Fanfic / A Wand for Skitter

A Wand For Skitter is a Worm and Harry Potter crossover.

Waking in the body of a murdered child, Taylor Hebert, once a supervillain and later a superhero, must discover who has been killing muggleborns, while she is being forced to go to Hogwarts, among groups who are the most likely suspects.

It is posted on Archive of Our Own (here), FanFiction.Net (here), and SpaceBattles.com (thread 1, thread 2), and is complete.

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Tropes:

• Accentuate the Negative: Taylor tends to do this due to her cynical nature.
• Assassination Attempt: The Death Eaters try to kill Taylor so many times and ways that she loses track.
  Hermione: You didn't tell me about an assassination attempt?
  Taylor: If I told everybody about every time people tried to kill me, I wouldn't have any time to get anything done,
• Bad Boss: Voldemort, as always, throwing numerous Death Eaters to their gruesome demises against Taylor long after it becomes clear the tactic isn't effective and he should really go and deal with her himself.
• Bag of Holding: Taylor can't really afford the larger-on-the-inside magical trunks she'd like, but she's able to get a cheaper rate for having her waist pouch expanded. With an extra charm to ensure that what you want is always on top.
  The look Hermione gave my bag was avaricious; she was probably wondering how many books she could stuff in one of them. The answer of course was about six hundred.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: As Dumbledore lampshades, Voldemort wanted to live forever, and thanks to Taylor's machinations, he ends up trapped in a Stable Time Loop, only to be released billions of years into the future, as the sun turns red.
• Bloodier and Gorier: There's more "realistic" violence (as opposed to fantastical injuries like having the bones in your arm vanished by magic) than even the later Harry Potter books, and it's much more graphically described. A good illustration is the final form of Taylor's boggart, a pile of gruesomely tortured bodies representing her fear of sliding downhill into committing atrocities. Due to her past experience, even the smell of carnage is accurately recreated.
• Boring, but Practical: Taylor uses a lot of relatively simple spells to great effect.
• Bully Hunter: Taylor doesn't tolerate bullying, whether it be to her or to others.
• Children Forced to Kill: Taylor appears to be eleven and twelve years old when facing Death Eaters. And her classmates increasingly get caught in her wake...
• Combat Pragmatist: Taylor doesn't always fight, but when she does, it's because she has to, so she's out to win by any means. Poison, ambushes, assassination, everything is on the table.
  If you could afford to fight fair, then you could afford to talk it out. Fighting was what had to be done when there was no other good choice.
• Dark and Troubled Past: It is incredibly obvious Taylor has this, and Snape and Dumbledore discuss this.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • A Death Eater sneaks into Hogwarts to kill Taylor, and Argus Filch is killed in the crossfire.
  • Cornelius Fudge is assassinated in Taylor's second year and replaced by Umbridge.
  • Umbridge is assassinated by Taylor (framing the Death Eaters for it) not long after and replaced by Amelia Bones.
• Disposing of a Body: Taylor uses bugs to entirely consume the body of Argus Filch, with Severing Charms cutting it into manageable pieces for spiders to carry away the leftovers and eat them later. There's still a smell left behind, but the House Elves clean that up without recognising it.
• Distant Finale: The final scene has Voldemort, billions of years in the future after being freed from the Time Loop Trap Winky trapped him in, right as the sun starts to turn red...with a recording from Hermione explaining exactly what happened to him.
• Do Wrong, Right:
  • To avoid making it look like he has any sympathies for Taylor, after a group of older Slytherin boys try to sneak into her room and are badly beaten by her, Snape lectures the other Slytherins about how the boys' plan wasn't cunning like Slytherins are supposed to be.
  • Throughout the story, Taylor often criticizes Voldemort’s methods and tactics in trying to conquer wizarding Britain, and finds him sorely incompetent more often than not. One of her very first impressions of Voldemort is to dismiss him as an "amateur" of a Dark Lord for openly leading a terrorist organization bent on straightforward conquest, rather than infiltrating the existing government and using a False Flag Operation to consolidate power like Coil or Palpatine.
• The Dreaded: Taylor starts to become this, especially after the Boggart incident.
