-hearted but mentally adrift, John never noticed Ren's occasional mental nudges. Now, people might get into the ethical side of things, but before you begin screaming your lungs out, children's brains are surprisingly resilient, they can handle a lot more trauma than we give them credit for, I discovered. Now let the drums roll.
Due to his faithful services in my younger years, I had decided to make him my aide or chaperone in the muggle side of things when we grow older. My recent experiments were regards to can we instill intelligence on somebody via the mind arts. The goings were slow though, without any material available to conduct my experiments. But I managed with what little I had, that being just myself.
The leglimency attempts weren't very fruitful when tried over long durations. I didn't know much about the topic, so I simply used him as a practice dummy for my budding wandless magic. The results weren't really much.
Beth, John's sister, was another matter. She was clever, perceptive, and oddly intense. She knew something was off about him, and that made her dangerous. But they had an unspoken agreement: don't ask, don't tell.
Still, she had caught him shrieking once when a moth fluttered near his face.
"I thought you a braver lad," she said, half-laughing.
"Bravery doesn't include winged demons," he snapped, brushing himself off.
The days passed slowly.
Ren filled his notebooks with memories from his past life—songs, movies, recipes. Anything to keep that part of him alive. But something was shifting. As his eleventh birthday approached, the pull of magic grew stronger. The air itself felt charged, like the whole world was holding its breath