Onwards, chap 1.3
At last, the school year was over. It was a pity really. Not that it was over, but that I was so glad it was. I used to love school, after a fashion, but I'd come to the realization that loving to learn and loving school were entirely different things. Sitting through class after class of dumbed-down material that I already knew forwards and backwards was nearly enough to make me pull my hair out. If not for the occasional time turner-induced jaunt between classes to blow off steam I might never have made it through the year.
'Year,' of course, I used only in the colloquial sense. During the course of two semesters I'd lived through at least fourteen months, perhaps more. My personal inclinations would have led to me spending even more time outside Hogwarts's boring confines but I'd chosen to moderate my use of the time turner and stay outside the rift following the dementor attack. The auror investigation and the attempts to resolve the ministry of all wrongdoing in loosing a pack of dementors on children had made it impossible to use the hourglass incautiously. But there was other reasons to limit its use, even after the aurors had departed and the teachers stopped eying the three of us with suspicion.
Circumstantially, at least, my extra-curricular activities had not gone unnoticed. My increased spellcasting abilities were easily disguised, but my age rather less so. Traveling backwards in time didn't make me any younger, and as a result I was starting to look suspiciously old for fourteen. The boys didn't mind. Ron's response to me looking like (and secretly being) closer to sixteen was "Damn girl, when did you get so hot?" He didn't have the guts to say it out loud, but I could tell he was thinking it.
Harry's more measured appreciation was actually far more flattering. He was even younger than Ron (and I'd had six months on Ron even before I started playing with time) but Harry struck me as being more mature, less flighty. He was steadfast against danger, had saved my life more than once with Ron only reluctantly at his side, and was surprisingly powerful for his age, though untrained. There was darkness in him too, but at times that seemed more alluring than worrying. Probably a feeling that I should squash. Mom had fallen for a bad boy too, but not all bad boys grew up to be dentists.
The girls had a different opinion of my fairly sudden maturation. Scoring better than them on every test was one thing, but looking better than them on top of that was just too much for them. Teasing had begun to turn childish pranks and even some of the fourth year girls had gotten in on it, wary of the way their boyfriends had started to look at me. Reluctantly I had to admit that my bust's stubbornly slow development was probably for the best. I had enough eyes on me already.
Hopefully everything would blow over during the course of the summer. Their memories of my younger self would fade, and it was expected that people grow up over the summer. As long as I didn't use the hourglass over the break it probably wouldn't be too hard to blend in. "Tch." I already knew that was one resolution I wouldn't be following. I'd probably cut back on vacations to Italy, and reaching the the rift atop the Astronomy tower would be too risky with the school closed, but there was one project that I was desperate to delve into over the break. Inspired by Sirius Black, I could be traveling through the Pyrenees on four legs rather than two next year.
Despite the illegality of becoming an animagus without full government supervision, the plan was practical as well as fun. After the near miss with a dementor's kiss I'd researched far and wide for defense against them after repeatedly failing to produce a patronus. Discovering that animagi in their animal form were resistant to dementors (as well as lycanthropy and most wizarding sicknesses) had made an already interesting subject jump to the top of my list.
My first two years in the wizarding world I'd assumed it was just like the muggle world but with magic, that the things that had happened at Hogwarts were an exception to a generally rational rule. This, it seemed, was quite far from the case. Not only was the wizarding world racist, inbred, poorly governed, and at a near-standstill technologically, the wizarding judicial system and prison in the UK was like something out of Dante's Inferno. The more I read of Askaban the more horrific and threatening it seemed. Apparently there was no such thing as community service or low-security prisons, just cells in Askaban that received varying amounts of attention from dementors. According to wizarding law you were either innocent of all charges (like Lucious Malfoy apparently) or guilty and sentenced to spent time with happiness-sucking, insanity-causing robed monsters, and many of those sentences were for life.
Considering the only slight chance I'd have of escaping a guilty sentence if my non-ministry approved time turner use was discovered would be to throw McGonagall under the bus, I hoped my animagus form was small enough to slip through prison bars.
End chap.
Alright, prologue's essentially done. On to chapter 2. Might be some typos, was watching John Oliver's show while writing. (It's a very good show.)