AN: It has been some time, and I'm sorry again, but I've been absolutely swamped with FINISHING MY SENIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL GUYS I GRADUATE THIS SATURDAY! Anyway, I was also having the worst writer's block ever, and I believe that was because I didn't have my plot details figured out and thus had no idea where I was actually going beyond the last chapter specifically. So I took a couple days to write out a whole summary of the story, all the way to where I see the end being, and let me tell you guys, we're only about a fourth of the way there. This is gonna end up being really heckin long, way longer than I actually expected. But now I have my mojo back, and school is done for the summer for me, so I'm going to hopefully get chapters up more frequently than I have been doing recently.

Thank you to lilylivered, 911weasleytwins, and honorary-marauder-1 for helping me stay motivated to keep writing and being supportive in general in my life-I can't wait to see where our lives take us!

Having now lived almost three school years in the Scottish castle that housed the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Marina thought that she knew the quirks of the stone halls quite well. She knew that in warmer weather, the classrooms were still quite cool and even drafty at times unless there were windows that let in plenty of hot sun. She knew that the moving stairs had a complex but certain pattern and that Wednesday morning was the only time they were arranged efficiently for her schedule this year. She even knew there was a not-often-taken back stairway that let her and Artemis go from Charms to Arithmancy in half the time it took Alfred. Despite these things, Marina had not yet experienced firsthand the incredible ability of the bare hallways to magnify and transmit the sounds of a heated argument. Or, more appropriately, the sounds of an angry Lily Evans shouting invective at James Potter.

Peter Pettigrew led Marina out of the library, down the hall, and up a spiraling flight of stairs. Marina could hear the redhead screeching as soon as she got her ears in the stairwell. Halfway up, she stopped and grabbed the edge of Peter's robes. He turned, brow pinched in worry.

"What happened?" Marina asked.

Peter looked up towards the floor above them as Lily shouted what sounded like an insult to James's tie-tying skills, of all things. "Well, you know James…he, erm, well, you know how he is…"

Marina leaned forward, fixing Peter with as serious a stare as she could come up with. She hoped it was convincing. Lily continued her shouting above them, voice growing shriller and higher by the minute, sounding quite like a teakettle near boiling. "Peter. What—did—James—do?"

With a sigh that moved his whole body, Peter's head sagged forward, defeated. "He tried to transfigure her flowers from a quill she had behind her ear but it just turned her hair into flowers instead."

"What?!" Marina screeched, pushing past Peter to run up the rest of the stairs. Steps away, the yelling stopped, and the Ravenclaw emerged into the corridor just in time to watch Lily Evans spin on her heel, long, green, flowering vines fanning out behind her, a broken quill stuck in the mess, and storm off down the hall.

For a moment, she just stood, watching the Gryffindor girl as she reached the end of the hallway and exited onto the main landing. Then Marina heard someone blow out a shaky breath behind her, and she turned, facing James. At the moment, he looked as miserable as she had ever seen him—had she ever seen him upset before in the first place?—with his face pale, eyebrows just pushed slightly together, and shoulders drooping. Was that his lip quivering, to boot? Marina sighed, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and shook her head.

"James," she began, "what happened?" She tried to be gentle and avoid sounding like she was accusing him.

He merely shrugged loosely, dropping his head to stare at his feet. "I didn't mean to ruin her hair," he said. "I was just trying to—well, I don't know, impress her, I guess."

Marina frowned. James sounded so incredibly defeated, but what he had done hadn't been smart at all. She opened her mouth, but then spied Sirius and Remus over the boy's shoulders looking very worried, gesturing wildly at her. James looked up at her, hazel eyes big and sad behind his glasses. With a click of her teeth, Marina shut her mouth and sighed again. Maybe it wasn't the time to give him a scolding just then. That was what Sirius and Remus were trying to communicate, wasn't it? Not to destroy their friend? It did make sense to comfort first. That's what she did with Annie: she comforted her first before dealing with the facts of the situation. People were delicate when upset, Gideon had told her once; that was after she had gotten really frustrated with Rachel the Hufflepuff one time last year and had upset her. You have to be careful of their feelings first before solving their problems, or else hearing about their troubles could upset them more. This situation with James was one of those moments when she had to be gentle and careful of his emotions.

"Come on, let's go talk about this," she said softly. She thought about giving him a hug, but Marina decided that would be too much, so instead she turned back to the stairs to go back to the first floor. "The library's quite cozy," Marina said over her shoulder. "We can talk about this there rather than this corridor, James."

