Summary: SSHG, AU, Hermione was always a survivalist. They all thought her a mere Muggle. Unwise to the ways of the Wizarding World, Hermione's family has always been exceptional. They may not have been "magical" in the usual sense, but they gave their daughter the ultimate gift in surviving whatever may come her way.
Beta Love: Dragon and the Rose, Dutchgirl01
A/N: Peter was always a horrible representation of the rat.
Survivalists
Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.
Elizabeth Bowen
My mum always told me to keep my nose clean as well as my teeth—well, she meant the rest of me too—and I always did my best to live up to her expectations.
Keep my nose clean right down to my tail tip.
Never forget to wash.
Brush my teeth, especially after a meal.
Keep my nest clean. No one likes to find fleas in their sleeping space.
Ew.
Share your food because you never know when it'll be your turn to be hungry.
Always keep your whiskers out of trouble and your head safely down.
Head first, tail last. (Don't go rushing into things, Hermione, gosh.)
Pay attention to your brain first, your stomach second.
Stay away from werewolves. They're rude, and they reek of wet dog. (They also lose their ever-loving minds during moon nights, which takes all the fun out of lycanthropy if you ask me.)
The basics, pretty much. There were a number of other things like "don't go out in public naked no matter how hot it is" and other sage bits of advice, but I'd imagine most parents have to teach their sprogs some form of common sense.
My parents were no different there.
When I got my letter from Hogwarts, they were pleased, as you could possibly imagine. I wasn't just their daughter; I was their magical daughter!
Sure, they were dentists of the highest calibre. Members of our rather large East London pack (and contrary to popular belief, packs are not just for dogs and wolves) had the cleanest teeth in London. There were members of our pack in all tiers of society, some even in the royal court, and what was one magical, wand-waving pup compared to THAT?
Still, mum and dad were immensely pleased to have such a talented daughter, and they were also mighty smug when they had to explain to Uncle Charles that their daughter hadn't squeezed UNDER the door. She'd just opened it with some intense concentration and a little bit of tail mojo.
Tail mojo? Really, dad?
My father. Dentist. High society. Talks like your normal, everyday bloke on the street. Dressed like a spy, and by spy I mean that he never failed to fit in everywhere. He never liked tuxedos, he didn't fancy martinis, and he didn't run around chasing skirts like 007.
Thank the gods for that. Mum would bloody well neuter him with her teeth.
Dad always knew where the teeth were in our family. I'd apparently taken after mum and had to learn that dad wasn't all that keen on being greeted like a living chew toy.
He loved me, though.
He gave me a wide variety of flavoured dental chews on every Christmas and birthday. Now that was love.
It kept me from murdering poor, innocent, hapless pencils.
Win.
Overall, being magical hadn't changed all that much in my life other than giving me even more ways to get my tail into, erm, out of trouble. Out of. Yes. Definitely out.
It was highly needed, to be fair. I lived in a castle with loads of cats and owls, and while I could, technically, shift into my much larger and more lethal form—that form did not help me to squeeze under doors on the third floor and slip below a Devil's Snare with a codependency problem.
It did, however, give me a dog.
I'd never managed to find myself a suitable familiar at the Magical Menagerie thanks to, well—cats and owls—but apparently, three-headed dogs were a-okay.
He thought so, anyway.
Hagrid was a miserable sobbing wreck that "Fluffy" would follow me around like I had the very last biscuit, and it was just for him, and he'd ignore all music if he thought I was going off on an adventure without him.
All it took was one swift swat to the nose with my claws. Triple swat, that is, one for each growling head.
Anyway, we were best mates now. Three out of three heads agreed. I named him Lord of the Hundreds after the cheese he stole from my dad—
Lord for short.
It made for when people said "Good, Lord!" an entirely new and amusing turn of phrase.
I could also smell the deeply buried truffles beneath the ground—and Lord would happily help me dig them up. He loved to dig. Just point to a place, and he'd dig a hole all the way to the Earth's mantle. The last giant hole had become a protected den for a previously believed to be extinct species of Scottish burrow-stealing dragon, and once again, Amelia Bones, the Head Boss of Me and Everyone Else that Mattered as far as I knew, had to fill out more paperwork.
