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Chapter Text

August 22^nd, 1994

The Burrow

4:38 P.M.

Unable to help himself, Harry winced as, on the floor below them, Mrs. Weasley’s thundering managed to get even louder. He, Ron, Hermione and Ginny were trudging dutifully up the stairs, doing their best to spare the twins the embarrassment of having their dressing down witnessed. Alas, no amount of distance was going to keep them from hearing – at the very least – snippets of Mrs. Weasley’s rage as she shouted at them at the top of her lungs. “-wasting your time!” “Honestly!” “-think by now you’d have buckled down-” “-can’t believe you’re still-” Harry had found the twins’ prank on Dudley to be wonderfully funny, but he would have been the first to tell them not to do it if this was the response they were going to get.

Noticing his reaction, Ginny chuckled. “Yeah. ‘S not the first we’ve heard of that this summer.” Harry raised an inquisitive eyebrow at her, prompting an ever so subtle blush. She covered it quickly, tripping over her words as she continued. “We’ve been hearing all sorts of things coming from their room–”

“Explosions and the like,” Ron interrupted, drawing a look of ire from his sister. “Honestly thought they were trying to kill each other once or twice, but we never thought they were making things.”

“Making things?” Harry echoed. “What, you mean ‘Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes’? What’s that about?”

Ginny sniggered slightly. “’S what they call ‘em. All those confections of theirs. ‘S their product line, y’see.”

“Product line? So ‘Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes’? That’s their brand?”

“We just call ‘em ‘Wheezes’,” Ron supplied, a crooked smile on his face. “Saves time.”

“But yeah,” Ginny answered his question for him. “Mum went snooping in their room a while back-”

“She was cleaning their room,” Hermione corrected, ever the authoritarian defender.

Ginny rolled her eyes. “She was snooping in their room,” the redhead reiterated. “Found all kinds of order forms and the like. We think they were planning on selling the stuff when they got back to Hogwarts.”

Ron barked out a laugh. “Fat chance of that. Mum’s got eagle eyes for the things now, she does.”

“Will you lot quiet down!?” Percy popped his head out of his door to snap at them. “Bad enough, Mum yelling at those two like an overzealous prison warden! I don’t need you lot thundering up and down the stairs while I’m trying to work!”

“We aren’t thundering,” Ron rolled his eyes. “Honestly, go back to your cauldron bottoms, Perce.”

Percy pursed his lips angrily and shut his door with a mighty slam.

Hermione turned baleful eyes onto Ron who looked at her askance. “Wha’?” he asked defensively. “Do you wanna listen to his latest update on standardized cauldron thickness?”

Hermione rolled her eyes. “Honestly,” she stressed, following close behind Ron and Harry as they entered his room. “You could stand to show a little interest in your brother’s work, Ronald.”

“Don’t call me, Ronald,” Ron snarked. “You sound like Mum.”

“Think that was what she was going for,” Ginny sniggered, hoisting herself up to sit atop Ron’s dresser. She bounced her legs noisily against the dresser drawers, Percy’s complaints about noise seemingly forgotten.

Hermione glared at her, but Harry spoke before she could. “Why are there four beds in here, Ron?”

Ron glanced at the fluffy, blanketed cots his mother had made up on his floor a little less than a month ago. He hardly noticed them anymore, he’d become so used to them. Ron shrugged. “The twins are bunking with us, on account of Bill and Charlie being in their room.”

Ginny sniggered again. “Making it much harder to experiment on their products, that,” she grinned mirthfully. “They tried testing some kinda potion in here a couple weeks ago-”

“He doesn’t need to hear about that!” Ron snapped.

Ginny’s grin widened. “Made all his hair fall out,” she stage whispered to Harry, which earned her a grin. Ron groaned, running a hand down his face. He idly fingered an orange lock, as if confirming that his mane was still present and accounted for. It had taken a rapid hair growth potion to get him back to an acceptable length, something which the twins had very reluctantly agreed to pay for. That is, their father forced them to pay for it on pain of confiscating their brooms for the remainder of the summer.

“Yeah, Fred and George are right gits, what else is new?” Ron groused. “Never mind that. Oi, Harry! You heard from–OW! Bloody hell, woman!”

Hermione, who had elbowed Ron rather severely in the stomach, cut her eyes at Ginny with all the subtly of a raging bull, and Ron likewise clamped his mouth closed with all the subtlety of a charging rhinoceros. Ginny eyed the two of them, and Harry soon after, with some amount of trepidation, but seemed content to let the matter lie. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know that the ‘Golden Trio’ had secrets of their own that she was not privy too.

Harry, for his part, sent Hermione a thankful look, which she returned with a nod. There was something else there, though, in Harry’s eyes. A question he could no more ask in front of Ginny than he could mention Sirius’ name. It was a project he had requested his brilliant best friend take on over the summer. Something that wasn’t entirely legal – by which he meant it was actively illegal – and something that Ginny would demand to be a part of at best. At worst, she would go straight to her parents, although Harry had a hard time painting Ginny as a snitch. Still, best to ere on the side of caution. He had waited all summer. He could wait just a few hours longer to ask Hermione about their oncoming extracurriculars.

August 22^nd, 1994

The Burrow

6:17 P.M.

It ended up being just under two hours before Harry had a chance to bring the subject up with Hermione. The lot of the Weasleys had been roused from their sulking (Fred and George) and their rooms (Harry and co.) and their working (Percy) and brought outside to sit and eat a delicious looking meal which Mrs. Weasley had prepared. Bill and Charlie had put on a great show, jousting in the air with the tables. It had created a clatter loud enough to incite another bout of Percy’s rage, but that had ended up coming just in time for Mrs. Weasley had called him down to eat just as he stuck his head out the window to scream, red faced, at his brothers.

“And no work at the table!” Mrs. Weasley had scolded him harshly, a sharp look in her eye. Percy had looked as if he had wanted to argue, but very fresh memories of the dressing down the twins had gotten kept him from muttering too loudly about ‘very important Ministry work’.

Now they were all seated and halfway through the meal. Bill and Ginny had joined forces to argue against Mrs. Weasley cutting Bill’s hair. “Mum, the bank doesn’t care! It’s the work they pay attention to.” Percy was droning about the importance of his job and the wonder that was Mr. Crouch, and Mr. Weasley was once more proving how good a father he was by enduring the talk. “A truly wonderful man, I tell you.” “Yes, he’s a credit to the Department.” Just next to the Golden Trio, the twins and Charlie were discussing the past Quidditch season animatedly, the lot of them bemoaning England’s abysmal performance against Transylvania. “Three-ninety to ten!? Can you believe it!?” “Yeh, and Wales lost to Uganda, the poor blighters.”

It was Ron, always the one to ignore the fact that their meddling could be overheard, who broke the ice between the three of them again. “So, have you heard from Sirius?” He had at least thought to lower his voice. Beside him, Hermione looked prepared to scold him as harshly as Mrs. Weasley had Percy, but her own curiosity saw her lean in to hear Harry’s response as well.

Harry had a mouth full of potatoes just then, so he responded with an exuberant nod until he swallowed and elaborated further, “Gotten two letters from him. Huge birds, they were. Tropical, I think.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Hermione said, her tone very genuine. “A bit of sun would do him good after…well, you know.” Her eyes scanned rapidly around the table, looking to see if anyone had heard her.

“Mum, ‘s not as bad as you say it is. Lots of girls like the long hair look!” Ginny cried.

They hadn’t.

“Yeah, but never mind that,” Harry responded, not all that eager to discuss Sirius at the moment. He’d like to think it was the public space that was making him change the subject, but he knew it was his own excitement. He peered very deliberately at Hermione. “How was your summer?”

Ron, who looked as if he’d only just remembered the assignment Harry had given Hermione at the end of the previous year, suddenly looked at their bushy haired friend with a look of palpable excitement. Hermione eyed the redhead warily, as if afraid he was going to loudly exclaim his excitement for all the table to hear. When it seemed that he was going to contain himself, Hermione said quietly, “Productive. And worrying.”

“Worrying?” Harry repeated.

Hermione nodded, sending bushy hair flying as she did. She leaned in, her voice adopting a harsh whisper. “Do you know how dangerous this can be?” she hissed. “Botched transformations and mutations. Not to mention the legal ramifications if we’re caught.”

Ron seemed unperturbed by Hermione’s announcement. “Come off it, Hermione,” he scoffed. “If Scabbers could bloody well do it, I expect we can. Right, Harry?”

Harry made to agree with his best mate, but it was Fred’s voice that cut in, saying, “And what was it Scabbers did, Ron? ‘Cept sleep all day and eat more than his fill?”

“Expect that’s what he wants to do, though, isn’t it, Fred?” George continued, grinning. He nodded approvingly at Ron. “I dare say you’ll be able to match Scabbers in those departments, Ron.”

“’Specially the eating bit,” Fred laughed. George joined.

Ron’s face heated. “Shove off, you two!” he snapped. “It’s a private conversation, innit?”

George gestured rudely in Ron’s direction.

“George Weasley!” Mrs. Weasley exclaimed furiously.

The younger of the twins gave a mighty cringe as his mother launched into another stern lecture on ‘being a proper gentleman’ and ‘table etiquette’. The conversation once more well away from them, the Golden Trio leaned closer together again.

“Ron’s right, Hermione,” Harry assured him. “I mean, you brewed a successful Polyjuice in second year! Course you can get us through this one.”

Hermione worried at her lower lip. “There’s more to it than there was to the Polyjuice,” she insisted. “A lot of it is just up to chance, and if any of the steps are done wrong – not to mention you have to have a mind for Transfiguration –”

“Hermione,” Harry laid his hand across hers. She looked up at him, the worry very evident in her eyes. “Come on, please.”

“Oh, alright, alright fine!” Hermione snapped. “But it’s asking for trouble!”

Ron snorted. “It’s us, innit? What else is new?”

August 23^rd, 1994

The Burrow

12:36 A.M.

The moon was high in the sky when the three of them snuck out of their respective rooms and into the night to meet. Not much more had been discussed at the table. Hermione had told them that they needed to meet outside around midnight to discuss the next part and that they were absolutely not to be caught.

“I don’t want to be caught out after dark with you two. Who knows what Mrs. Weasley would say?”

They had all blushed at the implication, and the matter had been dropped.

Now Harry was waiting outside under the light of the full moon on his own. He didn’t know where Hermione was at the moment, but he and Ron had decided that it was best if they snuck out separately. Less chance of Percy being woken by their ‘thundering’. Or Mrs. Weasley for that matter.

Harry kicked idly at the gravel rocks beneath his feet. He was in the back garden, sat beneath an extremely leafy bush so as to block the kitchen’s view of him. The full moon overhead gave him plenty of light to see by. Harry thought he spied a pair of gnomes wrestling by the gate on the far side of the garden. Wait…they weren’t wrestling…

“Harry,” Hermione hissed him out of his thoughts suddenly. She was crouched just beside him now where she had not been before. “Where’s Ron?”

Harry blushed, tearing his eyes away from the ‘wrestling’ gnomes. “Uh – he…”

“I’m here,” the redhead said, sliding into a seat beside them on the ground. “Longest five minutes of my life, that was. I miss anything?”

Hermione shook her head. She gave a small sort of groan as she fell out of her crouch and sat fully on the ground. “I just got here. Took me a minute to find them.”

“Find what?” Harry asked, fully recovered from his blushing fit. He was glad that not much color showed up underneath the moon’s cool light. Ron would have had a fit with the color of his face otherwise.

Hermione held out her hands. There were three small black, rectangular boxes sitting in them. “The first ingredient,” Hermione explained. Sheepishly, she continued, “I hope your mum won’t mind.”

“Why would she mind?” Ron asked, swiping one of the boxes from her.

Harry did likewise, reaching out to take the wooden box. Popping it open, he saw that there were four leaves held within. The leaves were small with three pointed edges, and they had been cut very close so as to remove as much of their stem as possible.

Ron plucked one out of the box and held it up, examining it in the moonlight. “What’re these?”

Hermione sighed heavily. “Honestly, Ron, don’t you pay any attention in Herbology?”

Like Ron, Harry held one of the leaves up into the light and thought that, that was a bit harsh. He didn’t recognize the little leaf either, and he doubted that he would be able to even in proper light.

“They’re Mandrake leaves,” Hermione explained, somewhat exasperated. Then she worried at her lip again, eyeing Ron speculatively. “Your mum…won’t mind, will she? I mean, Mandrakes aren’t – well they aren’t cheap, are they?”

Ron examined the Mandrake leaf a bit more before promptly shrugging. “They’re not very cheap, no,” Ron conceded. “But she’s hardly gonna notice a few missing leaves, is she?”

Hermione was clearly not as comfortable with Ron’s response as Ron was. She continued to chew on her bottom lip as she eyed the three boxes of contraband leaves with no small amount of guilt. Harry knew Hermione well enough to know that one of her crises of conscience was coming up, so he rushed to distract her.

“Why do we need Mandrake leaves?” he asked her. If he sounded a bit dumber than usual, Hermione didn’t notice. If anything, it made her launch into teacher mode all the quicker. Funny, that.

“They’re the first step of the process. A Mandrake leaf,” she indicated to the boxes, “a full moon,” she gestured upwards at the full moon, “and a mouth.”

“A mouth!?” Ron sputtered, earning panicked ‘shhhhh’s from his friends. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hermione twitched her nose idly, seemingly debating how she wanted to continue. “Practical’s better, I suppose,” she muttered. Hermione brandished her wand commandingly. “Open wide.”

“Wha’!?” Ron squawked indignantly.

“Open!” Hermione commanded, and – as her wand was pointed directly at his face just now – Ron obliged. “Right, now you’ll have to forgive me. This is gonna be a bit gross.”

Ron did not have the time to close his mouth and ask what she meant by that. No sooner had she finished her statement than Hermione had shoved her fingers into the ginger’s mouth.

“Oh, be quiet, Ron!” she snapped, maneuvering the tip of her wand around inside Ron’s mouth. The two fingers of her left hand were holding it open, allowing her unfettered access. “Honestly, do you think I’d be doing this if I didn’t have to?”

Finally, after about a minute of holding the redhead’s mouth open, Hermione withdrew with a sigh. “There,” she said definitively. Her mouth curled slightly as she wiped her fingers on her shirt. “Brush your teeth better, Ron.”

“The bloody hell was that about!?” Ron cried.

“Be quiet!” Hermione snapped. “If I go to Azkaban because you couldn’t keep your bloody mouth shut –”

“Hermione!” Harry cried, reeling back. “Are you alright? You just – you just cursed!”

Hermione huffed indignantly. “Oh, hush! This is a very stressful situation, Harry!”

Ron rubbed absently at his jaw. The cleaning charms Hermione had scoured the inside of his mouth with had left an odd, tingly sensation on the lower side of his face. “You’re the only one who’s stressed about it,” he complained. “Bloody mental…”

“Whatever,” Hermione rolled her eyes. She raised her wand again. “Come on, once more.”

“No!” Ron cried, scooting back on the gravel. He raised his hand defensively over his mouth. “Not until you explain what you’re doing!”

Hermione rolled her eyes again. “I had to make sure your mouth was clean. If the leaf is contaminated –”

“The leaf!?” Ron cut her off. “What’s the bloody leaf got to do with my mouth?”

“If you would open your mouth,” Hermione growled, “I would show you.”

Ron shared a panicked glance with Harry who only shrugged. He had no more of an idea of what was going on than Ron did. “I mean, it’s Hermione, mate,” he replied weakly. “She always knows best, yeah?”

It was Hermione’s turn to be grateful for the poor light as she blushed faintly. Ron, meanwhile, ran a hand down his face in exasperation. “Yeah, fine,” he grumbled, opening his mouth wide.

“Right,” Hermione readied her wand as she plucked one of Ron’s Mandrake leaves from the box. “Stay very still, now.”

Ron obliged as Hermione slowly stuck the leaf into his mouth. Harry couldn’t properly see what she was doing, but after a few seconds, Hermione pulled her hands out of Ron’s mouth. “What’d you do?” he asked her.

Ron smacked his lips, the movement of his cheeks implying he was moving his tongue about. “Stuck it to the roof of my mouth, I think,” he said. Then he winced slightly, pressing the palm of his hand into his cheek. “Agh! That’s bloody uncomfortable, that is!”

“Don’t mess with it!” Hermione snapped. “It has to remain intact the whole time, or it’s useless!”

“So, you did stick it to the roof of his mouth?” Harry pressed. He gazed inquisitively at Ron who was still wearing a look of discomfort. “Why?”

Hermione shrugged. “I read a sticking charm made it easier long term,” she replied.

“Makes what easier?” Harry asked.

“The first step of the process. Under the light of a full moon, a Mandrake leaf must be inserted into an uncontaminated mouth where it will remain.”

“For how long?” Ron cried.

Hermione hesitated. Her eyes darted upward, briefly gazing at the moon. “Until…the next full moon?” she offered slowly.

“A month!?” Ron exclaimed.

“Shhhhhh!” Harry and Hermione both hissed at him.

“’Shhhhhhh’ yourself,” Ron stuck his tongue out at them. Then he pointed aggressively at his mouth. “I have to keep this thing in my mouth for a bloody month!? How am I gonna eat!?”

“Carefully,” Hermione replied distractedly. She had plucked a handheld notebook from the depths of her pajamas somewhere and was currently flipping idly through its pages. How she could read it in the dim light of the moon, Harry didn’t know, but she seemed to be doing well enough. Her finger settled on a page, and she said, “Soft foods mostly – Do not damage the leaf. If it’s not completely intact at the end of the cycle, you have to start all over again. And there’s enough danger of that already.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ron asked at the same time that Harry said, “We might have to do this more than once!?”

Hermione snapped her notebook closed with audible attitude and huffed mightily. “I told you a lot of this is just up to chance. We can’t just brew a potion in the girl’s lavatory and expect to completely alter our physiology!”

Harry ran a hand down his face, groaning. Hermione was right, of course, and he hadn’t expected this to be easy. Still, it took a lot to get his bookish friend this strung out. Harry remembered that it had taken her five months of taking literally every class on offer last year before she looked as stressed as she did now. But then, he supposed that taking literally every class on offer wasn’t also highly illegal like this was.

“What else do we need to do?” Harry asked her as calmly as he could. He knew Ron would continue to bluster his way through every new revelation, but he figured he could ease Hermione’s burden just a touch if he presented a calm front.

Hermione flipped through several pages of her notebook again, landing finally on one that looked like a bulleted list. “Several things,” she said in the same distracted tone. “The potion itself isn’t that hard to make, but the ingredients aren’t easy to come by. One of our hairs – that’s not hard…the dew? Have to get that at Hogwarts –”

“Dew?” Ron mouthed at Harry who shrugged in response.

“– the chrysalises we can get at Diagon,” Hermione continued to mutter to herself as if she hadn’t heard them. Which, to be fair, she likely hadn’t. When she next spoke it was louder, to better address the boys. “This bit’s gonna be the hardest – well, not the hardest, it’s all quite hard. Blimey, we shouldn’t be doing this…”

“Hermione,” Harry gently course corrected her.

“When the next full moon comes, we need to put the leaves and all the other ingredients into pure crystal phials.” Hermione ran an annoyed hand through her bushy hair, brushing stray locks out of her face. “Which, frankly, none of us have the money for.”

“Bugger,” Harry cursed. Pure crystal potion phials were some of the most expensive on the market, unless you were buying the ones made of gemstones – but those were only for specialty potions. “We can’t just use regular phials?”

Most potions could be enhanced by use of a crystal phial – almost any of the majority of potions, in fact, could get better results from cooling within a phial of pure crystal. But it was never strictly necessary. A Draught of Living Death placed into a plain glass phial would net a patient five days of unconsciousness while one cooled in a crystal phial might net them seven.

Hermione, though, shook her head. “Won’t work,” she told him definitively. “The potion requires a crystal phial. And…a clear night.” She muttered the last bit, closing her notebook and hugging it to her chests as she did. Harry and Ron heard her plainly nonetheless and stared at her.

The both of them glanced up at the sky. It was…mostly clear by their usual standards, but there were plenty of clouds in the sky. They obscured large swaths of stars and drifted lazily through the sky, acting as if they were considering drifting to block their sight of the moon but weren’t quite sure yet whether or not they would.

“You realize we live in England, yeah?” Ron asked her.

“And go to school in Scotland?” Harry pressed.

Hermione glared hotly at them. “I am not the one demanding we do this!” she snapped crossly, cutting her eyes somewhat viciously at Harry. The Boy-Who-Lived held his hands up in surrender.

“Bloody hell,” Ron muttered, rubbing at his chin and cheeks with his hand. There was a still a grimace in his eyes, even if his mouth wasn’t curling unpleasantly at the moment. “Know any weather forecast spells?”

“None that go out a month,” Hermione sighed.

“That was rhetorical.”

Hermione stuck her tongue out at him.

Harry ran a hand through his hair, exhaling as he did. “Where we gonna get crystal phials, then?”

Hermione winced, as if she had been expecting the question. Which, of course, she had. “Well, we can’t buy them,” she trailed off. “And no one is going to give us any…”

“Hermione Granger!” Ron’s grin was infectious. “Are you advocating stealing? Stealing extremely expensive potion phials from someone?” He winked obviously at Harry. “We’ve finally rubbed off on her, we have.”

