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“The wizarding world, is perhaps the most cruel place to ever exist on this plane of reality. But you’ll do fine.” Garrick’s father says to him one day when he’s examining an elegant wand.
Garrick looks up at him from his seat in front of his father’s desk. His father is giving him one of his rare smiles. The creases on his forehead smooth out and his face looks ten years younger, not handsome, but gentler.
His father goes back to examining the wand, and the smile is gone, replaced by concentration as he runs long fingers over the hilt.
“Tell me what type of wand this is.” He commands, handing it to Garrick. Garrick takes it from him and sniffs it. It’s definitely silver birch. He touches the wood gently and brings it to his ear.
Magic swims gently in her core and he hears the soft, melodious sound of a unicorn hair whispering against the wood and pulsing happily when he strokes her.
It’s relatively sturdy when he applies pressure to the ends, and will be quite loyal to its owner.
“Sturdy, silver birch and unicorn hair Sir.” He says, handing it back to his father who gently slides it into a box and levitates it back onto a shelf.
When he’s done, Garrick’s father studies him for a moment, and a ghost of the former smile tickles at the edges of his lips. “Ollivander’s will flourish under your care.”
. . .
Garrick likes watching his father make wands.
He sits hunched over his work desk, magical lights bobbing around his head as he keeps up a constant stream of incantations.
The wood, ebony, bends under his father’s magic like liquid being sculpted around a single, glistening unicorn hair. It flows and ebbs as his father’s will changes its shape again and again until it is a solid ten inch wand with minute swirls and waves carved into the hilt. The rest of the wand is smooth and tapered. It’s a stubborn, but elegant wand, with the grace and purity that always accompanies unicorn hair.
The incantations continue for a few moments longer and then a soft breeze ruffles Garrick’s hair. His father sniffs the wand and lets out a satisfied sigh.
Garrick makes his way to his father’s desk on which magical texts and work materials are laid out neatly, quite the opposite of him. He’s messy and a bit scatterbrained. His workspace has texts and ripped out pages smeared with ink from his notes. It earns him many lectures on the importance of a tidy workspace, but ultimately he’s left to his own devices.
His father hands him the wand and he dutifully exits and finds an appropriately labeled box to lay it in. On his way he tests the flexibility, finding it absolutely rigid. Definitely stubborn, but incredibly powerful.
Unicorn hair is the most common core in the shop, so the box goes to the shelf labeled ebony in the largest of the three sections. The second largest holds dragon heartstring cores and the smallest has only a few hundred phoenix feather cores.
As he goes back to the work room, he feels the magic inside of the wands stir and chatter slightly at the arrival of new kin. The already present tingling in the air from such a high concentration of magic rises minutely. Normally, a person wouldn’t be able to sense a tiny change like that, but Garrick has been trained to sense such things and smiles.
. . .
The first wand Garrick makes unassisted is dragon heartstring and dogwood. It’s 12 inches and swishy, not particularly powerful, but interesting.
The hilt is curved sideways so that when it is held, it grasps the thumb, and it’s jagged along the whole length. Not a design flaw on his part, more a representation of the wand’s personality that he’s made the wood take the shape of.
It thrums happily in his hand as he rests it in the velvet of a box. His father gives him a nod from the doorway, approval gracing his aging face, and leaves to haunt the front desk.
He closes the lid of the box. His very first wand he thinks. A smile breaks free of him and he laughs quietly.
Inside the box, a whisper of something chuckles back and Garrick thinks that this is what his father meant when he told him once, that though a wand will always find a suitable owner later on, until then they are connected to their maker like a babe is to its mother. The only difference is that Garrick gets the feeling that the wand is the mother, not him.