The Transfiguration Professor's office was on the same floor as the staffroom, so Harry didn't waste any time to get there. At first sight, it seemed to be empty. He looked around, taking in the Spartan decor, opposite of what Richardson had in his office. The walls were lined with bookshelves, but the books on them were all clearly well-used. The desk was orderly, and the chair behind it seemed more functional than comfortable. The only decoration was an aquarium on the window, which was currently empty. In fact, the only thing worth exploring seemed to be—
"No way," Harry said under his breath, examining the large trunk standing against the wall.
The lid opened to reveal spiral stairs going much lower than he expected. After a brief hesitation, Harry ventured into the darkness.
Instead of candles or sconces, incandescent bulbs on the ceiling turned on as soon as he stepped on the first stair, illuminating a cavernous room with bright white light. There were a bookshelf and a desk with parchment and a quill that was writing by itself at the bottom of the stairs, but most of the space was occupied by an enormous aquarium. Inside, down on the bottom that was much lower than the floor, a lone figure was hunched on a rock among the seaweed and fish shoals.
Harry came closer.
"Alexander? Alexander Rowle?" he shouted, unsure if he could be heard from outside.
The inhabitant of the aquarium raised his head and froze for a moment, then rushed to the glass separating them in a flurry of bubbles. He banged at it, but not a sound came over to the other side.
It was undoubtedly Alexander Rowle, but the boy looked very different from what Harry had seen in the Pensieve. His emaciated body was naked except for a crude loincloth made out of seaweed, his limbs elongated and partially covered with semi-transparent scales. His hands and feet were big and webbed, and there were gills visible behind his ears.
Rowle seemed to shout something, but Harry couldn't decipher anything except for a silent "Help".
"I can't hear you, I'm sorry," Harry said apologetically. "But I'll help you to get out of here."
Harry went to the desk and looked through the parchments. The quill was recording Rowle's vitals and other scientific data in medical jargon he couldn't even begin to understand. Other parchments didn't bring any more clarity either. He could probably understand one word out of three, and that's disregarding the Arithmantic formulas. With a sigh of frustration, Harry returned to the aquarium. The best option was to get the trunk out of Doge's office first, but he wasn't sure moving it would be safe.
There was a sound from the direction of the stairs, and Rowle looked behind Harry's shoulder with a fearful expression. Harry spun around and took out his wand.
"Tsk, tsk," Priscilla Doge said from above. "You know the saying, Thompson, that curiosity killed the cat? You had your chance to play the hero with our brute of a Defence Professor, and you should've stopped right there."
Harry ignored the taunt. "What are you doing with the boy? Why are you keeping him against his will?"
He wished Doge would step down from the stairs, but unfortunately, she seemed to be content to hold the higher ground.
"Transfiguration as a subject has been stagnant for nearly two hundred years," she said. "My colleagues have grown complacent and refuse to push the boundaries because of self-imposed restrictions, rules, ethics concerns. I've been doing something all of them are too scared to be doing, and my research will revolutionise human Transfiguration as we know it!"
"You're doing illegal human experimentation on a boy you've kidnapped."
"He is of age and gave me his consent."
From the corner of his eyes, Harry could see Rowle shaking his head frantically and banging on the glass again. He seemed to be able to hear them even if they couldn't hear anything from inside the aquarium.
"Well, maybe he got cold feet at the latest stage," Doge conceded. "But he used to be perfectly happy to do it, and I paid him exceedingly well. But I needed to observe long-term results, to verify that my new spells are truly permanent. I even offered him a three-year contract. At that stage, I couldn't waste my time to search for another study subject and begin everything anew. The boy proved to be obstinate, so I had to do what's best in the name of science," she explained like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
What was it with Hogwarts and criminally insane teachers?
"Was it you who got Rowle's trunk from his dormitory?" Harry asked in an attempt to buy some time.
"If you are proficient in Transfiguration, you never need to bother with unreliable potions," Doge said smugly. "But enough of this chit-chat. I have a class to teach in ten minutes." She took out her wand.
Before she could do anything, Harry raised his own in one swift gesture and fired a stunner. Unfortunately, Doge ducked behind the solid wood railing of the staircase, and the spell hit the wall. The room shook dangerously.
"You are proving to be a bother, Thompson," she said angrily. "I was going to offer you the same opportunity as Mr. Rowle, but clearly you are in dire need of a lesson."