Hermione’s wand whipped towards the redhead, a pale orange light flying from its tip. Ron cried out in shock more than pain as he gripped the part of his thigh where her stinging hex had hit. “I am advocating nothing of the kind!” she snapped, her wand still pointed steadily at Ron’s legs. “I only mean to say that…well, obviously we don’t have the money to buy them. And…well, I’m sure that…Professor Snape has more phials than he strictly needs…” This last bit was said in a rushed whispery kind of voice so that Harry and Ron could barely understand it. But understand it, they did.

Ron snorted mightily. “Yeah. Right. Might as well just ask him if we can have them then, yeah? Oi! Calm down, you lunatic!” Ron cried as Hermione’s wand tip glowed the same pale orange as before. He could just make out her narrowed eyes in the glow of spell light. A few seconds passed before Hermione cancelled the spell, and Ron let out a grateful breath. “Bloody hell, though. Stealing from Snape? Spending months with a bloody leaf in our mouths? Seems an awful lot of work, mate.”

Harry sighed through his nose. “Guys, my dad did this,” Harry said then, his gaze far away. “Sirius did this. My mum probably knew about it, at least eventually. I want to do this. I need to do this!”

Ron and Hermione shared a heavy glance and gave a heavy sigh. They had known that, of course – Harry had explained himself ad nauseum at the end of last year when he’d asked her to look into how the Animagus process worked. Still, it was a rare day that their friend actually asked for their help. Oh, they were always there for him, and he was always thankful. For Quirrell, for the Basilisk, for Sirius. They had been there, following along behind or drug painfully along by their ear – or leg, in Ron’s case. But Harry so very rarely personally asked them to come along – to put themselves in danger for him. That he was doing it now…

“Yes, I know, Harry,” Hermione sighed heavily. She opened her own case of Mandrake leaves, withdrew one and leveled her wand in Harry’s direction. “I just wish you’d have chosen something that wasn’t so uncomfortable.”

“Didn’t Sirius say he used to ride a motorcycle?” Ron wondered as Harry opened his mouth to Hermione’s intrusion. “That’d be fun. Less work, too.”

Harry closed his mouth just before Hermione began her work to wink at his best mate. “Who says I’m not thinking of that one too?”

Ron grinned.

“Honestly,” Hermione clucked disapprovingly. She forced his mouth open, scouring the inside of it with a long series of deep cleaning charms. “You’re dedicated to putting your life into as much danger as possible, aren’t you?”

Harry grinned around Hermione’s fingers.

August 25^th

The Quidditch World Cup

10:12 A.M.

Two days later when the Weasley family and co. arrived at the field they would be camping in for the duration of the Quidditch World Cup, the rest of the Weasley family had begun to give the Golden Trio odd looks. Whether it was Ginny side-eyeing Hermione’s sudden reluctance to talk or Mr. Weasley’s quirked eyebrow whenever Harry mush-mouthed a word he was usually perfectly capable of saying or Percy’s amazement at Ron’s suddenly massively reduced appetite, the Weasleys had noticed something up with the three friends. They just didn’t have the faintest idea what that could possibly be. Mrs. Weasley had thought the three of them were arguing – a fair assumption given the multiple half-hearted glares Ron and Hermione sent Harry on a daily basis – but they were just as close as ever. Arguably, they were even closer.

Still, they were acting downright odd. Harry had a permanent, giddy sort of smile on his face that was marred only by the occasional grimace of irritation or discomfort. Ron was taking great pains to breathe only through his nose and seemed like he was trying to keep the lower half of his face as still as possible. Even Hermione was acting odder, or so Ginny reported. It used to be that Hermione’s smiles were all teeth – accented greatly by her two bucked front teeth that were so ubiquitous with her. Nowadays, she barely smiled at all, and when she did, they were small, reticent things like she had run out of laughter or something. The trio mostly talked only to themselves and, even then, in hushed whispers while barely moving their lips. More than once, they’d heard Hermione snap something along the lines of, “You’ll damage it!” at Ron, but they didn’t know what she was talking about. Alternatively, it wasn’t uncommon to hear Harry complaining to Hermione, saying, “You’ve got to teach me that breath freshening charm, ‘Mione. It’s disgusting!” What could that possibly mean? Was Harry going around kissing someone!? Hermione!?

That was Ginny’s primary conclusion anyway, but most of the rest of the family thought she was barking.

In fact, the only members of the family who seemed completely unfazed by the Golden Trio’s new behavior were the twins and Bill, all three of which just thought it was them being weird. The twins were well used to Harry, Ron and Hermione retreating into their own friendship, and they didn’t think it odd at all that they were doing it now. As for Bill, well, he remembered being fourteen. And he also remembered how nothing they did made sense even to them, let alone to the adults around them.

Still, the Trio’s relative silence had made it somewhat difficult to put up the tent with both of the muggle-raised children unable to properly relay instructions to the excitable Mr. Weasley. Eventually, the two of them had just bypassed the older man and thrown it up themselves. Granted, it was mostly just Harry following Hermione’s lead – he had never been camping before – but it still went a lot faster. Then Mr. Weasley had gotten hold of the matches, and the both of them gave up. There was no way they were going to manage to educate Mr. Weasley on how best to light a fire without the ability to speak properly, and neither of them wanted to see the disappointment in his eyes if they coopted his fun again.

Thankfully Charlie lost his patience not five minutes later and set the fire with a surreptitious stab of his wand. It was perfectly done to, timed just so that Mr. Weasley – in his ignorance – thought one of his dropped matches had ignited the thing. Harry, noticing this, laughed. “You were a Gryffindor?” he asked, somewhat incredulously.

Charlie shrugged in a self-congratulating manner. “I dated a Slytherin for about a year in fifth year,” he winked at him.

“You wha’!?” Ron squawked. “You never told me that! Ow!”

Hermione had elbowed Ron in the side then, glaring fiercely at his mouth when he turned his angry glare onto her. Ron grimaced, but immediately quieted.

Charlie, noticing all this, chose very wisely to ignore it. “Yeah, and that’s why, innit?” he said, pointing at Ron’s still vaguely outraged face.

“Yeah, but they’re snakes, aren’t they?” Ron persisted. “All slimy and slithery? How you gonna date that?”

Ginny, whose arms were laden down with a fresh bit of firewood, rolled her eyes as she walked by. “Real mature, Ron.”

Charlie laughed. “Ginny’s right, Ron,” he smirked. An impish look alighted in his eyes. “I promise the Slytherin girls are every bit as warm as the Gryffindor ones.”

“Charlie,” Mr. Weasley interrupted sternly, looking down the bridge of his nose at his older son.

The dragon-handler raised his hands in surrender. “I was talking about hugs,” he protested. “Get your mind out of the gutter, pops.”

The twins, Bill and Ginny roared with laughter, and even Mr. Weasley’s lips twitched a bit as he tried to remain stern. He shook his head and turned around, muttering quietly so that no one could hear, “Glad your mother isn’t here.”

“Why’d you break up with her then, Charlie?” Ron jumped back into the conversation, having completely ignored the bit about Slytherins being warm.

Hermione took the chance to tug surreptitiously on Harry’s sleeve. She hoisted the empty water bucket when he turned to look at her and jerked her head in the direction of the rest of the camp. He nodded.

“Mr. Weasley,” Harry called out, attracting the man’s attention. He gestured to himself and Hermione. “We’re gonna get some water!”

Mr. Weasley nodded. “Right, be careful then!”

When they had left the tent well behind them, and they could be sure that no one would overhear them over the noise of the crowd, Harry leaned towards Hermione and asked, “How are you doing?”

It was easier to talk amongst themselves than with anyone else, they had discovered. The three of them knew each other so well. They knew how they all spoke, and likewise how each of them responded to other. They knew how their tongues moved when they were talking to each other. They knew what they could expect to say in response to anything that might come out of someone else’s mouth.

Which is why Hermione had known to expect that kind of question from her empathetic friend and had her answer ready. “Horrible!” she exclaimed, throwing her hands into the air. “Ginny keeps saying things that are wrong, but I can’t correct her because I don’t know how long I’m going to rant or what I’m going to say when I do and – oh Merlin, I’m doing it now!”

Harry, likewise, had known to expect just this type of answer from Hermione, and he laughed uproariously at her miniature breakdown.

Hermione huffed. “How about you?”

They found the line for the nearest watering hole just under half a mile from the Weasley tent, which was good since there was a line that looked to be about that long for it. The two of them slipped quietly into place at the back of line, the bucket held by either of their hands between them. They swung it idly, like parents do a toddler.

Harry shrugged. “Never did much talking anyway, really.” He scratched at the back of his neck, smiling crookedly. “The twins keep trying to talk shop. Quidditch, you know. You can only nod and shake your head so many times before they expect you to join the conversation and, you know…converse.”

It was Hermione’s turn to laugh now, something she did eagerly. “It’s only been two days,” she bemoaned. “How are we going to do this for a month?”

“A month if we’re lucky,” Harry corrected her, smiling lightly. He was pleased to see that the line was moving at a fairly respectable pace.

She groaned. “What are we going to do when we get to school?”

Harry shrugged, still smiling. “I guess little miss know-it-all will have to settle for not answering every question the Professors throw at her for a while.”

“I do not answer every question.”

“You try to.”

“It’s not my fault if no one else reads the course material.”

“We do read the course material, ‘Mione. We just don’t read all of the course material in the first week.”

“And that’s my problem, why?”

Hermione placed the bucket beneath the spigot as Harry laughed, and he only finished laughing right around when the water reached the fill line. The both of them picked up the bucket in the same way they had carried it over, no longer swinging it about, although Harry did give Hermione a few minor panic attacks pretending like he would.

“You think Ron is still arguing with Charlie about the heresy of dating ‘snakes’?” Harry asked.

Hermione rolled her eyes. “Is water wet?”

August 26^th, 1994

The Quidditch World Cup

2:17 A.M.

“Aggggghh, I’ve lost my wand!” Harry cried, patting down his pockets in a vein hope of feeling the wooden stick where it had not been before.

“Harry,” Hermione hissed at him, the light at the end of her wand casting a pale, sickly light across her face. “Be careful! You’ll damage –”

“Sod the leaf, Hermione! I don’t have my wand!”

“You leave it back in the tent?” Ron suggested.

“How should I know?” Harry snapped in response. “I said I’d bloody well lost it, didn’t I?”

“Oi! Easy there, mate, remember who your friends are!” Ron groused.

“Harry,” Hermione laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “We’ll find it, we will, but right now we have to go.”

Harry let out a terrible groan, shaking his head violently as he did. She was right – blimey, why was Hermione always bloody right? In the distance, they could still hear the screams of Mr. Roberts’ wife and the crying of his two little children. There was a heavy scent of smoke in the air, and the sky was still red with flame.

“Come on, let’s go,” Harry nodded, pulling the other two deeper into the thicket. They’d left the tree line a few hundred feet behind to better hide themselves from anyone peeking into the forest, but they were now trying to maintain a parallel line. With all the chaos of the night, it would not do to add even more to it by getting lost in the trees.

“Wands won’t do us much good anyway,” Ron groused, jogging beside him. “Can’t risk casting too many spells with these bloody leaves in our mouth.”

“Keep quiet about that,” Hermione hissed. “There’ll be Aurors around before too long!”

Harry snorted. “There haven’t yet, have there?” He shook his head. “Poor Mr. Roberts. You see his wife?”

“Saw too much of her,” Ron said somewhat queasily. “Bastards.”

Hermione didn’t bother correcting his language.

Sometime later they came across a group of Veela in a tight group, bound together by a circle of ardent admirers. It seemed even the threat of imminent death wasn’t enough to overcome the allure of a Veela. Ron managed to shout, “My Animagus form! It’s a nundu, it is!” before Harry and Hermione clawed him away from the alluring witches and back into the forest. From there they were alone, stumbling through the forest as quietly and carefully as they could. The lights at the end of Ron and Hermione’s wands were as dim as they could be and still be seen by. Every time they passed over his face Harry patted his pockets in the vain hope that his wand had magicked itself back into its proper place. No such luck.

“Hermione, douse your light,” Ron hissed even as he did just that. Hermione did as she was told, but she kept a tight grip on her wand, levelling it by her hip. She looked like a cobra prepared to strike. Up ahead, they could see natural light – and the sickly red unnatural light of the fires – through a break in the thicket. They strained their ears but heard nothing. Not even whispers. Ron clucked his tongue, turning to his friends. “What do you think?”

Harry deliberated for a moment and then shrugged. “There might be other people there,” he said. “We can ask if any of them have seen Fred, George and Ginny.”

“Or,” Hermione whispered harshly, “there could be lot of black robed people who enjoy tormenting innocent people there!”

Ron shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so. We’d be hearing screaming or something right? Or like…maniacal laughter?”

“They aren’t comic book villains, Ron!”

“What’s a comic book?”

“Oh, never mind, let’s just go!”

Ron crept forward first, crouched low to the ground with his wand beside his eye, pointed aggressively in the direction of the clearing. He took a single step out of the thicket, still obscuring most of his body in the brush. It was a circular clearing, not much bigger than the living room of the tent had been. There was a large oak tree in the middle. Overhead, the moon’s light cast the entire thing in an eerie sort of glow, particularly when combined with the red glow of the distant fires.

“Careful, Weasley,” an unfortunately familiar voice drawled from across the clearing. “Someone who actually knows how to use a wand might take that as a threat.”

Ron hung his head in annoyance even as the other two stepped out of the brush and into the clearing. Harry snorted lightly. “That’s not you, Malfoy.”

“Can we find anywhere else to hide?” Hermione asked, looking distastefully at Malfoy. “I think I’d rather take my chances with the lunatics attacking camp.”

From his place leaning against the sturdy girth of the oak tree, Malfoy laughed nastily. “Sure about that, Granger?” he smirked. “You?”

“What’s that supposed to mean!?” Ron snapped, taking a step forward.

Malfoy rolled his eyes at him. “They’re hunting Muggles, idiot.” He leered at Hermione. “She’s the next best thing, isn’t she?”

“Whatever, Malfoy,” Harry retorted. “Why aren’t you out there, then? Mummy and Daddy tell you to hide in the woods while they get their sick thrills?”

Malfoy shrugged, unperturbed by Harry’s goading. “If they did,” he smiled, “it’d be more than your parents could tell you, eh?”

Harry went for his wand before he remembered it wasn’t there. Hermione’s hand latched tightly onto his arm regardless, her own muscle memory screaming at her to stop him. A less angry Harry might have had a problem with one of his friend’s automatic responses to him being to stop him from assaulting someone. Just now, Harry only wished he had his wand.

“Come on, let’s go,” Hermione pulled on him. She sneered at Malfoy. “We’ll find a rotten log to hide under, it’ll be better company.”

“Keep that big, bushy head down, Granger,” Malfoy winked at her. “You too, Weasley. I expect your blood traitor family is next in line.”

Ron’s jaw tightened and his shoulders squared even as he tromped after Harry and Hermione.

“Tell me, Weasley!” Malfoy called. “That stupid sister of yours even know enough magic to keep her and her knickers on the ground!?”

“FUCK YOU, MALFOY!” Ron screamed, turning and levelling his wand.

“Expelliarmus!” Hermione cried, catching Ron’s wand deftly in her hand. He turned to her angrily. “We have enough problems without you causing more! Let’s go!”

She turned, followed quickly by Harry, and stomped into the woods amidst the howling laughter of the Malfoy heir. Ron had little choice, however wounded his pride was. He followed after them, cursing loudly as he did.

“You alright, mate?” Harry asked when he had caught up.

“No,” Ron snapped churlishly. “Give me back my wand, Hermione.”

Hermione looked as if she wanted to argue, but, seeing the look on his face, she passed it back over without comment. It was only when Ron opened his mouth and stuck his wand inside that she cried out a startled, “Ron!”

Ron said nothing. He only pulled his wand back out and fished his mandrake leaf off of his tongue where it had fallen. He discarded it angrily onto the ground. “It ripped when I was cursing Malfoy.”

“Oh, Ron,” Hermione sighed.

Chapter Text

September 5^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

5:19 A.M.

The week and half that followed the Quidditch World Cup was abnormally hectic. On top of the chaos that always came to the Weasley house in the last week before school started, the added issues of what had occurred at the World Cup had compounded to create a truly stressful household. Mrs. Weasley spent all day and night tittering about the kitchen while she waited for Mr. Weasley and Percy to return from the gruelingly long days at work, at which point the both of them would practically collapse. They would be awake just long enough to shovel down the hot food Mrs. Weasley would place in front of them before wandering in the vague directions of their beds and passing out. They would be gone well before anyone else in the house was awake the next morning.

The rest of the Weasley family was much the same as their mother. Bill and Charlie led impromptu Quidditch games almost daily to keep everyone’s mind off of it despite the fact that Hermione vehemently denied ever wanting to play. If it wasn’t Quidditch than it was studying with Bill’s help as Hermione – of course – wanted to get a jump start on the fourth year curriculum and often drug Harry and Ron along with her. The Twins had toned down their antics since the Cup, but no one was sure whether or not that was in response to the newly added stress their parents were under or their complete and total fear of being told off so smartly again. Ginny kept mostly to herself, content as always to be the one Weasley that was well prepared ahead of time for the departure to Hogwarts. She had, had her stuff packed since the day after the Cup, and she was taking a lot of joy in watching the days tick by without any of her brothers doing likewise.

As for the Golden Trio themselves, things had settled into a new sort of routine. It skewed one way or the other depending on the day. Either it was Harry and Hermione dealing with a surly Ron who was quite miffed at himself and at Malfoy for having damaged his leaf, or it was Ron and Harry being eternally grateful that the Mandrake leaf in her mouth was limiting Hermione’s ranting abilities. It had looked as if she was going to take up some kind of revolutionary arms over Mr. Crouch’s mistreatment of his elf before Harry had aggressively pointed at his own mouth in reminder. The following days of quiet had been met with much thanks from both Harry and Ron.

Then had come September 1^st and the Hogwarts Express and Hogwarts itself where they had heard the announcement of the Triwizard Tournament, something they were all excited about. That two sister schools would be boarding at Hogwarts in just under two months had sent Hermione into an ecstatic frenzy to the point that she had even got over her surliness at the horrible thunderstorm that was plaguing the school that night. “You’ll understand later,” she had groused. Classes had hit the ground running – particularly Potions and Transfiguration, both of which were trying to get them prepared for the grueling O.W.L.s they would take next year. Of course, the most interesting by far was Professor Moody’s Defense class whatever Hermione might have to say to the contrary. Granted, Neville might also have something to say about the quality of the class, but Harry and Ron thought it was right cool.

Still, the prevailing issue in the Trio’s minds – even in Ron’s unfortunately stalled case – were the Mandrake leaves affixed to the roof of two of their mouth’s. The next full moon was still three weeks away, but the work was far from done. Hermione had submitted an owl order two days ago with Hedwig for the chrysalises of some kind of moth – evidently a necessary part of the potion – but there were still two major components that would require some legwork on all three of their parts. Ron had tried to skive off of it, citing his inability to complete the process with them upon the next full moon, but Hermione had cut him off at the knees by assuring him she would offer him no assistance when it was his turn if he dared to attempt that.

Today, Hermione would be sneaking into Snape’s office with the Invisibility Cloak and the Marauder’s Map to swipe three crystal phials from his personal store. Assuming she wasn’t caught and expelled, that would be the end of her task. Harry and Ron had the less enviable – but arguably easier – task of trouncing into the Forbidden Forest in search of a particular ingredient that would likely take them hours to find. The final missing ingredient of their potion was fresh dew from grass that had ‘not been touched by sunlight or human feet for a period of seven days’. The lack of sunlight meant they would have to find a patch of grass obscured by foliage, but the lack of human feet would be harder. Even in Hogwarts’ supposedly ‘forbidden’ Forest, both Harry and Ron knew that there were plenty of students who ventured into the woods for this reason or that. Thus, they had quite a walk ahead of them.

Ron’s held titled backwards, his eyes tracking the swirling clouds overhead as he walked backwards towards the Forbidden Forest alongside Harry. They maintained a steady pace despite Ron’s distraction, but Harry was still eager for them to enter the Forest and get out of sight. His historically blatant disregard for the Forest’s rules aside, it was still forbidden, and he was fairly certain Hermione would do something unpleasant if he and Ron weren’t able to gather the necessary ingredients because they got caught.

Which was fair. Given what her side of things was today, Harry could understand her desire for everything to go just right.

“I don’t know, mate,” Ron was saying, his head still loaded back like a pez dispenser as he gazed up at the sky. “Not sure it’s gonna work out for you two.”

Harry followed Ron’s eyes, looking up himself to stare at the miasma of gray and rolled his eyes. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand Ron’s position – losing his leaf had been a great blow to the ginger’s morale – but his blatant attempts to discourage Harry and Hermione from continuing the experiment just so they could all be on the same track again were getting old. Harry grabbed a firm hold on the shoulder of his robes and shoved him unceremoniously in the direction of the Forest.

“The full moon’s three weeks away.”

“Yeah, but this is England, innit?”

“Something that didn’t bother you when we started.”

Ron squared his shoulders and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his robes. “It did,” he complained churlishly. He muttered, “Just didn’t want to be the odd one out, ‘s all.”

Harry stopped to raise an eyebrow at him. “You mean like you are now?”

Ron met his gaze. “That’s a bit rude,” he said blankly.

