Hermione and the others didn't want to talk about what had happened up on the Astronomy tower.

They didn't mind Harry talking about it, even guessing what might have happened, but they didn't want to talk about it, and it took him a moment to realize that that was because of the whole "leaf under the tongue" thing.

The best thing to do at that point was really just to wish them good luck.

"It's much more relaxing being around so many Gryffindors like this," Blaise said, that Saturday, as he, Tracy and Daphne worked on History homework with Harry and his friends.

"You mean when most of them aren't saying a word?" Daphne replied, considering. "Hmm. I can see where you're coming from."

"I know where I'm coming from is England," Harry said.

Then frowned. "Or… actually, I'm fairly sure I was born in Godric's Hollow. Any idea where that is?"

"Still England," Daphne supplied. "Somewhere in the West Country, not sure of the exact details."

She examined her notes, then the book they were working from. "That can't be right. According to this the burning of Fimbert the Forgetful was in England, but this book says that the town where it happened is Scottish."

"Berwick upon Tweed?" Hermione asked, her words slightly mumbled.

"Yes, exactly," Daphne confirmed.

Hermione wrote something on a scrap of parchment and shoved it at Harry, who picked it up and read it.

"Oh, I see," he realized. "It's somewhere that kept changing between England and Scotland. So it's both depending on when you count."

"Doesn't that technically mean you could say it's either, and you can't be marked down for either of them?" Tracy asked.

Dean looked impressed, and nodded.

"See what I mean?" Blaise asked. "The only time most of them say anything is when they're correcting something. I could get used to this."

He made a note. "Fimbert the Forgetful… that's the one who knew he was going to be burned and forgot his wand?"

Harry nodded.

"I wonder what we'd call him if he wasn't named something like Fimbert?" Blaise mused. "It would be terribly unfashionable to call someone Gareth the Forgetful."

"If I did it I'd be Harry the Hapless?" Harry suggested.

"You'd be Harry the Hardly Harmed," Ron said, though it was a little hard to understand all the words.

Harry chuckled.

Some minutes later, as they were all reaching the point they had about the right amount of essay, Blaise put down his quill and tapped his fist on the table.

"I'm a bit worried about my mother," he began. "And I thought it would be a terrible idea to confess weakness to Slytherins, so I decided it would be better to ask Gryffindors about it."

"Why's that?" Tracey asked. "And we're Slytherins."

"Yes, but you're friends," Blaise waved off. "If I was someone else you'd feel you had to take advantage of it… but if a Lion knows about a weakness they're practically required to not exploit it. If You Know Who had convinced everyone he was terribly weak to having spells cast on him then Dumbledore wouldn't have been able to do a thing to him."

"I'm not sure it works that way," Harry said, frowning.

"Really?" Blaise asked. "Well, I assume it does, and everyone knows Slytherins are better at this sort of thing than Gryffindors."

"Why are you worried about your mother?" Daphne said. "She seemed perfectly fine last time we met, over the summer. Is there something in her letters?"

"Or has she stopped sending letters?" Harry asked, thinking about it. "That might be a reason why."

"Oh, no, none of that," Blaise said. "It's just – It's been a whole month since I left the house, and she hasn't married anyone yet. I'm wondering if she's ill."

Ron made a kind of gagging noise.

"Is he all right?" Blaise asked Harry, indicating Ron with a jerk of his head as the Weasley slowly slid off the chair. "He doesn't sound very well either."

Harry didn't know the answer to that at first, and he gave Ron a careful look.

"I think," Neville began, speaking slowly and carefully, "that Ron is trying not to laugh. I hope he doesn't burst something."

"Is there something funny about my mother being ill?" Blaise asked, turning to Daphne.

Daphne shook her head. "No, which would mean that the Weasley there would be being very ill-mannered if your mother was actually ill. Instead, she's taking a break from trying to gather up the wealth of every rich bachelor in the country."

"None of that's been proven," Blaise pointed out.

Harry mused that, because wizards were basically just people with magic, there must be people as odd as his friends in most Muggle schools as well.

That meant there were probably some odd students at Dudley's school as well, though that was a bit of an odd concept in and of itself.

Surprisingly – or at least surprisingly to Harry – in their next Care of Magical Creatures lesson, Professor Kettleburn told them to get out their wands.

"Professor?" Dean asked, putting his hand up. "Wands?"

