Amato Animo Animato Animagus
Harry kept secrets. That was a simple fact. If he was a dragon like the ones in fairytales, secrets would be his hoard.
They weren't the obvious kind of secrets. For example, his parselmouth status, that was never a secret per se, he just didn't have any opportunity to say it. No the secrets he kept were more personal.
Secrecy often saved people. Ever since he had learnt of the Fidelius he had wondered how much better it would have been if the secret keeper was one of his parents. He also wondered how exactly it was possible for anyone to find him or to know about the house in Godric's Hollow where his parents had been murdered and the Dark Lord defeated. After all, Pettigrew hadn't gone about telling people the secret had he? But somehow after it had all been said and done, people knew where it had happened.
It didn't make sense.
Magic didn't make sense.
But magic was his and so he adored it.
And he wanted more, more magic, more everything.
Which is why in his fourth year when the Triwizard tournament had him learning magic the likes of which he would have learnt only years later,he decided to become an animagus.
The animagus was considered a brilliant skill beyond just a complex transfiguration skill for a reason. Not only was it difficult, but it had a meaning, one that a few too many understood and thus feared.
A patronus was a protector. Whatever form it took was important because it was what the caster associated with safety. But an Animagus form, that went far beyond even that connection. Because an Animagus form was a true representation of a person's soul.
And that was the secret no one would speak. That they were afraid to be an animagus, afraid to see what form their soul would take. Peter Pettigrew had broken a long time before Voldemort had marked him, he had broken the day he turned into a rat.
And Harry had been afraid as well. When Sirius had told him that one day they would work on that skill he had been thrilled to share something with his godfather, to maybe be a bit closer to his father then. But it had taken only a few pages of reading a book on the animagus transformation for the fear to creep in and decide this was something he wanted to do on his own. Harry was terrified at what he would find.
What form did his soul take?
He had held the mandrake leaf under his tongue as he prepared for the third task. His leaf had been spat into a phial in the view of the light of a clear and full moon and the potion made with painstakingly collected dew untouched by human feet and sunlight and the chrysalis of a death's head hawk moth and a hair of his own. He had put it in a dark and quiet place, a mokeskin pouch he had purchased specifically for this and kept hanging around his neck in a chain and now he waited for an electrical storm.
He had done all of this in secret. He had considered telling Hermione or Sirius about it before but now he thought better of it.
Neither of them had answered his letters properly. They were keeping secrets from him too but they didn't even have the decency to keep them properly, they were dangling the secrets over his head to tease!
No, he wouldn't tell them of this.
Everyday for the past months, Harry had been chanting Amato Animo Animato Animagus as he woke, and now all his waiting had come to an end. A massive lightning storm was supposed to strike down at Surrey, Vernon had been told not to report to work and since this was happening on a Friday, the Dursleys had decided to go on a little trip to the beach. They had been uneasy leaving the Freak all alone in the house but Vernon had remembered that Harry couldn't cast any magic during the Summertime, taunted him with the knowledge for a while and then made plans.
So there Harry was, watching the clouds overhead churn angrily. He was sat in the largest room in the house, the living room with all the valuables piled in the kitchen and the furniture pushed back to the very corners of the room. As the dark night sky outside, hidden behind closed curtains, lit up with a lightning strike, Harry chanted the incantation one lasts time before draining the phial of the potion.
The effects were not immediate. Harry knew they wouldn't be, the book had said so. It took a while to take effect. In his meditations Harry had seen himself flying so he knew it would be a bird or a bat or something, something warm blooded. If he had seen an amphibian or a reptilian creature the sensation of cold would have taken over him, but a warm blooded animal meant feeling heat running down his body.
It swept through him in waves, with every throb it reached closer to his extremities until finally he felt it all the way down to his toes, and soon he began feeling its effects, losing himself to the lucid dream that would reveal his form to him before he Turned.
He was high above the Forbidden forest in the sky. His wings flapped, once, twice, taking him higher above the treetops and as the Whomping Willow came into sight, he swerved and dipped around its flailing branches playing a game before turning to the lake, soaring over the surface before dipping down to fly almost parallel to it, his talon dragging in the water.
And then he woke.
And then he knew.
The minute he first transformed, nothing would be the same. There would be no home for him, not Hogwarts, not Durzkaban, not the Burrow, nothing. No place would ever be anything but a cage once he knew the freedom of the sky. It pulled and tugged at his soul already calling out to him and he wanted desperately to answer it.
It was a good thing that the thunder and rain outside was loud, drowning out all noises because Harry could not control his screams of pain as his bones shrunk in on themselves, turning hollow, skin separating into feather, head growing smaller and smaller while his nose and mouth grew large, into an avian beak.
The storm still raging outside was the only thing that kept him in place, every single instinct screaming at him to take flight. The little part of his human mind that called this house Durzkaban was now a blaring screech of 'Not safe'. Only the silence in the house, save for a faint scrabble of rat feet outside, told him that the house was empty and slowly, that voice quieted down.
From his place on the rug, Harry took flight and landed on the bannister. Being higher up felt divine but it wasn't enough. Harry took off again, amazed by how easy it seemed to fly. There was no learning curve, just the sweeping sensation of air passing him by. Even when his wingspan was too large to fit within the door he shifted instinctually and turned through the doorway into his room. Hedwig's perch for perfect for him to use now while she was out and about delivering letters.
But as the storm raged on outside and Harry remained unable to fly, he grew antsy. He calmed himself the best he could and thought back, imagining fingers where there were wings, toes where there were talons and lips where there was a beak. The shift was less painful this time around and he would have been fine were it not for the fact that he was still in the perch and he tumbled down to the ground, the perch breaking in half under his weight.
He walked down the stairs put the living room back to the way it was and sat down to watch the news. The skies were supposed to clear up a bit the day after tomorrow. The Dursleys would be back by then but what did that matter?
Yes, he would fly soon.
The itch got worse the longer Harry had to wait. The Dursleys returned and with them his chores. Some of his animagus form carried over and Harry's eyesight grew a bit clearer, his hearing grew a bit sharper. He used his glasses less often now and could hear the rustle of leaves three gardens away.
Now, he heard voices when he was weeding the garden, voices he had heard before. Moody was nearby. He could hear the man mumbling under his breath, heard him hand over the 'shift' to another. Heard him complain about Fletcher, whoever that was.
But Harry didn't see him at all. Magic, of course, but magic did not change the fact that he had not been asked before being put under watch, did not change the fact that invading his privacy like this was wrong.
And it did not change the fact that there was no way for Harry to change into his animagus form with people watching him so closely.
Harry waited.
A sudden crack was all the opportunity he needed. He knew that sound, it was of someone apparating but he also knew that the 'shift' didn't end until midnight. Which meant that Harry was no longer being watched.
He took the stairs two at a time to get into his room, put the leather thong with the mokeskin pouch with all his belongings and more importantly his wand around his neck, threw open the windows, made sure no neighbours were looking and turned.
Within seconds he was out the window, flying so high over Privet Drive that he could see all the neat little houses and their square spread in Surrey. There was Mrs Figg hobbling around, peering over the hedges of Number four, as if looking for something. There was Dudley's gang and a few streets away were the two cloaked figures that—
That looked uncannily like Dementors
Dementors in Surrey?! How was this even possible?
Instinct drove him higher, farther and he sensibly fled the scene, wings carrying him into the wind, long suppressed instincts from many a game of Harry Hunting coming alive.
Harry Potter ran.
Amato Animo Animato Animagus