It wasn't until we were flying in Hedwig's talons that we noticed something odd. Being flyers ourselves, we were intimately familiar with geographical distances as seen from the air — both as a broom flyer and a winged one. But it wasn't until we gained our wings that we truly understood how fast — or slow, as the case may have been — owl mail was. Hedwig, when burdened by the weight of a package, could only fly about as fast as a car inside a city, and not as fast as they could go on the motorway. What's more, she had to stop every few hours to eat or drink just to survive the exertion of crossing significant distances. And as far as we were going, it wouldn't have surprised us if she were to fall asleep somewhere along the way.

But the fact that we made it back to Hogwarts before sunset? That did surprise us. Interestingly, it was Dumbledore's explanation of Hogwarts's charms from the other night that clued us — mainly Blue — in on what was happening. That, and seeing so many owls flying together.

There were paths in the sky. We'd have never been able to find them without Hedwig's guidance, but once we were there, we could easily smell the magic. While in that airborn path, the ground below seemed to squish without really squishing, if that made any sense. Everything appeared the same as it always had, and yet everything seemed closer together in the direction we were moving. The wind wasn't any stronger than normal, so we doubted we were actually going any faster, but the ground sped below us with unnatural swiftness.

A part of us, though not any one head in particular, wished those sky paths didn't exist — at least not right now. A part of that part was shame. We couldn't have known about that waterfall, nor could we have predicted the spell breaking. And yet, we felt so foolish and reckless. It wasn't our normal brand of foolishness either; riding the minecart deeper wasn't brave or heroic, it was only foolish. And now, we'd made a bloody mess for Dumbledore.

But the majority of us did want to get back to the castle, if only to take a quick dip in the lake, grab something to eat, and then fall asleep. Today had been a long day, and honestly, despite the fact that the sun was still up, we were actually quite ready to curl up in the Chamber of Secrets and sleep.

And with the adrenaline of the day fading, our eyes were quickly getting heavy and our necks were droopy. Yellow mumbled to Hedwig, "Give us a squeeze when we get there, alright, girl?"

Hedwig hooted softly.

We were asleep a few minutes later. Our dreams were fitful, but quickly forgotten.

We awoke to find ourselves lying on a familiar wooden table — one that had, amusingly, already played host to a dragon of similar stature. Above us, Hagrid loomed more than he ever had when we were human, yet his eyes were as full of warm amusement as we'd ever seen them.

Off to the side, Hedwig paused her eating, a mouse tail hanging out of her beak. She jerked her head in Hagrid's direction. Only once she saw that we understood did she swallow the rest of the mouse. She half-spread her wings, sagged her body, and looked up, obviously blissed out by mousy goodness.

Hagrid sure knew how to make animals happy. We supposed that that was why Hedwig delivered us to him.

"Evening, boys." Hagrid chuckled deeply, yet softly. "Never thought I'd see you knee-high to a bowtruckle again."

"It'sss a long ssstory," Green muttered.

Stepping over to the area of his hut that served as his kitchen, Hagrid started — no, resumed — tending to the hot pan. The fragrances of cooking meat and heated spices slowly tickled our noses, faintly making themselves known above the scents of the dried meat and spices he kept in his cupboard.

"There's hot water in the kettle. You lot think you can manage the tea at your size?"

Blue huffed. "Yes, we can make the tea." To be clear, he was saying that yes, we were able to do so, but he went ahead and proved it by making the tea. Simple levitation proved a sufficiently dextrous replacement for human-sized hands. "Sugar? Cream?"

"One cube, Blue."

Plop.

Plop, plop, plop, went the second cup of tea. We stirred Hagrid's with the single teaspoon while our tail stirred ours. "How long were we asleep?"

The half-giant shrugged. "Didn't really pay attention. Not too long." The movement of his tongs revealed his dish to be sausages. They smelled delicious, though all of his cooking did nowadays.

While we wouldn't say no if he offered some, and he probably would, we didn't ask for any.

"What's it like being small anyway? I always wondered."

Grey thought about quipping you were a kid once, but then we remembered that we'd seen Hagrid when he was our age thanks to Voldemort's diary and knew that he'd been taller than everyone at Hogwarts by at least a couple of feet since day one. He'd never been small. "WE'LL TELL YOU AS SOON AS WE FIGURE IT OUT OURSELVES!" came Red's tiny, squeaky, and still somewhat pained voice.

Remembering that we had something of a remedy for that last bit, Red dunked his head in the half-giant-sized teacup and slurped away. While not as warm and bracing as fire, the drink did ease his pain. The rest of us tried not to laugh at him and how silly he looked, and Green almost succeeded at it too. Of course, having seen it through our eyes as well, the stream of bubbles in the tea gave away Red's mirth.