She waved her wand in a corkscrew gesture. Harry raised a shield, but no spell hit it. Instead, a part of the floor in front of the aquarium he was standing on vanished, and he found himself toppling into the water under his feet. While he was flailing, piercing pain scalded his neck, going up behind his ears. Ignoring the knife-like sensation, he gasped for air one final time before the water came up his neck, but it brought him no relief. Suffocating, he felt the walls of the trunk closing up on him.
"Don't fight it, Thompson. You are only making it worse. You have gills now, so you'd better use them if you want to breathe."
On the edge of consciousness, Harry dove under and took a lungful of water. Instead of making him drown, as he fully expected, the breath filled his body with much-needed oxygen. While he was trying to orient himself, some invisible force propelled him backwards and up until he was at eye level with Doge on the other side of the glass. His eyes stung and his vision was blurry; apparently, his contact lenses were not suitable for underwater use. Harry took them out and the irritation stopped, but Doge remained a vaguely human shape on the stairs.
"Behold my perfect creations, Professor Thompson. Or don't, if the way you're squinting at me is any indication. If you manage to survive the encounter, we'll figure something out. I'll leave you your wand to even out the chances. But remember that you are in a glass tank."
Harry heard rather than saw Doge leaving the trunk. Turning around, he found himself facing a group of fish of different sizes, shapes and colours. Most of them with disturbingly large teeth.
"Fuck," he said. The words left his mouth with a stream of air bubbles, distorted, but intelligible.
The first fish—a glossy black one that looked like a cross between a catfish and a piranha—attacked. Harry dodged and fired a quick succession of spells at it.
"Impedimenta! Stupefy! Diffindo!"
The spells just bounced from the scales without stopping the fish even for a second.
"Sectumsempra!" This time, a gash appeared at its side, painting the water red. The fish stopped in its tracks for a moment, before charging at Harry again, the gash already healing.
"Sectumsempra! Sectumsempra! Sectumsempra!" Harry slashed his wand, aiming at the belly. The fish flopped around in the cloud of blood before tanking down to the bottom. Harry's relief, however, was short-lived. When his vision cleared a bit, at least four other fish had taken its place.
He felt a tug on his sleeve.
"Come on!" Rowle took Harry by the hand and steered him further into the aquarium. "You need to get rid of your robes and shoes, they just weigh you down!"
It was true; while Rowle was swimming fast, his body swift and agile, Harry's poncho felt like a dead weight hindering his every move. Still, he was reluctant to just take it off. He knew there was some use for it yet.
They arrived at a big coral reef and swam behind it. Squinting, Harry could just make out his surroundings. There were colourful anemones, algae and weird polyps reaching their semi-transparent fingers to him. Shoals of small fish flitted around the reef, thankfully paying Harry no mind. A couple of fish skeletons and an assortment of weeds were scattered around, and a crude spear made out of fishbones was leant against the pile of greenish-grey boulders.
"This is the most privacy I can get here," Rowle explained. "And when she runs her experiments, not even that. Anyway, the fish are coming, so get ready. I don't know what that spell you used was, but she bragged about them being indestructible."
"We'll see about that," Harry said, rummaging through his pocket. Taking out a red gel pen, he uncapped it, snapped it in two, and threw it over the rocks.
The loud boom rumbled across the aquarium, followed by the shaking of the bottom under their feet and rattling of the glass. Some rocks rolled away from the pile.
"Wow. Are they dead?" Rowle asked, peeking out with wide eyes.
"Probably just stunned. We'd better get out of here soon because I only had one of those," Harry said, taking off his trainers. "Expecto Patronum!" A ghostly stag appeared, undisturbed by the water around him. "Go to Severus and tell him that I found Rowle. Doge is responsible. We are stuck in the aquarium inside the trunk in her office."
The stag nodded, galloped to the glass and dissolved into silver vapour.
"What the—" Harry raised the wand to try again.
"Don't bother with a Patronus, Doge put up a ward against it after I managed to produce it wandlessly."
"That's impressive."
Rowle shrugged dismissively. "A fat load of good that did me."
Harry took out his powder box from his pocket and opened it under Rowle's incredulous gaze. Rowle caught the sponge that was trying to float away and poked a finger in the mushy powder in disgust.
"Do you really think it's time to powder your nose? We're underwater!"
"I always find time to look fabulous," Harry said, throwing his hair back in his best Lockhart impression. Being underwater, he didn't really succeed.
"Right." Rowle looked at the halo of wild hair around Harry's head, at his poncho floating around him like a giant stingray, and then at his discarded trainers that had seen better times.
"Severus!" Harry called at the mirror, ignoring Rowle.