Behind her, Marina heard the other boys quietly telling James they'd meet him in their common room. Then his footfalls echoed in the quiet, mostly empty hallway as he followed her to the stairs. The pair of them descended the stairs in silence, walked slowly back to the library in silence, and found a comfortable, quiet spot to talk in silence. Everything about James shouted disappointment and hopelessness to Marina. He heaved a sigh that seemed bigger than his lungs could possibly handle and dropped his chin on the arms he folded up on the table in front of him. Marina sat down across from James and mirrored his position, biting her lip.

"So," she said. "What happened?"

James sighed again. "We were coming back from Transfiguration, and Lily had her quill behind her ear. She does that a lot," he added. "It's really cute. It's like she gets so focused on what she's doing that she can't put it away. Anyway, we were heading back from Transfig, and I got this idea to transfigure her quill into a lily, like her name, you know?" He looked up then with his eyebrows quirked up in question. He waited until Marina nodded, digging her chin into her arm as she did so, before he continued. "But I guess I didn't have my aim right, or maybe she moved or something when I was casting the spell. And then her whole hair turned into plants. And then she turned around and she moved so fast her quill fell from behind her ear but it got caught on her hair—er, plants, I guess—and it broke and she was just so mad and she yelled at me and called me a show-off and she had her wand out but her friends Marlene and Dorcas—you know Marlene and Dorcas, right?" he cut himself off, looking up again. "Marlene McKinnon and Dorcas Meadowes?" He settled his head again and looked back at the table's wood grain between them again after Marina nodded, and he went on. "Well, Marlene and Dorcas stopped her from, I don't know, Merlin knows what. Hexing me, probably. She hexed me last week after I jinxed Snivellus's hair to turn green and slimy in Potions, so she probably was going to hex me again. And so then she walked away. That's when you showed up with Peter," James finished. He buried his face in his arms and groaned. "What do I do?" he asked, voice muffled by the sleeves of his robes.

Marina blew her curls out of her eyes. She should probably have Lark cut it so it looked more even and less like she had just grown it out from a pixie cut. Lark cut her own hair, and it was curly too, so she'd probably know what to do with it. She'd have to think about it later, though, because James was upset. What could she tell him? He had made the blunder, so what did he expect? Marina thought for a few moments before coming up with something encouraging to say:

"I think if that had worked, it would have been really sweet," Marina said. "Maybe she even would have liked it."

James looked up so quickly she thought he might've given himself whiplash. "You think so?"

"Well," she said slowly, "I said 'maybe.' She also maybe would have been really upset anyway. It's not exactly the most practical thing to have your quill turn into a lily, you know. And," she continued, "you did mess up the spell, so it's not really important whether she would have liked it or not."

"I didn't mean to—"

Marina rolled her eyes as she interrupted him. "It doesn't matter what you meant right now. It matters what happened. Right now, she's upset because of what you did. It sounds like she's going to be upset about this for a while. You should definitely apologize to her at the very least."

"But what about after that? Or what if she won't even talk to me so I can say I'm sorry?"

With another sigh, Marina sat up. "If you really want my honest advice, I think you should leave her alone. Stop trying to impress her, stop trying to get her to like you, and stop trying to get her attention all the time." It was hard to keep going with James suddenly looking to hurt and betrayed, but she continued. "Apologize to her, and then give her space to get over it. And even after that, you should still give her space so she can get to know you on her own terms, if she wants to. You've made your attempt and your impression, so now it should be up to her, don't you think?"

James nodded, looking down at the table again. "I guess so." He looked up and smiled a small smile, but a smile nonetheless. "Thanks, Marina." With that, the boy pushed his glasses up his nose, took in a deep breath, which was different than sighing, better than sighing, and got up from the table to scamper off to wherever Gryffindor House was.

Marina got herself up from the table too. After looking around the library a bit to see if Levi had gone back to Ravenclaw Tower, which he seemed to have done since he was no longer anywhere that she could see, she decided that any other research was, for the time, a lost opportunity. She herself left the library and began the long trek up to her house's entrance on the fifth floor. It was annoying that she was interrupted, but it was even more annoying that the library didn't seem to have the resources to tell her what she wanted to know. Out of all the books on all the many shelves, it would make sense that somewhere, someplace was even one single book about the process of becoming an animagus. So why couldn't she find anything useful? Instead, all she was getting was theory about the transformation after someone already knew how to do it, or just mentions or definitions. Maybe she just wasn't being thorough enough. After all, she'd only been looking for one day.