She got a share of the truffles, which apparently led to the much-needed purchase of supplies for the Department of Mysteries Unspeakables' field teams for the next few years. And some really mean truffle butter.
So, she was complaining but not REALLY complaining.
I had so many notches on my ear (literal notches) that marked me as DoM to those that knew what they were looking for. Others just thought I'd pierced my ears. My ears had been a little shady from the start from getting into a scuffle with John as a pup. He'd been the pack's bully, and he'd tried to shred my ears to teach me humility until the day I sank my teeth deep into his bollocks.
They tell me that the boy walks with a limp to this day—probably won't be fathering any pups in this lifetime. No doe in her right mind was ever going to willingly mate with a mangle-balled buck with a history of unresolved anger issues. Our species doesn't breed and have pups as frequently as our namesake (thank the gods), so our pairings must be carefully considered. The buck could strut and beat up their competition until they were ragged and torn, but the balls were in the doe's court.
Ahem.
Our pack leader, a silver-haired gentleman named Templeton, had gifted me with the name "Snapdragon" to commemorate my immortality in the pack. Long live the queen. How embarrassing.
Now, a mural of myself in tag art adorns a tunnel in London with a great gout of dragon flame bursting from my mouth and white-hot lasers shooting out of my tail—
At least only the pack knows it's supposed to be ME. Everyone else just thinks "oh, what a strange piece of graffiti."
Madam Bones said that is how she came to know of me before I knew of her. Apparently, she pays attention to random acts of street art. Who knew?
"Towering monster rats breathing fire and shooting laser beams out of their tail? Of course, I was paying attention to that," Amelia had said with a scoff.
I figured it was like all those newspapers that can't ever be relied upon to tell the truth even if it bit them on the face—
Still, it got my tail in the door, so to speak, into an exciting new life of intrigue, magic, and future employment. My parents were positively ecstatic!
I wasn't precisely unaffected by it, mind you. I had the promise of all the books I could ever wish to read, the opportunity to keep learning until the day I died, the possibility of multiple apprenticeships—
My tail was wagging in delight just thinking of it, and yes, before you ask, our tails do wag. It's embarrassing, but it's true.
What were a few holes in my ear for the promise of a lifetime of learning? Yes, please. Thank you, please, and hooray!
So, my mission, at least the latest one other than the most current one of getting that tasty snack from the top shelf of the kitchen pantry (it smelled delicious!), was to find the spy that was somehow getting information in and out of Hogwarts to Death Eater sympathisers.
Somehow, a few old followers of a bloke who had managed to off himself while trying to kill a baby, were getting restless out there in the Wizarding World. Information was getting passed from inside Hogwarts to those on the outside—but no one knew precisely how.
Now, my vision isn't all that great compared to certain others in the animal kingdom. I was not a hawk, after all, and sometimes I had to move my head back and forth to get a bead on what I was seeing. It was almost as if the images had to reload in my brain and form a better image. This required strategic placement of myself to the thing I wanted to get a visual on—like that biscuit tin.
My nose, however, was top-notch.
I knew, for example, that the biscuits hidden away in that tin had peppermint bits in them, and that made them incredibly desirable. One, I'd had liver for supper, and Lord kept trying to crawl down my throat for it, and two—peppermint shortbread fingers made everything better.
Pillaged peppermint shortbread fingers, well, even doubly so.
Something about the chase and the acquisition added a bit of extra-special flavour, I swear.
There was a rustle and a squeak from nearby, and my head snapped around quickly. My whiskers twitched, and my tail went straight out like a lightning rod.
Interloper!
Now, my parents always taught me to share, but there are certain rules to this. First, you have to be introduced appropriately. Noses first, bums second. You could tell a lot by a rat by how clean their nose was and if they kept their rump clean.
This particular interloper was covered in greasy crisp crumbs and cheese powder. He, and his male musk was definitely male under that cheese, definitely didn't wash downstairs like a proper rat.
