Disclaimer: I don't own DCMK or HP
No Need for Magic
2: Turtles, Potions and Roses
In their third year of acquaintanceship, Shinichi got in trouble with the transfigurations teacher for refusing to even try to turn a turtle into a teapot.
"I'm not going to kill a turtle just to pass a class," he informed the professor, shoulders squared and blue eyes flashing. "Besides, what's the point? I'd say that the chances that I'll have a teapot on hand are a lot higher than the chances that I'll have a turtle."
"Then just turn the turtle back once you've finished," the thoroughly exasperated professor had retorted. "Would that ease your conscience?"
Shinichi had scowled at the patronizing note in the professor's words. "You're missing the point."
Seeing the clear incomprehension on the professor's face, he'd elaborated.
"If you turn the turtle into a teapot then back, how do you know it's the same turtle? If it isn't then you've still killed the original turtle. If it is the same turtle then forcing it to spend its life being your teapot is cruel and unusual punishment."
The professor had found Shinichi's argument both perplexing and exasperating, especially since, in terms of logic, the argument was not without merit. After all, it was difficult to argue that being condemned to a life of teapot-hood could be anything other than a cruel fate.
Frustrated, the professor had eventually sent Shinichi to the headmaster. Minerva McGonagall had listened to Shinichi's reasoned arguments against transforming animals into inanimate objects and eventually decided that the situation was not unlike a student deciding to be a vegetarian or vegan. And so she had given him a note that allowed him to use substitute, non-living objects for his lessons.
Kaito, who had always been at the top of his entire year in Transfigurations, found himself changing any animal he transfigured for class back into an animal after class. Just in case.
And when he got back home that Christmas, he surreptitiously transfigured the pretty little teapot he'd made the previous year back into a turtle. He had been rather proud of it before, but now looking at the teapot made him feel guilty. He thought about it some more and apologized to the animal before taking it to a neighbor whose children, he knew, loved reptiles and amphibians. Shinichi really did make good arguments, he thought with some amusement as he made his way back home with a bounce in his step for a job well done.
He wondered briefly why he cared so much what Shinichi thought except that he strongly suspected that he already knew.
"You are a sight for sore eyes," Kaito declared at his first sight of Shinichi when they met up again at the train station to head back to school after Christmas break. Then e produced a red rose with a flourish and offered it to the younger boy. "Alas, without you, even the splendor of the holidays were bleak."
Shinichi instantly blushed bright red and pushed Kaito's hand aside, flower and all, before checking surreptitiously to see if anyone had seen the whole embarrassing display. To his horror, many people had. And they were, rather unsurprisingly, snickering.
"Have you finally lost your mind?" he hissed at the older boy, embarrassed. "Don't say things like that."
"I am only telling the truth," Kaito proclaimed, making no effort at all to lower his voice. Instead, he tucked the rose behind Shinichi's ear. "Aren't you the one who's always saying how important the truth is?"
He slung an arm over Shinichi's shoulders and began propelling him onto the Hogwarts Express without giving him any time to respond—which was just as well since Shinichi had no idea what to say. Honestly, Kaito seemed to be getting crazier by the year. And wasn't that a frightening thought?
Preoccupied as he was by the enigma that was Kaito, Shinichi forgot about the rose until Heiji opened the door to their compartment and asked him why he had a flower in his hair. Blushing, he hastily snatched the blossom in question from his head, but, though he wasn't entirely sure why, he found himself reluctant to simply throw it away. Somehow, the rose found its way between the pages of his arithmancy textbook where, unbeknownst to Shinichi, Kaito saw it two weeks later.
The uncontrollable grin that kept surfacing on Kaito's face at odd moments throughout the rest of that day had everyone edging away from him, afraid that they might end up caught in whatever crazy scheme he was hatching this time.
