The Flash Girls, "All Purpose Folk Song (Child Ballad #1)"
For someone who put up so much fuss over it, Sirius sure took to the meditation that was the beginning of mastering the Animagus transformation. He certainly memorized the slippery un-English (Remus said it sounded like Finnish crossed with Hebrew) of the chant before any of us. Before Remus, even.
And he started practicing on his own, which we'd expressly agreed not to do. I caught him at it once, in one of the hidden passageways, chanting out loud. He was so deep in trance that his eyes were glassy and unseeing. I walked past him without being noticed. It was beginning to work. I could see it. His face looked soft, like hot wax just before it melts. The sight made me just a little queasy; did I look like that, when the three of us sat in a half-circle, chanting along as Remus read to us from the book he'd swiped from the library? Somehow I never got around to asking Remus that, but I'm pretty sure the question lingering in my mind is part of why it took me longer to get the hang of the change than James and Sirius. I couldn't seem to keep up the chant without wondering if I looked melted.
It wasn't long after that Sirius got the transformation completely down for the first time. One moment the three of us were chanting in various degrees of trance, the next Sirius was yelping like a startled dog, which of course, he was. For a moment James looked angry – angry, I suppose, that Sirius had done it before him – and Remus was gawking as if he'd never seen anyone shift before. I wondered idly if his shapechanging looked anything like the Animagus transformation.
After that we practiced more than ever. I was so shocked at having seen it actually work that I had trouble getting back into trance, so for a while I just watched as Sirius got better at it, the slow change becoming swifter each time, until he could shift in a heartbeat. And James, too, had that softened-wax look that so upset my stomach. But it was even worse when James and Sirius could both change, and I couldn't. I was frustrated at being behind. Sirius and James thought it was funny. I took to spending my Saturdays in the library, reading everything I could find on Practical Transfiguration.
It was on one of these Saturdays that my studies were interrupted by a soft but distinct cough. I looked up to see a solid-looking blond with a Hufflepuff badge. His wide eyes gave him an almost cherubic appearance. Or that might have been because he couldn't be past his third year.
"I know who you are," he said quietly. "I know who your friends are."
I wasn't particularly impressed, and it must have showed.
"You can stop looking at me that way." He raised his chin slightly.
"I'm sorry," I replied, not very sincerely. "But I'm not sure how to react to some random child telling me he knows me."
His shoulders stiffened and he extended a hand formally. "Bartemius Crouch, Junior. My friends call me Barty." He suddenly looked very stern. "Your friends call me something else."
Oh. It was that Hufflepuff. He'd supposedly had very public hysterics last year when a fellow on the Slytherin Quidditch team had told him to get lost. And James had told us, sniggering, about having caught him and another boy snogging in a broom closet. "Um. You're, um..."
He looked me hard in the eye, daring me to go on. "Yeah. I'm um."
I sighed in frustration. "Look, what do you want?
"I just wanted to tell you. I never thought you were a bully. I hear how they talk to you." He glanced at another table, where a pale, thin boy his own age stared at him intently. "I just wanted to remind you that not everyone is like that." He turned on his heel and strode off, leaving me to puzzle over what he'd said.
Remus was still helping me practice the Animagus transformation long after James and Sirius were able to shift at will. He assured me that I was progressing, that he'd seen the air around me waver like heat-shimmer. And it was Remus who witnessed my first change.
"Oh, hell!" I snapped, changing back. "I'd be better off telling them I can't do it and I give up."
"It's not so bad." Remus tried to reassure me. "Rats are smart. Look how many wizards have rats as familiars."
I rolled my eyes. "Right, then, tell me that Sirirus would have been after you to bite him if you'd been a were-rat."
He sighed. "It's going to be awfully useful, though. I mean, you'll still be able to pick up things... you'll practically have hands!"
That did cheer me up a bit. And I kept on practicing with the chant, even after I could shift in a heartbeat. I'd read that I could gain better control that way, and it was true. Eventually I could halt the change partway through, or just change a certain body part. I kept that to myself though.
As I'd predicted, James and Sirius thought my Animagus form was hysterical.
"The worm's got a worm-tail!" James snickered.
I shifted back. "Well at least I don't look like a bloody great coat rack with a spiky set of prongs sticking out of my head!" I snapped.
It's funny what sticks.
I'm not sure how 'Moony' and 'Padfoot' got started, though. Remus and Sirius just started calling each other that.
You could say it was a secret I was never in on.