Harry rolled his eyes. They had come to the edge of the Forest now. Peeking in, Harry fought back a rolling wave of nerves. The Forest was always somewhat eerie and almost always unnerving, but it was especially so with gray clouds overhead and an all-important mission that would carry them miles into the trees at their backs. “Come on,” Harry fished his wand out. Harry remembered all too well the types of things that wandered in between the roots of the trees of this forest.

Ron sighed mightily, pulling out his own wand as he did. “If we see another bloody Acromantula, I’m gonna kill you, Harry.”

“If we see another bloody Acromantula, Ron,” Harry replied glibly, “I hope you do.”

The two stepped into the Forest.

September 5^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

6:03 A.M.

Hermione pulled Harry’s invisibility cloak tighter around herself and checked the Marauder’s Map for what must have been the eighth time since she’d entered the hall. Her wand hand shook lightly as she leveled the lowest powered Lumos she could manage at the old parchment. She didn’t know how the cloak handled light being cast underneath it, but she didn’t want to risk it. All the sneaking around with Harry and Ron had never gotten her completely used to such blatant rule breaking, particularly not when it put her entire academic career at risk.

Shivering lightly in the cool dungeon air, Hermione trained her eyes on the Great Hall. It was one of the only remotely legible areas on the Map at the moment. At this time of day – particularly on a Saturday – the Map was barely readable. The entire student body was bunched into four locations, making for an unreadable mishash of names that couldn’t hope to be comprehended. The Great Hall, however, was currently housing most of the staff and a grand total of nine students, all of them Ravenclaws. Hermione disregarded all of those names. She was only interested in one of them.

She had been sitting outside his office all morning, shivering against the cold. She’d gotten here well before the sun had risen ahead of any and every go-getting Ravenclaw in the school. Only three teachers had been awake at that hour, and the only reason two other students were similarly awake was because Hermione had drug Harry and Ron out of bed herself and kicked them outside into the Forbidden Forest. If she was going to risk her entire future, they could very well get themselves out of bed to find a bit of dew.

Approximately eight minutes ago – she had timed it – her target had left his office and wandered in the direction of the Great Hall to breakfast as he always did. Hermione would know. She’d been observing his early morning routine on the Map since their first morning back at Hogwarts. Professor Snape was an intimidating, vicious, mean-spirited man who she never wanted to get on the outright bad side of, but he was, nonetheless, a creature of habit the same as anyone else. If his pattern held true today – and she would certainly kill Harry and Ron if it didn’t – he would remain in the Great Hall until roughly six forty-five in the morning, after which he would return to his offices to do…something until classes began at eight. Hermione didn’t know what the part of his routine was when he was back behind the confines of his locked office door, and she didn’t particularly care. It had little bearing on her task here this morning.

When she had made sure – for the ninth time – that Professor Snape was in his usual spot at the end of the staff table, Hermione took a deep breath and stowed the map in her back pocket. She cast a quick, cursory glance around – as if worried some deranged Prefect was doing rounds in the dungeon at six thirty in the morning for the specific reason of looking for people trying to break into Professor Snape’s office – and then jabbed her wand quickly at the door.

“Alohomora!”

The door’s latch ‘clicked’, and it lightly eased open with a barely audible ‘creaaaak’. Hermione winced as if it had exploded.

She moved forward quickly, stumbling over the cloak as she did. She was no longer the tiny eleven-year-old she had been when she, Ron and Harry had snuck through the halls of Hogwarts underneath the cloak’s flaps, but she was still the smallest of the three of them. It drug along the ground around her as she stumbled through the doorway. Inside, she turned around and shut the door as quietly as she could manage – quite a feat given that every muscle in her body was screaming at her to slam it closed as a way to release her jittery nerves. It would not do for the slamming of a door to echo throughout the dungeons and draw attention her way.

Inside, Hermione pulled back the hood of the cloak, banishing the effect of invisibility as she did. It had been all well and good to drape it over herself like a blanket when she was younger, but she was quite content to wear it as it was meant to be worn today. Now it just looked like a soft cloak of rich burgundy. She glanced around quickly.

Hermione had never been in Professor Snape’s office before, having never infuriated him enough to necessitate a private visit nor had enough courage to seek him out to ask a question about any of his assignments. And that was a genuine shame since she had, had plenty of questions about his assignments over the years. Now that she was finally here where she had never been before, Hermione allowed her curiosity to override her sense of urgency for just a moment.

For Professor Snape, it was actually quite warmly decorated, she decided. There was a fireplace – the embers of which were dying down from their morning roar – on the far right wall with a rug and two comfortable looking recliners arrayed around it. Hermione took a moment to wonder at what type of people Professor Snape entertained down here before moving on. Alone the walls on either side of the fireplace were bookshelves, lined wall to wall with tomes of all shapes and sizes. A cursory glance of their titles revealed that they were, one and all, about the subtle art of potion brewing. On the far side of the room was a desk, upon which sat a stack of freshly graded papers beside a – much larger – stack of papers that were yet to be graded. Hermione spied the freshly written ‘P’ on the top of Vincent Crabbe’s latest assignment. She was surprised that Professor Snape evidently was capable of failing his Slytherins. On the left side of the room was a table with three cauldrons on it, the middle of which had a deep blue potion in it which was simmering softly. It bubbled and popped from the persistent warmth of the flames underneath it.

And there, on the far wall behind Professor Snape’s desk, there was a cabinet of potion phials. Her curiosity sated well enough, Hermione bounded across the room and fingered the delicate lock that kept the cabinet closed. Behind the glass she could spy rows and rows of phials of all different kinds. There were far more within the cabinet than its outward size would suggest. Magic, Hermione shrugged.

A flicking of her wand and a muttered, “Alohamora,” and the cabinet was opened. Hermione ran her hands over glass phials and diamond phials and ruby phials and quartz phials and emerald phials and even obsidian phials which she knew could only be used in the makings or enhancements of some of the world’s deadliest poisons. Hermione put that thought away, but she was sure to log the information. One never knew when Harry would well and truly infuriate Professor Snape past the point of rational thought after all. She’d have to start carrying a bezoar in her back pocket. There, though, on the top row, Hermione found her prize. A long series of crystal phials – too many to count at a glance. Hermione wrapped her hand around the delicate necks of three of them and stuffed them quickly – but gently – into her bag.

Quick like a whip, the door to the Professor’s cabinet was closed and the lock reapplied. She checked her surroundings. There was no other indication of her presence in the room for him to find. She would be like a ghost, she thought happily. Professor Snape would never know she was here, even if he did notice the missing three phials from his collection. As disinterested in rule breaking as she was, Hermione could always take pride in a job well done.

Hermione made to raise the hood of her cloak again but stopped suddenly to fish the Marauder’s Map out of her back pocket instead. Even the most unobservant of students would notice a door opening and closing of its own accord for no reason, she thought. Best to make sure the hallway was empty before exiting.

“I solemnly swear that I am up to no good,” she intoned dutifully, her wand tip pressed to parchment. A few seconds later, Hermione very nearly dropped the map in her haste to stuff it quickly into her back pocket.

Panicking, her hands gripped the fabric of the cloak’s hood, but she thought better of it. There were too many risks involved with that. Hermione took a deep breath…

…and the door opened.

Professor Snape froze in the middle of a doorway, registering the closest thing to shock Hermione had ever seen on his face. That is to say, his eyes widened fractionally, and he was not currently sneering. “Ms. Granger.” There was the sneer. “May I ask what you are doing here?”

There was an edge to his voice, and Hermione knew her next words would determine whether or not she spent the next month in detention. Something she was not at all prepared to forgive Harry for if it came to pass.

“Professor Snape,” she smiled nervously, putting on her best ‘breathy, nervous student’ voice. Something that was not hard seeing as how she was both out of breath and very nervous. “I’m sorry, I thought you’d be here and – well, you see Professor McGonagall just lets us walk into her office if she needs us…and, well then you weren’t here, and I thought it’d be very rude to have just walked in unannounced and then walked out of your office without you even knowing I was in here. But then, I suppose it was rather rude to be here in the first place…”

“Spit it out, girl,” the greasy-haired Professor snapped through gritted teeth.

Hermione gulped audibly. Her hand fished blindly in her bag, the cool touch of the crystal phials making her heart jump, until they gripped a loose sheet of parchment which she pulled out and extended towards the Professor.

“I had a question regarding the details of your assignment on King’s Blood.” These words all spilled from her mouth in a single breath.

Professor Snape gazed at her for a long moment…and then sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “And this could not have waited until after the ungodly hour of seven in the morning?”

“The early bird gets the worm, Professor,” she replied meekly with a weak shrug.

Professor Snape rolled his eyes, slammed the door behind him and walked forward towards his desk, grabbing Hermione’s parchment from her extended hand as he did. Her back to the Professor, Hermione breathed a shaky sigh of relief that she hoped came off as her genuine fear of disappointing authority figures. Had she gotten away with it? She hoped she had.

Hermione swallowed again. Well, it wasn’t all bad.

She had, had some questions about the King’s Blood potion.

September 5^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

7:27 A.M.

“Well,” Harry said delicately, trailing his eyes across his friend’s face, “at least we haven’t run into any Acromantulas.”

“Shut up, Harry,” Ron snapped. He was on the ground, sat upon a wide root with his back against an impossibly wide tree. With a single finger he poked repeatedly at a wide gash across his cheek which was bleeding quite profusely, wincing as he did. A few minutes ago, his foot had hooked a root and he had gone sprawling, cutting his cheek on a jagged bit of rock. “What am I gonna tell Madame Pomfrey?”

Harry shrugged, offering Ron his hand. He took it, and Harry hauled him back to his feet. “Tell her Malfoy did it.”

Ron stopped prodding his cheek for a moment. “Yeah, that’ll work,” he decided. “Maybe the git’ll lose points.”

“Or get detention,” Harry smirked.

“Or get expelled,” Ron grinned.

They both shared a laugh at the absurdity of that happening.

“How far in do you think we are?” Ron asked looking around. They didn’t know where the Forbidden Forest ended, but it had shown no sign of relenting so far. They had passed through a dozen different types of trees along the way. Tall skinny ones that numbered in the hundreds, short stout ones that were arrayed in perfect lines and even squat, fat little trees that barely reached their knees sometimes. Just now they were surrounded by trees as big around as Gryffindor Tower and seemingly half as high. There were a dozen or two of them that they could see, arrayed dozens of feet away from each other. Up above them, they created an impressive canopy, casting the ground around them in an eerie, gray sort of light. There had been grass here or there, but never anywhere that they could be absolutely certain had not been touched by light. Harry and Ron continued to console themselves that they were, at the very least, well past the point that any human feet would have reasonably been around.

Harry raised his wand. “Tempus,” he muttered. Then he shook the ghostly numbers that appeared away. “We’ve been walking for two hours. A good distance, I’d wager.”

Ron groaned and ran a hand down his face only to then hiss in pain as his palm drug against the gash on his cheek. “Ugh, that means it’s two hours back.”

“At least,” Harry sighed.

Ron groaned again.

No more was said, and the two of them trudged forward. At periodic intervals, one of them would stop to slash a wide gash into a tree with a powerful cutting charm. There were hundreds of trees marked just like that now, marking their way back to the school. They had attempted to keep as straight a line as possible along the way, but the both of them knew how confusing an endless forest could be directionally, and so they had prepared a backup plan.

As they walked, they talked, having little else to do. They discussed the Quidditch World Cup and how wicked it had been to see professional players in action. It had really put the skills of the Hogwarts teams – however talented they were – into perspective. Then they had discussed the attacks on the camp after the cup, and how right Mad-Eye was to be teaching them what he was. Neville’s behavior after Mad-Eye’s ‘Unforgiveable Class’ – as it had been christened by the student body – was especially weird to the two of them. The boy was always jittery and nervous, but he’d been downright catatonic by the end of it, and he’d seemed more willing to have tea with Professor Snape than to sit alone with Mad-Eye in his office afterwards. They wondered how Hermione was getting on for a moment before mutually deciding that she’d likely already been done for an hour or more and was impatiently waiting on their return. And, of course, they talked about girls.

“It’s Susan Bones,” Ron said definitively, his mouth full of a ham sandwich he’d packed into his pocket the previous night. “It’s gotta be.”

Harry shook his head. “Susan’s alright, but her face…I don’t know, it’s disproportioned, you know?”

Ron glanced at him sideways. “You actually look at her face?”

“I–There’s more to–I mean…sometimes!” Harry sputtered wildly, blushing. Ron crowed with laughter causing Harry’s blush to deepen further. He slugged his friend in the shoulder. “You’re lucky Hermione isn’t here.”

Ron rolled his eyes. “Hermione,” he scoffed. “Girl needs to loosen up, she does. She’d be in the runnin’ if she wasn’t so…Hermione.”

“Oi, don’t be rude,” Harry scolded him.

“What?” Ron smirked at him. “Someone got a crush?”

Harry blushed again. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he muttered. “It’s Hermione.”

“Exactly!”

Harry shoved him. “I don’t mean it like that!” he insisted. “She’s like my sister!”

“Yeah,” Ron nodded sagely. “And it just so happens that your ‘like a sister’s’ got buck teeth and hair out to here?”

Harry’s hand shot out to tighten around Ron’s shirt, stopping him dead in his tracks.

Ron stumbled lightly, his hands flying up to latch onto Harry’s suddenly iron grip. “Oi!” he protested. “I was only joking! Calm down, you lunatic!”

“Ron, look!” Harry cried, pointing with his free hand.

Ron looked.

There before them was a wide clearing of healthy, green grass overshadowed by nine of the enormously wide trees they’d been walking through. Overhead, their canopies wove together, forming an unbroken barrier of leafy green. Harry leaned down to spy closely at the nearest blade of grass. Still wet with the morning dew, if only just.

“Another hour and we’d have missed this,” he commented. He glanced sideways up at Ron. “And you wanted to sleep in.”

Ron straightened his jacket. “Twice in two weeks I’ve had to get up before five in the morning,” he muttered. “It’s torture, it is.”

“Yeah well,” Harry said, standing up, “should be worth it. You got the phials ready?”

Ron fished around in his bag a moment before he pulled out six regular glass phials in two hands. Hermione had been vague about exactly how much of the dew they were going to need, so Harry and Ron had decided to air on the safe side of things and overstock.

“You sure you’re gonna be able to do this?” Ron raised an eyebrow.

Harry nodded firmly, withdrawing his wand. “I’ve been practicing all week. I think I got it.”

“You think?”

“Shut up. Get the phials ready. And…sorry if I drench you.”

Ron sighed heavily, having expected that somewhere in the back of his head. He carefully set three of the phials down before unstoppering the other three and holding them steady in his hand, the necks pointing up.

Harry took a deep breath. “Aguamovere,” he intoned, swishing his wand in a wide arc. Unsteadily, as if it wasn’t certain what it was supposed to, the water lifted off of the grass, following the arc Harry had created with his wand. It trailed upwards, following Harry’s direction as he swirled and swirled and swirled it into a moving, spherical mass of water thereabouts the size of a quaffle.

“Carefully,” Ron muttered slowly, watching the water with wary eyes.

“That’s not helping,” Harry snapped. His left hand was gripped tighly around his right wrist, holding his wand as steady as possible. “Get ready.”

Slowly, Harry pulled his wand arm back, beckoning the floating ball of water with it. It moved through the air like molasses, slowly and hesitantly, shedding droplets of water as it went. Finally, it came to hover over Ron who looked up at warily.

“Go on then,” Harry muttered, strained. Sweat was beading on his brow. He had never held a spell like this for so long. Come to think of it, he had never held a spell at all. Ron carefully raised up the three phials until the tops of their necks were an inch within the ball of water. Then, Harry said, “Sorry about this,” and released the spell.

Ron gasped loudly but held the phials steady as the water cascaded over him like a waterfall, drenching him most of his upper body. His eyes completely covered by his hair, Ron smacked his lips. “We get it?”

Harry swallowed and breathed a shaky sigh and he walked forward to peer at the phials, still head steadily upright in Ron’s hands. Two of them had been filled all the way to the neck and the third had been filled almost three quarters of the way. It wasn’t perfect, but it was perfectly serviceable.

“Yeah,” he muttered, taking the phials from him so that Ron could correct his sight. Within a few moments, the phials were stoppered and had been stowed carefully within Ron’s bag. The phials themselves had each been placed within their own canvas bag, all of which were likewise stuffed within an additional canvas bag within Ron’s own bookbag. Hermione had been very clear that if any sunlight touched the dew at any time, it would be useless as a potion ingredient.

“Alright,” Harry sighed, wiping his forehead. “Once more.”

Ron sighed.

September 5^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

10:57 A.M.

It was a testament to teenage boys’ stomachs that even after six hours of trekking through rough forest, Harry and Ron still detoured to the Great Hall in search food rather than their beds. At the Gryffindor Table, they found Hermione waiting. She was nibbling idly on a piece of buttered toast which Ron promptly swiped from her hand and reading a book with a title that neither of the boys could translate.

“Hey!” she protested, wrenching her eyes away from the page.

Ron made an unpleasant noise at her with a mouth full of food and set about making himself a plate of his own toast. Harry sat down beside him and reached somewhat stupidly for the eggs. There weren’t any over-mediums like he liked, but he would settle for good old fashioned scrambled in their place.

Hermione looked over the two of them. Their eyes were drooping, and their hands weren’t quite doing exactly what they were supposed to. Where he went to grab the butter, Ron missed and stabbed at it with two fingers. Where he went to pour a glass of pumpkin juice, Harry misjudged the distance and knocked over the pitcher.

“You two look exhausted,” she commented idly.

Ron leaned his face hard into the flat of his hand, closing his eyes with a look of palpable relief. The toast on his plate went untouched.

“Extremely,” Harry commented dryly, shoveling a forkful of eggs into his mouth.

“Did you get it?” Hermione pressed, lowering her voice to a whisper and looking furtively around.

Ron, his eyes still closed, raised his bag high above his head and then let it fall back on to the bench beside him.

“If those don’t work,” Harry indicated to Ron’s bag with his fork, “you’re going into the Forest.”

Hermione stared blankly at Ron, not hearing him. “How did you get that cut on your face?”

Ron’s face slipped off of his hand and collided noisily with his buttered toast.

September 19^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

4:19 P.M.

Hermione slammed her books down onto the table loud enough to make Ron jump. Cursing lightly, the redhead quickly corrected his misplaced chess pieces. It was just him versus the pieces – he hadn’t found anyone willing to play – and he was actually losing rather badly. He’d had these pieces so long that they were fairly used to his style of play. Sometimes they got one over on him. His pieces back in their proper place, Ron looked up. Hermione was sat across from him now. Her hands had a death grip on the book she’d slammed into the table, and her hair was even wilder than usual. She looked positively harassed.

“Did you run here?” he narrowed his eyes at her.

“Where’s Harry?” Hermione asked him as he hadn’t spoken.

Ron shrugged, gesturing vaguely at the stairs. “Writing his third letter to Sirius,” he had the good sense to lower his voice at that. “Trying to convince him to stay wherever he was before Harry went and blabbed about his scar.”

It was then that Ron realized that Hermione truly was in a wrong way for she made no immediate mention of how ‘right and proper’ it had been for Harry to tell his godfather about his scar hurting. Ron looked up rather dramatically at his friend and was just about to ask after her health when she continued.

“I think McGonagall knows,” she hissed.

Ron blinked twice. “Eh?” he asked dumbly. “How could she know. It’s not as if she reads our mail. She doesn’t, does she?” An embarrassing request to his mother weeks earlier for underwear he’d forgotten to pack flashed through Ron’s mind.

Hermione narrowed her eyes at him, tilting her head slightly. Then she walloped him on the shoulder with her – really very thick – book. “Not that you idiot!” she snapped. She opened her mouth and pointed at it. “This!”

“Wha’!?” Ron squawked, rubbing at his suddenly throbbing shoulder. Hermione never pulled her punches. “How could she know about that? What, did she say something?”

Ron’s voice had fallen into a harsh whisper as he spoke. Hermione mirrored his tone. “She mentioned my breath.”

Ron blinked twice again. “What, are you not brushing your teeth regularly?”

THWAP!

“Bloody hell, woman!” Ron winced. Hermione had hit him again.

“My breath smells like Mandrake leaf, Ron!” she hissed at him.

Still rubbing his shoulder, Ron groused, “Well, who the hell knows what Mandrake leaves smell like?”

Hermione stared at him for a long moment, and Ron momentarily feared that she was going to hit him again. Instead, she set her book down on the table and began to tick off her fingers one by one. “Potion masters, Herbologists, Apothecaries,” with every word, she touched the tip of her finger to a finger on the opposite hand and folded that finger into her palm. “Seventh Year apprentices in any of those fields, Alchemists, the occasional wand smith and bloody Animguses!”

Ron sat silent for a moment. “I thought it was Animagi?”

THWAP!

“Ow!”

“Hermione,” Harry called out to them. They both turned to see him standing at the bottom of the stairs. He was bundled up tightly in a Gryffindor scarf that covered all of his neck and most of the lower half of his face. In his hands, he was clutching a thin envelope, within which surely lied his most recent letter to Sirius. “Stop abusing Ron.”

“Harry!” Hermione cried. “Professor McGonagall! She –”

“I know,” Harry interrupted her. “I heard.”