Ew, how disgusting!
Now, male rats in the natural animal kingdom tend to be bigger than females, but amongst my particular species, it's whoever didn't miss their meals—at least as far as the rat form went. Human forms, well, they were just as genetically imprinted as humans that couldn't shift.
I was a relatively short human female witch. But I was an unholy terror as a rat. I'm pretty sure that if someone saw me on a darkened street, they'd think me to be someone's dog in my rat form. Hey, there was a reason my magic helped me with doors—there was only so much spinal flattening a rodent could do! (The entire rumour that rodents somehow have collapsible spines is a myth, by the way—I can tell you that while my body is indeed pretty flexible, I am not made of plastic rubber, and I cannot elongate myself like Plastic Man—as fun as that might be, but I digress.) Basically, if my whiskers told me that I could fit in a space, I could fit in a space, and I was not rotund like Mr Copenhagen, who got himself stuck in a drainpipe while trying to escape a cat.
How embarrassing!
Irritated that my night's snack raid had been interrupted by a rather manky-looking male interloper, I reminded myself that I was not starving. My survival did not depend upon that peppermint shortbread biscuit, even if my breath disagreed. It was best not to be seen by some strange rat.
My lips pulled back sharply from my teeth.
My ears told me someone was coming, and that was my cue to vanish back into the darkness.
"I'm telling you, that stupid little bint is always getting us into trouble, Harry!" a familiar voice yelled.
"Be quiet, Ron! Do you want everyone to hear us rustling around in the dark?"
"I bet she murdered Scabbers!"
"Pull the other one, mate," I heard Harry's annoyed voice say. "You blame her for everything from your socks being missing to your own familiar disappearing. How is any of that her fault?"
"It just IS!" Ron hissed.
My whiskers twitched.
I'd stopped helping Ronald and Harry so much after our little "fun dip" in the pit of the Devil's Snare. I'd really stopped helping them after being petrified trying to keep them from doing something even more stupid—
There is just something about being petrified by a thousand-year-old monstrous serpent that just screams hard stop.
Literally.
Besides, there are only so many times you can be saved by Healer Manfred Morgan's healing breath before you start taking on a few disturbingly not-rat characteristics and start to look a little bit too much like your graffiti mural in the London tunnel system.
My parents, as always, thought it was great. Survivability was the theme song for a wererat. The more ways you could survive, the better (see: wicked) you were.
Parents. They were either proud of everything you did or else they treated you like a freak. There was rarely indifferent ground. There were a lot of fosterlings in the DoM that proved that one.
I used to think that a magical world would surely accept what I was so much more than the human world—
The answer to that was a rather harsh no. Turns out, outside of the DoM, magicals were just as horrible about people who stood out as anywhere else. They used their wands to fling spells at you to help you understand just how adamantly they believed it.
Thankfully, Amelia had found me as a young pup and got me fast-tracked to the magical world 101, 102, and 460, so Hogwarts wasn't the big shock it was to so many others. I could only imagine what kind of trouble I would have gotten into had she not found me so early.
Big trouble.
Do you have any idea how many roasted chestnuts I could've squirrelled away in so many random places before I would've been caught?
If I'd been caught?
Don't answer that. It would've been a lot. Let's just leave it there and cover that up with the rug. And a wardrobe. And um, perhaps a stone slab.
Young wererats are notorious hoarders. It's like— we have Niffler genes, only shiny equals food to us. Mum and dad may not come home. We must be prepared.
I was—
A very prepared sort of young pup. Just in case, you know, the end of the world came tomorrow or—after lunch.
Oddly, watching people like Ronald Weasley wolf all that food in one sitting made me violently compelled to hide the entire bread hamper full of bread somewhere for later. Otherwise he might—you know-eat that too, and maybe, I dunno—move on to my food on my plate.
I'd die first—
But—turning into a giant bipedal wererat and slashing him to bits in an impulsive food-guarding rage would probably go about as well as you might guess.
