The Stormborn Chapter 12

Wanda had expected many things when she took Harry from that grey little house on Privet Drive—but a plan was not one of them.

For the first ti in a long while, the Scarlet Witch was uncertain.

She stood beside Arica Chavez and Harry in a quiet neighbourhood, the hum of passing cars on the street behind them, the wind ruffling her coat as she looked to the boy she had just claid as her own.

Arica crossed her arms, raising a brow. “So… where are we going now?”

Wanda blinked, startled out of her thoughts. “I… I haven’t thought that far.”

“You’re telling we just broke into your not-son’s abusive house and we don’t even have a place to crash?” Arica groaned, rubbing her temple. “Wanda, you’re killing .”

Wanda looked apologetically at Harry. “I didn’t plan to run through the multiverse again. I want to raise you here, sowhere stable. I’ll find Billy and Tommy one day, but… not today. Not while you're with .”

Harry looked thoughtful, then slowly smiled. “I might know a place.”

Wanda tilted her head. “Where?”

Harry scratched his chin. “Before I take you there, you’ll need to change how you look a little. People might recognize you. You… look a lot like my mum.”

Wanda hesitated for a beat, then waved her fingers in the air. Her red hair darkened into a soft chocolate brown, and her eyes shimred for a mont before turning green.

Harry imdiately frowned. “Not green. My mum had green eyes.”

Wanda blinked, then changed them again—this ti to hazel.

“Better?” she asked.

Harry nodded. “Much.”

Then, from his pocket, Harry withdrew a polished, well-handled wand.

Wanda’s eyes widened. “What is that stick?”

Arica leaned in closer. “Looks like a wand. Is that a real wand?”

Harry smiled mischievously. “Watch this.”

He raised his wand high into the air and flicked it sharply.

BANG!

With a thunderous crack, a towering triple-decker purple bus appeared out of nowhere, screeching to a halt in front of them. It rattled the windows and sent Wanda and Arica stumbling back in alarm.

“The Knight Bus,” Harry said casually, stepping forward.

Wanda gaped. “You summoned a bus with a wand?”

“I an, yeah. Welco to Magical World.”

With a wide grin, Harry pulled a bandana from his pocket, wrapping it carefully around his forehead and covering his ssy black hair. He didn’t want to take any chances being recognized—especially in the place they were heading next.

The ride on the Knight Bus was as chaotic as always—beds flying, teacups hovering, and an elderly wizard nearly falling out of his bunk with every sharp turn. Wanda and Arica sat together near the front, gripping their seats.

Finally, they arrived outside the Leaky Cauldron.

Harry led the way. They slipped inside the dingy pub, where a few magical patrons nursed their pints or read the Daily Prophet. Tom, the hunchbacked bartender, gave Harry a curious look, but didn’t say a word.

Behind the bar, Harry tapped the right bricks on the hidden wall.

The bricks shifted, twisted, and peeled back to reveal Diagon Alley in all its chaotic, magical splendor.

Wanda stopped in her tracks.

The twisting cobblestone streets. The soaring, leaning buildings. Owls flying overhead. Broomsticks zooming between shops. Children dragging parents into sweet shops, and cauldrons bubbling in store windows.

“This… has been here the whole ti?” Wanda whispered.

Harry nodded. “Hiding in plain sight.”

They visited Gringotts first. The goblins didn’t even flinch when Wanda and Arica stepped inside. Harry led them through the marble hall until they reached his vault. When the doors creaked open, Wanda and Arica gasped.

Gold.

Mountains of it.

Harry shrugged. “Turns out defeating a dark wizard cos with lifeti interest and so thank-you donations.”

Wanda stared. “You could buy a kingdom.”

“Let’s start with a ho,” Harry said.

Next stop: the bookstore.

Wanda was like a child in a sweet shop—her eyes scanning every title, her fingers twitching with magic as book after book flew from the shelves into a growing stack. Her instincts guided her to tos of advanced transfiguration, interdinsional theory, and magic of the mind.

The shopkeeper blinked nervously. “Er—ma’am?”

Wanda flicked her fingers. The man blinked again, dazed, then looked away.

Harry frowned. “What did you just do?”

“Just a small charm. He won’t rember,” Wanda said innocently.

“That’s called stealing,” Harry said firmly. “And if you want anything, I can pay. I will pay.”

Wanda blinked, surprised by the authority in his voice. But she nodded.

So Harry approached the counter and handed over a pouch of Galleons.

They bought new robes. Clothes. Food supplies. A cauldron for fun. Two rooms at the Leaky Cauldron.

But it wasn’t enough.

They needed a ho.

The very next day, They t a wizard real estate agent nad David Greyson, a polite, well-dressed man with a chaleon quill and a scroll of magical listings that unraveled all the way to the floor.

“We have properties in Ottery St. Catchpole, Hogsade, Godric’s Hollow, and so more secluded places in the Highlands. For a young buyer like yourself, Ms. Maximoff, privacy might be ideal?”