The mirror remained silent. Harry remembered that Severus had a lesson right now, so he decided to call Pansy next.
"Potter? I have a meeting with Mrs. Featherwright, so you'd better... Circe's tits, Harry, are you underwater?" Pansy's voice was muffled but intelligible.
"Yeah, Transfiguration Professor turned out to be a crazy psycho who kidnapped Rowle and now me for experiments. We are in an aquarium along with some killer fish. It's inside the trunk in her office."
"What? I can't hear a thing you are saying. Are you at Hogwarts now?"
Harry nodded frantically.
"Is it the Black Lake?"
Harry shook his head. He tried to articulate "Transfiguration", but doubted he succeeded because of all the water around him. Pantomime has never been one of his party tricks.
"How do you always find yourself in so much trouble? I'm coming to Hogwarts." With that, Pansy cut the connection.
Rowle looked at Harry in surprise, eyes flicking to his forehead where the makeup was probably washed away already.
"Doge called you Professor Thompson, but this woman—"
"Yes, yes, I'm actually Harry Potter," Harry said tiredly. "Though Doge doesn't know that. I'm at Hogwarts undercover as a Divination Professor."
"Oh." Rowle gave Harry a once over again, this time with understanding on his face. "Why did you need to go undercover?"
"Your friend's grandfather hired me to find you."
"Really?" The boy asked in disbelief, but a hopeful expression flitted across his face for the first time. "I didn't think anyone would bother. Doge said they all swallowed her story about me running away. She was expecting at least some effort to find me, and then gloated that everybody was happy to see me go. I understand why Doge chose me, you know. Nobody here would miss me. Maybe Ed, but he has his girlfriend now," he said bitterly.
"It's not true, and you shouldn't listen to that vile woman," Harry said softly. "Both Edgar and Emma are very worried about you and haven't bought that you just ran away without telling anybody even for a minute. You mother is very worried as well. Tell you what, even Mr. Talbott feels sorry."
Rowle looked at Harry with open scepticism at the last name. "Next you'll be telling me that Richardson's rescuing puppies in his spare time."
"Well, no, but you'll probably be pleased to hear that he was fired yesterday."
"Really?" Rowle's eyes widened in surprise.
They sat behind the reef for twenty or so minutes, Harry trying all the spells he could think of that wouldn't do any irreparable damage, and Rowle sharpening his spear. Suddenly, there was a muffled sound behind the rocks.
Harry looked out and saw the fish coming to life. He squinted, but without his lenses or glasses, they looked like moving blurred shapes at this distance. He tried to create a cage around them, but it disintegrated in mere seconds.
"Only she can conjure and transfigure things in here," Rowle explained grimly.
The light outside the aquarium went on again, and Harry turned around to see a vague black shape hurrying down the stairs.
"Look out, Mr. Potter!" Rowle shouted, bringing Harry's attention back to the murderous fish.
Harry spun around and fired the Entrail-Expelling curse with as much power behind it as he could muster. The huge lionfish with white and orange stripes and stingers that was about to attack him exploded in a cloud of something Harry would most definitely find disgusting if he could actually see it properly. From the corner of his eye, he saw the figure approach the pool of water in front of the glass where the floor used to be. They probed the air with their hand and then wand, but there seemed to be some sort of magic barrier erected.
"Bring her down!" Harry heard Severus's voice. He couldn't help his heart fluttering madly. Another figure floated rather than came down the stairs and landed with a heavy thud.
Harry turned away from the scene to fight three fish swimming at him. Two were flat and black and white. Their spines and fins looked extremely sharp. The third one was long and had a fluorescent head and barbells. Harry wasn't sure, but he had an uneasy feeling that parts of its scales were missing. He hoped they were simply transparent.
While he was fighting the fish, Severus revived the person on the floor.
"Ennervate! How to dismantle the wards here?"
The only answer was a burst of female laughter.
"Imperio! Answer the question!"
"Unforgivables, really, Severus? Aren't you supposed to be redeemed and all toothless now?" Harry recognised Doge's voice. "My will is stronger than yours. No human would cross that line except for me!"
"No human, you say? We'll see about that," There was Pansy's voice from the stairs.
She marched to the pool and discarded her robe and boots. The next second, a large shark was diving inside and swimming under the glass to the main aquarium.
The shark joined Harry who by now had five new murderous fish to deal with and charged at them.
"Be careful!" Harry shouted, angling his curses away from the shark.
The only response he got was a snap of the huge sharp teeth.
"Well, at least try not to eat them. I bet they'd mess up your stomach worse than those prawn cocktail crisps we ate last month!"