X
It took Shinichi the entirety of the spring semester to really notice the roses. That wasn't to say he wasn't aware that they were appearing. The first had manifested itself on the nightstand beside his bed on the morning of the spring semester's first Hogsmeade weekend. It had been a splendid specimen of a rose, luxuriant and rich in color. Shinichi had given it a puzzled look before correctly guessing that Kaito must have left it there. He then incorrectly assumed that it had been an accident, moved the flower to Kaito's nightstand where the older boy had presumably intended to set it down, and put the matter out of his mind. It never occurred to him to connect the flower to the fact that it was Valentine's, especially since he didn't actually remember that it was Valentine's until he arrived in the village and saw all the heart-shaped décor and all the couples filling up the village's few restaurants.
When he got back to the Ravenclaw dormitory later that evening, it was to discover that the rose had returned. It now stood in a fluting glass vase that he had never seen before.
He spotted it as he was collecting his ancient runes and advanced geometry textbooks from his trunk. But since he had an essay and five proofs to write, he thought nothing more about the flower that night. Soon, it was as though it had always been there.
The one blossom was soon joined by others. It seemed Kaito had developed a great fondness for muggle magic, and he was always making things appear and disappear. From playing cards and flowers to other people's homework, he had learned a million and one tricks he could do with them all—none of which required an ounce of real magic, let alone a wand. It would have been difficult to say who was more exasperated by his new skills, his classmates or his teachers, but, then again, it would have been equally difficult to say who was more amazed.
Many a snowy or rainy evening found people gathered around Kaito either in the school library or in the Ravenclaw common room, all of them watching him perform feats of muggle magic and trying to figure out how he did it. Shinichi noted with more than a little amusement that wizards and witches, especially those from all wizard families, apparently had an even more difficult time unraveling Kaito's tricks than the average muggle.
Granted, Shinichi couldn't figure out all of Kaito's new tricks either, but he had the best track record in doing so of all their fellow Ravenclaws. Though Kaito was the only person he shared his conclusions with—something for which the aspiring 'magician' was grateful.
"It wouldn't be half so fun if we told them how it all worked," Kaito said, rolling a silk handkerchief up into a small, rubber ball. No sign of silk remained. Then, as he often did either during or after his impromptu shows, he produced a rose with a flourish. Today's blossom was red, and he handed it to Shinichi with a charming smile that had Shinichi's stomach doing odd, fluttery things that he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to think about.
Kaito didn't always whip out red roses, and he didn't always give those roses to Shinichi. He sometimes proffered blossoms to one or another of the girls in the day's audience. Once, he had even dared to offer a rose to the Headmistress, who had paused to watch part of his performance on her way to another part of the library. But those roses ranged in color from yellow to white to orange to pink. Only Shinichi ever received the roses that were red.
The vase on his nightstand now sported an elegant, crimson bouquet.
Even so, he never stopped to wonder about the roses until Shiho had seen him pressing another one between a hefty ancient runes textbook.
"That's sweet," she noted, tone wry. "I never took you for the sentimental type."
He had looked up from where he had just finished carefully arranging the flower between two clean sheets then folding the book over and around it. "What do you mean?"
Shiho only shrugged. "My sister's pretty sentimental, but even she didn't keep every flower her beau ever gave her. I wouldn't have expected that from you. But in some ways it suits you too," she added, beginning to sound more as though she was talking to herself as opposed to talking to Shinichi. "It's cute. But anyway, have you decided?"
Thrown off both by the implications of what she had just said and by the sudden change in topics, Shinichi could only stare at her. "Huh?"
"About if you're coming to my summer camp," she said, folding her arms and leveling him with an intent stare that dared him to have forgotten what she was talking about. "I gave you the overview last week. You said you'd decide by today."
"Oh, that, I remember," Shinichi said hastily. He did too, now that she had reminded him.
Shiho, having just completed her fifth year, had leveraged some of her connections and her reputation at Hogwarts to set up a summer camp for the study and creation of new potions. It was a novel idea that had caused quite a buzz among those who knew of it. The camp would take place for three weeks during the summer, and it would be located in one of the many national parks in the United States. She had yet to tell them which one as, last Shinichi had heard, she had still been reviewing retreats and camping grounds. She had extended invitations to those she considered to have potential, one of whom was Shinichi.
"I'd love to go," he told her, feeling a surge of real excitement that swept away all other thoughts. "I already wrote to my parents. They said they're fine with it. Though they want to know the exact location once you're sure. I think they're planning on dropping by, if that's all right with you."
