The restaurant closed for the rest of the week.
Not a suggestion. Not a "we'll see how everyone feels." Just a flat management decree delivered with the kind of stiff politeness people use when they're trying not to admit they're terrified.
Everyone go home. Paid leave. We'll call you.
Which, honestly, was about the best possible outcome you can get after being held hostage by a mind-controlling psycho in a purple suit and then having your entire dining room turn into a crime scene that no one could explain without sounding insane.
Silver linings and all that.
Mom tried to act like she was fine. She joked about it in that dry, tired way she used when she didn't want to talk about something. She said she was lucky, that everyone was lucky, that it could have been worse. But I could see it in the way she paused sometimes, just for half a second too long, like her brain was trying to pick up a memory and found only static.
She didn't remember me finding her. She didn't remember me dropping her with a pressure-point strike like she was a training dummy. She didn't remember the empty look in her eyes, the way she'd said "the master must eat."
That was a mercy.
A twisted, disgusting mercy, but still.
She parked downstairs, waved at Mrs. Chen like it was any other weekday, and hauled grocery bags upstairs with the kind of energy that only shows up when a tired adult suddenly realizes they've been handed unexpected free time. Her shoulders looked less tense than usual. Her steps were lighter.
Tonight, she was going to cook a proper dinner. The kind she used to make before work ate her life and turned her into a person who lived mostly at the restaurant and visited her apartment occasionally to sleep.
She'd been too absent lately. She knew it. I knew it. We didn't talk about it because guilt is a weird roommate; once you acknowledge it, it starts taking up more space.
And I think—no, I know—she'd started noticing something off about me. Not a single dramatic thing. Just a collection of little changes that add up. The way I listened to conversations like I was measuring them. The way I looked at the news like it was an incoming weather disaster I already knew the date of. The way I stopped being "a kid" in her eyes and became… something harder to place.
Teenagers get secrets. Parents pretend they don't notice. That's the normal dance.
But I wasn't a normal teenager, and my secrets weren't normal either.
She was fumbling with her keys—grocery bags threatening to spill, purse sliding off her shoulder—when a delivery man appeared in the hallway.
"Package for Shaw?"
"That's me," she said, and signed quickly.
Then the door opened.
I came out of my room immediately—too fast, like I'd been waiting.
Which I had.
Not because I was excited about a package, but because I was counting hours until I had something—anything—that could help me stop being helpless.
I took the grocery bags from her hands and carried them to the kitchen counter without a word.
Mom glanced at the box. My name was scrawled across the label in that universal delivery-driver handwriting that always looks like it was written during an earthquake.
"Abel, dear," she said, already peeling at the tape, "what did you buy on eBay?"
I didn't even look up. "I've been wanting to try making crafts," I said, too casually. "For school. Handicraft class."
Which wasn't exactly a lie.
I was making a craft. A deadly, illegal, reality-breaking craft, but still.
"Handicrafts?" Her whole face brightened, like she'd found a harmless problem she could actually solve. "I'm quite good with my hands, you know. Do you want help? I actually have some free time now."
"You do?"
"Yes, well…" Her smile faltered. Something dark flickered behind her eyes. "The restaurant was attacked by some crazy man."
My head snapped up so fast my neck popped.
"What?" I heard my own voice go sharp. "Are you okay? Is everyone okay?"
She blinked like she'd forgotten I didn't know what had happened. Or maybe she assumed I'd heard it on the news, because in New York you hear everything eventually.
"Yes, yes," she said quickly, waving me off. "Everybody's safe."
"Did you see a doctor?"
"Yes." She sighed. "Don't worry, Abel, I'm okay."
"You should've called me," I said, and I couldn't stop the tightness in my jaw. "I could've come to get you."
She gave me that look mothers give when they're trying to remind you they are the adult here. "I'm fine. I don't even have a scratch."
"Okay," I said. But my hands had curled into fists before I forced them open again.
Pick your battles, Abel.
If I pressed too hard, I'd start asking questions she couldn't answer—questions she didn't even remember. And I couldn't afford to let her realize that her son knew far too much about what had happened in her restaurant.
Mom watched me the way she did lately—quiet concern, the sense that I was carrying something heavy but refusing to put it down.
Then she switched topics like she always did when the conversation got close to pain.
"So," she said gently. "Do you want my help with your project?"
"No," I said quickly. Too quickly. Then I softened it. "It's a school assignment. I should do it myself."
"If you say so." She smiled, letting it drop. "Now let's eat."
"Okay. Let me help unpack first, then I'll take the… wood… back to my room."
I carried the box like it was fragile.
Because it was.
Not physically. Spiritually. Metaphysically. The kind of fragile that matters when you're trying to create a wand in a world that doesn't want you to.
When I got back into my room, I locked the door.
The click of the lock was more comforting than it should've been.
I set the box on my desk and tore it open with the careful intensity of someone defusing a bomb.
Wood.
Just wood.
Heartwood from a pine tree, supposedly over a hundred years old, bought from an estate sale upstate. The grain was dense and straight. The color was rich. The age was right.
It had cost me nearly a month and a half of allowance.
Worth every penny. Maybe.
I pulled out the other box from under my bed—the one that made me feel pathetic every time I looked inside.
Tools. Carving knives. Wood files. Sandpaper. A hand drill that had seen better days. The kind of equipment a hobbyist might use to make a birdhouse.
And at the bottom, cushioned in old t-shirts like they were broken bones, were my failures.
Wands.
Dozens of them.
Some too brittle. Some too thick. Some beautifully carved and completely dead—perfect pieces of woodwork with all the magical resonance of a brick.
The wood in this world isn't the problem, I thought, staring at them. The problem is that almost none of it contains magic.
