Chapter 1: 23 April 1991, Yugoslavia [12 days after possession]
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
It wasn't fair, thought Quirinus, after enough (almost enough) glasses of strong plum-flavored rakia to muffle the whispering ghost in his head. He'd been so close.
He had the drafts of dozens of research papers tucked away in his bags, some nearly finished, others rough outlines. Each one was a single brick in his masterwork's foundation, building slowly on the preceding publications, yet too small to catch the Ministry's attention on their own. He'd planned on trickling them out over the second year of his sabbatical as he finalized his experimentations. His reputation would slowly improve as that happened, culminating in a final paper that would've made him the foremost authority on an entirely new subset of Defense Against the Dark Arts.
In less than twelve months he would have gone from a barely tolerated researcher that 'dabbled in the dark arts' to someone sought out for professorships and guest lectures. Someone guaranteed to have his future papers accepted even in the most exclusive journals. Someone revered and envied in equal measures in every academic circle that mattered (and some that didn't). Not even the Ministry would have been able to silence his research this time.
Candice might've even apologized. (Not that he was still bitter about that.) ((He wasn't.))
Twelve days ago he'd had a future.
For a moment he felt like following Francisco's example and setting it all on fire: his papers, his charms, himself. Anything he wrote now, any further experiments he did with dark magic, would be tainted by association. He couldn't trust that his theories and conclusions were actually his anymore. It would be all too easy to slip in miscalculations, backdoors, or side effects that would cost curse-breakers their lives.
If only he hadn't gone into those smelting woods.
"Knowledge is worthless without the will to use it," said Tom in a faint mental whisper that bubbled up through the alcohol haze, his voice still more muddled emotions than words. He was quieter when Quirinus drank but never quiet enough.
"Knowledge is never worthless," muttered Quirinus, downing the last of the glass and ordering another drink.
* * * * *
When Quirinus sleeps, he doesn't dream.
Notes:
This fic was... an interesting one to write. I needed to work out what sort of antagonist Voldemort was going to be in this 'verse and that snowballed into a LOT of worldbuilding and unexpected Quirrell shenanigans. Finding just the right blend of personality to get someone who believably taught Muggle Studies and Defense Against the Dark Arts, and was reckless enough to get possessed by Tom, while also being smart enough to sneak back into Hogwarts as a teacher... was not an easy task. (But I'm still a little horrified that a fic this small took two years to hammer out.)
Also: Why are there only FIVE other works under the 'Competent Quirinus Quirrell' tag and that makes me sad. :(
Chapter 2: December 1974, England
Chapter Text
Quirinus Quirrell was seven and three-quarters when he learned what muggles were.
His parents were half-bloods that moved in pure-blood circles. One muggle grandparent each prevented them from properly rejoining polite society themselves, but Quirinus had two wizarding parents and four wizarding grandparents, which meant through him the Quirrells were once again in play.
He wasn't a Heir, but he was a heir, which meant balls and dances and 'suitable matches' were a core part of his childhood. (Whether Quirinus liked it or not.)
So while they might live in what seemed to be a perfectly normal muggle house, on a perfectly normal muggle street, in the perfectly normal village of Barkway, they never stepped foot outside.
Home, his mother insisted, was where you slept, not where you lived and true to her motto most of his first words were floo locations.
They took their meals at friend's estates or at wizarding restaurants and spent their leisure time in magical shopping districts or museums and libraries. He only played with children from proper magical families and spent time with tutors learning proper wizarding ways.
And no one ever mentioned muggles, at least not directly.
He glimpsed one once, when they were refreshing the enchantments on the windows at home to show the Scottish moors instead of Holkham Beach. For a brief moment his bedroom looked out into their actual neighborhood, but it was years before he realized that's what the oddly dressed wizard had been (or that the view hadn't been just another distant location).
It wasn't until his Mother had to explain what ''mudblood' meant (which he'd overheard during Aunt Pomona's rant about Hogwarts declining reputation) that he finally understood.
And he was fascinated.
How could anyone live without magic?
How did they build houses? Repair clothes? Stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer? Cook food and clean floors? They couldn't floo, or aparate, or use portkeys-- did they walk everywhere? What happened when they broke their arms playing quidditch? How did they play quidditch without brooms??