“Well, what are we going to –”

“Hermione,” Harry once more cut her off, this time going so far as to raise his hands in a placating gesture. “All she did was mention your breath. So, the most she’s got is suspicions. The only way to prove what we’re doing is if she opens our mouths and peers inside, and she’s not liable to do that now is she?”

“You have met McGonagall, haven’t you, mate?” Ron said dryly.

Harry sighed and ran a hand down his face ignoring Hermione’s typical call of “Professor McGonagall.” “Yeah, I have,” he said. “And she can’t rat us out on circumstantial evidence. Or rather, she won’t.”

“Harry,” Hermione said gently. “She was a teacher here when your father and Sirius underwent the process and she’s done it. She knows what to look for.”

“And Draco Malfoy is a blood purist git whose father turned blood purity into a murderous profession,” Harry countered. “But that doesn’t mean we get to throw Malfoy in Azkaban for what his father did. Innocent until proven guilty.”

“Unfortunately,” Ron muttered. The other two looked at him askance. “I meant about Malfoy!”

There was a pause. “Right,” Harry responded slowly. “Besides, with any luck this won’t be a problem in a few days. The full moon is almost here. Anyway, I’ve got a letter to mail.” He raised said letter gesturingly.

“Oh, Harry,” Hermione bemoaned. “I wish you’d stop sending those. It was the right thing to tell Sirius.”

Harry didn’t hear her or at least pretended like he hadn’t. He kept a steady pace until he disappeared out of the portrait hole in the direction of the Owlery. For his part, Ron settled back into his chess game. Hermione had been calmed down, McGonagall didn’t have enough proof to work on and everything was going to be fine.

September 25^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

12:19 A.M.

Harry looked up at the cloudy sky with angry eyes. The gray miasmic clouds had set in early that morning, and for as much as Harry and Hermione had exercised their will at it, the clouds had not moved. Now, staring up at the sky, Harry could not make out a single pinprick of starlight, and he certainly couldn’t make out the glow of the moon.

“Bugger,” he cursed.

Idly, he stabbed his wand into the roof of his mouth, awkwardly muttering, “Finite,” as he did. He felt the annoying, scratchy little leaf fall onto his tongue, and he quickly reached in and plucked it out. Smacking his lips, he turned around to face his two friends. Hermione was cross legged on the ground, leaning up against the far wall with her face in her hands. A low, continuous groan was spilling from her lips. Ron was leaned up silently against one of the Astronomy Tower’s pillars, fighting to keep a self-satisfied smile off of his face.

“Not even gonna get a day off,” Harry complained, rubbing at his jaw. “I haven’t tasted anything but leaf for two weeks.”

“Dinner was amazing tonight,” Ron told him impishly.

Hermione looked at him evilly, her hand straying towards her wand.

“Don’t,” Harry commanded, looking at her sternly. “You’ll sooner pitch him off the tower.”

“Who says that wasn’t the plan?” Hermione groused. Still, when she pulled her wand, she didn’t level it at Ron. Instead she did as Harry had, cancelling the sticking charm she’d applied to the roof of her mouth and pulling her own, saliva coated leaf out.

Harry joined her on the floor, heaving his own sigh as he thumped his head – rather more painfully than he had intended – on the wall behind him. “Well?” he addressed his friend.

Hermione shrugged mightily, flicking her mandrake leaf onto the floor irreverently. “Restart the process,” she told him resignedly. Idly, she fished in her bag for a moment before withdrawing the black, rectangular boxes she’d first presented to them a month ago. “That’s why I took extra leaves.”

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose and fought back a groan. This was his idea, after all. He was the one subjecting his friends to having leaves in their mouth and barely being able to talk and not at all being able to enjoy most foods. He, himself did not have the luxury of being annoyed at the situation. Still, looking up at the cloudy sky, Harry felt properly annoyed. Tonight was meant to be the night. He’d been looking forward to it for the past week – well, the past month really, but his excitement had hit a crescendo seven days ago – and the weather had even looked good too! It hadn’t been until this very morning that the clouds had moved in. As if God was teasing him.

Harry noted idly that Hermione was pressing his box into his hands. By mutual agreement, the three of them had agreed to split up the ‘paraphernalia’ – as Hermione liked to refer to it – between themselves to lessen the chances of being caught. Hermione was keeping her hands on the leaves and the phials she had stolen from Snape. Ron was in possession of the dew he and Harry had liberated from the forest. Harry, himself had been passed the dead husks of several moths – the ingredient that Hermione had ordered from Diagon nearly a month ago.

Harry flipped the lid of his box open and closed several times. A thought occurred to him. “The dew,” he said slowly, turning to Hermione. “It won’t like…expire, will it?”

Hermione shook her head. “It shouldn’t,” she assured him. Glancing sideways at Ron, she said, “So long as it hasn’t seen any sunlight, anyway.”

Ron raised his hands in surrender. “It’s been double bagged in my trunk until tonight,” he crossed his heart. Currently, the phials of dew were double bagged in Ron’s own bookbag at his feet. None of them had been particularly hopeful that the potion would be made tonight – particularly not Ron who was still hoping they’d be stalled enough for him to join them on time – but they had prepared for the best nonetheless.

Hermione nodded. “Should be fine then. We just have another month of…this.” She glared at the leaf in between her fingers for a moment and then shook herself. “Come on, Ron, do me.”

“Oi!” Harry cried, tongue in cheek. “Not while I’m in the room.”

Hermione blushed a bright crimson, and Ron wasn’t far behind her. “Harry!” Hermione hissed at the same time that Ron complained, “Come on, mate.”

Harry only laughed. “Go on then, Ron,” Harry nodded in Hermione’s direction. “Do her.”

Hermione glowered at him even as Ron crouched down level with the two of them and directed his wand into her open mouth. She did not stop glaring even when Ron had finished. Roughly five minutes later, all three of them had, had their mouths once more scoured with cleaning charms and sticking charms applied to the leaves on the rooves of their mouth.

All three of them smacked their lips uncomfortably for a moment, lightly probing the rooves of their mouth with their tongues. They gazed up at the moon petulantly, excited and irritated all at once. None of them wanted to endure another month – at least – of the mandrake leaves, but they did want to be Animaguses. And they had convinced themselves that it would be worth it in the end.

“Ron, you will keep control of your temper this time,” Hermione ordered waspishly after they had packed up and made towards the door.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ron said, shrugging the strap of his backpack farther up his shoulder. Harry drug a hand down his face, groaning as Hermione launched into a whispered rant about the ‘delicateness of the process’. Their bickering had nearly set Filch on them on the way up to the Astronomy Tower, and it seemed that it would likewise nearly set him on them on the way down.

Chapter Text

October 23^rd, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

12:37 A.M.

The weeks following that initial failure were some of the most stressed and harried weeks of the Golden Trio’s young lives. Whether it was their apparent inability to reliably speak to anyone other than each other – a fact which was doing more to shorten Snape’s lifespan than anything the three of them had ever done before – or their severely diminished appetites, the only thing that kept all of them from ripping the Mandrake leaves out of their mouth in disgust was the hopeful promise of the Animagus transformation. It fascinated and delighted them. Most of their conversations centered almost entirely around what the three of them thought their forms might be and how vexed they all were that they had no choice in the matter.

“You’ll be a raccoon, Harry,” Ron laughed. “Great big bloody glasses even when you’re an animal.”

“A monkey maybe, Ron,” Hermione declared. “To match the mess you make as a human.”

“I don’t know, Hermione. How about a shrew?”

Harry had been walloped hard for that last suggestion.

That said, the joy of what might be could only do so much to overcome the misery of what is. Hermione’s inability to properly respond to teachers’ questions – even most of the questions posed directly to her – was going to cause her to lose hair soon. Ron had lost four pounds from his lacking appetite, a fact which he seemed completely irreverent too. He just stared longingly at any bowl of chocolate pudding, cursing the earthy taste that all of his food had acquired. Even Harry – the happiest by far of the three of them in this situation – was suffering. The announcement regarding the Tri-Wizard Tournament and the subsequent cancellation of the Quidditch League for the year had given him hope that he may be able to escape most of the complications there, but he was once more out luck. In spite of the lack of actual play being done and in spit of her own desires to enter the Tournament, the newly christened Captain Johnson insisted the team still keep a regular schedule throughout the year to ensure they kept themselves fresh and ready for the following year. For Harry, the unofficial Quidditch practices had turned out practically hellish for him. He refused to open his mouth for any reason if he was even slightly moving his broom, too afraid that the high-speed winds would sheer his leaf off of the top of his mouth. As such, his teammates had taken to forcing undue drills on him in a desperate attempt to get him to call his plays or just bloody talk to another teammate! They were thus far unsuccessful, and Harry got the feeling they were growing tired of his trying new persona.

Luckily, tonight would mark the end of this section of the Golden Trio’s lives. When the previous Sunday had dawned on them, gray and dreary, the three of them had traded uneasy glances. Then Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday and then Thursday! On and on the gray clouds stretched, letting not a ray of sunshine nor a speck of moonlight through their grasp. Hermione had looked close to tears Friday night, gripping at her hair and muttering what sounded quite like obscenities under her breath. Not that Harry or Ron would suggest that, that was what they were. The last time they’d called her on her cussing, she’d hexed them in an extremely tender area. Then, Saturday had arrived. The clouds were not gone. But they could see blue sky in between them, and they were fluffy white now – not miasmic gray. The sun dared to peek through the curtain, and even the chilly cold couldn’t stop the flower of hope that blossomed in the Trio’s chests. Finally, Sunday morning had dawned clear and resplendently blue. There was not a cloud in sight. The sun beamed down brightly upon a courtyard that had only yesterday been dreary and drab.

Hermione had been woken by the warm sun on her face, and Ron and Harry had been woken by a warm Hermione hopping onto their beds, proclaiming the joy of a sunny Sunday morning. Dean had ended up throwing a pillow at the celebrating trio, but that had only served to make them move their party to the Common Room where they would further annoy a group of enterprising seventh years who were up early trying to study in quiet.

“Bloody nuisances, those three,” Dean muttered into his pillow.

From his position dangling half off his bed, Neville nodded his sleepy agreement.

Harry, Ron and Hermione spent the day practically vibrating with excitement. All the weather had to do was hold until the moon was high enough in the sky to shine on the Astronomy Tower. Then their trials and tribulations would be over. The potion, Hermione assured them, was very particular – whatever that meant – but it would only require patience and happenstance to work after tonight. There would be no more leaves in mouths. They were all as happy as a new couple after their first snog.

Thus, the night found them in the same place they had been the previous month – atop the Astronomy Tower, cross legged on the floor. They had formed a three-pointed little circle, arrayed around the three phials Hermione had liberated from Snape’s office almost two months ago. Hermione had discarded her robes and rolled up her sleeves to give her better, unfettered access to the ingredients. She made a show of checking her watch and then checking her notebook and then checking the moon.

“Right,” she swallowed nervously and held out her hand in Ron’s direction. “Dew.”

Ron jumped to, reaching into his bag and withdrawing three individually bagged phials of dew, the very same that he and Harry had trekked into the Forbidden Forest to get so long ago. Hermione unwrapped them carefully, holding them up into the light to get a better view of how much she was working with. Seemingly satisfied, Hermione set them down in front of her knees, unstoppered them and likewise unstoppered the crystal phials the three of them had in front of them.

With a lightly trembling hand, Hermione raised up one of the dew phials, preparing to tip it into its new crystal container. She paused. “You’re absolutely certain that you got it right?”

“It was miles into the forest,” Harry said. “No way anyone had touched it.”

“The sun?” Hermione pressed.

“Couldn’t have been,” Harry maintained.

Hermione breathed out a shaky breath. “Alright,” she conceded. She tipped the dew into the first of its new containers, following quickly thereafter with the other two. When all was said and done, there were still two and a half full vials of dew left over that went unused. Ron had wanted to pour the lot of it out, out of spite, but Hermione had maintained that they should keep it until the entire process was complete. “You never know what might happen.”

With the potion’s base now in place, Hermione withdrew a thin knife, grasped a single hair in between her fingers and cut it off, sliding it easily into the crystal phial. The distortion of the water and the crystal made it look much larger than it was. Hermione silently passed the knife to Ron who did likewise before handing it off to Harry. Hermione, meanwhile, had taken up a bowl and was crushing up the chrysalises of the moths she had acquired into a fine dust, which she herself poured into the crystal phials.

“That’s it,” she said, stoppering her phial. Harry and Ron jumped to do the same, stoppering them tightly.

Ron, gripping his own phial by its long neck, looked up at her in surprise. “What, we’re done?” he asked incredulously, as if he considered the entire two-month ordeal of Mandrake leaves, thievery and hiking to be too easy. “No more annoying tasks we have to complete?”

Hermione tugged idly at a lock of curled hair, pointedly not looking him in the eyes. “Well, I didn’t say that.”

Harry and Ron traded narrowed glances with each other, but Hermione was already continuing, quick to change the subject. Her fingers were flying nervously across the pages of her notebook, flipping between pages faster than Ron or Harry could comprehend the words printed on them. It seemed to make perfect sense to Hermione, however as she settled on a page near the middle of the book. Harry wondered if that was indicative of their progress. Had Hermione used this notebook exclusively for information on the Animagus process, or was the back half of the notebook taken up by other projects? He knew her mind ran at a million miles a second. It wasn’t hard for him to imagine her filling every other page with a different idea, nor was it hard for him to see her being perfectly capable of keeping track of it all.

“The potion has to stay out of the sunlight,” Hermione was saying, still refusing to meet the gaze of either of her friends. Her finger was running along the lines of her page as she read, a very un-Hermione like thing to do. “If it’s touched by sunlight, we have to start the entire process over again.” Harry and Ron both groaned loudly at even the thought of that.

“How long do we have to wait?” Harry asked excitedly. His limited knowledge of potions notwithstanding, even he knew that some potions had a very long maturation process. He hoped the Animagus potion wasn’t one of the ones that required years to properly mature to full use.

Hermione, exhibiting yet another decidedly un-Hermione like tendency, shrugged, finally looking up from her book. “To be determined,” she replied. Seeing both of the boys’ furrowed brows, she sighed and continued, “The potions require a natural event to finish setting. Whenever that happens, they’ll turn blood red, and we can drink them.”

“A natural event?” Ron echoed confusedly. “What’s that mean?”

“A thunderstorm, most likely. The book says any sufficiently powerful natural occurrence would work – volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and the like.” Idly, she scratched at her head, briefly turning over a single page to run her eyes across some dashed note on the back. “Professor Villanueva from Beauxbatons – he’s a minx Animagus – claimed that his potion set when his wife gave birth, and Professor Parker from the Salem Witch Academy stated that hers set when a colleague died in the same room she was keeping the potion. But…neither of those is likely to happen so…”

Harry snorted. “The way our school years usually go? I wouldn’t be surprised if Moody keeled over before the end of the year.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Ron agreed darkly.

Hermione grimaced to herself, her nose wrinkled. “Let’s plan for thunderstorms.” Scooping up the three potions, she handed them off to Ron, her tone all business again. “Double bag them like you had the dew vials and put them in your trunk. It’s less likely we’ll be found out if they’re in one place.”

Who exactly Hermione thought was going to be snooping through their trunks in search of contraband – something that had not happened in the entirety of their Hogwarts career – Harry and Ron did not know, but they did know better than to argue with her. Ron pulled the velvet bags back out of his bag, carefully bundling the vials and then bundling the bundles. Harry wondered if they’d be able to tell them apart when the time came to drink them, but he didn’t suspect there would be many issues. Hermione’s hair was much longer and curlier than his, and there would be no mistaking Ron’s bright orange locks.

“So that’s it?” Harry turned his attention onto Hermione as Ron continued to carefully bag up the potions as if they might shatter from the barest touch. He was taking no chances that he may have to again fill his mouth with leaf. “We just have to wait for a thunderstorm?” A grin quirked the corner of his lips. “Or a volcano? Or a birth?”

Hermione, though, did not meet his smile. Instead, she tugged again at the errant lock of hair hanging by her chin. “Well, there is another step…”

Harry did not like her tone, but he forced a chuckle from his lips. “Can’t be worse than Mandrake leaves right?” If his voice sounded somewhat strained, his friends were polite enough to not address it.

“No, we just have to say a spell,” Hermione replied with her own forced smile. “Everyday. Twice a day.”

Harry, growing more and more worried by her avoidance of the subject, said slowly, “That’s not terrible…”

Hermione nodded, still tugging on a strand of hair. “At,” she hesitated, “sunrise and sunset.”

A high-pitched noise emitted from Ron’s throat, such that Harry momentarily believed he’d already managed his Animagus transformation into some kind of bird. “Sunrise!?” he cried loud enough to wake the neighboring Ravenclaw Tower. “As in like…when the sun…comes up!?”

“That would be the logical definition of the combined words ‘sun’ and ‘rise’, yes!” Hermione snapped waspishly.

Harry ran a hand down his face in a long, single motion, accompanied by an equally long, single groan. When he had finished and his hand had slid off the end of his chin, he petulantly released one more higher pitched groan. “What’s the spell?” he asked defeatedly. He contented himself with the knowledge that it wasn’t as bad as the Mandrake leaves. It would be just like the Dursleys again – up before the crack of dawn to ensure Dudders had an enormous helping of breakfast.

Harry grimaced and silently resolved to never compare any aspect of this process to life with the Dursleys again.

Hermione flipped exactly three pages. There were only four words on the page she landed on, and though Harry could not read them upside down in her flowing script, he could see that she had viciously circled the incantation several times in looping, overlapping spheres. Hermione winced lightly. “It’s quite long, actually,” she muttered, more to herself. Ron and Harry both heard her and exchanged harassed glances. “And you can’t just say it and go back to sleep. It’s more of a meditation, really, to get you in touch with your inner animal.”

Harry sat up straighter. “You mean this will tell us what our animal form is?” He was suddenly much more excited about this spell.

Hermione shook her hand in a ‘so-so’ gesture. “Not in so many words. Certainly, it should help to narrow down what type of animal we are. The reports vary. Some people say they don’t feel much of anything – the baseline is a dual heartbeat that can’t really tell you much aside from how fast your animal form’s heart beats. Others say they can hear their animal or experience sensations their animal might in its natural habitat. Transfiguration masters aren’t sure exactly what the difference is between people. Professor McGonagall actually once wrote a fascinating paper on it. She said she knew exactly what her Animagus form was the very first time she performed the spell because she could feel what it was like to kill a mouse as a cat, and she speculated that it was because some people are more in touch with nature than others. For instance, Edgar Allen Poe was an infamous raven Animagus, but he lived in a city his entire life and said he didn’t feel anything while using the spell. It’s possible that–”

“Hermione!” both boys cried at once.

She blinked up at them, immediately chagrined. A deep red flush spread across her neck. “Sorry,” she muttered.

Harry and Ron shared a fond grin. Harry no longer doubted that the entirety of her notebook was filled solely with information about the Animagus process. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn if she had personally transcribed many of the essays she was quoting from.

“Anyway, the spell,” she continued, desperate to put her rambling behind her. “We’ll have to start tomorrow morning since the sun has already set. Don’t worry, the magic accounts for that, but you can’t fail to do the spell every morning and every night after this, or the magic will unravel, and you’ll have to start over again!”

The teens stayed up well into the night, listening as Hermione explained the finer details of the spell.

October 30^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

3:47 P.M.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

The days passed in a blur thereafter. However harassed Harry and – particularly – Ron were by the concept of waking up before the sun of their own free will, the delight and euphoria of no longer carrying around a leaf in their mouths overrode most of their complaints. For Harry, it meant a return to his normally chipper self on the Quidditch Pitch, if nowhere else. His team – Angelina in particular – were gleeful to have their Seeker back in top form, and Angelina had drug him off on a variety of occasions to hash out ultimately superfluous plays, as if she thought that Harry would mute himself again in the coming days and she needed to get all that she could out of her time with the Boy-Who-Lived. Harry tried hard not to think about the fact that if the next steps in the process were handled incorrectly, she wasn’t entirely wrong. Ron reclaimed his appetite as well as the weight he lost in addition to a few extra pounds that he hadn’t. He took to the unsightly habit of consuming food enough to feed three people at every meal to the point that Hermione had temporarily refused to sit by him when eating for a few days until he had calmed his habits down. As for Hermione, she was back to her “horrendously annoying know-it-all self” as Snape put it. Fully capable of speaking again, her hand was always the first to rise when a Professor asked a question as she tried desperately to reclaim her position as the student that would always answer when called upon. She had, unfortunately, burned a few bridges with her classmates as she developed the habit of screaming out the answer to a question even when she was not the one called upon. She was trying to make up for lost time and only stopped when Professors began to deduct points for her interruptions.

All the while, the three of them woke up at exactly the same time, waited patiently by the windows of the Common Room – even the most stalwart of O.W.L and N.E.W.T studiers were not up at that hour, and they had the room to themselves – and intoned the spell that Hermione had drilled into their vocabulary. The stuttering stumbles Harry and Ron had both experienced over the alliterative spell the first few times they’d said it that night on the Astronomy Tower were gone, replaced by surety and proper accentuation. Technically speaking, the spell only had to be intoned once as the sun rose and once as the sun set, but as it was meant to be a meditative experience, Hermione encouraged them both to take their time with the morning ritual. After the first session they’d experienced, Harry and Ron found that they agreed, and the three of them often spent as much as half an hour with their wands pointed into their chests as they incanted. They spent even longer doing so at sunset when they could find a quiet classroom just to themselves and didn’t have to worry about nosy upper years coming to see what three fourth years were being so studious about. In all, Harry and Ron had mostly gotten over their reservations about the early rise. When the initial few minutes of exhaustion had passed and they’d cleaned themselves up and prepared for their meditations, they found there was a peace in being up before everyone else. There was also no small amount of amusement in watching Neville, Dean and Seamus stumble groggily into their classes. Harry had taken a great amount of personal pleasure watching Snape curl his lip in distaste at someone other than him the one time Dean had passed out at his potion’s stand and spilled a sickly yellow gunk all across his head and neck. It had caused no small amount of hair growth, and Dean was still sporting a glorious mullet days later.