Manners, Hermione. My mum would insist that I be a civilised pup no matter where I groomed my tail. There might be some shady packs out there that were run like a gang of heathens, but I had a reputation to uphold—even if that reputation was as Snapdragon, terror of bollocks everywhere.
Sigh.
The manky rat below me was deep in a packet of crisps, and crunching away so loudly that every owl and cat in the castle probably knew exactly where Pudgy was.
For a rat, he was awfully unconcerned about predators. That was the kind of thing that could get a rat into trouble out there. Sure, you might be able to turn into a giant rat-creature, but if something broke your bloody neck before you could, you were still quite dead.
The only reason I was slightly less concerned out there was Lord. My big old brute of a bodyguard had three sets of ears and eyes along with fangs and claws to mutilate random interlopers with. He didn't really like the idea of me kicking the bucket, even if he had to sit on me to keep me from finding trouble with my whiskers.
Speaking of—
Oh, dear.
Pudgy was trying to run away from Lord—only his body was still stuck inside the crisp packet wrapper.
You could take a Cerberus from Greece, but you couldn't take the instinctive need to guard away from him.
Apparently, Lord had gotten a bit impatient waiting for me to come back and had come there to find me.
Oops?
The rat let out a terrified squeak as Lord's teeth clamped on a rear leg, and the animal wrenched his foot out from the dog's teeth and limp-scurried away, a trail of blood marking his close brush with death.
Lord licked his teeth, giving a low, thunderous growl in triplicate. Then, one head reached over and—
OHGODSDEATH!
He took me carefully into his mouth and carried me back to bed.
Okay, so—bedtime.
Sure.
I couldn't help but stare wistfully in the direction of the heavenly smelling peppermint shortbread biscuits.
Later, sweet deliciousness.
I will return.
Harry stared at Ron as he tried to wrap his rat's leg with a bandage and managed to turn the rodent into a disgruntled looking rat-mummy.
"I don't think that's the way that's supposed to work, Ron," Harry said rather doubtfully.
"I think he got caught in a trap or something," Ron snapped. "Hermione probably set it. She uses those weird Muggle things."
"It's a trap, Ron, and Hermione did not set a trap for Scabbers," Harry said, his face scrunching in annoyance. "He had cheese powder all over him, mate. He probably got caught raiding the kitchen or something."
Professor Lupin walked by to the Head Table, pale and shaky-looking as if he hadn't slept well in weeks.
"He looks like hell," Ron whispered with a frown.
Harry shook his head. "He's been teaching me loads of cool stuff and telling me all about my parents," he said.
"Dosen 'splain why 'e ooks li' th' Ni Bus ran 'im o'er las ni'," Ron garbled as he stuffed his face with eggs and bangers.
Harry scowled and poked at his plate. "Can you at least not talk with your mouth full?"
"Wut?" Ron said, bits of egg spilling from his mouth.
Harry turned in disgust and looked the other way.
Dementors were—strange.
More than just the floating-in-the-air creepy hovering kind of strange. They had that, admittedly, but there was something eerie about the way they were always floating about outside Hogwarts.
They weren't "allowed" within Hogwarts' walls, but not very many people felt much like taking a nice walk around the green when a flock of hovering Christmas Futures were out there just waiting to take your soul.
The books I had read about them said they were irredeemably Dark creatures that fed upon your happiness, but they also bestowed the Kiss to those who had committed the most heinous of crimes.
Well, Lord wasn't going to walk himself—well, actually he could, but no one really wanted that. The headmaster had seemed rather perturbed that Hagrid's dog wasn't going to simply disappear—though I'm not sure where exactly you would stuff a Grecian Cerberus to make it just "go away" at the end of the year. I doubt the centaur would particularly appreciate someone just dumping the dog off in the forest like some person wastes a bag of unwanted kittens out in the country.
Though, a litter of giant three-headed kittens might cause anyone some pause at that line of thought—
It certainly would give me pause.
Thankfully, there were no giant three-headed cat monsters out there looking to enjoy a tasty wererat dinner, and I was very glad of that. The nice thing about having permission to run out on the green with Lord was that there was no curfew restriction. Who was going to tell Lord that he had to hold it and couldn't piss until morning?