"Correct, Mr. Thomas," Kettleburn agreed. "Wands it is! I know that Care of Magical Creatures is popularly considered to not be one of the wanded classes, but since you are all wizard and witches it seems only appropriate to use magic when it is by far the best option. Now, I assume you all know the Scouring Charm already?"

Hermione nodded, but she was the only one who did. For everyone else, heads shook, and Professor Kettleburn put his remaining natural hand to his chin.

"Well, that might make this a little more awkward," he said, considering. "Still, you'll have to learn sooner or later, this is care of magical creatures after all..."

Someone asked what Professor Kettleburn was getting at, and he merrily told them that one of the things you had to do to care for a creature was to sort out cleaning their cages or otherwise dealing with the dung. Since none of them except for Hermione could cast the scouring charm, they'd have to do it with shovels and scrapers and other such tools.

Really, it wasn't that different from Herbology, if you thought about it.

As October slowly continued and the nights drew in, as the air got slowly cooler and sunny days less likely, Harry did his best to make sure he wasn't getting overworked.

The idea he had was that there were two kinds of overwork, where one of them was just that you had too much work to get finished – which was the obvious kind – and the other was that you had enough time to do the work but not much extra time left over. That second kind was a lot like what he'd had with Quidditch in second-year, especially during the period leading up to the exams, and now he knew what it was like he tried to notice.

It helped that even both his new clubs together involved much less time than Quidditch, and the meeting with the other non-human students sometimes ended in half an hour because nobody could think of anything more to say.

The dungeons and dragons club, on the other paw, did take up at least one evening. Usually Harry had to spend a bit of extra time with working out what they were going to do next, but Harry had sort-of-cheated by deciding that some of the things the group would run into would be the same no matter which way they went or what they did.

More importantly, everyone was enjoying it a lot. Whether they were running into Rebel Numenorans, Orcs, Dwarf bandits or just some monster spiders, everyone enjoyed the challenge of working out how to defeat what the latest enemies were – like sending Su's Rohan warrior off to deal with enemy archers on a nearby hill, or having Tanisis' elf lead them all around the side of a roadblock so they could attack the enemy from behind.

It had taken Harry a bit of time to work out what to have them actually trying to do, at least in the long term, but after some thought he'd decided that it would be good if there was an evil plan by Sauron to start a war.

He wasn't really sure on all the details, but he knew where he was going and that was probably good enough for now. It was no invasion from another universe like in the books about Pug, but it felt more Lord-of-the-Rings-y.

On the tenth of October, Harry and his friends went down to visit Hogsmeade for the first time.

Though, as they walked down, Harry wondered about how that wasn't actually very accurate. It was their first proper Hogsmeade visit, sure, but he'd been to Hogsmeade before because Sirius had a house here. And they'd all visited during the Easter holidays in Second Year, even Dean, though that had been only the once because he'd spent most of the rest of the holiday back home with his family.

There was something different about Hogsmeade when it was full to bursting of Hogwarts students, though. Laughter filled the streets, young wizards and witches running back and forth, and there was a huge crowd outside the sweetshop in particular.

"What first?" Ron asked, enunciating his words a bit better than before but still having trouble with the leaf under his mouth. "Sweets? Jokes?"

"We could look at the book shop," Harry said. "Or is that a bit stereotypical of me?"

"Stereotypical would be gold," Hermione pointed out.

Harry had to admit that was true – though he also had to admit he liked gold.

"Let's just look around," Dean said. "I didn't see much before."

"What about if I point everything out?" Harry suggested. "So… that's the post office, though it's mostly just an owl hire station. I think they have a thing they can do with big parcels, apart from just attaching lots of owls to it."

"House Elf, probably," Neville said.

The strangest thing about going around Hogsmeade, ironically, wasn't anything to do with Hogsmeade. It was the general strangeness of having a conversation where four of the people involved were doing their best to say as little as possible.

Being close to his friends as they tried to avoid the disadvantages of the Animagus ritual was really making it clear to Harry why more people weren't Animagi. Even if you knew every detail of the process, and even if you could manage all the bits, it was still really inconvenient for at least one month and usually several.

Sirius met them around lunch, which he treated them to, and they ate at a table outside the Three Broomsticks.

"After trying food in Muggle pubs, it's actually kind of interesting to look back at what this place does," Sirius mused. "It's mostly the same, fish and chips and stuff, but then you get to the pumpkin hotpot. I don't think they'd do that at the Crown Prince."