"Just so long as they don't get in the way," Shiho replied coolly before handing him a scroll secured with green twine.
"Here's everything you'll need to know about the camp and a list of what you'll need to bring. I have another one here for Kuroba, if you could pass it on to him."
"Of course."
X
Shiho's Rethinking the Potion Summer Camp was to be held in a mountain retreat somewhere in northern California. It was a beautiful place, all mountains and rivers and flourishing flora and fauna. It would be peaceful too, as Shiho had booked the entire retreat premises and put up spells to deter casual hikers from passing too close by. There were two cabins for boys and two cabins for girls with no divisions for Houses because Shiho felt that kind of divisiveness was pointless and counterproductive. Chores would be done in turn by everyone who was not an exceptional cook. If you were an exceptional cook, you could be let off other duties if you volunteered to handle the preparation of everyone's meals.
As for the purpose of the camp, well, Shiho had them all into the mess hall on the first day where she lined up several rows of potion bottles across the room's long table. Each had a notebook packed full of notes in front of it, a list of ingredients, and a goal.
"Here at this camp," she said, "We are going to see if we can recreate these potions," she gestured at the bottles on the table, "which would normally take months to make in no more than three weeks. I have some theories on how to replace some of the required time elements, and you may propose your own. But that is the first challenge we will be endeavoring to solve. A lot of these potions would be useful if they could be created faster. But as they are now, they are often considered too pricy or too untimely to be useful to anyone. I have gone over each of your school records, and so I feel I have a fairly good idea of what each of your skill levels and interests are. As such, I have assigned each of you to a team. You will find the team lists on the bulletin here in this hall tomorrow morning. If for some reason you want to change teams, you need to let me know before lunch tomorrow. If you don't, you'll stay with your assigned team for the duration of this camp."
Shinichi found himself teamed up with Kaito and two seventh year students, a boy and a girl from Slytherin and Gryffindor respectively.
"I'll be trusting you to keep Kuroba out of mischief," Shiho told him in that typical deadpan way of hers. She didn't, however, explain how she expected him to do this. Unfortunately, she walked away before he could ask. This worried him because he too knew Kaito's penchant for causing trouble, but he also knew that no power on earth could stop Kaito from doing something if he really wanted to. All Shinichi could do was remind him that not everyone shared his sense of humor or definitions of fun. But maybe that would be enough. Kaito wasn't an unreasonable person, just a law unto himself.
It soon became apparent to Shinichi, however, that, if there was going to be trouble from their team, it was probably going to come from the two seventh years before it came from Kaito.
Thanks to their House affiliations and the centuries' old rivalry between the two, the two seventh years had been eyeing each other warily from day one. They proceeded to argue over everything.
Their team had been assigned to working with transfiguration potions. More specifically, they were working on potions that could change a person into a specific animal for a limited amount of time. It was a variation of an animagus mimic potion that temporarily triggered animagus transformation abilities in an individual for, again, a limited amount of time (though Shinichi had read that the potion could awaken those with the animagus talent and help them learn to use the talent).
Shiho had provided them with various alternative, time-saving brewing instructions for the mimic potion that they were to test first. Her instructions came with detailed explanations on each theory, most of which went right over Shinichi's head, but every line of which the seventh years seemed to be able to argue about. If he hadn't been both the youngest member of the team and somewhat in over his head in terms of potions theory, Shinichi might have tried to intervene. But, as things stood, all he could do was watch and occasionally try to get a word in edgewise, usually to no avail.
If Kaito had helped, things might have gone more smoothly. The older Ravenclaw had a knack with people. He knew how to cheer them up and make them laugh, thus easing tension and encouraging cooperation. But he also seemed to find the two's sniping at each other to be incredibly amusing and therefore had no intentions of making them stop.
So instead Shinichi picked a set of instructions at random and began the testing process.
The first attempt was a dud, but the second resulted in a potion that looked, smelled, and sloshed exactly the way the animagus mimic potion was supposed to. That finally got the seventh years' attentions.