He had so many questions! …and no way to answer them.
When his parents discovered his new obsession (small children with secret research projects were never as clever as they wanted to be) they attempted to officially ban the topic, but that only made the fires of curiosity burn brighter.
One day he stumbled over a muggle paperback novel, left discarded on a bench at a wizarding park.
Automobiles! Spies! Washing machines! Exploding pens! Telephones! MI6! Electric torches!
Muggles and their ridiculously hobbled lives were secret and mysterious in the safe sort of ways that the Dark Lord and the ongoing wizarding war weren't. Which instantly made them the most interesting thing a small soon-to-be-Ravenclaw could imagine.
When it was finally his turn to ride the Hogwarts Express he had several feet of parchment questions prepared for the muggle-borns… and (in hindsight) an embarrassingly tragic lack of tact.
Chapter 3: 30 April 1991, Italy [19 days after possession]
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"You can't ignore me forever," whispered Tom through the firewhisky mists. The voice was growing steadier as the days went on, sounding more and more like a person and less like a garbled radio signal. (Though Quirinus had always considered Voldemort more of a thing than a person towards the end.)
"Watch me," said Quirinus as he clumsily fastened the clasp on his newly crafted bracelet. It was woven from thin strips of hawthorn and rowan, to ward against human spirits. Dyed in intricate indigo runes, to shore up his abysmally weak occlumency protections. Interlaced with tiny ferrous magnets and beads of enchanted tin left to soak in the light of a full moon. In theory, the magnets should attract the infesting spiritual energy and the moon-boosted tin should force some of the energy to convert into light whenever Tom attacked… but in practice he just liked the way they looked.
His last attempt had been a choker of braided spun lead (to block magical flows) and the waxing gibbous moonlight after a storm (for a spicy kick), but it had done little to muffle the whispers.
This time the magic tingled as it spread up his arm and the voice in his head faded a little bit more. Maybe a necklace would be more effective? Or possibly a slightly different rune set. Quirinus blinked as he tried to focus on the tiny purple lines. Drunken crafting was an entirely new experience and he reveled in the whimsical absurdity almost as much as it infuriated his mental parasite.
Parasites… He'd dreamt of doxies last night, a swarm of wide beetle wings against the sliver of a waning moon. He wasn't sure what they meant, divination had never been interesting enough to pay attention to his classmate's gossip about the class, but he feels like they're an omen. Maybe.
"Twigs and charms won't save you," hissed Tom as he dimmed into an angry background mutter more emotion than noise. "It's pointless to resist the inevitable." Only it felt more like 'I'm inevitable', which was ridiculous.
"All mimsy were the borogoves," Quirinus sing-songed, staring down into his newly arrived beer (having been forcefully swapped to something less potent by the annoyed bartender), fascinated by the bubbles. The bracelet's success was a decent ending to a mostly-pleasant day, which was unusual enough that he felt like celebrating. (Voldemort was no Jabberwocky, but Quirinus found he couldn't remember the words to much of anything at the moment.) ((O frabjous day!))
Quirinus had met with Aida for lunch (it would have been impossible to come through Italy again without seeing her) and they'd had a spirited (if slightly drunken) discussion over the use of indigo vs. European elder dyes. Since the summoning stone incident the curse-breaker had taken to doing some experimenting of her own.
Aida had no reason to think there was anything wrong (she was one of the few that Quirinus had resumed exchanging letters with) and for a brief moment while they'd enthusiastically scribbled competing theories on napkins, Tom's whispers had melted away.
Quirinus had forgotten what it felt like to tinker like this, chasing answers without spending weeks (or months) of research first. He used to craft like this in school, following hunches and flashes of intuition, earning him his muggle nickname. When he was Q the why's of magic were still magic and not just a means to an end.
But that was back before his sabbatical started. Back before his professorship, before the Ministry and the goblins.
Q finished off his beer (when had he started drinking it?) and ordered another one (and some fresh napkins).
"Every day I get closer to being what I once was," Tom hissed, echoing through the background noise of inebriation and charmwork. "No matter what trinkets you craft, every day a little more of you turns into me."
