There, is a tree swinging

The trio was on their way back from visiting with Hagrid for lunch on a warm spring day, the mud clinging to their boots as they walked. Harry always found himself introspective after talking with the half-giant, getting sucked into memories of times long gone.

Easter had passed the rest of Hogwarts by without much notice, but Hagrid seemed determined to celebrate anything he could. He'd decorated his hut with garlands of dyed eggs and hung ribbons on the apple tree by the front door. Even the usual rock cakes had taken a back seat to misshapen meringues.

It had been nice to see the single acknowledgement of the holiday. Harry was surprised to find that he missed the chocolate, and even the rhetoric; there was something profound about dying for another, only to come back to life.

Back in Gryffindor tower, he knew his mottled pink shirt still sat at the bottom of his trunk. Most days, Harry still didn't know who he was. This fact had bothered him profoundly back at Privet Drive, but it had come to matter less to him here, where the castle sang with magic and the students kept up a constant stream of noise to drown out the possibility of thinking too much.

In a way, wasn't his identity irrelevant compared to his actions, his choices? For now, he was content to drift through life. He didn't need to know where he was to understand whom he wanted to become.

Harry hadn't properly figured out where he was going, either, but he was certain it had to be better than the life he'd lived before. He wanted to be someone who lived vivaciously.

To live courageously. To be the kind of person who did the right thing.

For the moment, that was enough. Harry was enough.

"There'll be a thunderstorm soon," Neville said, drawing Harry's attention back to his own wet socks and rustling jacket.

Neville's eyes were following the whipping of the Willow's branches. "I can feel it in my bones."

"No." Hermione said firmly. "Not-t-t at our age."

Harry had heard Moody could sense Dark Magic with the stump of his severed nose. Sensing a cold front in one's bones was new to him, though. "Is that a family trait? I didn't know the Longbottoms had weather magicks."

"Not magic, bones." Hermione huffed. She tended to get upset whenever family magicks were mentioned, likely because as a muggleborn she couldn't have any. It was a tender subject they all tried not to bring up.

"My ribs snapped when I was eight," Neville continued. "My great-uncle Algie was dangling me out the window by my ankles when he accidentally dropped me. Mum was so furious I didn't see any of dad's side of the family for a year." He said it all rather chipperly, still watching the Willow. "Ever since, I can feel when there are big changes in weather. It's pretty useful."

Hermione appeared horrified beyond words.

"It's a wizard thing," Harry explained. "If children don't show signs of accidental magic the family will try to put them in life-threatening situations."

"Terrible." There were tears in Hermione's eyes. She clutched at Neville's hands, the skin of her knuckles going blotchy.

"I could have died," Neville added proudly, "but I didn't."

"For what it's worth, Hermione, it's not really the done thing anymore, and people definitely don't talk of it." Harry gave Neville a pointed look; his Gran would have kittens if she knew he was bandying this kind of information about. "But that's not important, weren't you listening? There's going to be a thunderstorm!"

He and Neville watched her face go from strong disapproval to dawning comprehension. "Animagi," she exclaimed.

Harry twisted to check nobody was around to eavesdrop, before returning his eyes to his friends. They grinned madly at each other.

The trio hurried into the castle, casting a quick Tergeo on their boots to appease Filch. Neville was brimming with excitement, his face flushed with it. They put their heads together for some last-minute planning before class began—it was lucky Snape wasn't nearby or he'd surely have come over to accuse them of being up to something.

xoxox

The storm blew in suddenly during the middle of a history lesson, announcing itself with the clattering of the classroom's windowpanes.

Harry had followed Neville and Hermione to class under James' invisibility cloak for this precise moment. Neville knocked an inkbottle onto his robes and then they were off under the pretence of cleaning up.

Harry flicked a Tergeo at the boy as they gathered under the cloak. Only their disembodied feet were showing as they hurried to the second floor.

Myrtle's bathroom was blessedly empty and their potion, hidden in a nook behind some broken tiles, was undisturbed.

The rain whipped against the open window. Lightning flashed, making the castle grounds look startlingly dark afterwards.

"Bottoms up," Neville said. On the edge of the forest, Harry could see a lone centaur staring towards the school.

"Amato Animo Animato Animagus," they chanted together, a distorted echo of three dormmates twenty years ago. Thunder crashed.

They settled down on their cushioning charms to wait.

xoxox

Harry blinked his eyes open, feeling the familiar ache from having sat still for too long. He turned his neck, wincing at the cracking sound. Beside him, Hermione and Neville were doing the same.

Neville's breathing seemed far too loud, whistling in tune with the wind outside. Harry got up and shut the windows.

"How did it go for you?" he asked Hermione.

"Alright," she said. "I was light, and sharp. There were colours I'd never seen before." She closed her eyes, frowning with the intensity of her thought. "I might have been a bird?"

Harry nodded, though he was a little alarmed. When he'd done it the first time around, James and Sirius had immediately burst into chatter after the ritual, waxing on about antlers, hooves, the smells all around them, and the feeling of a tongue that could loll.

"I just remember ears," he answered Hermione's questioning gaze. "I had been wondering recently about what shape they'd be, so I was very pleased that I could move them around. I was small." He shrugged. "That's all the spell gave me." He couldn't even tell what he'd felt like, what shape his body had been, nothing. Harry could feel his heart swelling in his chest, or was his chest constricting around it? Either way, it felt too tight. What if his animagus form was broken?