We lapsed into silence after that. Yellow figured Hagrid thought it was a comfortable silence, if the man's relaxed expression was enough to go by, but for the rest of us, it was a silence born more of fatigue than anything. For that moment, the quiet left us feeling little at all.

Gray was the one who broke the silence. "we messed up..."

We didn't tell him that we believed a goblin had died. We carefully avoided even hinting at it. But we did tell him of the destruction we caused, and how much trouble we think we got Dumbledore in. Shame — actual, genuine shame — was not something that we were used to feeling.

Rage, at ourselves and at others, we knew as well as any other stressed-out thirteen-year-old-boy. But shame? For that, we needed someone whose opinion we actually cared about enough. Before this summer, not even Hagrid had been close enough to us to really let us feel this level of shame.

Red, Green, and Grey seethed inside us. They despised the feeling, despised feeling weak and worthless and pathetic. Just this morning, when we'd awoken after we'd made a mess of ourselves on Hagrid, we thought we knew shame.

That was just embarrassment.

Blue and Yellow didn't like it either, but they continued our confession regardless of what the others thought. And in the end, it was probably for the best.

Hagrid scooped us up in his huge hands and held us close to him. "Harry, it'll be alright. Professor Dumbledore will get everything sorted out. I've known him since I was yer age, and I've never seen him get angry at anyone."

We curled up in his hands. They were slightly greasy and smelled of meat and spices, but they were also warm and his magic tickled our senses. It felt like being hugged all over.

'He is hugging us,' Yellow noted.

We're not sure which one of us thought it, but as we curled up and tucked our heads under our wing to hide the tears, we wondered if this was what it was like to have a parent that actually cared.

We didn't see Dumbledore again for three days. We smelled him in the castle, but his scent was weak, as if he were just spending the bare minimum amount of time at Hogwarts before leaving to do whatever it was that was keeping him occupied.

The first indication that something was seriously wrong came not from Dumbledore, but from Professor Flitwick. The man, who usually wore a smile everywhere he went, wasn't smiling. In his hands, he held a crushed copy of the Daily Prophet. It was obvious that the words within had made him upset, but about what, we didn't know.

We hoped our suspicions were wrong, though.

Pausing our morning feasting, we followed him to the teacher's table. Once more, we were human in form thanks to the very woman Flitwick was approaching. He set the paper down in front of her and muttered softly, "I'll have to speak to the headmaster about this. If this happens, I don't know if I'll be able to stay neutral and stay here, as much as I'd want to."

She looked down at the headline, then slightly less down to look at the charms professor. "Filius, I..." McGonagall then glanced our way, noticing us watching them. "I think we should have this discussion at a later date."

Flitwick started to respond, then followed her gaze. "Oh, yes. After breakfast, Minerva?"

The witch gave a quick nod. Nodding back, Flitwick grabbed the paper off the table and scurried off with only a curt greeting in our general direction. He exited the great hall a moment later, leaving us alone without transfiguration professor.

"Was that something we should be concerned about?" Blue inquired.

Yellow seized our single, human mouth and added, "Professor Flitwick looked upset."

McGonagall pushed her glasses up her nose and sighed. "No, Potters, it's not. Please don't worry about Professor Flitwick." It was spoken as a command, not a request. A well-meaning command, sure, but we could tell she really wanted us to keep our noses out of his business.

Unfortunately for her, her own copy of the Daily Prophet sat on the table in plain sight. It took a second to read it upside down, but by the time she'd followed our gaze and tucked the paper away, we'd already read the headline.

Ministry-Goblin Relations Deteriorate After Gringotts Dragon Escape.

Four of us went, "Oh."

Blue muttered, "The one time I wish Binns wasn't useful."

The sun wasn't bright these days. Well, it was, but it didn't feel like it. The dementors had arrived, and while we could barely feel them in the castle and couldn't sense them at all while in our chamber, out on the grounds, the world felt a little greyer.

Grey, the head, was the only one of us who didn't notice. He saw the effect inflicted upon us from an outside perspective, but he himself felt no more miserable than usual. It was nice, relatively speaking, that we only became 4/5 depressed when exposed to the outer edges of a Dementor's aura.

The reason we were outside, yet still within Hogwarts grounds and not flying away from the Dementors, was that McGonagall was finally ready to do her tests on us. We couldn't have any magic on us, which meant leaving our newly remade form stone aside. We may have still fit in the Great Hall and the Entrance Hall while untransformed, but the doors were getting a little tight. Plus, with how heavy we were now, our talons tended to scratch up the magically reinforced stone of the castle.

Spell after spell flew out of her wand at us. Sometimes, she'd smile and quickly jot something down in her notebook. Other times, she'd scowl and scratch something off. Occasionally, she'd coach us on a spell to perform on ourselves, and while we weren't sure what they all did, we had a guess.