The effects of the spell were as Hermione described them, right down to how much they varied between each other. Hermione seemed the least in touch with her ‘wild side’ as Ron had dubbed it, feeling only the dull, scattered heartbeat of her animal form during their meditations. She had not yet experienced anything of note that could tell her exactly what her form was going to be. She could assume only that it was small based on how rapid the heartbeat was. Surprisingly – or perhaps unsurprisingly on second thought – it was actually Ron who excelled at the meditations the most. He could feel with absolute certainty a slow, powerful heartbeat, the strength of which he said blotted out his own during meditations. Additionally, he said he felt exceptionally warm, as if he’d been sunbathing at the Burrow for the better part of two days and at times he felt as if a great weight had been laid all around his head and neck. Harry and Hermione had no ideas as to what the second sensation could mean, but they both speculated that the heat was probably a factor of his animal form’s environment – perhaps a desert. Ron had unpleasantly muttered that he hoped desperately he was not a camel. As for Harry, he was middle of the road. He felt the arrhythmic heartbeat of his animal form, but that was largely it. Occasionally, he would startle, feeling as if he had been blasted in the face with some type of cool wind or possibly an ocean wave. He hoped his form wasn’t some type of fish. He didn’t foresee how that was possible given how terrible of a swimmer he was. He had described the sensations to both Ron and Hermione, but they did not have enough details to render any kind of opinion on what it might mean. Still, he woke every morning excited to continue his meditations, hoping that today would be the day he’d feel what he needed to, to know what his form was.

Presently, the trio were arrayed on the outskirts of the grounds with the rest of the student body all around them. Today was the day that had been hotly anticipated by the school at large – the day the delegations from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang were both due to arrive. Many of the students were all atwitter about the event for a variety of reasons. He had heard girls giggling about how handsome French boys were supposed to be – a comment that miffed Harry in a way that was very British – and he had heard some of the Slytherins commenting that Durmstrang students were meant to know some right nasty curses on account of their Dark Arts classes. Dark Arts, Harry noted. Not Defense Against the Dark Arts. He wondered what type of students an academy like that would turn out – he hoped they were a pleasant sort but didn’t hold his breath. And then there were others like Hermione who were simply fascinated by the idea of meeting students who studied under different curriculums. It would be, she assured both Ron and Harry at every chance she got, a fascinatingly educational experience to talk to them. Ron and Harry took her word for it.

Just now, though, Hermione was not eagerly awaiting the arrival of Beauxbatons or Durmstrang but staring up warily at the sky above them. Harry tracked her gaze, wondering – with a brief spurt of excitement – if she was seeing the beginnings of a storm brew. He was disappointed to see that the skies were clear and light blue, reflecting the palpable excitement of the Hogwarts students.

“You don’t think they’ll be late, do you?” Hermione asked distractedly. She was idly chewing on the pinky nail of her left hand, a nervous tick she’d developed over the course of the last two months. Neither Harry nor Ron thought she was entirely aware of what she was doing. No doubt she’d be horrified to discover the damaging habit. And it seemed that she had subconsciously relegated the chewing to a single nail. “We’d get in so much trouble if we ditched the arrival to do our spell.”

Ron was unconcerned, reaching down to fish an orange from the picnic basket they’d brought with them. The three of them had been among the first to make their way out to the lawn in preparation for their guests’ arrival. Harry and Ron had moaned a bit, but they were lapping up the benefits now, being one of the few to have good seats at the very edge of the lake on a comfortable blanket that Hermione had enchanted with warming charms to help ward off the October chill. The snows hadn’t quite set in yet, but it wouldn’t be long before the broke. Harry wondered if a blizzard would count as a natural event to the potions sitting comfortably in Ron’s trunk. “They’re not even supposed to get here until four. We’ve got time.”

“’Sides, we’ve skived off dinners more than once the past week,” Harry said dismissively, echoing Ron’s tone.

“We have not skived off,” Hermione retorted, clearly affronted by the notion that she would ever skive off anything. “We’ve only been late a few times. And that’s rather different than not being present to welcome guests. Don’t you think McGonagall would notice?”

“Reckon she’d be too busy to notice,” Ron muttered half-intelligibly, his mouth full of two orange slices. Harry nodded his agreement.

Hermione groaned quietly, blowing a tuft of hair out of her face as she did. “You two are hopeless. Don’t you ever worry about anything!?”

Harry grinned impishly. “Why would we need to, Hermione?” he asked sweetly. “We’ve got you for that.”

Hermione tried in vain to fight the exasperated smile that tugged at her lips, and Ron and Harry descended into raucous laughter. “Honestly,” Hermione muttered with fond exasperation.

Whatever Harry or Ron may have said in response was drowned out by the collective gasp of most of the student body, immediately drawing the trio’s attention away from their faux squabble. Around them, hundreds of students were looking upward, their bodies contorted in various examples of excitement, be it shaky jitters, tiny little in-place jumps or hands raised to cover mouths that were still gasping. “In the sky!” someone shouted near the back.

As one, the students craned their necks to see that there was something in the sky moving swiftly towards them. Far too distant to be seen properly, it looked like a shapeless shadow, its blurry, formless edges slowly solidifying into recognizable shapes the closer it got. Harry thought he could see the outline of a corner near the left, but he was, perhaps, not the best judge when it came to seeing anything at a distance – or even really just seeing anything.

Hermione, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the glare of the sun, smirked lightly. “Is it a bird?” she asked dryly.

“I think it’s a plane,” Harry laughed.

Ron looked at both of them askance. “What are you two on about, it’s a carriage. Look!”

Ron was correct. Now much closer, the shadow had taken on the indistinguishable shape of a horse-drawn carriage – complete with four stunning, golden winged horses flapping their powerful wings in the front. Clearly a French design, he could see the reflective shine of artistic golden filigree all along the sides and front, set on baby blue wooden panels. It was stunning to look at, Harry would admit – for the French. The carriage banked suddenly, falling into a dive that carried them hundreds of feet down. The winged horses tucked their wings tight against their bodies as the carriage plummeted towards the earth, only to open them back wide, catching the wind and gliding over the assembled student body of Hogwarts, hooves and carriage wheels passing bare feet over their heads. Most of the students let out startled gasps of fear and excitement.

Hermione, her hand still raised to block the sun, turned to track the carriage’s movement as it banked into a wide turn, slowing considerably. “Superman!” she whispered with faux excitement, her lips still quirked in humor.

Harry met her gaze, and the muggle raised duo fell into fitful giggles as Ron looked on in abject confusion.

“Mental, you two,” he shook his head.

Serenaded by their own laughter, the trio settled in to await the arrival of the Durmstrang contingent.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

November 9^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

5:53 P.M.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus”

Given how well the year had been going for Harry thus far – a Death Eater attack at the World Cup notwithstanding – he ought to have known that something was soon going to come along and burst his bubble. And, on top of that, he ought to have known that it would happen on Halloween. Why he had not yet boycotted that holiday, he didn’t know, but he was going to seriously consider it next year. If it wasn’t Quirrell running in to whinge about a troll that he let in, it was Mrs. Norris being found petrified by a bloody basilisk. If it wasn’t his half-deranged godfather breaking into Gryffindor Tower in a murderous rage, it was being chosen as the bloody fourth Tri-Wizard Champion for Hogwarts!

Harry had, had no less than four furious breakdowns over the fact that he ought to be disqualified for being the fourth Champion in the Tri-Wizard tournament, one of which had been in front of the combined panel of judges and Ministry officials. Nothing had yet come of it and Hermione seemed to be growing increasingly agitated with each repetition. That was nothing compared to the supreme agitation – and that was really stretching the definition of the word – of the rest of the school. The Hufflepuffs, usually incredibly kind, easy-going people he got along with – Zacharias Smith being the obvious exception – had completely turned on him. Not an hour went by without passing a yellow trimmed student in the hallways, their fierce glares usually accompanied by curses – both verbally and magically. One first year had gone so far as to stomp on his foot, and he’d been so gobsmacked by the audacity of the little swot that he hadn’t done anything to retaliate. The Slytherins were actually fairly excited about the entire ordeal, if only because they greatly enjoyed watching him suffer. He heard the betting pool on when he would die had reached two thousand galleons. Fred had put down fifteen galleons that he would survive the entire thing. George had put down fifteen on him dying in the Second Task.

“Got to cover our bases, mate,” he’d explained, not the least bit apologetic.

“We’re trying to start a business, you know,” Fred had supplied.

The Ravenclaws were the only relatively neutral group in the school, but even then, he saw plenty of them proudly displaying their ‘Potter Stinks’ badges, a sentiment that, while annoying, was childish enough for him to largely ignore. As for the Gryffindors, their betrayal had hurt the most. “Your House will be like your family,” McGonagall had told them with no small amount of severity on that gloomy evening they’d first stepped into Hogwarts. Well, Gryffindor had proven themselves resoundingly similar to his family, turning their backs on him at the first chance they got. They matched the Hufflepuffs glare for glare, and while the hissed insults were less common and the magical jinxes and curses completely nonexistent, every whispered word into his ear by a fellow Lion hurt all the more. He had even heard one or two of the younger years use the term ‘freak’. He had steadfastly refused to show exactly how much that had shaken him.

The only saving grace was that Ron and Hermione, stalwart as always, had patently refused to abandon him. Indeed, they had circled the wagons around him so severely that they had more than once gotten in trouble with McGonagall – and in one particularly explosive incident, Snape – on his behalf. Hermione had nearly clawed Lavender’s eyes out for insinuating that Harry had done it only for the attention, and Ron had cursed Seamus bald when the git had admitted to cashing in on the ‘Harry’s Going to Die’ pool. The Gryffindors seemed to take it as a personal insult that Ron and Hermione had both announced that they believed him, and he had been wracked with horrible guilt the moment the rest of the House had begun to level the same accusations of ‘cheat’ and ‘glory hound’ at them. Ron and Hermione had simply brushed it off.

It was, frankly, astounding just how protective Ron was being of him. He seemed to take every insult levied at Harry as a personal slight, responding as if he were the one being insulted. After the fifth such incident – involving an upper year Hufflepuff and a particularly unsightly bowel loosening curse – Harry and Hermione had sat him down to insist he ease up on the retributions. Ron had claimed fervently that even he didn’t know exactly where this new protective streak was coming from. Certainly, he had always stuck up for Harry whenever the likes of Malfoy sauntered over to make wise cracks about dead parents, but it had never before extended beyond petty retorts and the occasional drawn wand. Ron had sat two detentions in the last week and a half, all on behalf of Harry. It was Hermione – of course – who speculated that it had to do with their Animagus meditations. Ron, being the most in tune with animal form, was exuding characteristics similar to what his animal form would – namely, fierce, aggressive protectiveness. Hermione called it ‘The Bleeding Effect’, a well-documented phenomenon inherent to Animaguses. In almost every case, an Animagus was known to exhibit some aspect of their animal form’s personality or characteristics. Professor McGonagall, for instance, was well known for her love of seafood. Harry had learned from a few letters from Remus that Sirius had inherited a dog’s ability so fall asleep instantaneously whenever he wanted to, and the less said about Pettigrew’s rat like features, the better. On the positive, that narrowed the possibilities of Ron’s form down considerably – he was obviously some kind of pack animal, probably a predator based on his aggressive responses. On the negative side of things, Ron was now having to learn how to control a newfound temper, something he had never been good at in the first place.

As for Harry and Hermione, their meditations continued with little deviance. Harry continued to feel the odd, random sensation here and there – chiefly, he felt random bursts of wind on his face or chest – and he had become fairly certain that his form was a bird of some sort, although that hardly narrowed it down. Hermione’s one major breakthrough had been, as she described it, “the uncomfortable sensation of having sandpaper run up her arms and chest”. Harry and Ron didn’t know what to make of that at all, and they wisely kept their remarks to themselves. Morning and evening meditations became Harry’s favorite time of day. Safe in a solitary, quiet environment with the only two people in the castle who did not think he was an attention-seeking glory hound, Harry could just manage to forget his woes and worries as he sunk into the spell and its incantation. He could forget the glares and harsh words of classmates, the disappointed stares of his Professors, the harsh betrayal of his Housemates. At times, deep within his meditative trance, he could even pretend that he had already mastered his transformation – that he really was a bird, free and unfettered. The disappointment grew everyday that a thunderstorm – or a volcano, earthquake, tsunami, birth, or death, Harry thought dryly – failed to show up.

Harry, realizing with that thought that the trance had well and truly broken, finished his final incantation for the night and withdrew from his thoughts. He was more and more reluctant everyday to return to the waking world of human responsibility. Being ‘Harry’ seemed a weight that got heavier every day. Only, he could at any time look across the room to his two friends and feel the weight lessen. Ron had already withdrawn from his own meditations and was waiting quietly at the far end of the disused classroom they’d decided to occupy. He was trailing bright red and gold lights through the air with his wand, occasionally flicking them to form crude words that Hermione would slap him for. Hermione herself was still quietly incanting, her wand pointed – rather too hard, Harry thought – into her chest. Her face was scrunched up tight in the way that it got when she was puzzling over a particularly difficult question that she didn’t yet have the answer to. He knew that it irked her that she was the least in tune with her form of the three of them, and he was all the more grateful for her cooperation in this ridiculous scheme of his for it. It wouldn’t have been possible without Hermione.

Harry sighed, beleaguered. A hand rose to run through his messy hair, distractedly knotting it in to even more of a crow’s nest then it had been before – was his form a crow, he wondered idly, smiling briefly at the thought. At the beginning of the year, it had seemed like such a laugh, learning how to be an Animagus. Never mind that it just seemed like an awesome skill to have, it made him feel connected to his father – and Sirius – in a truly profound way. Harry had thought he’d reached the peak of his connection to his dad when his Patronus had taken the form of a stag, which he now knew to be his father’s Animagus form. Now, though, he had a chance to follow in his footsteps, breaking rules and learning skills that few others in the entire world knew. He would be part of an exclusive club, the same exclusive club that had included his father. He had even hoped that his form would turn out to be a stag just like his father’s, and, although he had hidden it well from his friends, he had been rather disappointed when he discovered that wasn’t going to happen. He had brought Ron and Hermione in on it to share in the wonder, to do what they always did – get into more trouble than they should reasonably ever be in. It had been amazing! Even the horror of the leaves, he knew would one day be a fond memory he’d reminisce about to his kids. Now, though, he wasn’t entirely sure if it had been the right call.

The First Task was a little over two weeks away. He had no idea what awaited him, what he would do, how he would survive let alone win. He was outclassed in every way imaginable by the other Champions, and his very presence in the Tournament was a violation of international law. He was fairly certain that every Ministry official that had been present when his name had spat out of the Goblet firmly believed him to be a cheat, and it was only his status as the Boy-Who-Lived that had saved him from litigation. And here he was, meditating on a stupid spell every morning and every night while he waited for a ‘natural event’ to free him from the routine, as if it mattered at all. The odds were, the Weasley Twins and most of the rest of Hogwarts would be cashing out an enormous payday in two weeks when he was killed by whatever ‘test of strength’ the officials had planned. Well, there would be a benefit at least. Harry’s death would no doubt set Ron and Hermione’s potions and allow them to finish the process. It was a macabre thought, but Harry had found no small amount of sick joy in it.

He had even briefly considered giving up on the process altogether. Stopping the meditations, allowing the potion to spoil and going on with his tormented, cursed life. He was convinced that magic had purposefully tipped the scales away from him at every single turn. He could reap the benefits of escaping the Dursleys to a world of magic and wonder, but the price was discovering that he was famous for something he couldn’t remember, for something that had taken his parents from him. He could hope beyond hope that his godfather would be proven innocent of the crimes he didn’t commit, that he could have a real home with a man who wanted him, but the price for such foolish dreams was watching them crumble around him. And he could dare to try and form a lasting connection with his father’s spirit, but the price would be serving as a pawn in someone else’s scheme with this ridiculous tournament. Maybe, he figured, if he stopped trying to do what he wanted, the universe would stop fucking him over.

A thick, wadded up ball of parchment bounced suddenly off his head. Harry looked up, affronted only to see Ron with a slick grin on his face, his arms splayed over the back of the desks behind him. His best mate was watching him with an evil eye. “Stop brooding,” Ron commanded.

Harry glared at him, miffed. “I wasn’t brooding!” he said in a very broody tone.

“You’re always brooding,” Hermione muttered from her position to his left. Her head was bent down as she packed her books away, but she had most certainly meant for him to hear her.

“I am not!”

Ron hummed his disagreement, rubbing idly at his chin as if in thought. “Your mouth is closed and you’re frowning. So, you’re brooding.”

Hermione nodded sagely, as if Ron had just spoken a phrase of great wisdom. “He’s right.”

Harry opened his mouth to retort, but Ron was ahead of him. “Let me guess!” he cried over him, raising a hand and making a ‘go on’ gesture. “Something about ‘woe is me’, ‘nothing ever goes right’, right?”

“You forgot ‘fourth wizard in a Tri-Wizard tournament’,” Hermione faux whispered in a mocking voice, emphasizing ‘Tri’ in exactly the way that Harry would during one of his rants.

“Right, right,” Ron nodded at her. “Your parents are dead too, right? Haven’t heard that one before.”

Harry gaped at him, jaw dropped and all. Hermione gazed long into Ron’s face as he fought a smirk, desperate to keep the serious mask on his face. He broke as a giggle escaped Hermione’s mouth, his smile cracking into a wide-open grin. Raucous laughter escaped his lips. Harry, try as he might to muster up some kind of indignant anger, could not fight the smile that twitched onto his face.

“You two are the worst,” he shook his head at them, prompting even louder laughter.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

November 19^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

12:03 P.M.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

Harry had – perhaps naively – believed that the universe had already had its fill of surprising him this year. After all, the Death Eater attack at the World Cup had caught him completely off guard to the point that he had misplaced his wand, and to say that he had been floored by his name coming out of the Goblet was a severe understatement. He ought to have known better. He ought to have known that even thinking such things was tempting fate. At the very least, this surprise turned out to be rather pleasant when the shock had faded.

It occurred in perhaps the best place it was possible for it to have occurred given the circumstances – the middle of one of Binns’ dry lectures. Harry had been going about his usual routine doodling absently on blank parchment while pretending to listen to Binns recite a monotonous tale of the fifth Goblin Rebellion of 1497. He was aware enough of the lecture to know that, that was the subject, but he did not know if that meant that it was the fifth Goblin Rebellion to occur in 1497 alone – which seemed excessive to him – or if it was simply the fifth Goblin Rebellion to ever occur. He didn’t worry too much about it. If it was really necessary to know, Hermione was sure to have kept encyclopedic notes.

Hermione herself was beside him doing just that, head bent dutifully over a long piece of parchment that she had filled to bursting with Binns’ dry words. Hermione always complained of wrist cramps walking out of History of Magic. For as dry and boring as his words were, Binns certainly didn’t lack for them. Harry was glad to see that she had given up on glaring at him during this class – something that had taken years. It was an affront to Hermione’s studious nature to do anything other than pay attention when a Professor was speaking, but she had evidently finally come to the decision that Harry’s doodling was less offensive than Ron’s drooling. The youngest Weasley male usually used this period as a chance to catch up on his sleep – especially these days when they had to wake up so early to meet their meditations.

Harry smiled lightly. He, Ron, and Hermione’s sudden schedule shift had put them among the first students to enter the Great Hall for breakfast every day. McGonagall had pulled him aside to congratulate him on his new, disciplined, studious outlook, wrongly attributing it to his preparations for the Tournament. He had thought about correcting her, but the five points she’d given him for it had dissuaded him. His smile pulled into a frown. He wished that he could attribute it to Tournament preparations, but the truth was he was barely doing any Tournament preparations. With no idea as to what the First Task would be, Harry was completely in the dark as to what he should be preparing for. That, combined with the enormous skill and knowledge difference between himself and the other Champions had completely overwhelmed him. The condescending, disdainful article by Rita Skeeter had done little to improve his confidence.

Hermione nudged him with her shoulder and, still not looking up, slid a ripped piece of parchment into his view. It’ll be alright.

Harry, genuinely amused, resisted a snort. He scribbled a hasty note in reply, grinning all the while. Passing notes in class, Ms. Granger?

He was careful not to look at her, but he barely choked down his laughter at her offended huff. The note slid back into his view. Don’t be ridiculous!

Harry really did fail to choke down the laugh completely this time, but the rest of the class was too zoned out to notice the chortles from the back of the room. Harry reached down to scribble another sarcastic response only to pause, his hand halfway to the paper. A glob of ink collected on the point of his quill and fell onto the scrap of parchment below, smudging their previous notes. Harry strained his eyes, blinking and shaking his head in confusion. He…couldn’t see. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He could see insofar as he could make out enormous, shapeless blobs of fuzzy color, but he would scarcely be able to tell how many fingers someone was holding up if they tested him. Harry reached up, rubbing at his eyes behind his glasses, but it did no good. He still could not see.