"It was the same for me," Neville said then. "I remember excellent teeth and I could see almost all the way around me. My neck was strong and warm. It wasn't a clear vision like what the book said it would be."

As one, they turned to study the copies Hermione had spelled of the relevant pages.

When in the trance, the apprentice animagus will experience his animagus form in totality. He will wake seventy minutes later with a distinct impression of what his inner animal is. Further steps involve meditating on the experience of the form until the apprentice feels the pull of the shift.

"We all only got partial impressions," Harry summarised for them. "Hermione, yours sound like they were halfway decent, but still, we were supposed to know exactly by now."

Though if they were all experiencing problems, it wasn't Harry who was broken. Of course he wanted his friends to succeed, but he was also a bit grateful that he wasn't alone in having failed at this.

"The potion?" Hermione suggested.

"We took the same potion but you got better results," Neville said.

"It doesn't make sense." Harry sighed, setting aside the notes. "We should go to lunch before someone misses us. We can figure out what went wrong later."

They vanished the evidence of their actions and thanked Myrtle for her trouble. None of them said much, still trapped in their spiralling thoughts.

Why hadn't it worked? What had they done wrong?

xoxox

Naturally, it was Hermione who figured it out.

She descended upon them in the common room not a week later, slamming a dusty tome on top of Neville's potions essay. Harry quickly cleared away his own homework lest she damage it. "What's this?" Neville said, his face puckered.

"Light reading." Hermione flipped between the pages, very nearly tearing them with her enthusiasm as she leaned awkwardly over the table.

"Right." Neville sighed, setting his quill aside.

Harry hated how defeated his friend looked. "I'll help you rewrite it," he offered. "Maybe we can work in that bit about pingrape we just read."

Hermione finally caught on. "Sorry," she said quietly, her neck drawing back and her shoulders drooping.

Neville smiled at them both in turn. "Thanks. What did you find, then?"

At this, her hair bushed up again, seeming to bristle with its own excitement. "Here," she said, pointing at a passage.

Complex magics such as apparition should not be performed by underage wizards for multiple reasons, primarily their limited, youthful core.
A developing magical core is unable to withstand the strains of channelling great amounts of magic. Furthermore, the strong conceptualisation of self necessary for the accurate dematerialisation and rematerialisation is unlikely before the young witch or wizard has better grown into the concept of their body and self.

"See?" Hermione said, jabbing the page insistently. "It worked better for me b-be-because I'm older!"

Harry smiled at her, struck by fondness for her exuberance, the way she actually loved to learn for learning's sake. Who knew how long it would have taken them to reach that same conclusion without her?

Suddenly, it sunk in. He wasn't broken. His animagus form wasn't broken. The potion he'd brewed had been fine. "We'll try again next year," he decided.

His friends grinned back at him.

xoxox

In the fortnight leading up to their exams, Neville chewed his fingernails bloody. It had gotten so bad Madam Pomfrey was refusing him regrowing potions, which Harry thought was neither helpful nor professional. Instead of treating the symptoms in favour of the cause, Neville now wasn't being treated at all.

It was incredibly frustrating to watch, especially now that Harry knew more about the way muggles actually cared about these things. Wizards had mastered fixing physical ills, but as Frank Longbottom couldn't attest, their healing was crap on the mental side.

Point in case, Harry's occlumency lessons as a prerequisite for legilimency, to 'cure' his autism. Flitwick said he should keep doing his mind-calming exercises, which he was practicing every night before bed, but it was hard not to get caught up in the stressful energy that was vibrating through the castle like the lunchtime bell.

Harry watched as Hermione's hair grew increasingly frazzled over the last week of cramming. She was still very quiet, but she'd mastered a combination of Sonorus and 'Weasley would you pleasesh-shut up!' whenever the common room grew too noisy.

It was a clever phrase, as it could be applied equally to Ronald arguing with Dean on football versus Quidditch, or the twins setting off minor explosions by the open window, or even Percy lording his prefect status over people at the top of his lungs.

Really, Harry appreciated her verbal efficiency.

While Hermione had started finding her voice, Neville had grown ever quieter as the first day of exams neared. He'd been firmly convinced he'd forget everything and fail—until his gran sent him a Remembrall and Harry secretly enchanted it to glow red only every sixth use. Together with an encouraging letter from home, Neville seemed much more balanced, if still very quiet.

And then exams came and went like like driftwood floating downstream. Harry felt, in a way, like he was watching himself from a great distance, bobbing up and down gently as the world passed him by. Flitwick said this was a good sign, that he was making progress on the art of mind-clearing.

Harry was glad he'd said so, because to him it felt like he was going mad. Time seemed to jolt by in discordant moments.

He was also glad Aunt Petunia had convinced Flitwick of the necessity of letting him take his exams apart from the scuttling, quivering restlessness of fifty other firsties. Instead he was allowed a quiet room with only Hermione for company, supervised by Binns and a stately clock McGonagall had conjured.

The week of testing was enunciated by its soft tick-tick-tick, a metronome that crawled even into Harry's dreams. He wasn't bothered by the exams themselves, geared as they were to children with a single year's formal magical education, rather than his own eight.

Nevertheless, he breathed a deep sigh of relief when it was all over.

xoxox

Greetings, all my lovely readers. I hope you're collectively well. Take care of yourselves, please.
Coming soon: Harry and company participate in the plot regarding the Philosopher's Stone.