28 June 1890 — Ollivander's, Hogsmeade

Gideon had been anticipating this particular event, with varying degrees of anxiety, ever since he'd first taken Billie in. Back then, though, it had seemed like such a distant problem. He had years to figure out what to do with her when the time came to send her off to Hogwarts. To be perfectly honest, he wasn't even sure at the time that it would even be a problem he'd have to solve. He'd been fond of her before he'd realized that they were related, but he hadn't really known her well. She might have used her proximity to the shop to steal half his stock and run off into the night. She might have turned out to be so insufferable once they were actually spending time together that he had no choice but to turn her out again. As two years had flown by, though, he had only grown more fond of her than before, and now here they were — she was eleven (or close enough, anyway) and it was time to make difficult decisions, and he still didn't have very much of an idea what he was doing. He certainly didn't know what lay ahead of them from this point.

He wondered if this was the best time to bring it up. Maybe he ought to just leave her birthday as a day of celebration, and not try to have any difficult conversations. That was tempting, to be sure, but he knew that if he gave himself permission to avoid it any longer, he'd just keep on avoiding it all summer. As the clock ticked on, the options for how to handle her Hogwarts education dwindled, and it wouldn't be fair to Billie if he let his own reluctance to face the music on this limit what she was able to do in the fall.

That being said, he wasn't planning on starting off with the dreary stuff. He'd gone by a bakery that morning and picked up a little pastry pie for breakfast to mark the occasion, and had it ready when she woke up. After exchanging a warm greeting and offering birthday well-wishes, Gideon launched not into the conversation he was dreading but rather into a question that he hoped would excite her (because it had certainly excited him, when he'd been her age). "So, are you ready to find your wand?"

Billie Farrow

  

In true Billie fashion, she hadn't even realized what the date was until she'd woken up and Gideon had wished her a happy birthday. How could she have forgotten?! She'd been anxiously waiting for the day she turned eleven ever since she'd gotten it into her head that attending Hogwarts wouldn't be so bad after all. It would be her first step in either becoming an expert on magical creatures or the world's greatest quidditch player. Maybe she could be both! The former might even help Gideon with discovering new wand cores! Maybe.

She had been absolutely delighted by the pastry pie, something she made sure she thanked him profusely for. She had started to develop a real fondness for different sorts of food now that she didn't have to worry about starving.

Gideon's question caught her somewhat off-guard. Although she knew and fully expected to find a wand before she headed to school in September, she hadn't expected to do so on her birthday. "Today? Right now?!" She blurted out in disbelief. She had, mostly, obeyed the rule of not playing with the wands in the shop. It had all been much too tempting, but she'd succeeded in only peeking in boxes and once or twice poking them. "Yes. Please!"

  

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MJ, yet again working her magic.  <3 <3 Thank you

Gideon couldn't help but laugh at her enthusiasm, though it lined up with his expectations. He'd never met someone who was unhappy to get a wand, particularly their first wand.

"If you like," he said easily. "Though I'd thought we'd eat breakfast first. You'll have to promise not to accidentally destroy the shop before we open today, though," he teased, knowing full well it would be well out of her control if one of the wands she tried reacted poorly. The shop had certainly seen more than its fair share of magical mishaps throughout the years, from shelves being flung across the room to small fires and just about everything in between.

(Fires were his least favourite, for obvious reasons; hopefully they could avoid those today).

"After you find your wand, we'll have to find a day to buy the rest of your school things," he commented as he led the way towards the front room of the shop. "You'll get a list of everything you need when the letter comes, but there's no reason to wait on that for everything."

The letter that would, he assumed, be addressed to Wilhelmina. Gideon frowned as he considered that, but decided not to mention it yet. Instead, he went to the shelves and carefully selected a wand from among the rows of boxes. "Let's start... here."

  

Her nose wrinkled slightly at the promise she was meant to make. "I'll try, but I can't promise you that. Not when that guy, who was as old as you, broke a window a few months ago!" She assumed adults were supposed to have more control and know how to use a wand, even if it wasn't a perfect match for them. Maybe that's why that particular man had needed a new one so badly. He did say he had had some sort of accident with his previous one.

Shaking the memory out of her head, she returned to the task at hand and nodded about purchasing the rest of her school supplies. "Good thing we live in Hogsmeade, so we don't have to go too far!" Not that she didn't love occasionally traveling to Diagon Alley for business. "And I got some extra money from jobs, so I can help." She had mostly met her goal for her broomstick fund, but she hadn't exactly told Gideon about that, yet. "When do you think my letter is going to come?"

