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.
A/N: Subtle changes were made to the previous chapter to facilitate a more accurate depiction of time in this chapter. The changes were negligible and not important to anything plot related. Also. Points to whoever can spot the Hamilton reference in this chapter.