"I guess one of us should try it?" Shinichi asked a bit nervously, looking around the picnic table where their group was working that day.
"Let me," the Gryffindor, Annalisa, offered. "Just let me get my cleansing potion from my cabin. That should be able to wipe it out of my system if it turns out to be wrong."
"There's no need," Mike, her fellow seventh year, said smugly. "I've already mastered the charm counterpart to that potion as well as twelve spells for curing a variety of potion and poison-inflicted ailments. I doubt this potion is so off that it'd have an effect I can't fix."
His declaration earned him a disbelieving stare from Annalisa, but, to Shinichi's surprise and relief, all she said was, "That's good then."
And she promptly took a huge gulp of the potion.
It turned out that Mike didn't have to prove his aptitude with curative spells. Twenty minutes later, a cat, an iguana, a fox and a sparrow sat or stood eyeing one another on the picnic table. In an ironic twist, the cat was Mike and the iguana Annalisa. The two stared at each other, unblinking.
Not sure what they were thinking and lamenting the inability to talk in this shape, Shinichi fluffed out his feathers then hopped about to find Kaito watching him intently with bright yellow eyes.
Shinichi had to suppress a sudden urge to try and fly away. Did these bodies come with instincts? Because if Kaito was about to try and eat him, he was out of here.
To his relief, the fox did not try to eat him. Instead, he turned, hopped down onto the long benches, and turned back into Kaito.
"It's not fair," were the first words out of the older boy's mouth. "I wanted to be something that could fly!"
It took Shinichi two tries, but he managed to make himself human again and sat down next to Kaito with a sigh. "That's what the next type of potion is for."
"I know. I was just hoping I'd be a bird of some kind if I could learn to be an animagus."
"No animagus picks his or her shape," Annalisa replied, straightening out her T-shirt. "You get whatever animal fits you."
"And I say it was spot on for you, Kuroba," Mike added with something that might have been mirth tugging at the corners of his lips.
He glanced over at Annalisa just as the girl did the same, and their gazes met and held as their faces smoothed of all expression. They appeared to be thinking really hard or just being childish and refusing to be the first to blink. Or maybe they were trying to read one another's minds, Shinichi thought. Who could tell with those two.
Kaito poked him in the arm. "Hey, since we've completed our assignment for the day, how about we go explore the woods a little? We should be able to continue shifting back and forth for at least another hour or so. It'll be fun."
"So you want to go as animals?" Shinichi asked.
Kaito grinned. "Exactly. How about it?"
"I…guess that would be interesting," Shinichi admitted. Secretly, he was pleased that he really would be able to fly. Brooms felt unnatural to him. He just couldn't trust them. Wings on the other hand were meant for flying. That should be fun so long as he didn't run into anything or fall or…
"Just promise me something first," he said, leveling Kaito with a serious stare that had the older boy leaning forward with equal intensity.
"What?"
"If you start thinking you might want to eat me, I expect you to turn back and tell me."
Kaito blinked. Then he blinked again. And then he burst out laughing so hard that he toppled off of the picnic table bench and went rolling around on the grass underneath, clutching his stomach and howling like a madman.
"That boy has a screw loose," Annalisa said, looking down her nose at the still laughing Kaito.
Mike snorted. "I'll second that." He turned back to the Gryffindor girl, hesitated, then cleared his throat. "There are four other instruction sets for this first potion. We've only tested the first two. Since they're all running on different theories, the data collection won't be complete unless we try all of them."
Annalisa nodded slowly. "Might as well try them since we have time. I'll go get more ingredients from the storage room."
"Can't we take at least a little break and go explore?" Kaito asked, putting on his best puppy eyes (which, he would admit, were nowhere near as good as Shinichi's puppy eyes, but he doubted Shinichi would consent to using his cute puppy eyes to ask for time off). "It's not like we can test a new version of the potion while the first one's still effective anyway."
"No," Annalisa said slowly, looking from Kaito to Shinichi to Mike and back again. "But we could try it this way. Since you two brewed the first two potions, Mike and I can brew the remaining four if just you two test the ones we think should work right. Deal?"