"You've been to a pub?" Dean asked, blinking. "Huh."

"Ted Tonks took me the first couple of times I went," Sirius explained. "It's kind of halfway between fast food stuff and asking Kreacher to make me something."

"He does do good food," Harry said, using one of his chips to scoop up some mushy peas. "Remember that quiche?"

"Do you mean the quiche where he came to us apologizing about dumping half a bag of baking soda into it by accident?" Sirius asked. "He's still apologizing to me about that. You're the only one who had any."

"It was nice, though," Harry defended himself.

A flash of movement caught his attention, and he looked over to see Issola flying down from one of the rooftops. He swooped down in front of Fred and George Weasley and flared his wings, shifting into Percy in an instant, and tapped his foot.

"And where do you think you two are going with all those fireworks?" he asked.

"Perce!" Fred announced.

"Lovely to see you," George agreed.

"It's not against school rules to buy fireworks in Hogsmeade," Fred went on. "On account of how Hogsmeade isn't in Hogwarts."

"So we're not sure what you're swooping down on us like this for," George concluded.

"Well, if you're not planning on taking them into Hogwarts, that's all right then," Percy said, with a smile. "Let's go and set them all off on one of the nearby hills together. It'll be a family thing."

"Now, steady on," Fred said. "That's not on."

"Fireworks are a private thing," George declared.

"You what?" Fred asked. "You're seriously using that argument?"

"Not one of my strongest," George admitted.

"All right, come on," Percy instructed, twirling his wand and making the firework packages rise into the air. "We'll do it on Meade Hill."

It was hard for Harry not to be impressed.

"We had a bit of trouble with someone in Hufflepuff," Flopsy reported, a bit shyly. "And I think we didn't handle it well."

"What happened?" Harry asked.

"Well, we were typing our notes," Flopsy explained, as her sisters nodded along. "In Charms. And this boy next to us, um, Peter Trimble, he complained about how much noise we were making."

"I said we couldn't help it, it was the only way to take notes fast enough," Mopsy contributed. "It's mostly silenced anyway, it's just the sound of our claws and the parchment and stuff… and he didn't say anything to that, but he kept grumbling about how much noise it was making. It got on my nerves."

"Mine too, eventually I said that he should sit somewhere else," Flopsy took it up again. "Cottontail told me I was too loud, but I didn't really listen to her..."

"I kind of felt like he deserved it," Cottontail muttered. "Even though I said."

"It does sound like he was rude," Harry said, thinking out loud. "But… I suppose the difficult thing about something like that is that it is really annoying, but getting a teacher involved sounds just stupid."

"Exactly!" Mopsy agreed. "If any of us had told Professor Flitwick that he was complaining about the noise, we'd have sounded like we were the petty ones."

Tiobald made a few sign gestures, and Luna translated them. "Could you have moved?"

"Flopsy said afterwards we should have done that," Mopsy reported. "But… it felt like that would mean he was winning."

"And Gryffindors are supposed to be brave," Cottontail added.

"Maybe it would mean he was winning," Harry agreed. "I want to say that you shouldn't care if he thinks he's won, but… it's a lot easier for me to give that kind of advice when I'm not in the situation."

His tail lashed as he tried to think of something else.

June tilted her head, stretching slightly. "Maybe if I have a word with him about how that's not really a Hufflepuff thing to do?"

"Nah, I'll do it," Anna volunteered. "I'll sit down in the library with him, stroking Tyler, and say that what he did was really Slytherin."

"Isn't that praising him, though?"June asked, blinked, then snickered. "Okay, I actually like that."

"Why do I have to be the one who's being stroked?" Tyler asked. "Why not you?"

"Because it'd look weird for a fox to be stroking a human, keep up," Anna said.

Tyler stuck his tongue out. "Nyeh."

"That would be really helpful," Flopsy said. "I'm still going to feel like I didn't handle it right, but maybe it'll mean it won't happen again… but what if it does happen again?"

Tanisis had been lying with her head on her paws for a while, and now she spoke up. "I think I know. If it happens again, put your paw up and ask the teacher if you can move so that you can concentrate – if the other person's complaining to you, say it's so you can both concentrate. Then you're on the other side of the room… and if they follow you, then take it to the teacher because that's something that's much more clearly bullying."