• Exploited Immunity: Taylor's use of Peruvian Darkness Powder becomes well known, so her attackers come prepared with items to let them see in the dark, while she can only see through her bugs. Which means that the basilisk can kill her attackers instantly without affecting Taylor.
• Eye Scream: Taylor and Kreacher explode the eyeballs of the rats in Grimmauld Place before killing them, which helps win Kreacher over to be more sympathetic to her. She practised it first on Peter Pettigrew.
• Fair for Its Day: In-Universe, Taylor figures that wizards' long lifespans contribute to racism surviving longer than in the Muggle world.
  There were people who were progressive for their day, but by today's standards would be considered horribly racist. In the Wizarding world, a lot of them were still around.
• False Flag Operation: Taylor asks some of the seventh years to devise a spell to imitate the Dark Mark, so that she has the option to blame atrocities on the Death Eaters.
• Family of Choice: Taylor encourages Harry to find friends who will give him the love the Dursleys don't.
  Taylor: You can't be loved. Not at home. That doesn't mean you won't find other people who love you. Sometimes friends can be your second family.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: Taylor eventually figures out a way to transfigure containment foam, and then teaches the Ministry of Magic how to enact Master/Stranger protocols in order to counter Imperius curses, polyjuice, disillusionment, and invisibility cloaks.
• Godzilla Threshold: Moody doesn't want Taylor to just keep escalating, because the possibilities that magic and science can achieve together are truly horrific, like transfiguring U-235.
  Moody: If you start doing things like this, eventually the Death Eaters will be forced to reciprocate by doing similar things. That is a line that none of us want crossed because it means that the death toll will go far higher.
• Got Volunteered: Ron Weasley got volunteered by Fred and George to try containment foam on.
• Groin Attack:
  • Taylor sees that a troll's skin is too tough for it to be hurt, so she tries stabbing it in the scrotum. Turns out the skin is thinner there.
  • Professor Snape apparently anticipated some boys getting kicked in painful locations after Taylor was sorted into Slytherin. He didn't anticipate how quickly things would actually escalate (eg invading her dorm room and getting struck down with a sock full of galleons).
• Had to Be Sharp:
  • To be a Muggle-Born in the current Slytherin climate requires this, which is why the Sorting Hat distributed Muggle-Borns that would have been better suited to Slytherin to other Houses for their own safety. Taylor got in because it knew that she could handle it.
  • Taylor attributes the Muggles Do It Better themes in the story, at least partially, to the fact that without magic, they needed to find more creative and innovative solutions for the same result. It certainly helped that the fact that there are so many more Muggles than wizards means that they have a larger talent pool to draw from.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Winky crushes a Time Turner to trap herself and Voldemort in an endless loop. She's eventually freed in the epilogue, five billion years later, while Voldemort is left there on the abandoned and doomed Earth.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: It turns out that the main Death Eater base is inside the Ministry, on a level wiped from human memory by an Unspeakable experiment gone wrong.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Avery, when he and Selwyn killed Millie Scrivener, tortured her with the Cruciatus curse repeatedly before dealing the final blow. Taylor believes that her presence on the Harry Potter Earth is because the dying girl's accidental magic summoned her to stop the people who were hurting her.
  • Warrington tries to kill Taylor in a duel to avenge his father (a Death Eater killed during a failed attack on her and Harry), by summoning snakes that had been specifically spelled so that their venom would be resistant to magical healing — only for Taylor to deflect the snakes back at him. The duel might have been cut short early enough to save him, too, if it weren't for the shield he set up to prevent any outside interference.
  • Voldemort allows Crouch to die without even trying to save him. This lets Taylor get Winky (who was loyal to the Crouch family) to break a Time Turner and trap Voldemort in a time loop.
  • The reason Voldemort couldn't defeat Taylor even with his Seer Machine? Since he was the one who killed the Seers and used their brains in it, even though he was assured that they weren't conscious, he was sure that the Seers were working against him, so he never fully trusted it.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Taylor defends her past ruthless-but-necessary actions to the Sorting Hat. That attitude only makes it more convinced that she belongs in Slytherin.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: Taylor slices the robe of a bully she has incapacitated, then points out that she could have gone for the throat instead.