“I want sothing quiet,” Wanda said. “But not too far from the world.”

David nodded. “I know just the place.”

They portkeyed to Scotland.

And there, nestled between rolling hills, was a stone mansion that looked like it had once belonged to a noble magical family. Five bedrooms. An orchard nearby. Enchanted defenses in place. A private fireplace with Floo access. Greenhouses out back. Goblin-made locks and wards.

It was perfect.

“We’ll take it,” Harry said.

The price: 28,000 Galleons.

Goblins took care of the paperwork within the hour.

In seven days, Harry Potter had gone from the Dursley's… to a Manor of his own.

And as they stepped through the gates of the newly purchased estate, Harry looked at Wanda and Arica standing beside him—Wanda holding a stack of books, Arica chewing gum and flicking energy sparks from her fingers—and for the first ti in his life...

He felt safe.

He felt ho.

Just because Harry had left the Dursleys and found a quiet mansion in the Scottish Highlands didn’t an he was ready to give up everything familiar. School still mattered. Football still mattered. Normalcy still mattered.

And he was determined to keep those things.

Wanda and Arica were surprised when he declared one morning, over toast and pumpkin juice, “I still want to go to school.”

Arica blinked. “You an… your normal school?”

Harry shrugged. “It’s not great, but I like it. I like the classes. I like football. And I don’t want to disappear and make people worry. I already called and told my friends I moved in with a family friend.”

Wanda, who was poring over a massive to titled Fundantals of Transfiguration: Volu I, looked up with curiosity. “You still want to study normal things even when you have this?”

She gestured to the towering shelves of magical books around her—their newly filled personal library that was a bedroom before.

Harry smiled. “Yeah. Magic is amazing, but I want to live in both worlds. The magical one and the normal one.”

Arica popped a piece of toast into her mouth, grinning. “Then you’re in luck. My multiverse portals can do local travel, too.”

She stood up, brushing crumbs off her jeans. “Give your school schedule. I’ll get you there and back in ti for dinner.”

So it was decided.

Every weekday morning, Arica Chavez opened a swirling, star-shaped portal outside the manor’s gates—one that opened just a block away from Harry’s school in Surrey. She’d walk with him through the portal, give him a mock salute at the school fence, and vanish into the stars before anyone noticed.

Harry returned the sa way every afternoon, and none of his friends suspected anything strange—except that he was no longer wearing old, ill-fitting clothes or bruises from Dudley’s bullying. When asked, Harry simply said he was now staying with a family friend “in the country.”

“And you’ll still play football, right?” Jason had asked.

“Of course,” Harry said with a grin.

Back at the manor, Wanda was growing into sothing Harry never expected: a scholar.

When she first arrived in this world, her Chaos Magic had felt limitless—but wild. Untad. Dangerous.

But the mont she stepped into Flourish and Blotts, and later their ho library, Wanda discovered a world of structured magic: Charms, Transfiguration, Enchantnts, Conjuration. There were laws here. Theories. Techniques.

She was hooked.

“I thought my powers were everything,” Wanda confessed one evening, curled up in a chair with a book titled Enchanting the Elents. “But there’s so much more to magic than raw power.”

She spent hours every day flipping through books on Alchemy, Ancient Runes, Astronomy, and Arithmancy. She didn’t need a wand to channel the spells—her magic was different, older—but she followed the principles carefully, eager to master every new field.

What surprised her most was how much she loved learning.

“I never had the chance,” she told Harry one night. “Where I co from, we survive. We don’t study. But here… magic is knowledge.”

They had converted one of the larger upstairs rooms into a shared library—filled with the books they bought in Diagon Alley and the duplicates Wanda created from Harry's magical trunk. Most magical books couldn’t be copied, but Wanda’s Chaos Magic, shaped by will and runes she painstakingly studied, could bend those rules.

“I’m not rewriting the books,” she explained. “I’m echoing them. Mimicking their essence.”

Each important book had three copies: one for Harry, one for the manor library, and one for Wanda’s personal collection.

In return, Harry took charge of the kitchen.

He’d learned to cook through necessity at the Dursleys’ house—eggs and toast, bacon and beans, stews and pies. But here, soone actually appreciated it.

“Dinner slls like heaven,” Arica said every ti she ca down from training in the upper hall, rubbing her stomach and grinning.

Wanda once hovered in the kitchen doorway, watching as Harry expertly stirred a bubbling cauldron of vegetable stew and seasoned roast chicken with a blend of magical herbs from their garden.

“You really don’t need to do this,” she said softly. “We can conjure food, you know.”

Harry shook his head. “Conjured food tastes wrong. And besides, I like cooking. I like taking care of people who care about .”

That silenced her.

Later, as Wanda and Arica sat at the long oak table in the dining room, candlelight flickering in crystal sconces and the sll of fresh bread drifting in the air, Wanda found herself smiling.