"I say, aren't you going to dinner?"

Marina almost tripped on the next step as she stopped to look around. Her eyes landed on a small portrait of a gentleman wizard who was looking at her with a pipe raised aloft in his hand. He blinked at her.

"Should I be going to dinner?" she asked.

The wizard raised his eyebrows at her, took out a pocket watch, and squinted down at it, moving it forward and back to see it properly. "Well, I suppose so," he answered. "It's nearly six."

"Oh." Marina hadn't been aware of the time, but that was alright. She shrugged at the painted wizard and continued up the stairs. After she dropped her bag off in her dorm she would go back downstairs to eat. As it was, she was already closer to the fifth floor than the Great Hall.

Later, when Marina was tucking into a hot bowl of beef stew, Annie sat herself on the bench to her right and served herself a large helping of mashed potatoes. "I just watched Alfred Smith duel Jack Rivers very poorly over Etta Coldwater," Annie announced.

Marina, who was taking a drink at the time, almost spit her water out. "What?" she exclaimed, after she swallowed. "Who?"

Annie blinked. "Etta Coldwater and Jack Rivers, remember? Jack is in sixth year and was dating Etta Coldwater, who's in fifth year, since last year, but when Etta had the flu last semester Jack went to Hogsmeade with Tiffany Skew, that seventh year who always wears her silk dressing gown to breakfast on weekends, so when Etta found out she snogged Alfred in the common room to get back at Jack. I told you all this before Christmas holiday."

Marina nodded. "Yes, but Alfred dueled Jack Rivers?"

"Poorly, yes."

"Well, what happened?" Marina asked, forgetting her stew.

Annie shifted on the bench so she could face Marina without turning her head so much to the side. "Alfred was still upset that Etta couldn't give him any answer at all about their relationship, so instead of confronting Etta like any sane person, he confronted Jack. Jack Rivers got mad, and, you know, we're in third year and Jack is in sixth year, so he knows much more than Alfred does, thank Merlin, and he sent Alfred to the Hospital Wing in four minutes."

Marina rolled her eyes. "For all Alfred Smith claims he knows," she said, "he's really quite stupid."

"Dumb as a doornail," Annie agreed with a shrug.

—

As dumb as Marina and Annie personally thought Alfred was, that didn't seem to stop Etta from seeing Alfred's stunt as oddly endearing. As soon as Alfred was released by Madam Pomfrey, Etta was there to give Alfred a long, noisy, disgusting, public collection of kisses in the Ravenclaw common room, all the while showing Jack Rivers an obscene muggle gesture behind Alfred's back. For the next two weeks, every time the Ravenclaw third year girls entered their common room, they were attacked with the sickening sight of Alfred snogging Etta. It even got the the point where the boys in their year noticed it, too.

"Merlin, I hope Alfred and Etta are in the library or a broom closet or something," Irving said on Thursday as he, Evan, and Marina were walking up to Ravenclaw Tower after Ancient Runes. "I can't stand them."

"They're truly repulsive," Evan added.

Marina made a face in agreement. "I don't understand why they're still going at it," she said. "I mean, I get that Etta's doing it out of revenge, but why hasn't she stopped yet? And why on Earth is Alfred going along with it? Doesn't he know she couldn't care less about him?"

Irving snorted. "He's a bloke," he said. "He probably knows and doesn't care. Etta's fit enough that he shouldn't care, anyway."

Marina rolled her eyes. "That's so stupid," she said. "If I were him—and thank Merlin I'm not—I'd rather snog someone who I know actually liked me. I'll never understand boys," she said, shaking her head.

"And I'll never understand girls," Evan countered. "Out of all the blokes in the common room, why pick Alfred? He's awful to spend any time with. You've heard him go on and on about the daftest things to make himself sound smart."

For a moment, Marina frowned, thinking. Then she pushed her hair out of her face, trying to get it to stay behind her ears, and said, "Actually, I think Alfred was a very smart choice for what Etta wanted to accomplish. Her goal was to rub it in Jack's face that she was pissed off, and there are really two ways to do that, I suppose. Either snog the most attractive one in the room to say, 'Look, I'm better than you and can do better,' or snog the worst one in the room to say, 'Look, even this troll is better than you.' I suppose his obnoxiousness wouldn't be so much of an issue either because she's got his mouth occupied all the time anyway. What I can't understand is why she didn't leave it alone after she walked away from him before Christmas, and why she started it up again after Alfred antagonized Jack."