"That sounds like something we can do," Mopsy agreed, as her sisters let out not-quite-twin sighs of relief.

"How's the typewriter getting on, by the way?" Tyler asked.

After a moment's confusion about which one of the three would answer, Flopsy took the lead. "It's a bit tricky to use claws, but we're getting used to it."

"Maybe making it bigger would work," Harry said, thinking. "I know you can have magic tents and bags that are bigger on the inside, so you could carry it from class to class in a bag..."

There hadn't been a new Discworld book in quite a long time – the last one was Lords and Ladies, which had been fun but had been more than a year ago – and Harry felt faintly worried about it all.

It wasn't quite like with other books – if there wasn't any other book after The Shining Ones then the whole story would feel incomplete, whereas the Discworld books sort of started and then finished their own stories – but it was just one example of how it could be quite awful waiting for the next book in a series that you really liked. Or even just that was quite good.

Another of that sort of book series was the books about a space captain called Honor. There had been two books so far, and it sort of felt like everything was building up to a war but the war hadn't actually started yet, and in a way Harry would have been quite happy if the war never really happened (because that way there would be more fun to read about with the captain and her treecat).

Lying on his pile of duplicate books, Harry sighed a little.

Sometimes it felt like what he wanted was for a book series to be already finished – not because that way he could read everything, but because that way whatever awful things happened to the characters had already happened. Getting a new book and finding that a character you already liked got hurt, or that their friends found something out about them and stopped liking them, was just… it didn't spoil the book, but it felt much worse than running into it in book four of a five book series when book five was sitting on the pile just waiting to be read.

Maybe it was something to do with feeling that it would all be all right in the end. Thinking about reading the last of the Tamuli books didn't feel quite so upsetting, perhaps because it was going to be the last book?

Shaking his head, Harry rolled over onto his side. Then, deciding to check on the spur of the moment, he got the Marauders' Map out from his collection of things.

"I solemnly swear I am up to no good," he whispered, then pulled his wand back from the parchment. "Lumos."

By the wandlight, Harry watched as the map drew itself. It took a while to do so, which was a bit of a pain, and then he focused in on the area where Nora was sleeping.

No sign of anyone else in the room. Just her.

It had been worth a try, and Harry wiped the map clean before folding it up and tucking his head under his wing.

There was Herbology tomorrow morning, and some of the plants didn't like it if you yawned.

It was early the next week – and not long before Halloween – when Harry approached Remus at the end of a Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson.

"Everything going all right, Harry?" the lupine professor asked. "You didn't have any problems with that hex we were doing to fend off Kappas, did you?"

"No, Professor," Harry replied. "Or – I don't think so, but just offering them a cucumber seems much nicer to me."

"It is, certainly," Remus agreed. "But sometimes, regrettably, you get caught without a cucumber."

He took a seat. "Now, if it wasn't about the lesson, what was it you wanted to talk about? I'm afraid we won't have too long, I have a Seventh-year class in half an hour, but we can talk for a little of that time – unless you have a lesson first?"

"No, this was the last one today," Harry replied. "I was wondering about what Dumbledore said, about that powerful fire spell I should be learning – and if you think I'm ready to learn it yet."

Remus paused, then gave a solemn nod.

"A difficult topic indeed, Harry," he said. "You have a good deal of talent, and you are a hard working dragon indeed, but the problem with practising the Fiendfyre spell is that it's both very hard to control and very destructive if mis-cast."

Harry nodded, thinking about that.

"What would be a good way to get better, then?" he asked.

"Well… you've mentioned the Patronus Charm as a spell you're interested in," Remus replied. "That might be a good step. It's definitely not an OWL level spell, so it's the same rough difficulty as Fiendfyre, but it's much less likely to burn the castle down."

"Hogwarts is made of stone, isn't it?" Harry asked.

"Fiendfyre is extremely hot," Remus informed him.

"No, I understand that," Harry defended himself. "But what I mean is… wouldn't it melt instead?"

"That's a good point, but… that's Fiendfyre for you," Remus said. "It's kind of like that. Which is why I want to be as sure as possible before I teach it to you."

"Right," Harry agreed.

Hogwarts was a nice place, and he didn't want to burn it down. Or melt it, come to that.

Most of his friends were here.

"Hmm…" Remus mused, using his wand to silently summon a schedule. "Is there any day in particular you were thinking of? I'm afraid I'm busy most weekday evenings."