Kaito grinned and opened his mouth to agree then remembered that his opinion wasn't the only one that mattered.
"Shinichi?" he asked.
The smaller boy hesitated only a moment. "I don't mind."
"Great!" Kaito cheered. "We accept then." With that, he leapt off the bench. By the time his feet hit the grassy ground below, they had become dark, furry paws.
He turned to grin a fox grin up at Shinichi that clearly said, "Are you coming or what?"
Torn between sighing and laughing himself, Shinichi closed his eyes and thought of sparrows.
Their team (jokingly dubbed Team Furry by Kaito) made considerable progress that day and the next, and, by the end of the third day, they had tested more potion recipes than any other team save the one being led by Shiho herself. Mike in particular was rather proud of this accomplishment, although Shinichi thought the current state of affairs was probably due more to the fact that their trial recipes required less brewing time than any exceptional skill on their parts.
"That doesn't mean we can't be proud of what we've accomplished," Kaito pointed out.
"He's right," Annalisa agreed. "Now who wants to try this eagle morphing potion?"
The weeks flew by at remarkable speed. As expected, more trial recipes failed than worked, but there were still quite a few successes. Kaito got his chance to fly as a whole range of birds from eagles to magpies to owls. He'd been rather eager to try out being a bat too, curious about the world of echolocation, but, unfortunately, that particular morphing potion failed to do anything other than taste bad.
When they weren't working or taking their turns at the camp's various chores, Kaito typically dragged Shinichi out exploring with him. Sometimes they went as themselves. Other times, they took the liberty of using one of the potions they had made. After all, it would be a waste not to use them. And Shinichi suspected that Kaito was hoping to use the mimic potion to train himself to become a proper animagus. Shinichi didn't mind. There was something freeing about being a bird. Although he had a close call near the end of their first week when a hawk came dropping out of the sky without warning, talons extended. Shinichi barely managed to avoid being captured, but the maneuver sent him tumbling end over end in an uncontrollable spin that could have ended in a lot of broken bones if he hadn't landed in a particularly dense and soft patch of wild grass. He might still have been eaten by the hawk he'd just evaded if Kaito hadn't leapt at the returning bird, jaws snapping. Apparently the hawk wasn't in the mood for fighting another predator for the rather small meal the tiny sparrow would make, and so it wheeled away.
It was three days before Shinichi could make himself take the sparrow shape again and actually go back out into the woods. Now though, he made sure to keep close to Kaito or one of the seventh years when Mike or Annalisa or both decided to join them. Annalisa's iguana shape, nearly six feet long from snout to tail tip, was intimidating enough to keep most other local animals wary despite the lizard's herbivore nature.
"You know, this camp thing wasn't a bad idea," Mike remarked as he and Shinichi walked back towards the camp from a brief venture they had taken into the nearest town. Mike had said the other day that he had never seen a muggle bookstore before (not, he added hastily, that he thought they could possibly measure up to the wizard bookstores he frequented back home), and Shinichi had been chaffing at not having access to the new releases in several series he'd been following. As such, he'd leapt at the opportunity to go into town and pick up a few extra supplies—and visit the local bookstore. When Mike asked to tag along, Shinichi had felt it only polite to say yes.
He wasn't sure what he'd expected, but it certainly hadn't been to finish his own shopping only to find Mike buried in the comic book section of the bookstore. The older boy seemed to feel the need to make excuses for reading the muggle comic books—"Better than nothing", but Shinichi didn't miss how he excused himself halfway through their next supply stop to slip back and buy several of those comics. That was interesting, Shinichi mused, and he filed the observation away.
Shinichi had to admit that he was sad when the camp came to a close. He had learned a lot—certainly worlds more than he typically learned in a year of Hogwarts potions classes—but, more than that, he had had fun too. He had met wizards who, like himself, knew that the world could use some change.
On the last day before they were all to leave, Shiho gave a speech—her first since the welcome and her last for the camp. She thanked them all for their hard work and announced that, thanks to their efforts, they had validated nearly two dozen time-saving, alternative brewing techniques and nearly as many completely new but tried and tested low-cost versions of otherwise hugely expensive potions.