Both boys were quiet until Irving said, "Blimey, that's brilliant."

"Are all girls so clever about this stuff?" Evan asked.

"No, I don't think so," Marina answered. "It probably doesn't occur to some girls. It certainly wouldn't occur to me until after the fact."

As it happened, Alfred and Etta were, indeed, snogging in the common room. Disgusted, Evan, Irving, and Marina parted and just went to their respective dorms, not even bothering to cross the whole common room and instead taking the outer stairs. Marina hugged her arms and wished, as she always did when she circumvented the common room like this, that the stairway was warmer. She hurried her way to the third year girls' room before she started shivering. When she came into the dormitory, Lark was standing at the wall and updating the assignment lists for their shared classes, and Annie was sitting on her bed fiddling with a pot of magenta ink.

Lark glanced over at Marina. "Are Smith and Coldwater still in the common room?"

"Yep."

With a shudder, Lark screwed up her round face and stuck out her tongue. "I hope Temmie gets back without being traumatized," she said, going back to scratching her quill across the long parchment list against the stone wall.

Marina set her bag down on her trunk and slid off her shoes. "Artemis went down to the common room? What for?" Everyone had been avoiding it recently, especially the younger students, and except for the older students who could ignore the gross public affection.

"She went looking for something good to read from the shelves," Annie answered. "I think she had all her work finished, and you know she doesn't study."

Annie was referring, of course, to the long stretches of bookshelves in the common room, lining the study nooks and climbing up the walls so that you either needed a friend to cast a good Mobilicorpus or needed to summon a ladder. For generations, possibly as far back as the Founders themselves, Ravenclaws had been leaving books in the common room. Some may have been left deliberately, and some, Marina personally thought, may have been stashed and forgotten about. It was easy to find any school textbook you might've lost on the shelves, and it was just as easy to find leisure reading, most of it wizarding, plenty of it muggle. The only unspoken rule, as far as Marina understood, was that any book taken from the shelves had to be returned to the shelves. It wasn't quite as informative as the official Hogwarts library, of course, but it was quite respectable in its own way as a historical collection at the very least, if nothing else. Unfortunately, the only way to get to it was in the common room, which was an extremely risky location. Marina hoped Artemis would be alright.

The quietest of the Ravenclaw girls did return unscathed, and she had a pretty hefty muggle book with her to boot. At least her experience wasn't so bad, but, to be fair, Artemis hadn't been in the presence of Alfred and Etta for very long. It was a much worse torture the longer you had to look at them, as Marina found out the following week.

Valentine's Day was a holiday Marina had payed little to no attention to her previous two years at Hogwarts. Older students got mushier with their boyfriends and girlfriends and the Great Hall was temporarily decked out with paper garlands of pink and red hearts. It wasn't anything too odious. However, this year, the Ravenclaw third years were directly affected by Valentine's Day because of Alfred bloody Smith.

That evening after the four girls trudged back to Ravenclaw Tower from dinner—which did include the spectacle of every Slytherin student gradually growing pinker and pinker until the Slytherin table was a sea of hot pink students, followed by the appearance of heart-shaped bubbles spouting out of all their noses—Marina decided she should finally work on the star charts she had due for Astronomy later that week. For a while, she worked in the shared dorm without it bothering anyone, especially since Lark had fo finish hers, too. Once it got closer to ten, though, Annie announced that she wanted to get to sleep, just as Marina found the Divination assignment she was meant to have done for tomorrow's class.

"That's fine, as long as you don't make too much noise. You get annoyed with Divination and start flipping your textbook pages quite loudly, you know," Annie said, and said goodnight and closed her bed curtains.

Then Artemis went to sleep, then finally Lark asked to turn out the lamps in the room. With some reluctance, Marina gathered up her papers, books, and quills and retreated down to the common room, which was rarely deserted and whose lamps usually stayed on all night long. Ravenclaw housed many a night owl, many an early bird, and many a desperate student pulling yet another all-nighter, so it was normal to see students up and about the tower at all hours. Just as Marina expected, there was still a cluster of studying students seated near the fire. Just as she dreaded, Alfred was still awake with Etta.

Marina sighed as she ensconced herself in a study nook that offered the least view of the pair possible. Maia, who had followed her downstairs, settled at her feet, and Marina tried to make up something convincing enough to finish her assignment. She looked between what she had written and what was printed in her textbook and back again, she flipped the page to look at the chart of symbol meanings, she tapped the feathery end of her quill against the table, she shifted position in her seat, and she spent a good seven minutes staring at the label on her pot of black ink. The time dragged on, and the seconds ticked by, and Marina felt her eyelids begin to droop as she scrawled out a few sentences more. Then, in an effort to revive her focus, she looked up.