Not me, most assuredly.
It was nice enough that he at least told me he had to go, and didn't just take a convenient leak on my bookshelf.
I liked to ride on his back while he ran across the green, and Lord seemed to really enjoy feeling the wind in his fur. He seemed to respond to my seat and leg like a well-trained horse, and I thanked my parents for those dressage lessons I used to think were a "pretty strange thing for a rat to be doing."
Honestly, I should have had more faith in my parents. They were dentists, after all. No one suspected their favourite dentist of being a wererat. The local butcher. The teacher—
Obviously, we were all very talented creatures from all walks of life. Becoming a Cerberus jockey, however—I doubt my parents had planned precisely for that one.
Who could plan for that, really?
Lord skid to a halt next to the side of the lake and woofed. One head gave me a slurp, as the other begged for pets. The middle head seemed to stare off into the distance.
One of the Dementors hovered over the lake, its aura of frigid cold causing freezing hoarfrost to spread below and outward.
It floated closer, and I had to fight the instinctive need to either flee, sprout my thick warm furry pelt, or both.
My mum and dad would tell me to give everything a chance. You never know what the other person's story is. They didn't advocate throwing myself off a bridge just to see what it was like, but when it came to giving people a fair shake—they were pretty adamant about that.
Now, I always tried to listen to my parents' wisdom. They had a lot of rat smarts, and rat smarts were survival smarts. Blend in. Pay attention to your whiskers and what they are telling you. Don't leave your tail somewhere it could get stepped on. Hide your food from hungry corvids—about the only thing out there that was as motivated as we were about food hoarding, and they liked a lot of the same things we did. Don't leave food between your teeth. Floss.
You know, the practical stuff. Rules for life.
This was a Dementor, though. Were they even people?
That was a really dumb train of thought, Hermione. You're not exactly a "people", either. Where are those manners, hrm?
"Hullo," I said as the Dementor floated over.
The Dementor's hoarfrost made my whiskers tingle, and I wasn't even sporting any at that very moment. My hair sort of froze in place, perhaps the first time it wasn't trying to strangle the life out of some random bystander or myself. We all have our problems—my hair and I were definitely a problem.
That entire rat's nest analogy? My nest was perfectly in order, thank you VERY much. My hair? Heh, not so much.
The Dementor extended a gnarled hand toward me, and I held very, very still. It wasn't as if I expected the thing to pull out a scythe and reap me, but no one wrote much about Dementors over them doom, DOOM, GLOOM, and well—doom.
There wasn't much else to go on.
Fingers brushed against my temple, moving my frozen hair out of the way. I felt a slight tingle—like someone was rubbing my ears only it was not in the way that tried to create static so I'd zap myself. Ask me how I know.
It was pleasant.
I felt—curiosity. Concern. Annoyance, but— not at me. That was a relief. I wasn't sure how you went about annoying a Dementor, but I wanted to be off that grudge list, thank you.
It was—searching for something.
Some—one.
Hrm, I knew the feeling. I was searching for someone too—
The Dementor seemed to know what he was searching for, unlike me. I had a rather open-ended "find the person who is leaking information to the outside" blanket coverage. The Dementor had a particular person in mind.
As the tingle went across my grey matter, I caught an image of a shaggy, black-haired man that looked in great need of personal hygiene. Even rats kept better care of themselves than this guy—and you could find us everywhere. No excuses not to floss.
That must be the infamous Sirius Black— the supposed murderer that escaped Azkaban.
The Dementor didn't seem all that focused on the murderer part—it remembered the particular "taste" of his soul memories. Apparently, there was a unique sort of flavour to memories for Dementors, and I wasn't about to judge.
Oh—
So that's why Dementors liked certain memories.
Pain really was close to pleasure when it came to the seasoning of one's memories for a Dementor. Sirius Black was apparently a very naughty boy, whoever he was. Whether he was guilty of whatever crime that had put him in Azkaban was immaterial. His soul suffered, either by some action or deed (or multiple) or some greater sin that seasoned his life with guilt. Apparently, denial only made it taste even better.