"There is no doubt that the work we have done will go down in history and change a great deal that is to come," she told them all. "Perhaps we will return next year, perhaps we will not. But, no matter where any of us go, I bid you to keep with you the spirit of innovation and thirst to learn that you have shared with us here. Do that, and I think the future will promise to be bright."
Then she'd smiled. It was the first time Shinichi could recall having seen Shiho actually smile.
The same thought must have crossed Kaito's mind as he whistled. "Wow, never thought she had it in her."
"What?" Shinichi asked.
"Smiling. I didn't think she knew how."
Shinichi thought the comment a little tactless even if he'd sometimes thought the same.
The rest of that last day was spent partying outdoors in the pleasantly warm California summer. They had a barbeque and played games. Shinichi was pleased to discover that at least two of the muggle born students were also huge soccer fans. After explaining the rules to their fellow campers, they got a game going. Later in the evening, they all gathered around a campfire that flickered and danced in all shades of the rainbow, swirling periodically into fantastic images of castles and flowers, birds and beasts. They toasted marshmallows and took turns telling stories before someone brought out a guitar.
Music and laughter filled the night. It was all but inevitable that some people began to dance. Mike and Annalisa turned out to be rather good dancers. They raised quite a few eyebrows, especially since they had chosen to dance with each other. With the atmosphere all but aglow with good cheer though, no one stared for long. They were all colleagues here after all, and they were celebrating a joint success. That was really all that mattered.
It was all that should matter.
"Are you tired?" Kaito asked, dropping down next to Shinichi on one of the long logs they were using as seats beside the enormous, magical campfire.
"Not really," Shinichi said with a small smile as he watched their two teammates taking bows after a particularly intricate, fast-paced dance that had them both breathless and beaming to uproarious applause from their growing audience. "I should be, I guess. It's been a long day, but…"
Kaito laughed. "I know what you mean. There's too much energy in the air. Everyone's finally cutting loose after all that hard work."
Shinichi nodded slowly. "It feels a little like we're losing something though. I mean, when we go back… Will we all go back to who we were before?" He murmured, watching Mike grasp Annalisa's hand and bow over it, probably saying something dramatic. The Gryffindor girl was laughing, and there was only warmth in her eyes for the boy she hadn't been able to stand on their first day.
Kaito followed his gaze then shrugged. "Who can really say? But, if you ask me, I don't think there's much chance of that. Once you get to know a person, you can't really get to un-know them, if you know what I mean. Once that connection's been built, it's there. What you make of it moving forward though. Now that's the question."
Shinichi hummed thoughtfully, and he wondered if they were just talking about the seventh years' unlikely but clearly developing friendship or something else.
"Hey, since you're not tired yet, and I'm not tired either, and we're the only people still just sitting here, how about dancing with me?"
Shinichi blinked. It was several seconds before what Kaito had said actually registered in his mind. When it did, he felt a slow, burning blush beginning to rise up his neck and into his face.
"I—I don't dance," he said hastily.
"No problem. I'll teach you," the older boy declared. And before Shinichi knew it, he was being swept out onto the dance floor with Kaito's hand clasping his own and Kaito's arm around his waist. And, for a few minutes, it was as though the world had slowed. Time stilled. Shinichi could hear nothing, and all he could see was Kaito's grinning face and indigo eyes shining in the dark as they focused all Kaito's intensity on him. Shinichi felt as though he couldn't breathe. And the world around them whirled and spun in silent shades of green and gray and gold and satin veils of wood smoke that spun away to drift like flower petals on the breeze.
Afterward, Shinichi could barely remember anything about the dance. All he could remember was the burn of indigo eyes as they bore into his soul.
Those eyes lingered in his mind long after the dance and followed him right into his dreams. There had been something in them—something he couldn't quite put a name to but that had made his heart beat faster and his stomach do something fluttery that only confused him more.
In many ways, he was relieved to go home and be able to put that disconcerting feeling out of his mind. By the time he was heading back to school for his fourth year, he had managed to convince himself that the odd feeling had been something he'd eaten disagreeing with him.
TBC