"Friday evening?" Harry suggested. "It depends if it's okay to be out after curfew."

"Hmm, it might be," Remus said, thinking. "I'd probably have to walk you back to the common room in that case, but I'm sure Dumbledore wouldn't mind."

"Then Friday, Saturday or Sunday evening after curfew would all be good," Harry answered.

Remus' directions led him to one of the old classrooms on the third floor, and when Harry arrived ten minutes before curfew he found his lycanthruncle clearing away space in the middle of the room.

"Do we need the space?" he asked.

"Well, I don't know," Remus admitted, as Harry joined him in pushing away benches and long-unused cauldron burners. "But it's always better to have space to move around when you're learning a new spell – and, to be honest, I don't trust those cauldrons."

Once the last of the benches was pushed aside, Remus went to get a book out of his bag. As he did, Harry sniffed the nearest cauldron.

It didn't seem to have any spell residue in it, and a quick light spell on his wand revealed nothing visible in it either. Harry decided to scrape the inside to see if there was any residue left, and while that didn't result in him finding any dried up potion bits he did dig a hole clean through the bottom of the cauldron.

"What's that, Harry?" Remus asked, and Harry looked up a bit guiltily.

"I think I broke the cauldron," he admitted. "Sorry."

Remus used a levitation spell to lift the cauldron, and inspected the hole in it.

"Well, I can see why they didn't bother retrieving them," he said, after a moment. "That's really very thin indeed. I wouldn't be surprised if that cauldron split if it got kicked at the wrong time."

Harry winced, imagining that, then took a bite out of the cauldron as a snack.

"It does taste like good quality pewter, though," he said, swallowing.

Remus gave him a strange look, then shook his head.

"Now, there are two main types of magical creature that the Patronus is usually used against," he began. "Those are the Dementor and the Lethifold. I don't happen to have either of them, or a way to get hold of them, but we'll see how we do without them. Ready?"

Harry adjusted his weight, holding himself up with one paw on the corner of a table, and readied the wand in his free right paw. "I'm ready."

"All right, the wand movement is like this," Remus demonstrated. "And the incantation is Expecto Patronum. If you could repeat that?"

"Expecto Patronum," Harry duly repeated. "Which means, um… expect someone to help? I think?"

"I'm not certain all spells have quite correct Latin grammar," Remus told him. "And there are spells in other languages anyway. But roughly speaking, you're correct… let's see that again?"

Harry demonstrated a second time, and then a third, and each time Remus corrected him slightly.

"There are several reasons this is a difficult spell to cast," he explained. "It's complicated, and so you have to be precise, but it's also a spell which is particularly hard to tie off – I think Professor Flitwick will have covered that with you?"

"Something about how a charm that's been partly cast but not fully cast leaks magic, I think," Harry checked.

"Good, that's right," Remus agreed. "Which means it's a spell that can tire you out quite quickly, unless you've nearly perfected it – so watch out."

Harry nodded, understanding that.

"The most important thing about the spell, though, is that it relies more than perhaps any other spell on how you feel and your own willpower." Remus tapped his fingers on the nearby desk. "It's a spell which is fuelled by happiness – normally this means you think of a happy memory, the happiest you can find, and pour all of that into the spell as you cast it."

"I can see how that's hard to do," Harry agreed, taking in a deep breath before blowing it out in a slightly smoke-filled sigh. "It's hard to concentrate on one thing, and it's hard to pick which memory is the happiest. I've got a lot."

Remus swallowed, taking Harry's wing-shoulder and squeezing it for a moment, then stepped back.

"Shall we give it a go?" he invited.

After two hours of practice, Harry knew just what Remus meant about how it would be draining. Every time he managed to sustain the white mist of the incomplete spell it just hovered there, not seeming to do anything but clearly using fantastic amounts of energy because it brought him sinking down to all fours inside a minute.

Remus assured him that it was fine, and that the Patronus was meant to be a difficult spell – getting it right in two hours would have been amazing. That did make Harry feel quite a lot better, and after Remus took him back to Gryffindor Tower he went up to the dorms for ten minutes with Wings before bed.

The bit about never having seen an exploded working diagram of a goose always made him giggle.

"Phew, that was a trial!" Ron announced, on Sunday morning. "I don't know how Hermione finds the time to do all that stuff. Just not being able to speak was enough of a pain."