  Taylor: It would have been easier, and less trouble for me really. This is me being merciful. I won't be again.
• Implied Death Threat: Taylor settles on intimidation as her first approach for dealing with Draco Malfoy.
  "Are you threatening me?" he asked incredulously.
  I shook my head. "Absolutely not. If I was threatening you, I'd pull out my wand like this, and I'd mention that I knew the cutting charm."
  Casting the spell, I used it to slice the ropes holding my trunk together.
• Improvised Weapon: Taylor looks for ways to use everything in a fight.
  • She reads through the list of first-year spells and promptly decides that they're usable as weapons. Fire-starting is obvious, but levitation also means you can drop things on people, and a spell that can trim clothes can also sever throats.
    The ability to give someone a cold didn't seem that useful, but I was going to reserve judgment.
    It would make torture easier for one thing. Hold their mouth closed and then use the spell to fill their nose and lungs with mucus. There would be a certain degree of panic involved.
  • Professor Snape assumes she won't care about getting a cat or toad because they can't be weaponised. She retorts that he's wrong, she can think of at least three ways.
  • The first time she sees Exploding Snap being played, she starts thinking about ways to deliver lots of cards at once, or alter the spell to make a bigger explosion.
  • Professor McGonagall turns her desk into a pig as a demonstration, and Taylor wonders whether it can actually be eaten, or whether it would revert to splinters within a person's stomach (or even bloodstream).
    Would that be a perfect form of assassination?
  • After the Transfiguration lesson, Taylor wonders if she can get a supply of extra matchsticks to practise transfiguring them into needles. Partly to get better at it, but also, "there were things that could be done with a large supply of needles."
  • Magical Christmas crackers are very impressive, with the kind of toys have Muggles have since realised are unsafe. Also, the prospect of a loud bang and cloud of smoke on demand results in Taylor secreting a number of them in her extended pouch.
    I was reasonably sure that my bugs would be able to activate one too. I might even be able to activate several. It wouldn't give me much of an advantage, but sometimes there was a thin razor's edge between being dead, and being not dead.
• Inherent in the System:
  • Because Muggle-Borns can't practice magic at home over the summer and other holidays due to the Trace, those children with wizarding parents are able to get an edge over them, especially with the Pure-Bloods who can afford tutors for their children.
  • The lack of Muggle education and academic credentials available from magical schools limits Muggle-Born career opportunities significantly, cutting out most non-magical options.
• Innocent Bigot: Madam Pomfrey has a moment where she implies, apparently unconsciously, that wizard lives are worth more than Muggle lives. Taylor thinks that such subconscious views aren't uncommon, even if the wizards aren't aware of it.
• Kids Are Cruel: After her past bullying experiences, Taylor doesn't let her guard down when she arrives at Hogwarts, keeping her face stoic and wishing she had a large enough swarm to offload her emotions.
  The one thing I couldn't do was to show fear. Children were little monsters, and while Emma, Sophia and Madison had been outliers, I'd seen a lot of casual bullying in my days as well. There had been a lot of kids who had laughed when I'd been shoved in the locker, and a much larger group that had stood by and done nothing.
  Kids tended to pile on when someone went down, and they were vicious. They hadn't yet developed the ability to empathize with people, and their idea of morality was "don't get caught."
• Killed By The Adaptation: Justin Finch-Fletchley was one of the muggle-born children killed before he even received his Hogwarts letter.
• Killing in Self-Defense: Taylor does this a lot. The fact that they were legitimately trying to kill her is the main reason that she's not in Azkaban.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Taylor only has 250 bullets for the machine gun she sets up, but she configures it to fire them all in twenty seconds. The unfortunate victims basically splash.
• Make an Example of Them: Taylor usually only kills in self-defence. When she kills in revenge for atrocities, she makes sure to send a message, such as stabbing the fragments of their wands into their own eye sockets.
• Memetic Psychopath: In-universe, Taylor becomes this to the Hogwarts student body. Basically anytime there's a discussion of a hypothetical situation, people predict that it will lead to Taylor killing people in gruesome ways, and one student jokes that a cheering potion would be like poison to her.
• Mook Horror Show: Chapter 59 is from the perspective of one of the Death Eaters who were sent to kill Harry and Taylor on the Hogwarts Express, as the group is killed off by Taylor one by one.