Harry snatched his glasses off his head, thinking maybe they had fogged for some reason – perhaps one of the students in the class had jinxed them about this bloody Tournament. For the second time, Harry paused. More precisely, he froze, and his glasses slipped from his grasp, clattering noisily with the floor. A few students turned around – Binns continued droning on, unconcerned – but they turned their heads away quickly when they saw who had caused the ruckus.

Harry, his gaze still trained fixedly at a single, wobbly grain on the desk, reached out blindly to pat urgently on Hermione’s shoulder. She looked up, sputtering momentarily as the movement put her face directly in line with his patting hand. “What?” she demanded in a low hiss. “Are you alright?”

Harry blinked. He blinked again. He blinked one last time just to be sure. “I can see,” he whispered hoarsely at her.

Hermione furrowed her brow. “What? Of course you can. What are you talking about?”

“No,” he responded urgently, excitement trickling into his voice and giving it a little volume. Hermione made a frantic shushing gesture. “No, Hermione. I can see.” He pointed aggressively at his unencumbered eyes.

Hermione drew back, eyes wide. “What?” This time, she sounded more stunned than annoyed.

“Your eyes are brown,” Harry told her gleefully. “You’ve got three freckles underneath your left eye that look like a triangle. And that!” he pointed down at her sheet. “That says ‘417 dead at Battle of Gringotts, November 1497’. Hermione, I can see!”

“Shhhhh!” she insisted, glancing warily at the annoyed looks they were getting from their classmates. It was one thing to not pay attention in History of Magic – everyone did that – but it was another to infringe on someone else’s not paying attention. “I don’t get it, what happened?”

Harry shrugged in a mighty ‘I dunno’ gesture. “It just happened. One second to the next. I could see through my glasses and then I couldn’t.”

Hermione’s eyes glazed, and she began to mutter random syllables of fragmented words in that way she did when she began to think faster than her mouth could work. For several long seconds, her eyes darted back and forth, her mouth working wildly as she catalogued and dissected the issue in her mind’s eye. Then the fog cleared. “The Bleeding Effect,” she determined.

Harry frowned. “I thought that was only with like…minor things. Like Ron’s temper. Or McGonagall’s appetite.”

“Professor McGonagall,” Hermione corrected out of habit, chewing lightly on the end of her quill. “It’s not unheard of. Powerful witches and wizards usually reap greater benefits from the Bleeding Effect. Charlemagne was a hippopotamus Animagus, and the stories say he could bite through iron chains. You said you were sure it was a bird?”

Harry nodded absently, disconcerted by her words. “Must be, yeah, I know what it feels like to fly…”

“Must be a bird of prey, then. Something with amazing sight, powerful enough to overcome your own ocular issues.”

“Ocular issues?” Harry echoed. Only Hermione could make his legal blindness sound so clinical. “But I don’t get it, why would that happen for me?”

Hermione looked up at him oddly. “What do you mean?”

“You said powerful wizards,” Harry retorted.

Hermione narrowed her eyes. “Yes,” she said, as if she didn’t get what he was saying.

“Why would it–” Harry cut himself off, reaching up to scratch at the side of his head. “I mean, I’m just…well, I’m just me.”

Hermione’s gaze softened like butter. “Oh, Harry,” she said, as one might say to a troubled child who didn’t understand what he was saying. “You don’t really think that, do you?”

Harry furrowed his brow at her.

“It seems we are out of time,” Binns’ monotonous voice drifted from the front. Harry’s brain was well programed to keep an ear out for a dismissal amidst the endling droning of useless facts. “Please collect your things. Seven inches on goblin genealogies from 1432-1576 by next class, with special emphasis on what bloodlines proved most influential towards–”

Harry tuned him out again, sure that Hermione would remember the assignment on his behalf. Across the aisle from him, Ron snorted himself awake, falling off of his hand momentarily. He blinked blearily at the two of them, smacking his lips. “I miss anything interesting?”

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

November 24^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

3:16 P.M.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

The thunderous roars were still ringing in his ears. The roar of the crowd. The roar of his own blood pounding in his ears. The roar of the wind as he sheared through it, faster than he had ever gone in any Quidditch game. And, of course, the sky splitting roar of the Hungarian Horntail. It was over, he reminded himself. He had done it. The cool metal of the egg pressed against his burning leg – still exceedingly warm and blistered from the near miss he’d had with the Dragon’s flames – was testament to that. He had done it. He had succeeded. He had done it. It was over. The thunderous roars were still ringing in his ears. The roar of the crowd. The roar of his own blood pounding in his ears…

Madame Pomphrey bustled around him, worried lines creasing her face as she waved her wand back and forth across his figure. Physically, he was fine. The burn on his leg was surface level, the scrapes on his face and hands easily healed. Something had caught his lower back rather viciously – who knew what he had gotten up to while he’d been off trying to out fly a dragon – but that too would be right as rain after a night of rest and potions. All things considered, he’d gotten off rather well. Indeed, all the Champions had with the exception of Miss Delacour who had taken rather too long to put out her burning skirt. She’d be applying that topical ointment for at least a week. Unfortunately, she was quite certain Mr. Potter was descending rapidly into shock. He was looking everywhere but nowhere, his eyes glazed over and faraway. He seemed to be swaying in place, as if he were still banking his broom to escape the Dragon’s clutching jaws. He only barely responded when she snapped her fingers in front of his gaze. She was halfway to sedating him, but the cursed judges wouldn’t allow it until his score was rendered. She’d wanted to hex Dumbledore when she’d been informed of Mr. Potter’s involvement in the Tournament, and she was quite certain it wouldn’t be the last time she’d experience that feeling this year.

“Harry!” two voices cried at once behind her.

Poppy rounded on them in an instant. “No!” she ground out emphatically, splaying her arms wide and blocking their view of the boy. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him list suddenly to the side, only to right himself like a toddler fighting sleep. “He is harassed and barely functional! I will not have you stressing him further with undo noise!”

Ron snorted. “Fat chance of that, isn’t there?” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the tent flap. A wind was catching it at periodic intervals, throwing it open far enough to let in the roar of the crowd. “Have you heard the ruckus out there?”

Poppy brandished her wand in his face, a scathing scalp cleaning charm on the tip of her tongue. “That does not in any way relate to how I shall run my medical tent, Mr. Weasley!”

Ron leaned away, his eyes crossing. “Right,” he said quickly, stammering his words. “Of course. Sorry, Madame Pomphrey. Course you’re right.” He had his hands up in surrender, a nervous, tittering smile on his lips.

The tent flap pealed back, this time by a dark-skinned hand, and a young man leaned his head into the tent. Pomphrey resisted the urge to curl her lip at the man. He was another faceless Ministry official she couldn’t bother to learn the name of. All the better to keep them faceless and nameless – it made them easier to blame for putting her charges in danger like this.

Still, his smile was pleasant enough. “Sorry, Madame, but if he’s alright, the judges are ready for him.”

Poppy did not curl her lip at the man, but she made no effort to disguise her displeased grimace. Her wand fell away, and she harrumphed angrily. “Oh, very well!” She waved the two other Gryffindors towards their friend. “You two, help him out! Keep him steady, and as soon as he has his scores, you get him straight back here so I can knock him out!”

Ron and Hermione had both moved to stand on either side of the Boy-Who-Lived before she had even finished speaking. Each of them took a firm grip on one of his arms, Ron going so far as to sling Harry’s over his shoulder to better support him. Harry swayed on his feet briefly, threatening to spill over Ron’s back before Hermione tugged him back into balance. A dopey smile alighted on his face. “I’m good, I’m good,” he assured her in an almost loopy voice. “It’s over. I did it. I’m safe. It’s good. It’s over…” The muttered reassurances continued, petering off into an inaudible murmur that had Hermione looking at him with no small amount of worry.

“You see what I mean, then?” Poppy asked rakishly.

Hermione grimaced. “We’ll get him back as soon as we can, Madame. Come on, Harry.”

As the three Gryffindors half-stumbled their way out of the tent – that annoyingly pleasant Ministry official gesturing grandly in the direction they were meant to go – Poppy ran a hand down her face. She wondered if she would ever have anyone in her life to prevent her from experiencing undo stress.

“Really!” she muttered scathingly, turning around to organize her already perfectly organized potions. “Tournaments and teenagers and dragons! These children will be the death of me! And none more so than Harry Potter!”

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

December 7^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

4:09 P.M.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

Harry rode something of a high in the days following the First Task. Once the shock had worn off – courtesy of much appreciated medical coma induced by Madame Pomphrey – the reality of his situation had truly set in. Not only was he still alive – and certainly he had bankrupted no small amount of Slytherins for pulling that off – but he had done even more than just survive! He had thrived! His performance in the First Task had been, as Ludo Bagman had been quick to assure him, exemplary! The judges, barring the blatantly biased Karkaroff, had been quite impressed with his death-defying flight against the Horntail. While it had not been the most economical solution in terms of time, it had by far been the most entertaining to witness. Krum’s brute force solution had cost him in the long run, Cedric’s ingenious Transfigurations had required too much focus and Fleur’s had likewise not accounted for circumstances like a Dragon’s deep slumber fire breathing. Indeed, the judges – again, with the exception of Karkaroff – agreed that he had made the most successful use of his individual skillset to best the Task. That was no small compliment, and the fact that he was currently tied for first place with Krum had twisted many a nipple in the Hogwarts student body.

Oh, the majority still thought he was an attention seeking glory hound, of course. It was just that no one really wanted to be on the bad side of a fourteen-year-old that had successfully tussled with one of the most aggressive dragon species in the world.

The Trio’s meditations continued with barely any change.

Enthused by Harry’s newfound 20/20 vision (an estimate on the part of Hermione who was by no means an expert in vision testing), the Trio threw themselves even further into the meditations than before, often times taking up hours in the evenings as they sunk deeper and deeper into their respective trances. More than once, they’d had to huddle uncomfortably close to each other beneath the Cloak and shuffle their way back to the Tower to avoid Filch or McGonagall or – worst of all – Snape, which was a prospect made far more difficult as fourteen-year-olds than as eleven-year-olds.

Unfortunately, despite Hermione’s insistence on meditating for at least five minutes longer than the boys and Ron’s apparently natural talent for connecting with his ‘wild side’, what few examples of the Bleeding Effect they could conjure served only to drive Hermione spare as she had suddenly developed an alarming penchant for random, short lived naps. Ron had laughed himself into a coughing fit at the absolutely harried look she had sported when she’d wandered into the Common Room, fresh from a severe telling off by Madame Pince about the ‘proper care of historical tomes’. Evidently, she had drooled on the school’s only copy of Oscar Wilde’s Magically Mundane, one of only seventeen copies of the closeted wizard’s collection of magical poems in existence.

It had taken Hermione several minutes to admit – in a voice like she had survived a bombing – that she had been banned from handling the library’s rarer books until the next term. Ron’s redoubled laughter had been enough to draw her from her shellshocked stupor, though only long enough to begin chasing him around the Common Room with the thickest volume of Hogwarts: A History that she could find – which Harry and Ron privately believed she kept hold of for the soul purpose of wholloping them when they got too much on her nerves. Harry had only sat back and observed, as he had been doing for the better part of a month now.

It had been quite a shock to the Wizarding World when Harry Potter, who was infamous for exactly two things – his scar and his glasses – had arrived at breakfast one morning completely devoid of the eponymously round spectacles everyone had come to associate him with. Neville had, in fact, shyly attempted to tell Harry that he must have forgotten them in the dorms, and Malfoy had attempted to make a loud and entirely unfunny joke out of the fact that Harry must have had his brain singed to forget something so obvious.

Mouth stuffed full of butter, toast, and eggs, Harry had only grinned, and the blonde ponce had eventually wandered off.

Operating under the – admittedly flimsy – excuse that Hermione had dug up some old Optometry Charms to heal his vision, he and the would-be eye doctor had, had to sit through nearly an hour of McGonagall’s heated lecturing about the danger of unsupervised ocular surgery. And really, they hadn’t meant to laugh. It had been an offhanded thing, beginning at the corner of the lips with a twitch of amusement that the other would mirror and exacerbate. A vicious cycle that had eventually ended up with the both of them holding on to heaving sides and clinging to the other for support so as to not fall from their chairs in the midst of their delirium. McGonagall had, of course, given them a furious detention for the ‘disrespect’, which had only served to add fuel to the fire.

Really, given that the likely outcome of their botching the Animagus procedure could result in permanent, un-healable disfigurations that would trap them in a hellish middle ground between man and beast, ‘botched ocular surgery’ just didn’t seem to have the same bite. Neither, they had thought in the mist of their raucous laughter, did the threat of a detention hold much sway in the face of the minimum sentence of three years in Azkaban if they were caught.

McGonagall had given them two subsequent detentions for the outburst before throwing her hands up, accepted that Harry’s vision had turned out perfectly fine, and Harry had settled into the quiet, personally pleased routine of learning how to observe without the obscuring influence of too thick glass.

Things, he felt safe enough in thinking, were looking up.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

December 17^th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

7:38 P.M.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

Things were not looking up.

Despite the distance that had grown between him and Halloween as time drug on, the aftereffects of the night’s fateful events continued to plague him. It irked Harry – and by extension, Ron and Hermione, who’d sat through hours of his whinging over the last few months – to no end that he’d had to split his time between loving the Animagus process and despising the Tri-Wizard Tournament. He felt most days as if he were pivoting from one extreme to the next, often more than once in a single day. From the elation of his animal form’s stuttering heartbeat to the annoyance of the rest of the school’s lack of belief in him. From the giddiness of remembering – for the twelfth time in a day – that he no longer needed his glasses to the shuddering breaths of his now fire and dragon filled nightmares. It had all been bad enough in the lead up to the First Task, when he had known little and expected less. But now the Tournament had thrown a dragon at him, leaving any and all death defying options open to him in the future. And far worse than simply not being told what the next Task entailed, he now felt every further day he continued in ignorance of the Second Task’s details to be a personal failure. The answers were there, reflecting distorted, golden images in his hand and filling his ears with ringing screeches. He just couldn’t find his way to them.

And then, of course, there was the Yule Ball. Far worse – in Harry’s opinion – than anything that the next Task could throw at him was his ongoing inability to muster up the courage to even try and find a date. It didn’t help that Hermione – who had been his first choice to ask – had apparently already secured her date to the Ball, although she continued to refuse to say who it was in the face of Ron’s continued refusal to believe she actually had one. The redhead himself had also managed to find some newfound confidence and had asked Lavender Brown to the Ball no less than five minutes before an elder Durmstrang boy had attempted to do the same. Meanwhile, Harry had been shown up in courage by six separate girls, one of which was a Ravenclaw first year who had somehow found the gumption to ask him to the Ball in the middle of the Great Hall at dinner. He’d still been fairly certain that he’d been more mortified to decline her invitation than she had been to receive his declination. He had been fully prepared to skip the ordeal all together, but McGonagall – who he had become certain in the last few months had inherited feline hearing from the Bleeding Effect – had descended upon him within an hour to inform him that, that was not possible as he, a Champion, was required to open the Ball with his partner.

“Ah,” Harry had tried, eyes darting back and forth across the hallway in a desperate bid to latch onto anything that wasn’t the overbearing form of his Head of House. “Well, technically as it is a Tri-Wizard Tournament–”

He had trailed off in the wake of McGonagall’s furious glare at the words that she – along with most of the rest of Gryffindor – had become painstakingly used to from him.

He had sighed and muttered quite defeatedly, “Yes, ma’am.”

That had been a week ago, and he was no closer to finding a date today than he had been then. His efforts – or, more specifically, the lack thereof – had been met with no small amount of derision from both Hermione and Ron as well as others. Seamus and Dean had spent the previous night ribbing him about his priorities. “You can outfly a bloody dragon, but you can’t ask a girl out!?” Lavender had likewise spent the morning giggling behind her hand to Parvati while throwing him looks that could, at best, be classified as blatant. He’d caught no words of their conversation, but the mirth swimming in Parvati’s eyes had disabused him of the notion to even think about asking her. Even Neville had gotten in on the jokes, citing “I asked Ginny the day after Dumbledore announced it.” as his excuse to do so. That had doubly annoyed him, seeing as how Ginny would have been a perfect candidate to ask to the Ball and Harry could find absolutely no reason to shoot down Neville’s ribbing.

“Just ask someone!” Hermione had hissed at him that very morning in apparent annoyance. As if it were simply that easy!

“It kind of is, mate,” Ron had supplied with a shit-eating grin on his face after Harry had voiced such complaints.

Again, Harry had been quite annoyed at his inability to poke holes in his best friend’s logic.

Desperate to escape the claustrophobic, girl-filled halls of the school, Harry had fled to the clear, open air of the grounds after lunch, a freshly written letter to Sirius clasped tightly in his hands. Harry had no way of knowing if Sirius was even getting these letters as he had received no response from his godfather, but that had not discouraged him from trying. There was too much on the line for Harry to sit back and let the man put himself in danger on account of Harry having a few bad dreams. Harry was certain that Hedwig wouldn't take kindly to him making use of one of the school's owls again, but at the least, she was certainly not going to mock him about his inability to find a date. And anyway, worrying about Sirius, while not fun, offered him a bit of reprieve from the myriad of other worries that were plaguing him these days.

The Second Task, the Yule Ball, the Tournament as a whole, the persistent worry that any of the ever-present Ministry officials would catch onto his and his friend's highly illegal extracurricular activities. These were all problems that directly affected him. If he failed to unlock the secrets of the Egg, the Second Task might well and truly spell his end. If he failed to muster up the courage necessary to ask a girl to the Ball, he would be ridiculed endlessly by friend and foe alike as well as lambasted by McGonagall. Failing to sleuth out the mystery of who had put his name into the Goblet could easily result in his death, and if the Ministry discovered the unfinished potions in Ron's trunk, he'd be spending the next several years in Azkaban. But with Sirius, there was no immediate danger to himself. Of course, if Sirius was captured, he would be executed, and Harry would go round the bend about it. But it still wouldn't be him getting executed - just, somebody he cared about. It was refreshing, he thought, to spend time worrying about what might happen to someone else as opposed to what might happen to him.

Harry wondered for a moment if that was why Hermione spent so much time fussing on him before remembering that it was him he was talking about, and that she had every conceivable reason to worry.

Within the Owlery, Harry called down to a completely unassuming barn owl that was tinted the same color as rotten leaves. He tried to be stealthy about it, clicking out of the side of his mouth as close to a whisper as he could manage, but of course he had failed. Hedwig had spied him the moment he came in and flown down to proffer her leg to him as she had done every time he'd visited the Owlery in the past few months.

Harry looked every bit as nervous and shamefaced as he had the last five times, reaching up with his free hand to scratch at the back of his neck in the face of Hedwig's narrowed glare. "Sorry, girl," he attempted a smile. Hedwig remained unphased, clearly unamused. "You know you're too visible, girl. I can't send you."

Hedwig hooted in a horrendously affronted tone, and Harry had to look away from the intensity of her glare. He wished he had more reason to make use of her since he obviously couldn't with these letters to Sirius, but the truth was that Harry didn't know enough people to warrant writing more often. What few people he wanted to talk to were at Hogwarts with him, and the one time he had written a faux note to Ron to give her something to do, she had bitten a chunk out of his ear and refused to come down to him for two weeks.

"I know," he whispered to her shamefully, reaching out to run the backs of his fingers down her feathers. "Soon. I promise. With any luck, you and I'll be able to fly together any day now. That'll be fun, yeah?"

Harry dreaded the day he'd actually get to do that as Hedwig puffed up her chest in anger and nipped painfully at the backs of his fingers.

"Gah!" he cried, cradling the hand in his stomach. It was surface level, of course, as Hedwig's wounds always were, but she still somehow always found a way to manage to cause the most pain with the least damage. Shaking off the pain, Harry sucked away the excess blood before wiping what remained on his robes.

Hedwig was above him now, pointedly glaring into the wall and away from him all while the rotten leaf colored owl watched the proceedings with an empty, patient expression. It had its leg out as it had the entire time.

Grumbling to himself about traitorous owls and bloody beaks, Harry set to work tying his latest plea to Sirius around the barn owl's leg. He would admit to taking some small glee in the creature's patient willingness to assist him after the disaster of Hedwig's attitude. The owl was the first friend he'd ever made in the wizarding world, but some days he wished he hadn't stumbled into so intelligent a familiar. Of course, that desire paled in comparison to his regret at annoying his oldest friend, but he was allowed to be as vindictive as she was.

Trying hard not to think about the longstanding argument he was currently involved in with a bird, Harry finished up his work with the owl's leg and carried it to the nearby window. "Be safe," he entreated the blank little thing, patting his head perhaps touch too hard. If this owl were capable of intense expressions, it would probably be glaring at him. "And try to get to him before he does something stupid."

Harry lightly tossed the bird out the window, marveling at the way it took wing and caught the air beneath its wings as it leveled itself and set out towards the horizon. He smiled at the sight, watching the bird drift off into the ether until it was a speck at the farthest edges of his vision. A moment later he blinked, and the bird was gone.