"I do know what you mean," Neville agreed. "I kept having to stop and think about what I was going to say. And mealtimes were..."

He shook his head, taking a pasty.

Harry inspected his own pasty, then took a bite – enjoying the combination of textures – and blinked as the whole thing started to fall apart.

"You hold it like this," Ron told him, demonstrating, and Harry adjusted his grip before beef and potatoes avalanched out onto his plate.

"Okay, so we're heading out this afternoon, right?" Dean asked. "I think the time in Africa is about the same."

"Lake Victoria is a bit further east than we are, but the thunderstorm there usually starts in the evening," Hermione reported. "I did some reading about it over the summer."

"I hope you enjoy it," Harry said, thinking. "I'll probably come with you to Sirius' house, but then I'll just read or practice a spell until you get back."

He took another bite of his pasty.

"You sure you're okay with that, mate?" Ron checked.

"Well, yeah," Harry replied. "I'd rather watch, but it's not like you're going to be away for long. That's kind of the point."

"So here's something I was wondering," Dean said, frowning. "That moth chrysalis thing you had to put in each of the potions, Hermione, are they found all around the world?"

"I… think I need to look that up," Hermione admitted. "I wonder if there's a version of the ritual used in places the moth doesn't live?"

"That's what I was thinking," Dean agreed.

"It'd be a laugh if in Brazil they just cast one spell and it's done," Ron sniggered.

The sky got steadily darker and more ominous towards lunchtime, and by two in the afternoon – as the friends left for the walk to Hogsmeade – the whole of the sky overhead was a deep, ominous black.

"Cripes, who knows a spell that protects you from weather?" Ron asked, looking up. "Any minute now it's going to bucket it down."

Harry took the book he'd been planning to read, a copy of Born to Run, and tapped it with his wand to cast an Impervious spell.

"I don't think it would be a good idea to cast a spell like that on any of us," Hermione said, thinking. "We are going to be doing something that involves the weather."

There was an ominous rumble from overhead.

"...or we could just hurry to Sirius' house now," Dean suggested. "That was a thunderclap."

Everyone exchanged glances.

Then, by an invisible signal, they all broke into a run.

Harry kept his head tilted so he could keep an eye on the sky overhead as they hurried down to Hogsmeade, and the little flashes of sheet lightning up in the thunderhead overhead were dancing from place to place – sometimes directly overhead, then over the Forest or Hogwarts instead, but always nearby.

There was that rule about how you could count the seconds between the flash and the bang to tell how far away the storm was, and sometimes there was a very long wait of maybe ten seconds and a not-very-loud rumble. Then there would be a bright flash just overhead and a very loud BANG only about a second later, which Harry was pretty sure meant the storm wasn't even very high up.

The rain was just starting as they reached Sirius' house, big fat wet splats which soaked everyone to the skin (or hide) in an instant, and as Harry's friends panted in the hall they could hear the rain drumming on the roof.

"Well, this is convenient," Sirius announced. "You've got the potions?"

Hermione nodded, raising a hand for time, then reached into her satchel and took out four stoppered bottles with labels around the necks. All four of them were blood-red, just as they were supposed to be now that the lightning storm had started, but each one had a different texture – Ron's vial was clear, Hermione's bubbled and roiled constantly, Dean's was milky and cloudy, and Neville's one had a faint internal glow to it.

"Are they supposed to be different?" Dean asked, suddenly sounding worried.

"I sort of expected that," Sirius assured him. "Ours were, too, but buggered if I know what any of it meant."

A crack-BOOM shook the house, and everyone with a potion bottle held onto theirs tightly.

"Let's get you all started," he added. "The basement's cleared out, and we should hurry while the storm's still going."

Down the stairs they went, Harry following behind everyone else, and his friends all spread out a bit under Sirius' direction.

"Remember, you won't know how big you'll end up being," he reminded them all, as Harry took up a position lying against one wall. The basement expanded slowly in size as Sirius made sure they had as much room as possible, growing to the point you could probably fit an elephant in without any trouble, and then a bit more for luck. "Do you remember what the final steps are?"

"We cast the sensitization spell again," Ron said. "Amato Animo Animato Animagus, I think?"

"That's it exactly," Sirius agreed. "You cast that with your wand pointed at your heart. Then you drink the potion."

"Well… here goes," Neville gulped. "Amato Animo Animato Animagus."

AN:

Yep, I'm going there.