Blue and Green, upon discussing it with each other, came to the conclusion that she was trying to understand how our body and magic interacted. More specifically, whether it was our body, our soul, or some external magic that had resulted in us having the shape we did, and what it would mean for us to change it.

McGonagall gave us an eight out of ten on our assessment. She promised to show us the letters that explained her methodology later, then went back to analyzing us. It was a little unusual for Professor McGonagall to not directly answer one of our questions, but she seemed anxious, so we didn't press the issue.

Eventually, she concluded, "It's a little worse than I'd hoped, but far better than I feared."

"Don't sugarcoat it, Professor. Will we ever be able to be human again?" Blue asked.

"Human-ish. The chances of you becoming completely human are small — not zero, but not likely either. I'm almost certain that all five of you will get stuck somewhere along the process, not completely human, but not completely dragon. How far you get depends on your personality, like any animagus transformation," she explained. The whole time, she'd been flipping through her notes as if confirming her words as she spoke.

"When you sssay 'ssstuck,' what do you mean?' Green probed.

"I'll only be able to guide your animagus form so much before it solidifies, I think," McGonagall said, flipping through her notes yet again to confirm. "Yes... You'll still have two forms, one as you are and one a mix of human and dragon. A bit like this."

Suddenly, McGonagall shrank until she was barely two feet tall. Her head became a tabby cat's, a tail sprouted from under her similarly shrunken robes, and her hands became fuzzy. Despite that, she was still recognizably human in profile. It was like how Hermione had been with the bad polyjuice, only a more seamless mixing of cat and human traits. She curtsied once, then shot back up to her original size and form.

"Impressive!" Blue complimented. Having done some reading of our own on the animagus transformation, we knew that the magic tended to dislike being stopped in the middle; an animagus's magic wanted them one way or the other, but not both. "So we'll all be like that?"

"Thank you. And yes, you will. To answer your next question: I do mean that each of you will have a separate human form of your own that is some mix between human and dragon. There's still some degree of unpredictability, but that's true for the original transformation." She flipped her notebook closed. "Personally, I'm interested in how you'll manage to split apart and rejoin together. I'm confident it will be safe, but that doesn't mean it won't be interesting."

An unseasonably chilly and strangely lifeless wind chose that moment to sweep across the grounds. As it blew past us, a bit of color seemed to leech from the world, leaving everything a little duller than it had been before. We, including McGonagall but excluding Grey, shuddered. "Why don't we head inside now? I have what I need."

"WE AGREE! THE DEMENTORS ARE... UNPLEASANT!"

McGonagall snorted mirthfully. "Understatement of the century, Potter."

We summoned our form stone and draped it back around Yellow's neck. One pop later, we strolled on human legs behind McGonagall as we retreated back to the warmer castle.

Our mood following the reveal that we could get human-ish and, more importantly, separate animagus forms lasted through the day. It dimmed slightly the next morning when McGonagall told us that the most unpleasant part of the process was the only part that hadn't been changed; starting at the end of the month, on the full moon, we'd have to wait for a whole month with a mandrake leaf in each of our mouths. We could charm it to stick and to resist fire without issue, but while the leaf itself would become flavorless after barely an hour, the charms wouldn't. We tried the spells just to see and wound up with a disgusting combination of mint and rotten eggs. The flame-freezing charm turned out to be the egg flavor, but that meant we'd either have to deal with the flavor or risk losing a month of progress if even one of us exhaled too hard.

Our mood dimmed further when we finally saw Dumbledore. He looked tired. Very tired. Smaller, too, as if he filled less space with his presence. The deepest part of us all, Consensus, did not like it, although not for the reason our past self would have thought; to see him diminished, tarnished, irritated us, as he should have been stronger.

Blue wondered where these thoughts were coming from. Yellow suggested we should start meditating to figure ourselves out before school started, just in case.

Our irritation was on top of the more normal reactions like shame, concern, and curiosity. We only noted the annoyance because it was the only emotion that hit us all equally. We made a note of it, but then moved onto more pressing matters.

"HEADMASTER!" Red bellowed, transfigured robes flapping as he sprinted over to the wizard. The rest of us followed behind. "WE DIDN'T MEAN TO DO THAT! WE'RE SORRY THAT WE MADE SUCH A MESS!" The rest of us, Grey included, nodded vigorously in agreement.

To our relief, Dumbledore didn't look angry — just incredibly weary. "Accidents happen, boys. I trust the lot of you together are wise enough to figure out what you did wrong yourselves? Five heads are better than one."

"we know." Grey didn't make eye contact as he spoke. "we did."

"And have you been kept abreast of what's going on?"