The fight, if it could be called that, was quick and messy. Doge did her best to make the fish spell-resistant but thankfully didn't think to protect them from the steel-like jaws of a fellow aquatic creature. Harry winced at some especially disgusting sounds followed by anguished cries from the other side of the glass. They stopped abruptly even before everything was over with a stunner from Severus.
Finally, Pansy turned back into a human, whipped her wand and cast a Bubble-Head Charm. The ease with which she did it looked really impressive, although Harry knew that she practised the move for three days straight when they were tracking Celestina Warbeck's glamour expert on Ibiza. She had pissed off the entire local mermish community and learned the hard way that attempting to eat a grindylow was a bad idea, but now she could do the underwater transformation on reflex.
"It just wouldn't be Hogwarts without some insane murder plot to get you," she said, inspecting his gills critically. Her voice was all businesslike, but Harry saw worry flickering in her eyes. "And take off your po—robes, for Merlin sake! There's such thing as taking dedication to the job too far."
Harry sheepishly disentangled himself from the poncho. Pansy turned to Rowle who was watching her with an awed expression and ran a number of spells on him.
"We can probably sort you out soon enough, Potter, but this here will take longer. Thankfully, Doge seems like the type to keep records."
She turned back into a shark just as somebody else appeared on the stairs. Harry recognized McGonagall's Scottish brogue.
"Priscilla? Severus? Mr. Talbott gave me some tall tale—Merlin!"
Pansy jumped out of the water and transformed back on the other side of the barrier.
"Ms. Parkinson!" McGonagall exclaimed. "What is the meaning of this? Are you somehow involved in… whatever this is?"
"How typical," Pansy scoffed, her voice dripping with disdain. "Here I am, saving Harry Potter's life, for everybody just to jump to the worst conclusions they could possibly come up with."
"Harry Potter?" McGonagall repeated blankly.
Harry waved his hand from behind his glass. He really wished he could see her face right now.
Two hours and Bill Weasley's visit later, Harry was finally out of the aquarium. Bill managed to break Doge's wards rather quickly, but her Transfiguration spells on Harry proved to be more difficult. Fortunately, she did keep meticulous records, so Pansy, Severus and McGonagall found the spells they needed in her logs soon after. McGonagall wanted to perform the counter herself, but after the ensuing argument, she conceded that Pansy was proficient enough to do that. Finding the right counterspells for Rowle would require much more work, and half of them would have to be developed from scratch.
As soon as Harry emerged from the water, Pansy and McGonagall returned to Doge's notes, deep in a discussion he couldn't even hope to understand. Instead, he took a couple of careful steps to Severus, squinting myopically. Severus raised his wand, making Harry stop in his tracks, but the other man simply dried his clothes and directed him towards the spiral stairs, following closely behind.
"You are an idiot, Potter." Severus sighed tiredly when they came out of the trunk. "What made you think that climbing into this thing without warning anybody was a good idea?"
"I thought I had some time before her return." Harry shrugged uncomfortably. "And I certainly didn't expect… that. How did you find me?"
"Talbott barged into my classroom. Apparently, Doge touched him in the hospital wing and he had a vision about her with you and Rowle in this aquarium. Considering that the boy still had his tiger head and paws at the time, it was a rather difficult message to communicate."
"But you still got it." Harry smiled. Summoning up his courage, he blurted, "I'm sorry I deceived you, Severus. I wanted to tell you, but I knew that as soon as I did, you would act differently, and I… I really like you, you know," he finished lamely, taking another step forward to see Severus's face better.
"You are an idiot," Severus repeated but didn't step back.
Harry took that as encouragement as he swayed forward to touch Severus's lips with his own. At first, Severus was unresponsive, but then his lips opened, returning the kiss. Growing bolder, Harry put his hands on Severus's chest. His head swam, but whether it was an after-effect of being underwater or breathing in Severus's aftershave, Harry didn't know or care.
There was a gasp behind them, and Severus broke the kiss, quickly stepping away. McGonagall climbed out of the trunk, levitating a big pile of parchments in front of her. She cleared her throat.
"I… have a lot of matters to address, so I'm going to my office for now. Miss Parkinson generously agreed to stay and help research the spells Priscilla used on Mr. Rowle and the counters to them. See you at the staff meeting today, gentlemen." After a pause, she added, "And we'll definitely be having a conversation after I deal with the most pressing issues, Mr. Potter. You can be sure of that." With that, she left the office, muttering something about one surprise too many under her breath.