Which might be true, but it also might not (because Tom was nothing if not a liar and what had happened to Francisco was a solitary data point) and either way Q was already sketching out plans in copper wire and black walnut.
Theories were meant to be tested, after all.
Notes:
For an absurd level of detail/research, please check out the corresponding chapter in the Worldbook fic (Magical Properties of Woods, Metals, etc.). And yes, I did also totally look up the historical moon phases (and occasionally the weather).
All credit to Lewis Carrol for the highly recognizable quotes from the Jabberwocky (1871).
Chapter 4: Year One (1978), Hogwarts
Chapter Text
The Sorting Hat barely touched his head before Quirinus Quirrell and his bonfire of curiosity were sorted into Ravenclaw. The hat hadn't even spoken to him, only chuckled with the sort of benevolent amusement that all librarians he'd ever met had shared, and sent him on his way.
From that moment on, his life became a constant stream of questions.
To offset the crushing disappointment of finding that Muggle Studies wasn't offered until third year, he bartered with muggle-born classmates for their help in his quest to learn Everything Muggle. Most of them were dying to learn Everything Wizard and he found tales of pure-blood society (which they'd most likely never get to experience first-hand) were good as galleons.
By the end of the year he had collected a variety of muggle school books, snacks, subscriptions to muggle magazines a classmate promised to owl over, and a few unkind nicknames.
…and the unsettling feeling that he was missing something.
Muggles, he'd discovered, spent a lot of time doing incredibly boring things in incredibly boring ways.
Lawnmowers were fascinating but didn't work on their own and they still raked and weeded by hand. Some families had dishwashers, but not all, and automobiles were something only adults were allowed to use.
Electricity sounded brilliant, but didn't do anything other than turn things on (and off). Planes were amazing, but no one had actually ridden in any, and unlike brooms only certain muggles were allowed to pilot them. Movies and television turned out to be just plays captured in long running photographs, not interactive performances, as he'd assumed.
Where were the crazy contraptions from Marvin the Mad Muggle? The exploding tea sets? The briefcases that turned into bicycles? The closest thing he could find were the deadly pens and wristwatches used by James Bond in his well-loved paperback.
(It took him several more years to suss out the line between 'muggle stories based on real events' and 'muggle fiction based on semi-plausible events'. They nicknamed him Q in the meantime.)
Some muggles were rich and hired other muggles to do all the boring bits for them, but for most of his classmates' families a good portion of their day was spent badly imitating house elves.
For the life of him, Quirinus couldn't figure out why muggles were forbidden.
* * *
Quirinus didn't mention muggles even once while he was home for the summer, much to his parent's poorly hidden relief. He'd learned a lot during his first year in Hogwarts, but the lessons took to heart were all about unbiased field research.
So he read his smuggled muggle newspapers each morning and listened instead.
The Dark Lord and the war dominated the conversations, just like they did at school, but bits and pieces of the muggle world seeped in from time to time. Only was never the bits he expected.
No one mentioned the Iranian Revolution that ended earlier in the year (which had been covered heavily in muggle newspapers), but the Uganda–Tanzania War (which muggles seemed to care less about) came up because it ruined Aunt Pomona's travel plans for a magical safari in the area.
He'd expected the wizarding world to be blind to anything related to technology, even the Skylab crash in Australia, but the millennial anniversary of the High Court of Tynwald and Robin Winter-Smith's tragic accident during a motorcycle stunt jump also went unremarked. (Hertfordshire was nearby and he'd assumed the crash would have garnered at least a 'see, I told you muggles are scrubs' from his cousin whose family wasn't as strict about staying inside.)
The ascension of Margaret Thatcher to Prime Minister was close enough to home that some wizarding papers (and conversations) made note of it-- but it was all very detached. Very distant.
But, he thought as he took copious notes each night, why wouldn't it be?
The muggle world, fascinating as it was, didn't really impact his day-to-day life. It couldn't, with all the charms and wards and magic seeped into every border where one world ended and the other began. They were two parallel universes that only overlapped geographically… and without muggle-borns, there'd be no reason to interact at all.
Quirinus still wasn't sure how he felt about that.