This felt like ho.

Not a battlefield. Not a collapsing world. Not a ruined illusion.

But a ho.

And so the days passed.

Wanda buried herself in magical theory.

Harry balanced football and astronomy, Defense spells and fractions, wandwork and Muggle howork.

And slowly, the manor that had stood silent and cold for decades… beca filled with warmth, and laughter, and life.

Days at the manor began to follow a rhythm.

Harry would rise early, slipping into the enchanted library chamber with a stack of magical books under one arm and his wand in hand. Wanda was often already there, a floating orb of crimson Chaos Magic illuminating her face as she ditated or skimd through thick tos in Ancient Greek and Latin. They had grown used to sitting in silence, breathing magic together.

Wanda had begun what she called the transfer—the delicate act of teaching Harry to feel and wield Chaos Magic.

“It’s not sothing you learn,” she told him gently one day, as they sat in the library’s ditation room, surrounded by shelves of ancient grimoires. “It’s sothing you surrender to. Chaos can’t be tad, but it can… bond.”

She placed her fingers over his chest.

“It must accept you, Harry.”

She wasn’t flooding him with raw power—Wanda was far too careful for that. But day by day, she let small tendrils of her magic wrap around Harry’s core, helping him learn how to feel it, control it, live with it. Sotis he could conjure a crimson spark that floated for a second. Other tis, the sparks burned his fingers and left the curtains smoking.

“It’s like trying to teach a dragon to sit,” he muttered one day, rubbing a singed sleeve.

Wanda only smiled. “Yes. And yet... you’re already farther than I expected.”

While Harry and Wanda spent hours learning together—Harry through books and wands, Wanda through theory and Chaos discipline—Arica Chavez grew restless.

She had never been the bookish type. Portals and punches were more her style.

But watching Wanda imrse herself in magical fields, and Harry split his ti between magical textbooks and chaos ditation, stirred sothing in her. She wasn’t going to be left behind—not here.

One afternoon, she sat across the table from Harry, tapping her fingers against a book of Herbology Harry had left open.

“Is this… stuff hard to learn without a wand?” she asked.

Harry looked up from a parchnt he was scribbling runes on and blinked. “So of it. Not all. Care of Magical Creatures doesn’t need a wand. Herbology’s all about touch, sll, care. Potions are tricky but doable. Arithmancy… well, that’s magical maths.”

“Magical maths?” she raised an eyebrow. “Sounds horrifying.”

Harry laughed. “It is.”

But she tried anyway.

She began spending hours in the greenhouse at the back of the manor—a glass and iron do humming with warm energy. Inside grew Mimbulus Mimbletonia, Fluttering Vines, enchanted Orchids, and even a small clump of Gillyweed Harry had smuggled from Diagon Alley.

Arica took to Herbology like a natural.

She had patience. Instincts. She could sense when a plant needed sothing—and plants liked her. The greenhouse began thriving under her touch. Buds blood faster. Leaves turned toward her like they knew her voice.

“You have a gift,” Wanda told her one day, kneeling beside a blooming cluster of Moon Lilies.

Arica shrugged. “I just don’t want to be useless.”

“You never were,” Wanda said firmly. “But now you're could be more.”

She didn’t stop at Herbology.

With Harry’s help, Arica set up a small potions and alchemy room in the cellar—once used as a wine chamber, now lined with copper cauldrons, labeled vials, shelves of powdered ingredients, and glowing bottled stars. She taught herself how to grind salamander scales, crush billywig stingers, and brew basic healing potions from Bubotuber pus and Dittany.

When one of her potions exploded in a puff of pink smoke, staining the ceiling permanently magenta, she just grinned. “Progress.”

At night, she read books on Arithmancy, her tongue poking out as she scribbled magical equations.

And beyond the books, the manor was alive.

Magical creatures had begun showing up, drawn by the intense magical energy generated by the Chaos Magic within the house and the steady spellwork Harry and Wanda were performing every day.

A family of Bowtruckles nested in the willow tree near the greenhouse.

A silvery Niffler had taken to stealing spoons from the kitchen drawers.

A Kneazle—a cat-like creature with intelligent eyes and a forked tail—appeared in the garden one evening and now guarded the manor like a proud sentinel.

“I think she likes you,” Harry told Arica as the Kneazle curled up by her feet during potions practice.

“I don’t trust cats,” Arica muttered, though she didn’t move.

Even the air around the property shimred with enchantnt, ancient and growing. Goblin-run wards had sealed the manor against intruders, and the land itself thrumd with protective runes. The house had beco more than a refuge.

It had beco a sanctum.

A ho where Chaos Magic t Hogwarts magic, where friendship flourished like wildflowers, and where three strangers from different worlds were no longer just surviving…

But becoming sothing more.

Harry was mastering two worlds.

Wanda was rediscovering the aning of family.

And Arica… was no longer running.