In my second life, magical trees grew in magical places. They soaked up ambient energy like sponges. Some forests were practically alive with it, and wandmakers like Ollivander had access to cultivated groves—trees grown for generations to be attuned to spellwork.
Here, I was buying wood off eBay and praying it had absorbed enough… something… to function.
This is embarrassing, Ollivander would've laughed himself sick.
And then he would've offered me tea and told me to stop being an idiot and get a proper core. Because wandmaking wasn't just wood. It was partnership. It was the marriage of material and intent and some deep, weird resonance that didn't care how badly you wanted it.
But in this universe, I didn't have phoenix feathers or unicorn hair or dragon heartstring sitting on a shelf.
I had pine heartwood and desperation.
So I started anyway.
Wand-crafting—real wand-crafting—was equal parts art, science, and prayer. You choose the wood. You shape it. You balance it until it feels like an extension of your arm rather than a stick you're holding.
Size mattered. Flexibility mattered. Ollivander used to talk about wands like they had opinions, and he wasn't wrong. Dimension and "fit" were part of the resonance. Too long and you overreach; too short and you choke your output.
I'd settled on thirteen and a half inches. Long enough to channel serious magic, short enough to conceal.
I set the pine heartwood on my desk, picked up the knife, and began.
Smooth strokes. Controlled pressure. Remove excess wood, reveal the shape underneath. Carving always felt like negotiation: the wood resisting just enough to remind you it wasn't yours, the blade answering with patient insistence.
There you are.
By the time Mom called for dinner, I'd finished the rough shaft. Straight, smooth, tapered at the tip. It looked like a wand.
Whether it would behave like one was another issue.
The hard part wasn't the carving. It was everything else.
Drilling the internal channel for a core—without splintering the wood. Engraving patterns inside that channel to guide power—without misremembering one line and creating a wand that exploded in my hand.
And that was assuming I could even get a usable core.
My "core options" right now were so pathetic I didn't like thinking about them. Feathers, bits of bone, maybe a snake skin sample. I was basically trying to fake a miracle with craft-store materials.
But I'd learned something since my memories returned: magic doesn't only live in mythical creatures.
Magic lives in meaning.
In age.
In intention.
In the way you bind it.
And if I could embed the right runic matrices—protective wards, amplification patterns, binding sigils—maybe I could force the tool to work even if the ingredients were subpar.
My runes were a patchwork. Some were remembered. Some were reconstructed from obscure digitized manuscripts hidden in university archives and mislabeled as "decorative Viking inscriptions." Some were scraped from New Age forums where people stumbled onto real symbols without understanding what they were.
Decorative. Right.
I could hear Professor Vector laughing at that.
I could also hear Hermione telling me to double-check everything three times.
I set the shaft down carefully and went to dinner.
Mom had made Chinese food. Or rather, American Chinese filtered through her best approximation of authenticity after years of my quiet corrections. She was about seventy-five percent accurate now, which was genuinely impressive for someone who'd never been to China and learned cooking through sheer stubbornness and YouTube.
Kung Pao chicken. Fried rice. Steamed vegetables that were only slightly overcooked.
"How does it taste?" she asked, watching me like my opinion mattered more than the laws of physics. "Has it gotten worse?"
I swallowed and smiled. "It's delicious."
Relief softened her face instantly.
She started asking about school, the way parents do when they want to reconnect but don't know how to say, I'm sorry I've been gone so much. I gave her safe answers. Nothing that would lead to follow-up questions. Nothing that would make her worry.
Then I asked, casually, "How's work at the restaurant?"
Her expression shifted. A faint frown. A shadow behind her eyes that didn't settle into a full memory.
"It's… fine," she said.
Fine, meaning: not fine, but also not something she could fully describe.
Which, again, was a mercy.
Fewer memories meant less trauma.
I relaxed a fraction. She was okay. Shaken, but okay. Which meant killing Kilgrave had been worth it.
Totally worth becoming a fugitive.
Absolutely worth having S.H.I.E.L.D. sniffing around.
My frown must've slipped out for half a second, because Mom gave me that look again—quiet concern.
I buried it.
Because the truth was already catching up.
I knew I'd been too visible. Even with the hood. Even with deleted cameras. Even with costume changes. New York was full of eyes, and S.H.I.E.L.D. had more eyes than the city itself.
They were looking for me.
That meant the wand needed to be finished soon.
With a wand, I could cast memory charms properly. Obliviate wasn't just a trick; it was insurance. If someone got too close, if an agent asked the wrong question, if someone saw too much… I could erase the moment and vanish.
And if things got worse than that—
I always had the nuclear option.
New York had a Sanctum Sanctorum.
The Sanctum had a connection to Kamar-Taj.
And Kamar-Taj had the Ancient One.
If I was desperate enough, I could try to reach her and offer something in exchange—knowledge, warnings, anything—just to get access to real wand-making materials and training.
It was a terrible plan.
Possibly suicidal.
The Ancient One didn't treat threats gently, and I wasn't naïve enough to assume she'd see "reincarnated wizard from another universe" as harmless. Voldemort wouldn't last five minutes against her, and I was not Voldemort-level yet. Not even close.
So unless I had no other choice, I wanted to stay off her radar.
Finish the wand.
Control my magic.
Survive long enough to prepare for what was coming.
After dinner, Mom washed dishes and settled into the couch with her show—Desperate Housewives—like suburban drama was the kind of danger she could handle. I said goodnight, grabbed fruit, and retreated back to my room.
Locked the door again.
That click sounded like sanity.
I laid the wand shaft on my desk, spread my tools out like surgical instruments, and stared at the wood until my eyes ached.
Alright, I thought.
No more improvising with finger-spells on rooftops.
No more "maybe this works."
Tonight, I build the thing that keeps me alive.