The muggle-born students had been shocked when they'd learned Remembrance Day, Bonfire Night and other cornerstone holidays from the 'real' world were missing from wizarding calendars. They seemed honestly baffled that wizards didn't know or care about their sciences, politics, or whatever celebrity was popular on their side of the wall. (Not that it took most of them long at all to decide the wizarding world was the side they wanted to live on.)
Quirinus still wanted to be a wizard, of course, but there was something missing.
When he returned to Hogwarts, he bought two full notebooks with him.
And even more questions.
Chapter 5: 9 May 1991, Belgium [28 days after possession]
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Q dreams of his room at Hogwarts, decked out with blue and bronze and piles of textbooks bigger than he was. He dreams of his workbench in the goblin tunnels, covered in paperwork and prototypes he'd never got a chance to make. He dreams of his room at home with his muggle paperbacks and the view of Holkham Beach and the feeling that something is missing.
Q dreams of fire and tansies.
* * * * *
"Clever," whispered Tom sarcastically as Q held up the glass of Westmalle's Tripel to catch the last rays of sunset and filter them through the clear, golden yellow and onto the carved wooden charm hanging off his wrist. Q had taken to drinking at muggle establishments now that Tom was capable (and prone) to engaging in more complex arguments (conversations).
"I thought so," said Q with a drunken grin as the cedar rabbit came to life. He hadn't been much of a drinker before, but his magic seemed to embrace the heavy haze required to keep Tom in check. It wasn't proper etiquette to be constantly sloshed, of course, and he'd gotten his fair share of judging looks from wizards and muggles alike as he talked into his pints. He really should cut back a bit.
The rabbit charm twitched its nose and ears, twisting slowly on the cord of braided unicorn hair (to prevent Tom from influencing it) ((as if it was that simple)) to look around the room. The rabbit reminded him of how Vanlokt always called the tunnels 'warrens' and Q knew the goblin would have ordered a dozen, just because he could. "Live, Prince of a Thousand enemies! Live and be cunning and full of tricks."
The rabbit blinked, did a biiiiig stretch with a yawn, and for a moment Q was caught up in memories of seventh year and the faint whisper of wooden wings.
"A fairy tale animal from a muggle children's book can hardly stop me," whispered Tom, unimpressed with Quirinus's worthless trinket and pointless Hogwarts reminiscing. "Nothing can." After all, Tom was the most powerful Dark Lord since Grindelwald.
"You think that's true," muttered Q, and downed the beer. "But you think a lot of things are true that you've got no proof for. That your Death Eaters are still loyal. That a toddler really did deflect an Unforgivable. That you're destined to be something other than a spiritual worm in my brain." He hiccupped and frowned down at the unexpectedly empty bottle. When had he run out? "Hypothesize all you want, I'll stick to actual research and peer review."
But all his research hadn't helped, had it? All his planning and experimentation had been pointless and he had no one in Europe he could turn to for help. The Spaniards would be furious with him for his silence, the French would be smug at his failure-- Even in Scotland, where he'd be safer, who could Quirinus go to that would even believe what had happened? The goblins? They might hate the Ministry almost as much as Quirinus did, but whose to say they would help him instead of killing him for what he'd done?
He was all alone.
Thump, thump, thump, went the rabbit on his wrist, stomping a hindfoot to warn of danger… and the crushing inevitability of failure faded as Quirinus slowly untangled Tom's thoughts from his own until he was Q again.
Tom had started as muffled whispers, indistinct words more emotion than speech, but even as he'd grown those thoughts had always been uncomfortably other. Ever since Q had realized Tom was Tom, he'd been able to tell which thoughts weren't his own… but now? Now Q needed the rabbit.
Q popped the top off the next beer.
If nothing else, I've proved I can slow you down, thought Q, blurrily triumphant. His charmwork was getting better and he was iterating faster through the failures, even if he wasn't quite there yet. All he had to do was hold out long enough to find a true solution… so close.
After all, they could both feel how Tom was becoming Q the same way Q was becoming Tom.
* * * * *
Q dreams of the forest in muted, grayish-browns with the flash of blue songbirds in the corner of his eyes. He dreams of bright yellow tansies that are alive and dead in the same heartbeat. Q dreams of the Nott estate and bone white masks. He dreams of the Faro de Cala Figuera lighthouse and the way the tide pulls at the hull of his sailboat when he gets too close.