Standing on tiptoes, Billie squinted at the first wand Gideon had selected. Even after watching him for almost two years, she still hadn't figured out how he knew which wands were best to suggest. Tentatively, she reached out for it, her expression a mixture of excitement and feeling as if she doing something wrong. She hadn't been allowed to handle them before.

"I...I just wave it, right?" She sounded almost nervous, as if she somehow feared she might not actually possess any magic after all.

  

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MJ, yet again working her magic.  <3 <3 Thank you

"Well, if you break a window, I'll just make you fix it with your new wand," he teased. He was obviously intending no such thing. Even if he thought the restriction on underaged sorcery was a little silly (having been allowed to do magic outside of school from the moment he'd been able to, himself) and even if their position in the center of Hogsmeade meant they were very unlikely to be caught, he wasn't intending to invite any additional scrutiny to his shop at the moment. Not, at any rate, until he'd sorted out what they were going to do about Billie and her approaching school year.

Her comment about being able to help pay for supplies made him smile subtly, but he didn't address it. He neither needed nor expected her to 'help,' as she called it, just as he didn't fully expect her to contribute around the shop in order to 'earn' her accommodation there, but he had the sense that this distinction was important for her, and he could respect that. She'd been independent for longer than any child ought to have been, and while he would have given a great deal to go back in time and make it so that that wasn't the case, it had taught her some things that he thought were rather admirable. How many eleven-year-olds had any real appreciation for hard work? It certainly hadn't been something he'd developed that young.

"I think the letters come out at the end of July," he said in answer to her first question. "But it's been a while since it mattered for me, so I could be wrong. There's — some things we'll have to talk about, before you actually leave for Hogwarts," he added, a little hesitantly. Maybe he ought to just put it off until the end of July, when there was actually a letter. Maybe it wouldn't even be a problem; maybe they'd done the math wrong on her birthday and she wouldn't be eleven until after the start of this school term, buying him another year to figure things out. That was an empty hope, though, and he knew it. He may not have been in contact with her mother when Billie was born, but he knew roughly the date he'd been, ahem, involved in the process. It would have had to have been the world's longest pregnancy to push her birthday clear through to September.

But they'd have time to talk about all of that later — right now, they were finding her a wand, and this was a much less complicated ordeal (at least for Gideon) than having a serious conversation about the future. "Mmhm, wave or tap or swish. Whatever feels natural to you, when you hold it," he explained, leaning against the nearest shelf and crossing his arms so that he could watch when she tried it out. "This one's fir and phoenix feather. My father always said fir wands were for survivors," he commented. He'd heard the stories of resilience from the owners of fir wands recounted from his father's lips many times throughout the years. Unfortunately for his father, the collection of fir in the shop hadn't been able to save either it or the old man from succumbing to the Hogsmeade fire years ago.

  

Billie pulled a face at Gideon, knowing full well that he'd have to be the one to repair the window. Even if she had to do it the muggle way, she wasn't quite sure she could life a pane of glass that big on her own. Nor did she trust herself to do so. It was one thing to help someone affix a shutter; it was another to install something infinitely more breakable.

She let out a somewhat impatient breath that letters were nearly a whole month away, but Gideon seemed pretty sure that she would be attending, so maybe she didn't have to worry about not receiving one. "Things?" She questioned, her eyebrows furrowed, trying to determine what he meant. "What things?" His hesitation had her a bit worried.

Her attention returned to the fir wand in her hand that she idly rolled between her fingers while she listened. It was amazing that it was as smooth as it looked. Most wooden things Billie had grown up around would give you a splinter, even if it seemed like it wouldn't. "Survivors from what?" She blurted out, not particularly needing an answer for she seized the opportunity to give it a bit of a test wave through the air, almost as if she were trying to poorly conduct a symphony.

  

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MJ, yet again working her magic.  <3 <3 Thank you

Gideon had a feeling right after he'd handed her the wand that it wouldn't be the right one, but the wave she gave it confirmed his suspicions. Sometimes he could just tell that a particular wand wasn't going to work, though he couldn't have articulated exactly why he felt that way. He'd been doing this long enough, he supposed, first while assisting his father and then in his own right once he'd become an adult and fully fledged wandmaker, that he had something of a sixth sense for the right match. Still, it was helpful to see how the incorrect wands reacted, because it helped him hone his next guess. This one did nothing particular exciting, just put out a sad squishing sound before Gideon crossed to Billie and deftly snatched it away from her.

