The morning of my sixth awakening began with a scream, a sneeze, and a suspicious trail of biscuit crumbs leading directly to Renauld Swayne's bed. I blinked into consciousness, my dream already vanishing into the ether like steam off a kettle, and sat up in time to catch my sister barrelling into the room.
"Ren, did you try to read Beth's mind again?"
"No," I said immediately, which, as everyone in the household had learned, usually meant "yes, but I haven't figured out how to not look guilty about it yet."
Hannah crossed her arms and tapped her slipper against the wooden floorboards. "She says you stared at her for three whole minutes and then asked if her favourite colour was 'yellow, but only on Wednesdays.'"
"Well," Renauld (which is my name now! What do I know?meh!) sniffed, brushing crumbs off his pajamas, "was I wrong?"
Hannah stared.
He stared back.
"…It's chartreuse," she said, narrowing her eyes. "You're losing your touch."
"Legilimency is hard," he groaned, flopping back onto his pillow like the world's most dramatic noodle. "Especially when you've got the magical finesse of a potato."
It had been six years since he was reborn into the magical world. He didn't remember the exact moment he 'awoke'—not in the baby Moses sense, with dramatic clouds and swelling orchestras. More like... a software update. Dreams began to feel more structured. His thoughts more layered. Bits of his past life filtered in, uninvited and annoyingly detailed.
He remembered the Covid-19 lockdown, his old apartment in London, the perpetual grey. He remembered dying, unceremoniously, without glory or fanfare. Just one last breath. And then—this.
A second life.
A chance.
Renauld wasn't bitter. He wasn't grateful either. Just... resigned. If the universe wanted him to try again, fine. But he was doing it on his own terms.
He practiced magic every chance he got. The wandless variety, since his own wand was still years away. Small things: floating spoons, conjuring lights, levitating socks. He succeeded in levitating a bug once. Briefly. Before it exploded.
Then came the great pepper shaker incident.
"Accio pepper!" he cried, pointing dramatically at the table.
Nothing happened.
"ACCIO PEPPER!" he repeated, with equal parts hope and delusion.
A nearby glass of milk exploded instead.
Emma Atkins appeared seconds later, towel in hand, expression set to 'grandmotherly disappointment #6.'
"Renauld, dear," she said, dabbing the milk off his face, "magic isn't just about yelling louder. You sound like you're summoning a demon, not a condiment."
"But it twitched!" he insisted.
"That was your sister's elbow."
"…Ah."
Despite the failures—and there were many—Renauld never stopped trying. He practiced wandless Lumos under his blanket with a toy wand. He tried (and failed) to read his goldfish's mind. He memorized the Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1) cover to cover, even though he technically didn't own it yet.
Somewhere deep inside, a fire burned. Quiet, steady, and impossible to put out.
He was going to succeed. He had not come back from death, reincarnated into a magical world, just to be average. He would master legilimency. He would crack wandless magic. He would carve a path for himself—not because of prophecy or power, but because he was stubborn enough to treat ambition like a religion.
The Atkins household—grandparents Emma and Thomas, sister Hannah, and the ever-vexing Renauld—sat snugly on the edge of the countryside, equal parts peaceful and eccentric. Thomas, a retired surgeon, had a mild obsession with crossword puzzles and war documentaries. Emma, a proud squib descended from the noble but pruned Black family, kept her secrets behind lace doilies and lavender perfume.
Olenna, their daughter and Renauld's elusive mother, was a name mentioned rarely but with sharp inflection. She worked for the Ministry in a department no one spoke of—an Unspeakable, naturally—and dropped in like a shadow now and again, always when the children were asleep.
"She does important work," Thomas would say with a tight smile.
"She's hiding something," Hannah muttered once.
"She wears too much perfume," Renauld added, unhelpfully.
Still, her presence loomed in odd ways: letters without return addresses, advice passed down secondhand through Emma, and occasionally, a warded trinket tucked into Renauld's sock drawer. She was a mystery wrapped in a career wrapped in a lie.
And Renauld—newly aware of who he had been and who he might become—had started to catalogue everything: strange expressions, magical books with notes in the margins, odd glances from shopkeepers.
He was preparing.
Preparing for what, he didn't know. But preparation made the chaos quieter.
And with his birthday approaching, he sensed that things were about to change.
Soon, he would be receiving his letter. Then his wand. Then Hogwarts.
And after that? Everything.
Even if he had to blow up a few more milk glasses and traumatize a goldfish or two to get there.
Thomas and Emma Atkins were gentle, if not eccentric in the most charmingly British of ways.
Thomas, a retired surgeon who now spent his days muttering at crosswords and sipping brandy at precisely five o'clock, was a man of quiet intellect and sudden emotional bursts. He had the sort of pride that didn't need announcing—he just existed in it.
Emma Atkins, née Black, was a study in contradictions. A proud squib descended from the venerable (and frankly unhinged) House of Black, she held her chin high and spoke with the tone of someone who could absolutely win any debate, even if she had no idea what the subject was. Her home smelled faintly of lavender and old paper, and her memory was as sharp as her tongue.
"You can always tell when a child is special," she often mused over tea, her eyes scanning Renauld with unnerving accuracy. "They carry it about them, like a scent."
Renauld would grunt in response, eyes never leaving his book or chocolate frog.
But he liked her. Both of them, actually. They had raised him and Hannah with care, even if a touch outdated. They didn't pry too much, didn't coddle unnecessarily. They trusted them.
Still, Renauld couldn't help but note how often they paused when the subject of his mother came up.
Olenna Swayne was a ghost in their lives—mentioned sparingly, seen even less. She had once been a rising star at Hogwarts, sorted into Slytherin, and later recruited into the Department of Mysteries. Or so they said.
"She's doing important work for the Ministry," Thomas would mutter, as if trying to convince himself. "Confidential. You understand."
But Renauld, whose intuition had sharpened alongside his memories, understood that "confidential" was a euphemism for "unfathomable." His mother worked with the Unspeakables. The name alone was practically a dare not to investigate.
She showed up occasionally—always in shadow, never when the children were awake. Once, Renauld thought he glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye during a thunderstorm—tall, elegant, with something serpentine in the way she moved. But by the time he blinked, she was gone. No note. No scent. Just the feeling of having been observed.
Hannah didn't speak much of her. She was old enough to remember the nights spent waiting by the front door, the birthdays missed, the promises left unfulfilled. But if she ever cried, she did so in silence.