He dreams of rabbits and warrens and goblins who tell him to keep digging, he's almost there.
* * * * *
A hangover potion kills the pain and water fixes the dehydration but Q reaches for a beer out of habit as soon as he wakes… only he doesn't need it, does he? He looks down at the rabbit, clinking against the glass, and then puts the bottle back down.
"You have to talk to me now," said Q, "like a civilized parasite."
"Do I?" asked Tom. "How long do you think that chunk of wood will stop me?" Thanks to the rabbit Tom's voice was more clearly Tom, but Q could still feel the impatient frustration that was his, but wasn't his. They (Tom) needed to go home.
"Long enough." Q looked around the rented room, taking stock. He still had his knapsack and what remained of his supplies. He had another year left in his sabbatical, he could just… keep going. Only that would mean talking to the goblins again. And his mother.
"I've lost ten years," snarled Tom. "I'm not losing any more time because of you." Because Tom thought Q was an insignificant blip in his path, like the asphalt humps of sleeping policemen that forced traffic to slow-- only Tom didn't know what those were. Q did.
"You're dead," said Q although they both knew it wasn't true (Q just wasn't sure how). "You have all the time in the world."
"I have loyal followers awaiting my return," said Tom. Only that didn't feel as much like the truth as it had a week ago. "I have plans."
"So do I," said Q, "and there's more of me than there is of you." It was frustrating not to know why they knew that, but they did. But that wouldn't be true forever, soon Tom would consume him and the last sparks of Quirinus would fade away into nothing.
Thump, thump, thump, went the rabbit.
"Use your words," said Q and then winced at the bright blind storm of fury that came from being trapped, controlled, disrespected by someone so infuriatingly inferior. "And which one of us is the pure-blood?" Because he knew, but he didn't know, just what buttons to push.
"I WILL GRIND YOU TO DUST!"
"You can try," said Q and gathered his things. The rabbit should work (would work) long enough for him to backtrack a bit. He might not finish the sabbatical, but maybe he could salvage some of his own grand plans.
Q absentmindedly picked up the bottle on the way out, the beer was delicious and it couldn't hurt to lend the rabbit a helping paw.
Notes:
The quotes this time are from Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972). Who better to have lending a helping paw than a tiny El-ahrairah?
Chapter 6: Year Two (1979), Hogwarts
Chapter Text
"Why do you care so much about muggles?" asked Mary as he tried to explain the concept of moon landings and supersonic aircraft over lunch. "Or really, why do you care if we know so much about muggles?" She was a fourth-year, but one of the few pure-bloods that still willingly sat near him. (Even the half-bloods were starting to give him a wide berth.)
Q blinked. "But they don't have magic!"
"Exactly," said Mary, but didn't sound impressed.
"If they can do all this without magic, think of what they'd do with magic!"
"Then they'd just be wizards," pointed out Liam who was a half-blood in Q's year, and even less impressed. "They'd be wizards and they wouldn't need washing-up machines and lawn eaters. They'd have house elves and magic."
"But they thought up lawn mowers," insisted Q, "They started with scythes and just kept going until they had them. We've got cutting spells, but nothing for lawns. Nothing like that. No wizard ever imagined it!"
"We've enchanted grass that only grows to the proper height," said Mary. "And their lawn eaters are only good for eating grass, not rocks or trees. Cutting spells are good for anything. Also, stop talking with food in your mouth, it's gross."
"Lawn mowers," said Q grumpily.
"Have they made anything we don't have?" asked Liam.
"Spaceships!"
"That we need?" countered Mary.
Q spent the rest of the year trying to figure out (via vigorous debate) ((and peer review)) if laser watches, televisions, shoes that made footprints going the opposite direction, radio cassettes, guns, and short range walkie-talkies were things wizards needed or not (and why).
He even made mock-ups (just for demonstration purposes, of course) which they played with until they broke. Which was the tipping point where even the pure-blood teachers started calling him Q.
* * *
"Muggles made trains!" Q pointed out as they all boarded the Hogwarts Express to go home for the holidays. "We couldn't even make a proper copy, not of the modern ones. There's too many electronics."
"But we don't need it," said Mary, "we could take the floo, or apparate, or even the Night Bus."