That made Dementors, this particular one, mighty keen on having a good nosh. I could relate. I was still bitter about having been denied that delectable peppermint shortbread—
We all have our obsessive-compulsive foci—
The Dementor pulled out something from its robes, and I—
Oh, Merlin! Was that—
It was!
Peppermint shortbread, come to Hermione!
I think I rubbed my face all over that poor Dementor's hand. I might have licked the crumbs off his robe. Maybe. There might even have been a moment of celebratory control. Possibly.
The Dementor's body was exuding hoarfrost, and I suddenly realised it was laughing at me.
Other Dementors were floating in now, possibly attracted to the sight of some young bushy-haired wererat losing her tail over peppermint shortbread. The larger one (and I could tell it was definitely larger in comparison to its fellows) let out a low hiss-like growl, and the other Dementors seemed to float in consideration of whatever it was the larger one had "said."
Maybe it was something like "paws off my new wererat buddy." I wasn't exactly fluent in Dementor.
Three of the "smaller" Dementors provided some huge bone-shaped biscuits for Lord, and Lord happily slobbered them up like the furry vacuum he was prone to be. Good thing he was resistant to poisons and diseases (or so the books told me.) As far as mythology spoke of Cerebus (the one guarding Hades' realm) it wouldn't be good to have your dog keel over to some really stupid mortal affliction while guarding the border between the living and the dead. Then again, I've seen what Lord ate (and smelled it), and if he could survive that, well, he could survive practically anything.
Lord's tail was wagging in enthusiastic approval. The Dementors, apparently, could live. Or—whatever it was that Dementors actually did.
The elder Dementor seemed curious as to what I saw inside Hogwarts, and being that it had provided a nice bit of tasty food to grease the cogs, I relaxed as the Dementor's presence moved over my mind again.
I didn't fight it, and it didn't hurt at all. It seemed that was how Dementors communicated—it was all in the head. Maybe, they were speaking at supersonic or subsonic levels, but my ears didn't pick up anything. My eyesight was nothing to write home about, but my ears tended to work just fine. I wasn't a bat, mind you, but I could always hear my dad trying to sneak crisps out of the kitchen in the dead of night.
The Dementor's mental presence eased, and it felt kind of strange when it pulled away. It was really curious about—
I frowned. The other rat?
Pudgy.
There was something about it that the Dementor found attractive, and that could only mean one thing. The rat had partaken of something that was familiar. Familiar to Sirius Black. That made him a rodent of interest to the Dementors.
The Dementors were, apparently, frustrated in their inability to go inside the building, but people frowned on Dementors milling around their children, usually. I couldn't even begin to imagine why.
I frowned again. Now, if I were an exceptionally cunning individual outside of my normal wererat innate whiskers for risk awareness, it would behove me to find the safest place possible to make my nest. Now, a wererat makes a nest pretty instinctively, but if I were a human hiding from scrutiny—
Hogwarts would be one of those places like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It had to be one of the safest places in Wizarding Britain because it was designed to protect children.
Would Sirius Black have had a familiar?
A fat, rat familiar, perhaps?
As familiars go, Pudgy wasn't exactly winning any prizes with regard to situational awareness, at least inside Hogwarts. And if Ronald's obsession with blaming me for his bloody rat's disappearances proved anything, it was that there were a lot of ways to get lost in Hogwarts—intentionally or not.
Wait.
I thought back to Pudgy's frantic attempts to escape the crisp package. Now, again, my eyesight was not anywhere near as good as my sense of smell or my hearing, but—
The elder Dementor seemed to sense I was trying to consolidate my memories into a coherent stream, and it extended a hand toward me again.
Again, I felt its cold fingers brush lightly against my head and hair, but the practice of allowing the Dementor to access my thoughts was getting easier. I'd had a little training with Lord as my familiar. Mind you, the Dementors were not my familiars, but the basic concept was the same.