• Mook Depletion: Over the course of the fic, Voldemort's forces end up more and more depleted, between Taylor killing all the Death Eaters he sends after her and Dumbledore further thinning the ranks via the Muggleborn Liberation Front. Eventually he resorts to hiring mercenaries for the final attack on Hogwarts.
• Moral Myopia: Thomas sees Taylor kill Nigel without any apparent remorse, and takes that as proof that she's demonic rather than human. Meanwhile, both Thomas and Nigel were present for the specific purpose of murdering Taylor, which Thomas feels no remorse about and considers to be morally praiseworthy. (It makes sense in his head because he thinks only purebloods are really human.)
• Muggles Do It Better:
  • Taylor discusses this with McGonagall at one point, pointing out that it helps a lot that Muggles have genuinely more talented individuals to draw upon.
  • At one point, Dumbledore suggests that Muggle medicine might one day even surpass wizarding medicine. Despite Madame Pomfrey's reaction, the Distant Finale reveals that Muggles were the ones that eventually cracked immortality.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Even before the Boggart incident, Taylor unnerved her classmates. Her idea of a 'suitable environment' for self-defense lessons for the Room of Requirement to simulate? Brockton Bay post-Leviathan.
• No OSHA Compliance: Taylor is unimpressed by the moving staircases that could easily break a child's neck, and even more so by the broomstick lessons that are practically begging for it. She does, however, approve of how the greenhouses are divided according to the danger levels of the plants inside, so that eleven-year-olds aren't dealing with man-eaters.
  However, I found myself interested in what exactly was in those more dangerous greenhouses. I suspected that some of them might be useful.
• Noble Bigot:
  • Professor Travers may have some minor prejudice against Muggles and Muggleborns, but he doesn't let it affect his job.
  • While mostly an Innocent Bigot, Madame Pomfrey is rather dismissive of Muggle medical practices, and finds Dumbledore's suggestion that they could ever rival, or even surpass, wizarding medicine laughable.
• Orcus on His Throne: It's lampshaded a few times that Voldemort seems to have an aversion to facing Taylor himself.
• Paranoia Fuel: In-universe, the Wizarding World is milked of this by Taylor.
• Plausible Deniability:
  • Professor Snape doesn't precisely like Taylor, but he does respect her capabilities and acknowledges her right to defend herself. So when she starts asking questions about how someone would go about cursing mail, he informs her that curses are upper-year subjects, which she won't be ready to learn about for some time yet.
    While Snape was seemingly refusing my obvious interest in curses, he was also giving me a clue as to who my attacker was. Essentially he was saying that it had to be a fifth year or above, possibly a gifted fourth year, or a professor.
  • Taylor suspects that Rowle has an inkling about her secret study group, but that since it's reduced discipline problems overall, he's willing to officially ignore it.
• Point of Divergence: The main point being the Death Eaters getting the Hogwarts acceptance list and targeting the Muggle-Borns on it before they get their letters. This leads to Taylor ending up in the Harry Potter world in the body of a murdered Muggle-Born girl, and the rest is history.
• Poke in the Third Eye: Viewing the Simurgh with Legilimency is a very bad idea.
• Power Misidentification:
  • Taylor unconsciously starts replicating her old insect-controlling power through accidental (at first) magic, but initially assumes that it's related to her shard.
  • People start to assume that Taylor has a Seer ability due to her ability to keep escaping attacks by Death Eaters as if she knows that they're coming, when it's actually just her using her insect senses. She deliberately reinforces the misunderstanding in order to hide her true abilities.
• The Power of Hate: Frustrated by her inability to find a single untainted happy memory of the necessary strength to fuel a Patronus, Taylor manages to stumble on what she calls a Dark Patronus, fueled by hatred in the same way that a normal Patronus is fueled by joyful memories, which for her takes the form of a dark swarm of insects that quickly renders a target Stripped to the Bone. She herself can only control it via her insect-controlling abilities.
• Racist Grandpa: Taylor attributes part of the wizarding world's Fantastic Racism to a combination of this and Wizards Live Longer meaning that racist views can more easily be passed onto new generations.
