I dob't own Harry Potter or his Animagus form, but I did hab da idea to put dem together. (This is a clue as to Harry's form)
Harry scratched his head, staring blankly at the parchment in front of him. As it turned out, Animagus training was hard. He'd had to study the night sky for various patterns, link the correct constellation to his date of birth, and since he didn't know the time he was born down to the minute, he now had to do several calculations in base 12, begin brewing a potion on the correct night and add the basilisk skin and wolfsbane at the exact right times, then keep up a steady rhythm of stirs and add a drop of his own blood every seventh stir.
And that was before sieving through his mind for any non-human emotion, identifiable only by that particular potion, and confining them into a separate portion of his mind with advanced occlumency, and then using those emotions to isolate the specific formation of magic that would allow him to transform. Then he'd have to feed the formation more magic over a couple of months until it stabilized and he could transform at will.
It was amazing that the Marauders had managed it, especially since basilisk skin wasn't sold at the apothecary, and went for high prices on the market thanks to the dangers of harvesting it.
Thankfully, he'd actually had the presence of mind to slip down to the Chamber of Secrets and cut himself a load of skin from the basilisk he'd killed. After a few interrogations disguised as absent curiosity, Hermione had confirm that the body was his by right of conquest, so his plan didn't go up in smoke.
All the other ingredients were part of his third year requirements, and he'd somehow had masses to spare despite all his goof-ups in Potions. He privately suspected Dobby of restocking his supplies.
The scribbling of a quill marked Harry's completion of the mathematics, and he snapped shut the convenient guide to number systems he'd found in the local muggle library. The day today was the first of July, which meant he'd need to begin brewing at exactly midnight. He'd rather have had a little more time to set up, considering that it was already nine in the evening, but the potion only needed minimal setup on the first night, and didn't need to be watched for a day after the first half hour, so it wasn't too detrimental to his sleep cycle.
Harry came to a startling realization on the second of July: without Snape or the dungeon atmosphere bringing his mood down, Potions was actually a nice subject to study. The bubbling of the cauldron over a conjured fire was a nice change of pace from the frantic wand-waving of Charms and Transfiguration. History probably would have managed the same feat, but Professor Binns' monotonous retelling of various goblin rebellions made it difficult to imagine.
Harry had actually taken to roasting marshmallows above the currently hot pink liquid, of course discarding the ones that got in the way of popping bubbles. It was a fun way to waste away the time, and Harry guessed that he would spend days like this with Ron and Hermione in the future, especially if they wanted to become Animagi themselves - the potion used the blood of the drinker to form a connection to their mind, so he'd need completely new batches for his friends.
An alarm went off and Harry jolted in surprise, almost dropping the molten mallow into the potion and spoiling them both. The half hour was up, so he quickly threw the basilisk skin into the cauldron, settling the bubbles that had been threatening to spill over the edge. After checking that the potion went the bright blue it was supposed to, he slipped into his old bed and was out like a light.
Harry groaned as he set up his mediocre occlumency shields just in time to fully awaken. He'd been practicing occlumency for a week or two at Hogwarts, but he still hadn't quite gotten to the proper level. Thankfully the potion didn't lose effectiveness over time, so he could easily bottle it up and leave it in his school trunk until he mastered the art.
His thoughts were rudely interrupted by heavy stomping, and he grinned to himself. It was strange that Vernon thought he could catch Harry in the act when his footsteps woke the neighbors. Vernon burst in, surveyed the room for a few seconds and made a gruff noise of disappointment before leaving the room, all without acknowledging the occupant. The room-shaking thuds slowly faded away, and Harry whipped the invisibility cloak off his concoction, glad that he'd gotten a better cauldron stand than the average.
The potion resembled lava, complete with a thick skin of what seemed to be rock, so Harry dropped in a few purple petals and pushed the skin to the bottom of the liquid, where it dissolved back into the mix. He sighed as a haze of smoke began spilling from the cauldron, signalling that he had timed it correctly. In just another day, the potion would be complete.
Covering the potion with the cloak again, the budding Animagus settled on his bed and dove back into his mind.
Amazingly, Harry managed a rudimentary form of the advanced occlumency he needed by the time that the potion was finished. Said potion had turned out perfectly without the usual stress of a Potions class, and he resolved to learn more of the theory so he could actually do a decent job in the dungeons. He pulled a few round-bottom flasks from his trunk and ladled as much of the potion into them as was physically possible; he'd most likely need more than just one to identify the different emotions and memories.