I thought strongly about the memories I was trying to access—
And I felt the Dementor guide my memory back to a train car back in my first year.
"Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow, turn this stupid fat rat yellow!"
My memories circled around that memory of the train car and the disturbingly familiar rattus buttockicus sticking out of the snack packaging.
IDIOT, HERMIONE!
My head jolted upright, startling the Dementors.
I'd always thought that the reason Ron's stupid spell hadn't worked was that it was utter rubbish and nonsense, but— what if it wasn't?
What if the rat didn't turn yellow because it wasn't a rat at all?
The Dementors hissed together, and I had a collective image of the reason Sirius Black had escaped them—they looked to humans as their meals. If Sirius had successfully escaped, he'd managed not to be human at the time.
What was it that Professor Lupin had whispered to Harry thinking no one could hear them? His father had been friends with Professor Lupin, Sirius Black, and Peter Pettigrew.
Scabbers.
He'd always stank of crisps and food. So much so, that I couldn't even smell the rat in him in the way I usually did.
What if that wasn't because of the food?
What if he didn't smell like a rat or change colour that day because he wasn't a rat at all?
Had I missed another wererat in my home territory?
No, not likely. Any wererat worth their whiskers knew the proper introductory sniff and present. Whiskers then rump.
While it would be possible to cloak one's scent with the cloying scent of humanity found in Hogwarts—there would rise another question. Why?
Wererats were social creatures, and we didn't much care for being alone. Being alone caused—issues. Wild rats, domestic rats—we were all social beasts, and it didn't matter that we spent a lot of time in a human form. When it came down to it, we needed social interaction to keep our brains properly stimulated. We kept our nests clean because nothing ruined the social experience like seeing someone's messy nest and thinking "well if they can't take care of their own living space, then what else aren't they taking care of?"
Mind, the wererat was a complicated creature that kept two lives perpetually in balance (unlike the poor werewolf that was literally at war with itself mentally and physically—hence the painful full moon transformations.
Why the moon? We had no idea.
There were wereanimals around the world, but the werewolves got the short end of the stick, so to speak. There were the rare werebeasts that were attuned to solar eclipses, and if I had a choice, that would not be my trigger.
Limiting!
At least I wasn't a wereshark or whale or aquatic beast of some sort that had to live in a human city. I couldn't even imagine how horrible that would feel being trapped in a human body for that long and no way to let yourself go without having to answer some serious questions from the constabulary in the morning.
No, as species went, I was quite happy being a wererat. There was far worse I could have been afflicted with, and I considered it a blessing that I wasn't a werewolf.
Those thoughts aside, it came back to the same question of "why would another wererat not reveal himself to me?"
Unless, they weren't a wererat at all—anymore than they were a real rat.
I felt the wrinkling on my face increasing.
But that would mean—
My thoughts went back to my first year when Professor McGonagall had surprised the entire class by being the cat on the desk.
Animagus.
What if the reason Sirius Black had successfully escaped the Dementors was that he and his friends had learned to become Animagi?
It would explain how Sirius could have eluded the Dementors.
It would also explain how information was getting in and out of Hogwarts unseen.
Who really paid attention to another rat on the Hogwarts' green?
As a token rat on said green, I could say, quite safely, that no one really paid attention to one more rat on the Hogwarts' green—save the owls and cats who wanted to eat them.
What if Scabbers, who I had begun to realise was Pudgy himself, was actually a man?
Didn't Ronald say that Percy had Scabbers before him?
Now, a natural rat in the wild was lucky to live to the ripe old age of one year. A domesticated rat, pampered, and regularly given access to a veterinarian, could live two to four years, but I think the record stood at around seven. Scabbers was—pushing the line of geriatric rat well into walking death, even if enhanced by regular exposure to magic and a familiar bond (which was not possible considering Percy dumped Scabbers for an owl even faster than Ronald inhaled a barbequed chicken wing.)
I knew that because my tight bond with Lord had proven that I'd sooner die than cut Lord from my magic and my soul, and that was a hard pass.