• The Shameless: When Taylor hears about the nasty slur "mudblood" for those of nonmagical heritage, rather than be upset by it or ignore it, she starts calling herself that. Draco Malfoy is thrown far off balance — especially when she proceeds to imply that she's a crazed killer.
  Taylor: Oh, I know what it means. And if anyone else calls me that, they'll likely regret it. But it doesn't bother me all that much. I know what I am, and I'm comfortable with it.
• Sock It to Them: Taylor's first fight with bullies has her fill a sock with galleons. It quickly became a Signature Scene for the fanfic and numerous "sock full of galleons" jokes ensued.
• Squishy Wizard: Taylor notes when fighting some Dementors that they seem rather weak physically, wondering if no one had even tried using physical force against them before.
• Stating the Simple Solution:
  • When talking about Pensieves, Dumbledore mentions that extracting memories causes them to fade somewhat and diminish in intensity Taylor suggests that people suffering from trauma might be helped by having the memories of their experiences repeatedly extracted so that they're not tormented as much by them. Dumbledore later repeats this to others, which, along with scans of Taylor's brain, leads to a major breakthrough in treating people affected by the Cruciatus Curse.
  • The killing curse cannot be blocked by any known magic. What does Taylor suggest for dealing with it? Ducking behind physical objects and barriers, since it can't do much to those.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Taylor is impressed by the physical security around Hogwarts in preparation for an international conference, but then she discovers that the drinks have all been poisoned with diluted Draught of Living Death.
• There Are No Therapists: When a pet is suggested to Taylor for emotional support after the deaths of her body's parents, she responds that she'd be better off with actual therapy, but is told wizards don't have any therapists.
  Taylor: Color me surprised. Your culture would probably be a lot healthier if you did.
• Time Loop Trap: Voldemort's eventual fate is to be trapped in a time loop for billions of years.
• Torture Is Ineffective: Taylor drops the trope name when talking about the Cruciatus Curse.
• Troll: Taylor isn't at all serious about the possibility of being elected Minister for Magic, but she enjoys the look on Professor Snape's face at the prospect.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: It's incredibly obvious to her classmates that Taylor grew up in a bad neighborhood.
• Uncanny Valley: Between being an adult in a child's body, offloading emotions onto her swarm, and having lived through immense trauma, Taylor comes off as wrong to many people, but especially to Rita Skeeter, whose (beetle) Animagus form is terrified of her.
  The way she moved was like someone who was wearing someone else's skin, as though there was something just waiting to explode out of her skin to devour her.
• Underestimating Badassery: Taylor is constantly underestimated. Even after she starts openly killing Death Eaters, Voldemort still doesn't really take her seriously... to his detriment.
• We Have Reserves: Voldemort, probably due to his Horcruxes, doesn't really care that he's basically throwing his minions to their deaths fighting Taylor, with Lucius wondering at one point about his seeming aversion to finishing her off himself, this bites him in the ass when he lets Crouch die in an ultimately futile effort to kill Taylor, allowing her to turn Winky and have her break a Time Turner, trapping her and Voldemort in a Stable Time Loop.
• Wizards Live Longer: Due to a combination of their magic and magical medicine, it's not unheard of for a wizard or witch to live to be around 200 years old.
• Written by the Winners: Taylor finds it probable that more than one historical "Dark Lord" or "Dark Lady" actually won, they just weren't called that in the history books due to their victory.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Lucius Malfoy starts to see Taylor this way.
• You Got Murder: Taylor doesn't know anyone outside Hogwarts to speak of, so when a letter comes for her, she doesn't bother to open it. Pansy, after deriding her for apparently not knowing how to receive mail, opens it instead — and her fingers break out in boils from the bubotuber pus it was soaked in.
  Looking over her shoulder, I saw that the letter simply said in big block letters, "You aren't wanted here, Mudblood."
• You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: Taylor quotes this verbatim to a bully she has just petrified, levitated over a potentially lethal drop, and warned that she can get him while he's sleeping. Because she isn't actually angry yet, but if he manages to ambush her at some point, she might become so.
  Taylor: Nobody is safe, and if you should happen to catch me by surprise... well, I'm not even angry with you now. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry, I don't think.

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