Harry was jealous. How marvelous it would be, he thought, to be able to do just that. To go and go and go and go and have no one care that you had. Harry had spent his entire life looking past horizons, wondering at the secrets the world was keeping from him just beyond the borders of his own little world. As a kid, his horizon had been the cupboard's dusty walls. Then it was school and the release being away from Dudley would give him. Then it was Hogwarts and that sense of belonging he was sure was waiting for him. Then it was Sirius, and hadn't that been a bit of a letdown? Lately, it had been the potion. That potion, patiently waiting at the bottom of Ron's trunk for a sky that wasn't clear, a day that wasn't routine.

There was freedom in that bottle, he was sure. There were a hundred horizons waiting for him at the bottom of that potion. A thousand.

"Alright there, Harry?" A voice cut into his monologue.

Harry jumped as if bitten, turning in place to spy the intruder. Across the way, silhouetted by the late-day sun in the doorway of the Owlery was Cho Chang. There was amusement on her face, quirking at her lips and crinkling the edges of her eyes. She was dressed casually in a sky-blue sweater that was two sizes too big. It hung down past her waist halfway to her denim clad knees, and the sleeves reached out to cup the tips of her fingers.

Harry swallowed with a throat that was suddenly dry. "Cho!" he said, a touch too loud and as if he were greeting her. He cringed at himself and said in a much quieter tone, "I didn't see you."

Saint that she was, Cho made no mention of his bipolar tone as she left the doorway to cross into the center of the room. A laugh wrapped itself around her words. "Yeah, that'll happen when you're staring off into nothing. What were you thinking so hard about?"

"Owls," Harry answered immediately, and immediately, he regretted it.

Cho found a great amount of humor in this if the mighty snort she made was any indication. Making a great show of looking all around her, she leveled him with a smirk. "Good place to do that," she told him dryly.

He laughed – just once – though at what, he wasn't sure. "Yeah," he said dumbly for want of anything else to say. "What about you?"

She raised an eyebrow at him.

"What are you-uh-doing here?"

With one hand, she reached behind her to pull a tightly crumpled envelope out of her back pocket. Her sleeve fell away from her hand, falling halfway to the elbow and revealing the dusky skin of her wrist. A moment later, Harry wondered to himself why he'd bothered to notice that.

"A letter to my mum."

"Good place to do that," he said with a desperate little laugh in a tone that was almost what Cho had managed.

Cho, though, found it funny, or at least, pretended to. Harry could never really tell. "Yeah, she's been going spare about this whole Ball thing," she said in a tone that suggested that this was funny as she idly tapped the letter against her open palm.

She's not the only one, Harry thought vindictively.

Cho found his eyes. "She wants me home." She nodded, eyes trailing away from his as if following some thought to another place entirely. She muttered her next words. "Misses me."

Harry was at a bit of a loss, being entirely unfamiliar with the concept of anyone at home missing him. He was certain that if Aunt Petunia or Uncle Vernon had spared him a single thought in the leadup to Christmas Break, it was to thank whatever deity they worshipped that he'd not decided to come home. But that didn't seem the type of thing that Cho wanted to hear, and it certainly wasn't the type of thing that Harry wanted to say. In lieu of that, he asked, "Do you?"

Cho looked back at him, puzzled.

He cleared his throat. "Miss her? Them?" he quickly corrected. "Do you miss them?"

A smile broke across her face then, more genuine than any Harry had yet seen from her outside of the Pitch. Her eyes got that faraway look again. She was remembering, though Harry could only guess at what. "Course I do," she said with a little laugh. "Loads. But the Yule Ball...It's gonna be amazing, you know?"

This time Harry was the one who laughed, and he worried it may have come across a touch too bitter. "Yeah. Amazing." Harry couldn't be sure exactly what part of him decided to speak up in that moment. Certainly, it was a part he hadn't previously known existed outside of life-or-death situations. But the voice that spoke to him did so with the same ferocity and fervor as the one that had shouted in his ear as he faced down the Basilisk and Quirrell and Lupin. Nut up, Potter! So, he did. "Do you want to go?"

The words caught her attention. "Hm?" Harry didn't know if the reaction was for having not heard his mumbled words or for not being quite happy to have heard them.

He tried to clear his suddenly thick throat again but failed. He soldiered on. "Do you," he said again, haltingly, "want to go to the Ball? With me?"

Another part of Harry, this one more distant than any he had yet heard from, took the moment to congratulate him. Truly, he had a better grasp of understanding other people's emotions than he truly thought. Harry knew instantly that she was going to say no.

It was the way her face tightened up in an instant. The way she tried to smile but couldn't quite manage it. The simultaneous widening and softening of her eyes. He could give her credit that she obviously wasn't going to take any joy in what she was about to tell him, and he could give himself credit that he had noticed that.

"Oh," was her first word, and Harry thought that it was a fairly shit one to start with. Her second – "Harry," – was an even shittier follow-up.

He headed her off, throwing up his arms to wildly wave the situation away as fast he could. "It's alright, Cho," he said, attempting a smile and managing a grimace. "It's fine."

"No, Harry, it's-" she began but cut herself off, suddenly unsure. She tried to continue. "It's not that-I mean, it's just-Well, somebody already asked me."

"Yeah, of course!" he exclaimed a bit too loudly. "Course they did. Why wouldn't they? I mean, you're-Yeah. Well! Anyway, I just..."

He trailed off, unable to complete the sentence in the wake of the emotional rollercoaster the world had decided to put him on in the past few minutes.

"I just..." he tried again, staring clear past her shoulder.

Confused by his reaction, she threw a brief glance over her shoulder, but could see only the window, the owls, the rocks. "I really am sorry, Harry," she said again, quietly. And she meant it. Harry would recall the tone of her voice later, and he would take a bit of heart in the truth of her words.

Right now, though, he was still looking directly away from her, out the Owlery window. "It's fine," he replied, and he meant it, odd as that was. Finally, his eyes snapped back to the girl he'd just been turned down by, and he found it oddly amusing how little he actually cared about that in the moment. "It's fine, Cho. Promise. I gotta go."

She blanched, clearly having not expected that. "Harry?" she called after him, but he had already slung his bag over his shoulder and taken off towards the door. He was halfway down the steps by the time she managed to follow him. "Harry!"

He didn't even pause in his sprinting. "I gotta go!" he screamed again. "Bye, Cho!"

And then he leapt clear over the last eight feet of stairway, colliding with the rough, highland dirt. Bag and clothes askew, he took off for the school, chased by the distant, oncoming sound of thunder.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus.”

Chapter Text

December 17th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

8:39 P.M.

The long, winding walk back to Gryffindor Tower seemed interminable to Harry, whose brain had long since begun to leave him behind in its fervor. He was too hyped up on excitement, apprehension, fear, and elation, too uncertain of how things were going to go down in the next couple of hours. The culmination of months of work and energy was a daunting thing, regardless of how eager Harry was to finally cross the finish line. He had never thought to ask Hermione about the specifics of how this final step of the process would actually work, trusting that she would be able to provide the answer at a moment’s notice if he needed it. He regretted that now, cocooned in the myriad worries that had suddenly sprung up in the wake of this oncoming storm.

Did the potion need to be drunk during the storm, or would it set permanently after it had passed? Was this storm powerful enough to actually set the potion? If it wasn’t, would their disturbance of the potions reset the process, forcing them back to Mandrake leaves and earthy dinners? Why were these bloody staircases making things so difficult!? These questions and many more paraded about his mind with the intensity of a passing stampede, robbing him of anything but the huffing breaths of his exertion and the scattered excitement of the coming thunder.

By the time he had made it all the way up to Gryffindor Tower – later than necessary, having been sidetracked by three detours along the way on behalf of the Hogwarts Staircases – the storm had truly begun to roll in. The sky outside the windows had darkened considerably, giving what warning it could to those students who were still outside before the rain arrived. Distantly, Harry watched a cloud alight with the furious crack of lightning. He spared a brief moment to wonder if Cho would make it back inside before the rain took her before he plunged through the Fat Lady’s portrait hole with a quickly muttered, “Masterwort!”

The Fat Lady barely had time to get out of the way before he’d rushed past her. “Manners!” she cried heatedly after him, but he didn’t even hear her.

Ron and Hermione were in the Common Room, thank Merlin. He didn’t know what his over-anxious heart would have done if he’d have had to track them down throughout the castle. Even with the help of the Marauder’s Map, it would have felt like an impossibly long task. They were sat on the floor beneath the far left window, deep into a game of Exploding Snap that had taken their attention entirely away from the darkening daylight outside the window.

Harry hurried over to them.

“Hedwig still mad at you?” Ron asked, by way of greeting, momentarily bringing Harry up short.

“What?” he huffed quickly. In the wake of his excitement over the storm, he had honestly forgotten his purpose in the Owlery entirely. Thinking on it now, though, another wave of excitement settled over the memories. In his next letter, he’d be able to tell Sirius the good news. “Yeah. Bloody furious.”

It was his voice that caught their attention rather than him. The huffing, out-of-breath quality of his words drew their eyes quickly away from the game to glance at him in confusion. They spared each other a brief glance of bewilderment before returning their attention to him. It was one thing for Ron or Hermione to show up unkempt and frazzled. Hermione came sprinting in on the edge of curfew every other night, forgetting herself amongst the library books, and Ron often let his excitement get ahead of his feet. Harry, though? That was new.

“Blimey, mate,” Ron muttered, arching an eyebrow as he glanced him over. “Did you run here? The Common Room wasn’t going anywhere.”

Having fulfilled the necessary masculine quota for paying attention to the troubles of his friend, Ron turned quickly back to his game. Hermione, after a long moment looking him over, did the same.

Harry stared for a long, protracted moment at the hunched forms of his best friends. Not once had their eyes strayed to take in the view outside the window, nor had they noticed in their focus that the light they were playing by was beginning to diminish. “Are you two blind!?” he demanded, catching their attention once more. His voice came out a touch strained. His chest was still heaving from his run.

Hermione looked up annoyed, which was only compounded when her lapse in focus caused one of her cards to explode, showering her wrist in burning sparks. “Agh!” she cried, reaching up to reflexively nurse her hand. “What are you talking about, Harry? What’s gotten into you?”

Giving up on anything less than being blatantly obvious, Harry gripped the both of their chins tight between his fingers and forcibly turned their heads to the window. Harry muttered a prayer of thanks at how immediate the effect was. Ron’s card fell out of his hand, colliding with three others already in play and set off a chain reaction of sparking explosions that showered all three of them in sparks. Not a one of them noticed.

“Blimey,” Ron whispered, and that about summed it up.

Releasing their chins, Harry leaned closer to Hermione. He wasn’t quite far gone enough into his excitement to forget that what they were about to do was still highly illegal. “Is it gonna be enough?”

No sooner had he spoken that a great flash of lightning silhouetted the tree line of the Forbidden Forest in a monochrome still frame, chased shortly after by a tremendous, stone-shaking crack of thunder. Across the room, a sixth-year boy cursed under his breath about “Bloody Scottish weather.”

Hermione, eyes now glued to the thick, distorted glass panes of the window, nodded very slowly. “It’ll work.” Then, she said it again in a voice that dripped excitement and compelled elation. “It’ll work!”

A laugh spilled from her lips and jumped to Harry’s and then Ron’s, and in an instant, they were all laughing in half-crazed wonder at the fact that it was all happening. It was finally going to come true, that stupid wish he’d had beneath the full moon a few months ago in the Hogwarts Courtyard. All they needed was privacy and a potion.

Harry’s grip on Ron’s shoulder was perhaps a touch too tight, but the both of them were too far gone into their fervor to notice. “Ron,” he told him deliberately, “get the Cloak out of my trunk and take the phials to the Astronomy Tower.” He gestured briefly to himself and Hermione with his free hand. “We’ll follow behind.”

“That’s clever, Harry,” Hermione smiled, and if the words were a little condescending, Harry let it go. It was too good a day. “Best if they aren’t ever even seen, in our hands or yours.”

Ron nodded to the both of them and set out, practically sprinting up the stairs. A second year – a small little thing with a mop of unkempt brown hair atop his head – had to practically throw himself over the bannister to avoid his charge. He cast a sinister glance over his shoulder at the redhead but was aware enough of his place in the Hogwarts hierarchy not to say anything about it.

Alone with his thoughts, one of his best friends, and the impending act of stupid, ridiculous fun they were about to partake in, Harry could only grin across the short space at Hermione. She matched his expression tit for tat.

“Hermione,” he said, surprised at how his voice had begun to wobble a bit. He thought he’d at least have gotten through half the sentence before looking like a complete pillock. “Thank you. We couldn’t have done this without you.” Well and truly choked up, he continued, “We couldn’t do anything without you.”

Firmly ignoring the tears that had gathered in the lids of her eyes, Hermione smiled widely at him, displaying those newly shrunken teeth that Malfoy had inadvertently blessed her with. Overcome with the emotions of the day, Hermione threw her whole body at Harry, wrapping him up in as tight a hug as she had ever given him. Neither of them made comment of the way Harry hesitated in it, the same as he always did. They only smiled wider at the way he slowly wound his arms back around her and hugged her back.

Pulling away, they chuckled at each other, surreptitiously wiping away their tears and smiling widely. Clearing her suddenly thick throat, Hermione said, “I can’t believe it’s finally happening.”

A weight pressed itself briefly against Harry’s back, accompanied by the rustling of the fabric of his robes and something else. Shortly thereafter, the portrait hole opened seemingly of its own volition and the Fat Lady could be heard muttering about “Children who need to make up their mind.”

Harry took a tight hold of Hermione’s wrist and pulled her up. “Believe it,” he grinned at her, pulling her along the corridor and out the portrait hole.

They giggled and laughed and shoved and raced their way all the way to the Astronomy Tower.

December 17th, 1994

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

9:27 P.M.

Ron spent the few minutes he had to himself in the Astronomy Tower ahead of Harry and Hermione’s arrival debating with himself. No small part of him desperately wanted to take a peek at the potion that would shortly turn him into an Animagus, something he had never even imagined he would be. But the larger part of him, honed by three and a half years of being best friends with one of the smartest witches in the castle, told him that he ought to wait. He was uncertain how his interaction with the potions might affect them, and it would be just like him to screw the entire thing up at the last minute because he got a bit impatient. No, it was better to wait. Hermione would be there any minute, and she would explain what they needed to do. He could wait.

On the other hand. Just a little peak probably wouldn’t hurt. A small one. Nothing out of sorts. What problems could it really cause?

No. No, he should wait.

But...

Ron was still indecisively arguing with himself when the door to the Astronomy Tower opened. He jumped, reflexively putting himself between the door and the velvet bags that held their exceptionally illegal contraband. He relaxed when he saw that it was Harry and Hermione, red faced from their running with laughs still bubbling out of their lips.

He huffed. “Took you long enough.”

The two of them moved swiftly past him, grinning and smirking at his feigned impatience. He matched their expressions, sputtering wildly when Hermione reached up to wrap her hand around his face and shove him unceremoniously. “Shut it!” she snapped, the bite of her words removed entirely by the chuckle that hiccupped its way out in the middle of them.

For his part, Harry had moved immediately to the bags on the floor, hands and eyes greedily wrapping around them. Hermione’s hand appeared in a blur of movement, slapping sharply against the back of his palm and eliciting a startled “Agh!” from the Boy-Who-Lived.

“They aren’t ready yet,” she shook her head art him, pulling him away from the bags.

“What!?” Ron squawked. “But you said-!”

“The storm isn’t properly here, Ronald,” she sighed exasperatedly, gesturing towards the open-air columns of the Astronomy Tower. The sky had darkened to an ominous, starless black, and the winds that the storm had kicked up were downright frigid as they blew through the gaps in their robes, but it was still some miles off. “We’ll need to wait till its right on top of us to be sure. If we disturb the potions too early, they won’t set. We’ll have to do it all over again.”

Ron huffed and slid down the wall, falling unceremoniously onto his ass. “Trust you to make this terrifying.”

Hermione released a single, harsh laugh. “Yes, cause the threat of a permanently botched half-human, half-animal transfiguration isn’t nightmare inducing enough on its own.”

“Oi!” Harry exclaimed, swatting Hermione’s shoulder and Ron’s knee. “No bickering! I swear you two’ll turn out to be cats and dogs, the way you fight.”

A moment of silence followed, broken by Ron muttering quietly under his breath. “Hermione’d be the cat.”

“I’ve never seen a ginger dog, Ronald!”

“Stop calling me ‘Ronald’!”

“It’s your name! Ronald!”

Harry turned away from them with a heatless roll of his eyes and a tired sigh. Taking up his own spot on the floor, he turned his attention solely towards the oncoming storm, allowing the too familiar sound of his friends’ bickering to drift off into the white noise it had become over the years.

Harry would have to remember the Astronomy Tower for future use when he wanted to get away and be alone. They had chosen it for the base of their extracurriculars because it was usually deserted, save for those rare late-night classes when Professor Sinestra drug them all out of bed to smirk at their bagged eyes over her steaming mug of coffee. Truly, though, storm watching in the Astronomy Tower was a sight to behold.

It took about twenty-five minutes for the heart of the storm to truly roll onto the grounds and lay claim to Hogwarts. Up here at the tip of the school in the open air of the Astronomy Tower, Harry felt as if he were right in the middle of it all. As if he were a cloud himself, bouncing off his brethren and shaking away his own thunder. Luckily for the three of them, the enchantments around the Tower prevented the rain, thunder and lightning from getting in to damage anything. The rain pattered off an invisible wall of warding magic, beading up on thin air as if it were glass and falling down in sheets to waterfall off the edge of the Tower. Once, a monstrous crack of lightning flared just a few feet off the edge of the tower, exploding in a shower of sparks against one of the Tower’s outer stone columns. It hadn’t left a mark on the stone, but the impact it had, had on the three of them was intense. They’d gasped wildly, sliding back away from the edge out of reflex to huddle against each other. It had been bloody loud and whether the stone was impervious to such effects or not, it had still felt like the entire Tower was shaking beneath the weight of the lightning’s force.

In the aftermath of the lightning strike, the world seemed strangely silent, and the Golden Trio was no exception. They sat with their shoulders pressed tight against each other. Hermione’s hands had reached out to grip too tightly to Ron’s arm in the shock of the lightning’s impact, and she hadn’t yet realized to let go. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of silence, a more distant rumble of thunder broke the spell.

Hermione took a deep breath, releasing her hold on Ron’s arm. It left ten, nail shaped indentations in the boy’s skin and robes. “I think we’re ready now.”

“You think?” Harry had meant for the question to come off humorous, but his tone was still a touch too blank to do the job.

“Right,” Hermione breathed, more to herself than to them. She extricated herself quickly from the pile of limbs to crawl her way across the room to the velvet bag of phials that had since remained untouched. Carefully and with trembling hands, she pulled the drawstring open and reached inside. The tension didn’t break, however, until she had opened up the individual bags that contained the phials. Only then did she breathe a hardy sigh of relief, looking as if her entire body had deflated all at once without the pressure of the day’s tension to keep her afloat. When she managed to pull her limp head up to look at the both of them, she was smiling. It was a soft, genuine kind of smile without teeth. “It worked.”

The boys didn’t have it in them at this point to whoop for joy or in any way exclaim their exultation. They were pleased, no doubt. But now it was real. Now was the moment of truth. There would be time for more celebration after it had worked.

Hermione rooted quickly through the remaining bags, pulling each of the phials out in turn and holding them up to what little light there was. But this late into the night, the sun had long since left them behind, and whatever light the moon had to offer was obscured by dark, broiling clouds. Eventually, Hermione withdrew her wand from her back pocket and shined a Lumos directly onto the glass. When she had done this to all three, she wrapped her hands tight around the third. “This one’s mine,” she said in a tone that suggested she didn’t quite believe it.

Quickly, she pointed to the phial on the left. “Ron’s.” The phial on the right. “Harry’s.”

Harry’s original supposition the night they had created these potions – what felt like so long ago now – had proven to be largely incorrect. Away from the direct glow of Hermione’s Lumos, it was next to impossible to tell them apart. The deep, blood red darkness of the liquid all but obscured the hairs within, making bright ginger look like ink black. Hermione’s did remain easier to locate, being far longer and curlier than either of theirs, but it required a keen eye to find the differences between Ron and Harry’s.

His own phial held loosely in his hand, Ron asked as an aside, “What happens if we drink the wrong ones?”

Hermione looked up at them from her notebook sharply, looking in that instant more serious than either of them could remember her being since that night in the Common Room after their first run-in with Fluffy in first year. “Don’t do that,” she said very simply.

Ron’s hand tightened considerably around his phial.

Hermione’s finger ran back and forth across the well-worn pages of her notebook, tracing the edges of words she’d written half a year ago now. They were near to the back of the book now, and it was undoubtedly Hermione’s least favorite part. Yes, the leaves had been heinous in their annoyance, and Hermione had, had a few closed calls with almost missing her meditations. But those were understandable, clearly delineated aspects of the process. When it came to this part, everything got...esoteric.

“Okay,” Hermione said, eyes still following the lines of old sentences and scribbled thoughts. She said again, “Okay.” And then, “Right.” Finally, she seemed to collect herself enough to look up from the pages of her notebook. “We need to spread out. Ron, over there. Harry, you stand here. I’ll stay over here.”

The boys obeyed with raised eyebrows. As Harry passed by her on the way to his spot, he asked, “Aren’t you and I going to be small? Why do we need the room?”

