Chapter One: Wrong Afterlife, Population: Me
I would like it noted, for the record, that I did everything right.
I ate my vegetables the second time around. I exercised. I went to bed before midnight like a functioning adult and I did not, not once, fall asleep scrolling on my phone until my eyes felt like sandpaper. I fixed my family. I built a good life out of the wreckage of my first one, brick by deliberate brick, and I died at the end of it surrounded by people who loved me, in a soft bed, with absolutely zero regrets.
I was owed a nice, quiet, dreamless eternity. A cloud. A harp. Maybe a strongly worded but ultimately forgiving conversation with whatever cosmic committee handles this sort of thing.
Instead, I was being squeezed through something that felt suspiciously like a garden hose two sizes too small, and someone very far away was screaming, and it took me an embarrassingly long moment to realize the someone screaming was me.
Cool. Cool cool cool. Great start.
Baby Brain Is a War Crime
Here is a thing nobody warns you about reincarnation: your soul might remember everything, but your brain is a fresh, gelatinous, newly-installed piece of hardware, and it does not care about your feelings. I knew, somewhere underneath the static, that something had gone deeply wrong with my whole "next life" arrangement. I just couldn't hold onto the thought for longer than four seconds before it slid away like wet soap.
Mostly I cried. Mostly I slept. Occasionally I was aware enough to be furious about both.
The first clear thought I managed to hang onto — really hang onto, turn over, examine — arrived somewhere around what I'd guess was month four, in the middle of being burped over someone's shoulder like a sack of very displeased flour.
This isn't the province. This isn't the truck. This isn't my mother's perfume.
The room smelled like woodsmoke and old parchment and something floral I couldn't place. The voice murmuring above me had an accent I didn't recognize, all rounded vowels and clipped consonants, nothing like the language I'd grown up dying in twice already. And when I finally, finally got enough control over my own eyeballs to focus on something more than blurry light, I found myself staring up at a ceiling with exposed wooden beams and a candle that was — I would swear to this on both my previous lives — floating.
Not on a string. Not on a hidden wire. Just. Floating. Doing its little candle business, flame flickering merrily, defying physics like it had personally never heard of gravity.
I remember thinking, with the particular deranged calm of someone in the middle of a genuine crisis: okay. Okay. That's fine. That's totally fine and normal and I am not panicking.
I was panicking.
The Slow, Horrifying Process of Elimination
I want to be very clear that I did not immediately clock it. Reincarnation into a magic system is not exactly the first hypothesis a rational person reaches for. My brain, still gummy and half-formed, ran through the more reasonable options first: hallucination, dream, some kind of elaborate coma fantasy, brain damage from whatever had killed me a second time.
But candles kept floating. And then, one grey afternoon, a woman I was fairly sure was my mother in this life waved a slim wooden stick at a pile of laundry and the whole basket rose gently into the air and drifted itself into a cupboard like it had somewhere to be.
I lay in my crib and had, I think, the first fully formed emotional reaction of my new existence, which was: oh, absolutely not.
Because here's the thing about growing up as a very online, very fic-brained twenty-something in my first life: I knew exactly what floating candles and self-folding laundry meant. I had read entire novels of speculation about wandwork and house points and a boy with a scar shaped like a lightning bolt. I had strong, deeply held, entirely non-canonical opinions about house sorting mechanics. I had, God help me, written meta essays about magical theory at two in the morning instead of sleeping like a person with self-respect.
And now I was apparently living inside it.
Doing the Math, Badly
I didn't know the year. I didn't know the month. I didn't even know for certain if I was right — maybe this was some other magic world entirely, one with a suspicious number of coincidental floating candles and no relation to anything I'd once read for fun at unreasonable hours. Wishful thinking, maybe. A defense mechanism, dressed up as a hypothesis.
But then, on a bright afternoon roughly a year into this new, aggressively magical existence, someone unwrapped a newspaper on the kitchen table nearby, and I caught — upside down, half-focused, infant vision doing me exactly zero favors — a date at the top of the page.
I did the math the way you do math when you desperately don't want the answer to be what you already know it is.
If I was right. If this was really the world I thought it was. Then somewhere out there, right now, a baby with messy dark hair was toddling around a house in Godric's Hollow with two parents who loved him very much and exactly one and a half more years to live before the worst night of his life rearranged everything.
I lay very still in my crib, staring up at my own floating candle, and had approximately the calmest possible reaction to this information, which is to say I was not calm at all.
"Okay," I said, out loud, in the only vocabulary currently available to me. Which was: "Ba. Ba. Bababa."
Somewhere in the house, my mother laughed, delighted, completely unaware that her infant daughter had just quietly, internally, sworn several oaths and one (1) genuine curse word.
I had wished for a next life. I had prayed for a second chance to do things right.
Nobody — and I cannot stress this enough — nobody had mentioned a war.