Downing a mouthful of the stuff, Harry briefly raised an eyebrow at the surprisingly pleasant fruity taste of the drink, before placing the flask back on the floor, covering the entire array of equipment with the cloak and diving into his mind to make a proper attempt to sort his memories.
The first time he'd managed to see his mindscape, Harry had been amused to note that his memories were strewn about the 'floor' like an untidy man's dirty washing. At first, he hadn't been able to interact properly with the thoughts, but he eventually managed to sort them into various piles based on which year he'd gotten them.
It had been rather worrying when he'd ended up with few memories before his eleventh birthday, but the book he was working from said that memory annihilation was common among abused children. While Harry wouldn't classify himself as abused or a child, he had to admit that his life hadn't been the image of happiness it probably should have been.
After he'd sorted everything into neat little piles, Harry had been left with a gigantic space for his current emotions to run amock inside, greatly increasing his capacity for said emotions. His previous nightmares had been contained since he'd sandwiched the bad memories between so many better ones, and he found himself thinking more clearly than ever.
The hardest part of the training had been the barriers. He needed to fence off his animalistic emotions and memories from the more human ones, and to do that he needed barriers. He'd started simply enough, surrounding his mind with a couple of thick stone walls like the ones comprising Hogwarts. After that, he'd added windows and doors so he could easily see and interact with the world from inside his defences. He'd added a roof just in case aerial mental assault was possible, then immediately recognized his mistake when the inside went pitch black. It had taken the past few days to set up torches and a pen for the animalistic thoughts, but he was ready.
This time, everything was different. The memories, rather than the normal colours that they usually were, had been tinted to reflect the type of memory. According to the book, there were three kinds of memory: Human, the memories of rational thought; Sensory, the memories of sights, sounds, smells and so on; and of course Animalistic memories, those of instincts and reflex. The colours were different between people, so the only way to figure out which was which was through process of elimination.
The red-tinted memories were Sensory for Harry. He'd noticed a couple of different tastes in the first year pile, so those had been fairly easy to figure out. All the red memories were taken out of their piles and placed right next to the year they came from. The blue ones were Human. Just like the Sensory memories, these ones came out of the piles and into their own. Of course, that left the green memories. Now that Harry could identify them however, they'd gotten good at fighting back. He could barely move them to the pen in the corner, and once he'd finally shoved his way to victory, the piles came apart and Harry was reminded of how his mind had looked at first.
That done, the almost-official Animagus looked through the nearest window to enter the real world once more. He grasped where he knew the invisibility cloak to be and lifted it off the Potions things.
He was met by five vials of unused, unuseable Animagus potion. He immediately groaned as he realized that he'd have to somehow get rid of them without magic. One glance at the book, however, convinced him to just hold onto them.
It was the next day and Harry was rested up after the event of the previous day had left him exhausted. Vernon had once again barged in and stormed off sulkily, so Harry was ready to try an actual transformation. The book stated that he would only be able to hold his Animagus form for seconds at a time at first, but over time it would become easier to make the connection until he could hold it even in his sleep.
All things considered, the training hadn't been too extremely advanced thus far. Harry briefly wondered if people just assumed it was hard because they couldn't be bothered to go through all the different steps, and he honestly couldn't blame them. To him though, the result would be well worth the effort, even if he turned out to be an animal that he didn't particularly like. God forbid he was a rat though. If that happened, he'd keep the secret to his grave and never use the form, no matter how useful it would be in a scrap.
The Animagus book offered a surprising nugget of insight among the already helpful instructions: transforming didn't trip the unaderage magic wards, just as Metamorphmagus and Werewolf transformations didn't, because they were all a part of a group of internalized transfiguration. For a similar reason, Animagi and Metamorphmagi couldn't become Werewolves, and neither Metamorphmagi nor Werewolves could become Animagi.
That final observation seemed somehow important so Harry stored it in his mind for later and settled down, preparing his first attempt at Animagus transformation.
Yes, I'm doing another Animagus fic. The last one was my most long-running series so far, just because it basically gave me a skeleton key, except for plots, so I never really got bored... until I did.
Now I feel like doing more Animagus stuff, but it's been so long since I updated Scared? that it doesn't really feel right to update it now. Maybe sometime in the future though.
You might figure out Harry's Animagus form next chapter, but I seriously doubt anyone reading this has watched the Youtube series the creature is from. It's hands down my favourite ever series, so I'll be posting the link once I give a passable description of the form.
PS: What do I do if a series I'm writing for doesn't have its own category?