Hermione’s eye twitched lightly as she resisted the urge to sigh. It was astounding, frankly, how much these boys trusted her. She had every faith that if she phrased it in the right way, they’d leap off the Astronomy Tower at her behest. But it was equally astounding, she thought, how many questions they always had for her in spite of that faith.

“The process is...trying,” she explained, as if that was going to make anything clear to the boys at all.

Ron raised an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hermione gave a half shrug. “People describe it differently. For some people, it’s painful. That’s usually when the form is bigger – sorry, Ron. Not always, though. A lot of people describe a kind of tickling or a full body itch. Some people get sick.”

She zoned back into the world around her to see that the boys were still looking at her from across the room with that expression of theirs that meant ‘we’re confused, but we’re trying’. She did sigh this time.

“We’re probably going to be moving around a lot during this process,” she said slowly. “More than likely, we won’t be in full control of our bodies, and we don’t want to hurt each other while we’re doing it.”

Harry and Ron looked at each other for a long moment, and Hermione’s lips quirked up in amusement as she got to watch their patented ‘well, I mean Hermione’s always right, isn’t she’ look settle onto their faces. They’d settled on a norm for that one sometime halfway through their first year, and it hadn’t changed since. They turned back to her to nod once and went about their way quickly pressing themselves into the spaces she had outlined. The Astronomy Tower was a wide, flat, circular landing, and the Golden Trio had settled in such a way as to form the points of a triangle with no small amount of space between each other.

“Okay,” Hermione said again, reaching down to grasp at the lid of her phial with lightly trembling hands. Trying – and failing – desperately to disguise the bundle of nerves she had suddenly become, she looked up to give the other two a shaky smile as she gripped her wand. “Last step.”

Ron, whose phial had already been halfway to his mouth, stopped short. “There’s more!?” he whined.

Relieved of a bit of the tension by the old familiar feeling of exasperation, Hermione rolled her eyes at him. “Just one thing,” she assured him a voice that said she didn’t much care if there were a hundred more steps to accomplish. “The spell.” She pressed her wand into her sternum in demonstration. “You’ll need to incant it one more time, and then drink. Just like our meditations. Focus hard on everything you’ve felt up to this point. Everything you know about your other self. Today, you meet them. You need to show them that you’re ready to.”

Harry and Ron nodded at her, all trace of petulance or argument gone. The reality of the moment had well and truly settled onto their shoulders. All of their adventures over the years had been nothing compared to this – the follies of children who thought they were bigger than they were in over their heads. This was an act of continued rebellion committed over the course of months, culminating today into a single, instantaneous act of illegality. Today, in a very real and inescapable sense, they would make a decision that would forever alter the way they lived their lives. It would stay with them forever, until the day they died.

“Amato Animo Animato Animagus,” they incanted in one unified voice, wands pressed into their chests. And then, as one, the three of them drank deep, swallowing the potion in three large gulps.

The effect was immediate, although it took Harry a moment longer than necessary to recognize it. Over the years and his many trips to the Hospital Wing, he had become too used to the notion that all potions, no matter their purpose, tasted terrible. He’d been distracted enough by the weight of what he was doing to not think too much about it, but the moment the cool crystal phial had touched his lips, he’d been certain the potion’s taste would match its appearance, and that he was about to swallow the thick, choking taste of blood. But that was not the case. The potion had felt and tasted exactly like water, passing through his mouth and down his throat so easily that Harry had almost choked at the shock of it. Like when you mistake the cup of Pumpkin Juice on your bedside table for the three-day old one but in the opposite direction. The only irritation the potion had provided was the scratchy feeling of swallowing one of his own hairs.

When the shock of how easy the potion had gone down had passed, the singularly unique feeling of its effects took hold. Harry felt as if his body were suddenly not his body. As if the skin and muscles and legs and arms and bones and hair he’d grown up with all his life were all entirely foreign, belonging to someone else, anyone else but him. It felt wrong in a way that was entirely too strange to properly quantify. Itchy in a way that didn’t need to be scratched. Ticklish in a way that didn’t make him squirm. He gave a full body shudder, as if he could shake away the feeling, but that only served to make it worse. Everything felt loose, or at least, that was the closest word Harry could find to describe the sensation. He felt as if he were five years old and had climbed into the closet to try on one of Uncle Vernon’s blazers. It cloaked him and covered him head to toe, entirely dwarfing his little limbs and swallowing up his head where his neck was supposed to come out of. Except, instead of a blazer, it was his own bloody body.

The more he moved, the more loose he felt. The more out of sorts. A groan escaped his lips, but it was garbled and higher pitched than it ought to have been. Even his vocal chords seemed foreign now, too far away from normal to be his own. Surely, they had to be someone else’s. He couldn’t possibly use those now.

The others were doing better and worse. Hermione, as was expected of her, seemed to be faring the best of the three of them. She was still upright at any rate, back straight and legs crossed. At odd times, she seemed to twitch or fidget, as if something was brushing against some instinct she’d never had before. Her face would scrunch up, one side at a time in an approximation of a sneer, as if she could disdain the sensation away. Across the room, Ron was far worse off than either of the other two. The potion had hit him in an instant, knocking the breath from his lungs like one of Bill’s old stomach punches. He’d released a harried gasp that had sounded more like a low warble that he should not have physically been able to make, and he had collapsed onto the floor. Just now, he was clutching at himself in every place he could manage it. His head, his neck, his sides, his arms, his stomach. Everything seemed wrong with him, and he kept groaning as he laid there, rolling about on the floor the like he’d just woken up with a stomach flu he hadn’t been expecting.

Harry and Hermione, being distracted in their own unique ways by the rapid, unnatural changes being forced upon their physiology, failed to notice their friend’s distress. They were too distracted with themselves, with trying to find their way out of the odd maze of foreign sensations and uncomfortable feelings wracking their bodies.

They did, however, notice when their best friend reared up onto the caps of his knees with a final, strangled cry as he grasped at his throat. There was a look in his eyes, they noticed. A look of fear, palpable and real. It was the last and only thing they noticed about Ron before it happened.

Ron threw himself out and about, as if some force from inside of him was trying to tear itself out from every edge of him at once, and then he exploded into an enormous kerfuffle of golden, ginger fur and snarling, roaring noises. Where had been Ron, there was now a fully grown, quite startled lion!

Unsteady on his own feet, the lion – Ron! Harry and Hermione both shouted to themselves when their brains had caught up with the truth of what had just happened – stumbled about on the floor, slipping and catching itself on the smooth cobbles in equal measure.

“Ar?” he said, sounding as confused as a lion possibly could. Ron’s enormous, feline head swiveled back and forth on a neck bigger around than Harry’s waist. He looked down at his feet – his paws – first and then back up and behind to stare at the long stretch of his new, powerful body.

It was the tail that broke the metaphorical camel’s back. When it swung into his vision, Ron finally cracked beneath the pressure of what had happened, and he screamed. Only, he was a lion, so it was less the cracking scream of a boy mostly through puberty and more the deafening, barrel-deep roar of a fully mature African predator.

Harry fell over, grasping desperately for his wand in an effort to stave off the stampede of attention Ron’s hollering might attract. With unsteady hands – which were suddenly acting like fingers were a foreign bloody concept – he gripped as tightly around his wand as he could and pointed towards the door. He moved his mouth, but no noise came out save a garbled screech that was half Harry and half something else. The wand fell from his shaking hands a moment later, and Harry went scrambling after it.

Still more in control of herself than either of the other two, Hermione leveled her wand at the door and cast, “Silencio!”, sounding almost like she’d been smoking for the better part of the last thirty-seven years with how raspy her voice sounded. Hermione’s wand likewise clattered to the floor as she reflexively reached up to grip her throat, the first signs of true fear flashing onto her face.

Ron continued to warble, though thankfully it was much quieter now. Of course, quiet was a relative word where bloody lions were concerned, and his cries were beginning to grate on the other two’s ears. In particular, Hermione’s who had begun to clutch at her head against the noise.

“Ron!” she rasped, choking halfway through the word. “Ugh! I c-can’t!” She petered off into a wracking cough. But the cough didn’t stop. Her chest continued to heave even as her hands reached up to cradle her throat and cover her mouth. She fell over, sprawled across the floor as she heaved and hacked.

Ron loped over, nearly tripping on every single step as he did. He wasn’t used to the amount of weight he was carrying around yet, and he was having trouble compensating. There was a look of worry on his face, insofar as a lion could look worried. He poked and prodded his way around Hermione’s body with his oversized nose, making half panicked rumbling noises from the back of his throat. Harry looked across at them, willing his body to move, but his arms had practically given out on him at this point, and his torso felt too heavy to lift. His face was pulled down into an unhappy mask, but he wasn’t sure at this point if it was just a reflexive reaction to his discomfort or worry for Hermione’s sake. Truthfully, he wasn’t certain he had the emotional capacity at the moment to spare Hermione any worry.

Ron looked up at Harry for a moment and warbled at him uncertainly. Harry didn’t know if he was trying to express equal worry for him, or if he was asking for help with Hermione. Harry didn’t much care either. He’d chased his wand halfway across the room before his body had given out on him on the edge of the Tower. He was leaned now against one of the pillars, half falling off of it. He hoped he didn’t continue to slide. He wouldn’t have the strength to pull himself back up if he did.

Another low whine escaped Ron’s mouth as he gazed across at Harry, but he eventually turned his attention back to Hermione, the same worried noise spilling out again. Hermione had, by this point, stopped coughing in favor of making what sounded like clawed retching noises with her mouth. Drifting in and out of a deep, warbling baritone and up to a high pitched keen, she cried and whined and screamed at the discomfort that wracked her body. Compelled by an inherent need to comfort her and some new, uncertain instinct he was trying to get familiar with, Ron leaned down to lap his overlarge tongue across her face. It seemed to do the trick.

Hermione gasped and sputtered against the sensation of Ron’s tongue and turned away from him with her entire body. Halfway through the turn, she ceased to be Hermione. In contrast to Ron, Hermione shriveled. She shrunk rapidly in place, so quickly that to blink would have made it seem instantaneous. Hair sprouted form every pore of her body, and when she shook her entire frame – finally shaking off the horrid, out-of-body discomfort that had accompanied her so far – she stood in place as a large, fluffy type of house cat.

“Mrow?” she said curiously, much quicker on the uptake than Ron had been. She seemed perfectly at ease on four, furry legs, taking quick stock of this new norm. She was absolutely covered in fur, bushier even than Crookshanks but remarkably more kempt. Most of it was white, accented by streaks of deep, chocolate brown – the same color as her hair – down the back sides of her legs and on the tip of her tail and, though she couldn’t see, affixed over her face like a brunette mask. What type of cat she was, she couldn’t say, but she most certainly was a cat. She wondered...

Looking up into the enormous, brown eyes of the much larger cat in the room, she said “Mrrrrrroooow?” as deliberately and slowly as she could, like she was trying to sound out a new word to a toddler who hadn’t quite gotten it yet.

Ron reared back, narrowing his eyes at her. He cocked his head. “Rawr?” he said in the same tone. Hermione shook her head.

A new noise interrupted them, entirely different from the feline whines and warbles that had filled the room so far. It was the screech of a bird, ungodly loud and horribly panicked. The two cats in the room turned their heads, and their eyes widened in tandem at the vision of horror before him.

Harry – still human despite the animalistic noise that had come from him a moment ago – was slipping from his limp place upon the pillar. Ron and Hermione rushed forward, uncertain of what they were going to do but nonetheless desperate to do it!

They were too late.

Harry fell.

“Mrrroooow!?” Hermione cried, racing towards the edge of the Tower. Had she still been human, there was every possibility she may have jumped after him so great was the need to save her friend, but as it was, her feline instincts ground her paws into the stone, bringing her to a halt along the edge before she could. And, truly, if Harry were in any other situation at any other time, he’d have laughed out loud at the fact that Hermione could use the exact same tone of worry even as a cat!

To say that Harry was panicked would be a bit of an overstatement. Certainly free falling to his rapidly approaching death was not a way he liked to spend his time, but it also wasn’t something he was entirely unused to. He’d been playing Quidditch for years now, and he’d taken more than one dive – on and off the broom – over the course of his career. He’d familiarized himself with the feeling. Just last year, he’d fallen from about this height – maybe even higher – when the Dementors had wandered onto the Pitch to ruin his day as they were wont to do.

Of course, Dumbledore had been there then, ready and able to catch him. He wasn’t here now.

At least, he probably wasn’t.

You never knew with him.

Harry was rambling. Losing time. But he could be forgiven that.

The truth was, there was nothing about what was happening now that felt wrong. Death was scary, of course, and the ground was death, rushing up to meet him. But what was the ground to him but something he’d always been above. Diving was what he did! It was how he survived, how he prospered in a world that was always out to get him. He’d no sooner lose himself to the dive than he would the wind, and just as that thought was unthinkable, so too was this.

The ground, the earth, the world? They were too far beneath him, to easily left behind. He had only to open his wings to escape anything – to escape everything. Something – entirely foreign and yet oh so painfully familiar – caught beneath the outstretched valley of his wings and like the gentle slope of a winding hill, carried him up and away from the rushing earth until he was level and floating.

Several long, interminable moments later, the truth caught up to him, and he would admit he panicked. It was the wings that caught his attention first, so naturally a part of him that, in the beginning, he hadn’t even realized he had them. But there they were, stretched out interminably away from him, catching the wind beneath them and propelling him onward. He worried for a moment that the realization of his situation would rob him of this instinctual protection – like the cartoons Dudley used to watch where the coyote didn’t fall until he looked down – but no such thing occurred. They stayed true and flat, slicing thin, unencumbered lines through the air and rain. On occasion – entirely of their own volition, it felt like – they would flap to keep him aloft as the air current required.

After that, it was a deluge of sensory information unlike anything he’d ever felt. His vision was, frankly, absurd. He’d thought he had learned what it felt like to see when his glasses had been rendered obsolete, but he knew for certain now that he would feel just as blind when he’d transformed back. To him, to whatever species of bird his soul now inhabited, there were no secrets. No crevices nor cracks that he could not see, that he could not find. The world a sharp, clarified vision of movement. Every rustle of a branch, every twinkle of a star, every movement of a mouse. He could see all of it, and he didn’t even have to try. It was all part of who he was now, this inherent ability to catalogue all that he could see. He had thought also that he knew what flying felt like, but that was another thought he’d proven to be absurd. He wondered to himself what a broom would feel like now, in comparison to the weightless freedom of your own body holding you aloft on the breeze. Weighty, clunky and boorish, he thought. Like too much work and not enough reward. Would he even want to play Quidditch anymore when at any time he could take to the air unencumbered? When any moving rodent or passing leaf could be his snitch? He doubted it.

Harry was enraptured. Every aspect of what he and his friends had accomplished delighted and distracted him. He didn’t know how long he spent out there, slicing his wings through the wind and rain, but eventually the truth of the weather caught up to him enough to pull his attention back to reality. It was bitterly cold, and the wind was picking up. The storm had lulled in the aftermath of that one enormous lightning strike, as if magic itself had given them the signal to go ahead with their plans, but it was beginning to pick up again. The distant warble of thunder was in the air, and as far away from the castle as he had gotten, even his new eyes would struggle to find it in the dark of the nighttime storm if he strayed too far.

He banked, flapping his overlarge wings in time with the whistling of the wind and carried himself back to the Tower from which he had fallen. Ron and Hermione were there waiting for him, matching expressions of feline worry on their face. Ron had fallen onto his stomach, and his splayed limbs took up an enormous space on the floor as he covered his muzzle with his overlarge paws. Hermione, cute little cat that she was, was pacing the length of the Tower’s edge, and though he couldn’t hear her, he was certain she was cursing up a storm to herself. He took a moment to wonder whether Hermione would curse more now, safe in the knowledge that no one else would be able to understand her as a cat and that her reputation as an abiding good girl would be maintained. The thought made him laugh, and it came out as a happy screech.

All four of Ron and Hermione’s ears perked in an instant, and their heads lifted. Entirely capable of seeing him as he approached, they tracked him as he glided through the air and into the confines of the Astronomy Tower. Wings outstretched to catch the air and slow his arrival, he came to an instinctual rest upon the floor beside Hermione.

Hermione looked up at him, and it took Harry by surprise. When he and Hermione had worked out that his form was more than likely a bird of prey, he’d been expecting something along the lines of a falcon or a hawk. Impressive, fast, capable, but small. Out there on the wind, alone with himself and the sky, he’d had no reference for his size. But just now he towered over her at least two feet – possibly more.

Ron, at least, was still suitably huge in comparison.

“Rawr,” the lion rumbled appreciatively at him. Or at least, that was how Harry chose to take it. Hermione matched Ron’s expression if not his voice.

Harry released an excited, overloud screech that had Hermione flinching away from him and shaking her head with a hiss. Ron laughed, the sound weird, disjointed and warbly coming from his overlarge frame.

For what felt like hours, the trio existed only with each other and their new, exciting abilities. They took careful stock of themselves and each other, noting with glee the subtle, tiny ways in which their animal forms matched their human ones. Hermione was, of course, as bushy as her hair, and her eyes were the same deep, chocolate brown they were as a human. Ron’s entire body was a warm, sunned auburn. The natural golden fur of the lion had been tinted by his own ginger hair, in no place more so than his mane which hung around his neck like an enormous, orange wreath. It was deep brown mixed with gold at the bottom, lightening to a ginger auburn color at the top that was so light it was practically see through when light shined through it. And his eyes, likewise, were the same brown they were as a human. For Harry, the changes were more subtle. He, of course, had his same emerald eyes – unusual for a bird to be sure but nothing anyone would do more than shake their head at – and his coloration varied between light gray and the same deep black of his human hair. Around his face, his feathers were a light, speckled gray color with the exception of two areas Harry would later shake his head at and bemoan. Black lines of coloration created the approximation of round spectacles around his eyes, and there could be no mistaking the zigzagging line of deep black that formed a lightning bolt halfway up the crest of his head. The only one among them who’s exact form was not so easily found, Hermione spent several long minutes circling Harry and running her eyes up and down his form, cataloguing every detail she could for a trip to the zoology sections of the library the following day.

Or, really, later that day as by the time they finished with their gleeful romping, it was past midnight, and their exhaustion had begun to bleed through their fervor. After so many months of building anticipation and excitement, the release of it all at once had spent them – never mind the physical toll the transformation itself had taken on them. They were bone tired and nearly ready to fall asleep here on the floor as animals. But the alluring thought of their soft beds pulled them away from that precipice and onto the subject of exactly how to go about returning to normal.

They hit a wall instantly.

Hermione would later curse herself silly that, in her own excitement, she had not taken the time to explain the basics of the process to transform back into a human to Harry and Ron before they’d taken the potion. As it was, she was forced to remove herself from them, crossing over to the other side of the room and shutting off her ears as best she could to their panicking. They had obviously come to the conclusion by now that they didn’t know how to turn back, and it was beginning to frighten them.

For several long moments, Hermione sat squatted onto her haunches with her eyes closed. No cat had sat so still since the day Harry Potter was dropped off on the doorstep of Number 4, but within fifteen minutes of patient, meditative efforts, the results began to show.

It was much slower pulling oneself out of a transformation than it was plunging oneself into one. Whereas Ron had exploded in a fervor of transfigurative magic, and she had shriveled up in nearly an instant and Harry had never even realized he’d done it, this transformation was a slow, gradual process. It was also bloody uncomfortable. The books she’d read – and she’d read many – indicated that one of the hallmarks of the Animagus transformation was the lack of pain associated with it. In contrast to something like a werewolf – whose entire existence was pain – once the Animagus got the process down pat, there wouldn’t even be the initial feelings of discomfort that accompanied the first few transformations. ‘Initial feelings of discomfort’. Those were the words the books had used, and Hermione felt now that, that was horrendously underselling it. Every part of her itched, including the inside parts she didn’t even know could itch. Her skin, her eyes, her teeth, her bones, her muscles, her fucking blood! Everything felt like she was getting a cast taken off and fresh, unimpeded air was touching her for the first time in months. She was so distracted by the offensive sensations that she didn’t notice that Harry and Ron had stopped their caterwauling some time ago, nor did she notice why they had stopped.

When at last the transformation was complete and she was again Hermione Granger, human girl, she shook her entire body free of the sensation and smiled widely across the room at the two wild animals that were actually her best friends. They were staring at her as if she’d grown a second head, which was odd. She supposed it might have been weird to see the slow transformation of animal to human. It probably looked weird. “Right!” she beamed. “I’m sorry. I should have told the both of you about how you’re going to-why are you staring at me like that?”

She’d been all set and ready to run off into one of her long-winded rants about the process – taking some small glee in the fact that neither of them would be able to vocally stop her – but their long, unblinking stairs had finally stumped her. Their reactions didn’t help her confusion. For a few, long seconds, their heads didn’t move. At length, the two of them finally looked across to each other before looking straight down at the ground very deliberately.

Hermione blinked. “What are you two...?” she trailed off, shivering suddenly as the cold, December air washed against her skin. Her...skin...

She looked down.

“AAAAAGGGGHHHH!” Her scream easily rivaled Ron’s initial roar as her arms snapped up to cover herself. Caught up in her fervor, Hermione practically climbed the wall in her haste to distance herself from Ron and Harry to better hide the fact that she was as naked as the day she was born.

Hermione continued to scream.

Harry and Ron continued to look down.