The pair was still there, by Merlin, and Marina quickly looked away to something less nauseating. Her olive eyes scanned the shelves, absently skimming the fading titles embossed and printed on the spines. For no particular reason, her gaze came to rest on a battered copy of their Transfiguration textbook for this year. At this point Marina was so tired of doing Divination, a class that she firmly believed was all a load of dragon dung for anyone who wasn't a proper Seer, that she would even rather be writing a theoretical essay for McGonagall on the mechanism of whatever the last spell they had learned was. She snorted lightly to herself; Merlin's pants, she'd even rather be practicing her transfiguring right then.

And then it hit her: why not kill two birds with one stone? If she went to the library to continue her animagus research, she could blow off Divination and get out of the common room all at once. Marina rose quickly, startling Maia awake, and started stashing her things in her school bag without much care for neatness or organization. Then she was crossing the common room and heading out of Ravenclaw Tower, with only one backward glance at the clock. It was just about one in the morning.

The only problem, really, was curfew, which had long since passed. Marina had heard from other students who wandered at night frequently that Filch was a formidable obstacle to a nice midnight walk. There were a few out-of-the-way passages Marina knew of that would conduct her to the library on the first floor, but it was likely that Filch knew of them too and would be checking them—or if not Filch, then his cat. Prefects, too, had rounds through the castle in the evenings after curfew, but it was possible that Marina was out of bed too late to run into any of them. In honesty, she didn't actually know how late the prefects stayed out in the castle, though she was sure they had to go to sleep at some point. And what if the paintings caught her? Some of the were quite nasty. With all this in mind, Marina decided her best bet might just be most usual daytime route, and therefore the least suspected by Filch; as long as she was quiet, she could probably get down to the first floor without waking any portraits. As for the prefects, well, she'd just hope that luck was on her side.

On tiptoes, Marina went as quickly and quietly as possible down the hall, around the corner, and approached the landing. She stuck her head out first, looking for anyone on the stairs and listening for the snores of a million painted wizards and witches. For only a moment she paused to breathe a sigh of relief that she had made it this far, and then she was off. Just in case, she crept down the stairs slowly, ready to duck below the stair bannister if she heard anyone coming. After five stories of this, her legs were tired from being bent and moving down the steps differently than she usually moved, but she had made it safely. There was no sign of Filch or Mrs. Norris's eery cat eyes, so it was so far so good. There were fewer portraits on the walls of the corridors that lead to the library, so Marina continued on at a normal walk.

The large doors into the library were shut, as always, but instead of yielding to a gentle push like they did during the day, they were locked at this hour. This was no real issue. Casting a furtive look around her to make absolutely certain no one was about, Marina flicked her wand, whispering, "Alohamora." With a soft click, the door unlocked, and it swung inward with only a gentle creak of its ancient hinges as Marina eased it open just enough to slip inside. "Colloportus," she said, and heard the door lock itself again.

After tucking her wand away again, Marina headed for the section of shelves dedicated to transfiguration-focused books, noting the ones she had already looked through and trying to guess which ones might tell her what she needed to know. She spent some time tugging various books off the shelves and skimming through their pages for any word of animagi, turning up just as much as she had the last time she looked; that is to say, she found a fat lot of nothing useful. When she heard the bell tower chime out three in the morning, Marina decided she had been out late enough and started walking back towards the library doors. It was frustrating that she hadn't found a single helpful thing, like last time, but the excitement of sneaking around the castle after curfew was wearing off and leaving her sleepy.

Her winding route through the aisles brought her past the restricted section of the library, and Marina lingered there, yet another idea suddenly growing in her head. No one was in the library to tell her not to, so maybe she could just have a quick peek...

The restricted section, which Marina had never had the occasion to peruse before, was like a breath of fresh air, a total relief. In two beats of a hippogriff's wings, the fourteen-year-old had found a very promising little book entitled The Humble Journey of a Seeker for the Art of Animagical Transfiguration of the Self, transcribed, translated, and transposed by Brutus the Younger, with no original author to be found anywhere on the cover, colophon, or title page. There were a few pages of introduction by this Brutus the Younger fellow, which Marina read through with an increasing bubble of excitement brewing in her chest. Yes, this was perfect—it would be a perfect guide to follow. Now the only thing left was to get back upstairs and get to bed.