"Why do we take the train?" asked Darren, who was a Hufflepuff muggle-born who'd fallen into their group's orbit during a heated debate one lunch. Q wasn't sure if he was a third-year or fourth-year, but he annoyingly sided with Mary most of the time.
"Mum says it's a bonding experience," said Liam, "and the Night Bus is just a copy too. Muggles made buses first." Liam had warmed to the idea the muggles might not be as boring as he'd thought, even if he didn't defend them as forcefully as Q.
"And indoor plumbing," said Darren as he pushed past Mary to grab the window seat. "Apparently it was scourgify this and scourgify that for a while with you lot. Still, I'm gonna miss having elves doing chores for me. I hate cleaning the bathroom."
"Muggle-borns aren't allowed to do household magic?" asked Mary, offended on his behalf.
"We aren't allowed to do any magic, but even if we could, Gran says magic can't clean as well as Ajax and elbow grease. Too bad you can't just enchant the cleaning supplies so she couldn't tell it was magic."
Q's brain stuttered to a halt as the conversation continued on without him. Charmed household items weren't cursed items, there was no reason to waste time and energy making sure they looked muggle when in use. Magical cooking pots stirred themselves with no obvious spoon, magical dusters floated about on their own, using the cloth and air currents to gather up the dust into a compact ball for disposal. Even prank items only looked normal until they went off.
Q couldn't think of a single non-cursed thing that hid the fact that it was magic while working. (The fact that it was illegal to knowingly give a muggle a charmed object (even if it wasn't a cursed one) was beside the point. He'd be giving it to a muggle-born.)
"You could put out cream for hobs and brownies," offered Liam. "They're sorta like house elves, but more random in the chores they choose to do."
"Does that actually work?" asked Darren skeptically. Neither hobs nor brownies had been mentioned in any of their classes.
"Well, mostly no, you tend to just get feral cats, but it can't hurt."
Q already had his sketchbook out and was working on combining scrub brushes with invisible cleaning charms and the rest of them wisely let the conversation tangent elsewhere.
* * *
"It's a clever bit of charmwork," Charms Master Flitwick acknowledged when Q brought him the finished scrub brush near the end of the year. "But I'm not sure I understand why you made it?"
That… was not what Q has been expecting. "It's for the muggle-borns to clean with, for the Statue of Secrecy?"
"I know the rules about doing magic outside of school are rarely enforced for wizarding families," the Charms Master said. "But the Ministry is very firm about muggle households. I doubt the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office would approve, even if you meant well. Magic isn't meant for muggles, even if they can't tell that's what it is." He handed back the scrub brush. "But it's a very clever bit of enchanting. I look forward to seeing what else you come up with!"
Q took the brush and his disappointment to lunch where Darren came over and bemoaned his fate while the rest of the table shared the Charms Master's confusion. Even the muggle-borns had accepted that magic done outside of wizarding areas (if it wasn't magic meant to prevent the muggles from noticing them) was like setting manticores loose from the zoo.
When he really stopped to think about it, Q wasn't sure if he understood the 'why' himself.
Muggle-borns almost always moved into wizarding towns after Hogwarts graduation so the only wizards who mingled with muggles on a regular basis were squibs. Squibs living in muggle areas were highly encouraged to avoid owning any magical items outside of a floo (and sometimes not even that), so his brush wasn't much use to them either.
Even in the best case scenario there was only a short window of time where a muggle-born could (or would) have wanted to use magical tools that pretended to be muggle. He'd known that, he must have-- but somehow it had gotten lost in the rush of tinkering.
It was his first truly useless invention.
He resolved to never let it happen again.
* * *
Q turned the brush loose to scrub one of the less popular hallways before he left. It would run out of magic in a few weeks and at least this way it would fulfill its purpose (even if Caretaker Filch probably wouldn't approve).
Chapter 7: 11 May 1991, France [30 days after possession]
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
With the help of the rabbit, Q fled to the south of France in one focused push, but he couldn't help drafting back towards Great Britain as the days rolled on (and Tom adapted).
The rainy warm spring unfurled around them as they slowly inched towards Scotland.
Towards Hogwarts.
Towards home.