"Not that one," he explained as he replaced it in the box and turned his attention to reshelving it. "I like fir wands, and to hear my father tell it their owners survive all sorts of things. One was nearly eaten by a dragon. One of the others went out on the Hogsmeade Expedition and returned unharmed even though everyone else in their group died," he continued, before reflecting that maybe this was a bit more morbid than he'd expected. He'd thought fir was a nice sentimental starting point for Billie, since she'd proved so resilient in her life so far, but now that she'd asked for actual examples he wasn't as keen on it as he'd been at first. Those wand owners who had proven to be survivors had gotten themselves into hairy situations in the first place, after all, and he didn't want her running off to face down death anytime soon, with a fir wand or not.

He let his eyes skim over the shelves as he considered where to go next. It never hurt to try walnut when looking for a first wand for a child, but pear or larch might suit her just as well. Not hawthorn, he reflected; hawthorn was too complicated. "Let's try pear," he decided, moving to another section of the shelf and pulling one box halfway out, then changing his mind and choosing an adjacent wand instead. He hadn't made every wand in this shop, but since so much of their stock had been lost in the fire he'd had a hand in a good deal of them, and when one spent so long crafting a wand it was hard to forget the particulars of its creation. There could be a good deal of difference in two pear wands that had come from different trees — or even from the same tree, but paired with a different core or treated differently during the process.

"And Hogwarts... well, I don't know how much you've heard about it," he said, circling back to her first question as he handed her the wand. "But there's just some... logistical things we'll have to talk about. Like the dormitories," he added softly. "After everyone's sorted, all the boys from the house sleep together in one room with a bunch of beds, and all the girls sleep in another room like that."

(Would she see the implied problem in that arrangement, or would he have to be more explicit? He wasn't sure).

  

The noise the wand made had her looking a little discouraged, but she'd observed the process enough to realize that people didn't tend to find their wand right on the first try. At least she hadn't broken anything! That was always the much less desirable option.

"Fli-" She stopped herself before she cursed. She was at least attempting to curb her swearing habit. Well, around Gideon and other adults. If she could shout atrocious things at Jimmy all day, she would. "Those people were really lucky. Especially with the dragon!" It made perfect sense why the fir wand hadn't worked for her. Billie hadn't exactly been in such extreme, mortal peril as Gideon's examples. Even if she was fairly sure her mother had wanted to drown her when she was born.

Her blue eyes took on a rather serious squint, watching Gideon carefully as he went about selecting one box and then another. It amazed her that he had such a good memory. To her, all the boxes and wands were practically the same, especially if they were crafted from the same type of wood. "I don't think I've ever eaten a pear," she idly mused while he made his choice.

Taking the pear wand, she held it carefully in her right hand, not yet making any motions with it. Why was Gideon talking about dormitories? Was he afraid she wasn't going to be able to share? She'd slept in the same room as her brother growing up, and she'd shared a sleeping space with other children in slums of Hogsmeade and the village she'd originally come from.

"That's alright with me. I had to share a bed with my brother Joe usually. And, when it rained, sometimes me and some others had to sleep real close." She shrugged her shoulders at that. She'd grown so comfortable, living as a male, and it was a topic they very rarely spoke about. So, it didn't occur to her to draw other conclusions from Gideon's statements. Especially with the excitement of finding a wand dancing about her brain.

"Wait. Does that mean if I get put in the same place as Fletcher, we'd have to share a room?" She groaned at the thought. Surely, she'd murder him.

With another small lift of her shoulders, she tried flicking the pear wand this time. Maybe how she moved it would help her find the exact right match.

  

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MJ, yet again working her magic.  <3 <3 Thank you

She hadn't pieced together what he was getting at, but there was no way to continue the conversation from this point without his just coming right out and saying it. Gideon wished that he'd put this off until after they'd finished finding her wand, but it had just sort of... tumbled out, with one vague statement leading into the next until it was unavoidable. With years to plan how he was going to bring this up and what he was going to do about it, one might have thought he'd have it planned out a bit better, but that clearly wasn't the case. Then again, he'd never planned to be a father (at least not at this stage in his life, to a Hogwarts-aged child). He was out of his depth here as he had always been, but Merlin help him, he was doing his best.

"Well," he said gently, as though delivering bad news. "Not if you're in the girls' dormitories."

He wanted to watch her reaction to this statement and see how she took it, particularly as it was the first time he'd ever brought up the idea that things might change before she went off to Hogwarts. Unfortunately for him, at that moment the wand she was trying out caused a pipe to burst along the back wall of the shop. With a muttered curse (though nothing particularly profane; he'd long since learned to handle minor mishaps without insulting the more uptight customers who might have caused them), he drew his wand and headed off to fix it before the water could damage anything of importance.