The headlines this morning were worse than yesterday. The bank had already been repaired — without curses being involved, a single wizard had fixed the bank with a handful of mending spells — but is doors had been locked since the bank had closed the afternoon we broke out. After a couple days without access to their money, the wizards and witches of the United Kingdom were getting impatient and demanding answers.

"Unfortunately," Blue remarked.

"While I have no doubt that the situation will be eventually resolved," — though whether or not it would take suppressing another rebellion to solve remained unspoken — "We do have a slight problem," Dumbledore confessed.

"What problem? Can we help?" Yellow enquired.

Dumbledore shook his head. "The Hogwarts's primary finances are housed within Gringotts. These are the funds with which the school pays its staff and, more relevantly, purchases supplies."

It took a long second to connect the dots, but when we did, it felt like that time when Dudley had kicked us in the nads. No money meant that the frequent food purchases the house elves made to feed us wouldn't happen anymore. In short order, we'd literally eat through every last piece of food here. We'd literally eat through the last money Hogwarts would have until a goblin rebellion was averted or stopped — and it was all our fault.

"Ssscalessss!" Green suddenly exclaimed. The rest of us immediately saw his logic. "You sssaid our ssscalesss were mithril. We've been sssaving the onesss we ssshed."

Dumbledore smiled warmly. "While your generosity is immensely appreciated, it doesn't solve our issue. The only creatures in the UK that can work mithril..."

"Are the goblins," Blue finished.

"BUGGER!"

"Can we sell them abroad?" Yellow pitched.

"probably not," Grey, of all of us, replied. By way of explanation, he chucked a memory at the rest of us — Uncle Vernon complaining to house party guests about customs and tariffs on imported metal. The implication: trying to move a metal as rare as mithril across the border and then trying to sell it would attract all kinds of unwanted attention from the government and would cut into how much money we could make. And that was assuming we found a buyer.

"BUGGER!" Red repeated, a bit louder this time.

A five-way debate broke out in our minds, vocal speech discarded as we drew up then promptly discarded plan after plan. Within a minute, we'd settled on three basic outlines:

One, stay here and live of rocks and acromantula. Hagrid would not be happy, the acromantulas would not be happy, and we wouldn't be happy, having to hunt in a forest. But, we could do it.

Two, roam the countryside and hunt what we could. Again, this was doable and we already did it a little, but we couldn't hunt too much in one area. There just wasn't enough easily accessible game, and our hunting skills were... subpar. Nevermind the muggles that might see us.

Three, go with Charlie to the dragon reserve in Romania. On the surface, it sounded like the best idea. We'd brought the idea up with Ron and Charlie before when our fear was that we'd never be human again and were thinking about where we could live. We'd need to write some letters to check things, and we had to hope that nobody made the connection between us and the bank incident (which was unlikely), but it was perhaps the best option.

Best long term option would be more accurate. The sheer distance between here and Romania made getting to and from there a potential nightmare. Realistically, we were stuck with options one or two, which both basically amounted to, "You can sleep at Hogwarts, but you're on your own for food."

Reluctantly, we said to the headmaster, "We can take care of ourselves for food. You can still have our scales, even if you can't sell them yet."

Sheer relief flashes through Dumbledore's eyes for the briefest of moments, before his normal, serene smile appeared for the first time today. "I had not wished to ask, but your help is greatly appreciated, Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, and Grey." He met each of our eyes as he said our names.

"we wouldn't have needed to help if we hadn't asked to go deeper into the caves..." Grey bitterly muttered.

"Grey, none of you could have predicted that this would have happened. Yes, you took a risk, but not even I know all the protections Gringotts has, or how they would interact with spells on yourself. I couldn't have predicted it."

"The papersss are sssaying that another goblin rebellion might happen. A major one thisss time." Green crossed his arms. "People will sssuffer becaussse of usss."

Dumbledore clasped his hands together, causing them to disappear into his voluminous robe sleeves. The animated stars on the purple cloth twinkled in a way that his eyes did not. "To be honest, if this does turn into a rebellion, it will be one a long time in the making. I trust Professor Binns has instilled at least a basic understanding of why the rebellions happen in the first place?"

"ITS THE ONLY THING HE EVER TALKS ABOUT!" Red grumbled.

"Then you also know there's one every few decades. It was simply bad luck that we happened to be the ones to set it off."

"We?" Yellow asked.

"Goblins can be just as irrational as wizards, you will find," the headmaster replied. One of his hands fell to his side while he raised the other up. Giving it a dismissive wave, Dumbledore added, "Allow this old man to bear this burden alone?"

Taking it as the conclusion of the conversation it was meant to be, we didn't pursue the topic. Yellow instead said, "Again, we're sorry, sir."

"Apology accepted, boys. Take care of yourselves for the next few days."