They could be there in a day, if Q let them. It wouldn't take more than a few hours to apparate there, even less to portkey. Q began avoiding wizarding areas (even more than he already was) hoping to reduce the chances he'd give in.
Not that it helped. Thanks to his sabbatical, Q was more familiar with the muggle world than he'd ever dreamed of being as a child and knew dozens of ways to get back to England without raising a wand.
But there's still enough of a line between where he ends and Tom begins that they don't take any of them. They still argue a lot and sometimes Q finds himself agreeing with Tom's ideas, just not his methods. Tom's getting better at being a person again, better at sounding reasonable and rational (Q wonders how much of that is really Q and not Tom), but he still dissolves into pure emotion at times. Pure anger, pure need.
Q tries (now and then) to move further into the continent, over to Italy or Greece, but the closest he ever comes is thinking about how much he wants to. He spends his days counting all the payphones they passed (that could be used to call travel agents) and lingered near train stations in the early spring rains, watching trains leave without them.
He couldn't drive, or hire a taxi, or even walk somewhere with the intent of heading in the wrong direction for more than an afternoon without getting a splitting headache and what amounted to a panic attack. The rabbit wasn't much help against Tom's blunt emotional pushes, but neither were the rest of Q's inventions. (They were meant to fight dark magic, not Dark Lords.) ((Or what was left of one.))
So he loitered instead, spending their days crafting new trinkets and drinking Tom into silence. (Which started to mean drinking himself to sleep, but at least the wine was good.) He practiced his French, failed to learn oil painting, and avoided other wizards (and goblins) with a depressingly polished skill.
Tom can't make them go anywhere, not like he can keep Q from reaching out for help (not yet), but the temptation was always there.
The Kellys were here too, somewhere, and he started to reach out to Liam one night when he'd had enough glasses in to make it seem like a good idea (but not so many that he'd forgotten how to use a quill). Liam's father had been an auror once and Liam had always been good at charms.
They could help… but if they saw him, they'd know what Quirinus had done.
Thump, thump, thump, went the rabbit.
But for the first time, Q found he agreed with Tom that asking for help was the wrong choice. Not for the same reasons, of course, but that somehow made it worse. He could resist this time, could finally reach out and get the help he knows they'd offer.
He puts down the quill, incinerates the letter, and picks up the bottle.
* * * * *
Q dreams of the Ministry apologizing to him. Dreams of Dumbledore pleading with him to return to teaching. Dreams of Durmstrang and Beauxbaton's offer letters arriving by owl as his parents watched with pride. Dreams of Vanlokt welcoming him back with a pleased curse and his old desk waiting for him in the warrens, covered with notes.
Q dreams of the Black Rabbit with glowing red eyes. She doesn't need to thump, real or not, and just watches over him until he dreams of nothing at all.
* * * * *
When the compulsion to move was too much, Q travels one muggle town closer and stops. It's enough, but not enough, and every time he gives in it gets harder and harder to remember why they needed to stop. They're running out of money because Q hadn't budgeted for renting rooms for this long. Most curse-breaking work was done out in the field so he'd planned on camping… but setting up a tent near enough to the muggle bars is too risky.
Spending all his galleons pretending to be a muggle wasn't what he was meant to be doing.
Q had gone on sabbatical to gather definitive proof that his ideas had merit. That melding muggle scientific practices with magical ones had potential in countering and containing a wide variety of dark (and light) magic. One wizard (or goblin) kitted out with his inventions was as effective as an entire curse-breaking team for non-exotic defenses.
It was faster, safer-- and he'd proved that it worked in practical application, time and again.
Until Tom.
But it had worked. He had proof recorded and cataloged, dozens of papers already drafted, just waiting for a final edit. They could revolutionize curse-breaking, go back to Dumbledore with their head held high. They were so close to having everything they'd ever wanted.
All Quirinus had to do was go home.
Thump, thump, thump, went the rabbit.
Notes:
The Black Rabbit of Inlé (Inlé-rah) is another rabbit from Watership Down and represents Death. While they are male in the book (and the animated movie) they are female in the miniseries and I'm fond of that version.
normal_author on Chapter 1 Sun 14 Dec 2025 05:28AM UTC
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Khriskin on Chapter 1 Sun 14 Dec 2025 01:07PM UTC
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