  

Normally, Billie would have cracked a joke about the pipe, proud that she hadn't broken a window. (Although, a burst pipe was, arguably, worse.) However, Gideon's words stilled her into silence. What was that supposed to mean? Why would she be in the girls' dormitory? Surely, nobody else but Gideon and Quin knew her little secret. Right?

Unless.

Had he told someone else? Had he told Hogwarts? Why would he do such a thing? She was perfectly happy being the person she'd paraded about as for nearly three years. She'd even made friends. She'd created an entirely new life, and she was sure appearing at school as a girl would destroy it. Nobody took girls seriously.

To keep herself from causing any more damage, Billie set the wand down on the nearest surface. It was probably the last sensible thing she was about to do. Not wanting to waste any time, she pursued Gideon, quickly skittering after him toward the back of the shop, her arms folded firmly across her chest.

"Why would that happen?" She demanded, her little face creased not with anger, but betrayal. "Everyone knows I'm a boy."

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   Gideon Ollivander

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MJ, yet again working her magic.  <3 <3 Thank you

Gideon fixed the pipe with a wave of his wand, then turned his attention to the water. Quite a bit had spurted out in the short time the pipe had been burst, but luckily it hadn't spread to anything except the floor behind the counter, which made it an easy thing to fix. By the time he'd finished that and turned his attention back towards the shop, Billie had caught up with him. The expression on her face was one he wasn't sure he'd ever seen before, and he hoped he didn't have cause to see it again any time soon. The suggestion, then, had not gone over well. He had expected as much, of course. If Billie had any actual inclination to put on a nice dress and grow her hair out and learn to dance with young men, she would have mentioned it herself at some point during the two years they'd known each other. He didn't really need to hear her insistence that she was a boy in order to understand what she was thinking.

"Except you aren't," he pointed out as gently as he could. The last thing he wanted to do was start a fight when they had serious matters to discuss, but that much was just a fact. No matter what she wanted, or what he might want for her, the circumstances of her life remained unchanged, and the Hogwarts record would reflect that even if no one else in the world knew. "And it might not be obvious now, but it likely will be, sooner or later," he continued. (Did Billie know about puberty? He hoped she had at least some inkling, because if he had to add all of that into this conversation he might become paralyzed with awkwardness before he managed to get through it all).

With a frown, Gideon pocketed his wand and crossed his arms loosely in front of him. "I'd meant to wait until after we found your wand to bring this up," he said with a sigh. It was obviously a little late for that; she'd set her last wand down and was standing between him and the rest of his stock, and he seemed to have earned her full attention with his last comment.

  

"I am," Billie immediately bit out, even though she knew what he meant. No matter what she did or said, the fact remained that she'd been born as a girl. She would never truly be male, not in the biological sense. She'd, of course, made up her mind that she could just simply hide it and never get married. It's not as if people made it a habit to truly investigate. So long as you dressed and acted like the gender you wanted to portray, people just assumed you fit into that category. It felt much more natural to her than she did when her mother made her wear a dress.

"I'm not pretty or dainty or anything. I don't talk 'bout dresses an' cleaning an' getting married an' babies all day. I like quidditch an' fighting an' adventures an' interesting things." She didn't want to grow up and only have children and constantly catering to her husband to look forward to in the future. She wanted to have a man's job and to think for herself. Why did everything have to be so different? It's not as if she could do all that and be a girl.

Now that she was suitably worked up, any effort to speak in a more proper manner rather quickly went out the window.

"It ain't never gonna be obvious, 'cause I ain't gonna let it be." Billie knew very little about puberty, but she did realize that women developed certain features as they grew older. Her mother hadn't been particularly well endowed, so she figured it might be rather easy to hide such things. Some women did so when they pretended to be men in plays! Perhaps, she could find out how. Couldn't magic also help?

Billie returned Gideon's frown with one of her own, giving him a look that spoke volumes about how poorly of a job he'd done with waiting.

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   Nephele Lestrange

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MJ, yet again working her magic.  <3 <3 Thank you

"You can do all that and be a girl," Gideon countered. They'd probably missed the boat on getting her a proper foundation in etiquette and fashion, anyway, even if she wanted to get into all of that stuff. For one thing, Gideon didn't know what all that stuff would even entail; he'd certainly never been interested in it and he hadn't had a serious relationship with a woman who was. He'd never gotten much beyond flirting with a woman of his own social status. Even if he did have the knowledge or resources to connect her to that world, though, he wasn't sure it would do any good. Just look at the Scrimgeour girl who had been raised in a Muggle slum until she got her Hogwarts letter; her parents had been able to give her every advantage from the age of eleven onward, and she'd ended up (from what he could tell from the rumor mill, anyway) disgraced and estranged from society, and who even knew what she was doing now. He certainly didn't want anything like that to happen to Billie — so perhaps it was for the best if they avoided the angle of trying to be a respectable young woman altogether.

