WHO: @ofxdedalus. [closed]
WHERE: Ollivanders, Hogsmeade Branch.
WHEN: 14th April, 2003.
Hogsmeade had never been Rabastan’s haunt of choice.
It was quaint — a too-sweet gingerbread village, dusted in a healthy helping of confectioner’s sugar snow and tailored to attract the children who inhabited the castle it had sprung up in the weeds of. It had none of the hustle of Diagon on a busy day, but rather a sleepy shuffle that some might find charming, if they were already resigned to the inevitability of death, he supposed. It was difficult to imagine why his whims had brought him here today, other than the rare but pressing need to be far from the Estate, here where the rubbernecked members of the Hogsmeade Small Business Association would no doubt be up in arms about an (acquitted) ex-convict roaming their precious cobblestones like a bandit. What he did know is that the sign, swinging gently in a gust of wind, turned his head and he turned with it.
With the cheerful jingling of store bells he loped inside the second-tier branch of Ollivanders, neck craning curiously towards the endless stacked boxes housing wands that had been deemed worthy of a second location. It was precisely the kind of place he had never needed to enter in his life — both of his wands had been plucked from the vaults of Lestrange heirlooms. But it occurred to him, rather belatedly, that a wandmaker might have some insight into the growing idiosyncrasies of his own wand and if that wandmaker was not about to go blabbing about his having been here to his brother, all the better.
When the bells from the door failed to produce anyone from the back of the shop Rabastan stalked further through the stacks of wands, finding the counter huddled amidst them and reaching over to hit the second bell there with a flourish. A scrambling sound from somewhere beyond the door followed and Rabastan settled for hopping up onto the edge of the counter, feet swinging aimlessly as his eyes fixed somewhere between a teetering pile of boxes in the back corner and nowhere. Was that candy? He plucked a piece from the bowl nestled next to the register to inspect it and added a helpful, “Ding dong,” to the empty air, “There’s a robbery happening in here,” he wrinkled his nose as he popped the candy into his mouth — some Honeydukes monstrosity no doubt — and the itch of boredom crept into his fingers, like he perhaps wanted to see what would happen if he just opened one of those boxes and—
“Diggle,” his mind hadn’t been so very turned by Azkaban that he couldn’t recognise someone he’d been to Hogwarts with and Bash’s head turned sharply to fix upon the face that appeared in the doorway. “A year above me. You were a—” his head tilted, tongue catching between his teeth in thought before it was shaken loose, “One of the boring ones, I suppose, but we all have our own skunks to skin don’t we?”
Sliding off the counter with a silent oops as if he were at all ashamed to have been caught, he continued helpfully, “I was hoping you might solve a mystery for me Diggle.”