"There's a whole Quidditch team of women, you know," he pointed out. "And you could still do plenty of interesting things." Probably not fighting, admittedly; that wasn't really appropriate behavior for men to be engaging in any more than periodically, and would doubtless raise eyebrows for a woman... but hopefully it was also the sort of interest she would grow out of.

Which was really the crux of the matter. If Gideon was confident that the way Billie felt about things now was the way she would go on feeling for the rest of her life, he could try and help her keep up this charade. It wasn't as though it bothered him that she was presumed male by everyone who met her. But what would he do if, as she grew, she changed her mind and did want to do something more feminine with her life? Or what if, when she reached her fifth or sixth year at Hogwarts, she had a crush on a boy and couldn't do anything about it, because they'd already cast their lot? It might seem like an impossibility to an eleven-year-old girl, but Gideon could picture it all too vividly. He was already dreading having to face those conversations, because there wouldn't be anything to say, except that he was sorry — and to admit that he'd suspected this would happen and ought to have done something, as her guardian, to prevent it. He was an adult, after all, and she was a child — that meant that he ought to know better how to proceed.

He wasn't sure he did know better, though, which was the root of this nauseated feeling in his stomach. What if he pushed her towards the wrong choice and she regretted it later, or even worse, resented him for it? What they did between now and Hogwarts would alter the course of her life for better or for worse, and he was definitely in over his head in considering it.

  

"No, I can't. 'Least not without people being flippin' jerks 'bout it," Billie retorted, shooting Gideon a withering look. "You get to be born a boy. It's easier for you to do what ya want without nobody sayin' nothin'." She thoroughly believed that. Even in the muggle world, a girl who preferred to climb about in trees and catch rats was frowned upon. Boys were lucky.

Pausing in her rambling, she let her arms drop to her sides. "There is?" Billie had no idea that there was a women's only quidditch team. Then again, she hadn't exactly thought it possible, nor had the boys she ran about with brought it up. Why would they? It wasn't exactly of interest to them. They likely thought it was dumb.

What would they do if they realized she was a girl?

With an uneasy look on her face, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, trying not to let that thought fully form in her mind. She didn't want to know what would happen if those who'd known her previously as a boy found out. Billie was certain she'd lose all her friends. Why would she want that to happen?

After a few moments of silence, she very quietly asked. "How come you suddenly want me to be a girl now?" It was the only conclusion she could seem to draw as to why he was suddenly bringing the subject up.

  

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MJ, yet again working her magic.  <3 <3 Thank you

He saw a potential opening when she asked about the Quidditch team. He ought to have thought about bringing up the Holyhead Harpies before, now that he thought about it. What if her reticence to present as a girl was only because she'd never seen one engaged in anything interesting? Maybe a well- timed Harpies match could have settled this conundrum for him a year ago. Now, the Quidditch season had been halted for the World Cup, and the National Team was hardly going to inspire her. There was only one girl on the team and he honestly wasn't even sure if she was any good. He was not, normally, a particular fan of the Harpies.

Before he could bring it up either way, though, he noted a shift in the air and a subsequent one in her expression. Gideon watched her helplessly, sure that he'd said or done something that had hurt either her feelings or her pride. He wasn't sure what it was, though, much less how to fix it.

"I don't want you to be a girl, Billie," he said softly. "I want you to be happy. And I'm afraid that if you go to Hogwarts and try to pretend, something might happen that would make both of us unhappy."

  

She just didn't understand. If Gideon didn't want her to be a girl, why did he have to bring it up in the first place? The confusion was evident on her face. She just couldn't fathom why school could be so different from just living in Hogsmeade. They'd kept it a secret this long. The only other person who know was Quin, and that is because Gideon had outright told him. To her knowledge, nobody suspected a thing. Why would going to Hogwarts change that? Billie had even kept her secret before she met Gideon. He wouldn't have even found out if her mother hadn't called her that terrible name. Wilhelmina.

"What could happen?"

Was he afraid someone would find out? It seemed just as likely to happen while she lived here as well as at school. Why did everything have to suddenly get so complicated? Maybe it would be easier if she just didn't grow up.

  

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MJ, yet again working her magic.  <3 <3 Thank you