The Dementors seemed to be whispering to each other. I felt the tingle in my brain that felt like whisker twitches in my grey matter. The bigger one seemed to glower more menacingly over the others, and the smaller ones sort of shrank back, chastened.
The larger Dementor reminded me of our pack leader, Mr Templeton. He'd listen to everyone's opinions first, but if he thought you were mental, he'd put his foot down or his teeth into your rump if that's what it took. Our family always respected him because he was a thinker. Thinkers survived, and he looked out for all of us. I'm not sure if I could ever be a leader like that. Looking out for my food caches was trouble enough. I couldn't even imagine trying to juggle a pack of wererats and keep their noses out of trouble collectively.
I had the sneaky suspicion that he allowed me to set my teeth into our pack bully. John may never father pups again, but my taking him out, teeth first, did multiple things. One, I earned my pack name, two, no one didn't respect my teeth, and three—John didn't bully anyone anymore. Templeton didn't have to kill him.
There was always the risk—
Mess with the leader, and if you didn't yield, things invariably got messy. Fatal even. And wererats—we tended to make decisions to support our leader when we liked them. Wise wererats supported wise leaders because no one else wanted the job. John would have met a sticky end in a dark alley somewhere, and that was just a darker part of wererat life.
In allowing me to deal with John myself, I'd shown everyone that I could handle my problems, and I had had our leader's support. Thinking on it, now, I came to the sinking revelation that I'd end up becoming the pack's enforcer. The silent one that sat in the shadows until something needed doing, and then—just magically made it happen. In my case, it might actually involve actual, real magic. I'm sure Templeton saw that as a side benefit. He was always weighing all his rats' talents and putting us in places where we shined the best.
There was a larger pack on the other side of London that wasn't run with Mr Templeton's discipline, and you'd see them on the evening news as gang fights and other such rubbish. They were killing each other off without our pack having ever lifted so much as a paw. It was a younger pack with an arrogant young leader who thought he knew better than a few thousand years of wererat evolution. Their part of the city was like a constant crime drama straight off the telly. So, when our pack saw all that nonsense, well—let's just say we were quite happy with Mr Templeton, and we wanted to keep him exactly where he was.
The larger Dementor extended its gnarled hand again, and experience told me that it wasn't going to try and take me out. They couldn't go into Hogwarts—but I could. I could be their eyes. I could be their agent on the inside.
I was starting to think that sooner or later I was going to be everyone's agent on the inside. Perhaps the DoM put a sign on my back that said "I'm your wererat. Things needing done? Look no further." Then again, maybe Templeton did that to me ever since he let me take out John with my teeth.
Teaming up with Dementors, though? No one would ever suspect that. Until a few minutes ago, I wouldn't have either. No one writes books about such things. I'm not sure I would, either. It felt like a secret that should be kept.
Also, it's really hard to be a good boogeyman when you're cuddly and bring shortbread biscuits to a clandestine meeting, pet the dog—
My previous image of them was ruined, most assuredly.
Maybe they would prefer I kept that to myself, too. Kind of like the big burly biker guy with the cute fluffy kitten in his lap. Mind you, cute fluffy kittens grew into murdering cats, so all of them could go jump in a lake, in my opinion.
I had biases, okay, but you grow up dodging everyone's free-roaming predatory moggies, and you start getting a little irritated by felines in general. I didn't much care for predatory birds, either.
Same reasons applied.
I ground my teeth together in agreement with the Dementor's plan, and for a wererat, that was a sign of fervent emotion. Agreement or disagreement. Our eyes kinda bulged out, too, which always looked like we were trying to squeeze ourselves out of a tight space. The Dementor seemed satisfied, and the aura of menacing frozen death lessened enough that the lake was no longer spreading ice underneath them.
The grindylows would be thrilled.
The Dementors gave Lord pats on each head, and Lord tail wagged as they floated off into the distance. Someone needed to tell Lord that enthusiastic tail-wagging did not help the doom and gloom reputation that Dementors wore well.
Patting Lord on the middle neck, the Cerebus was ready to trot back up to our room—a room I did not share with anyone else, thanks to Lord.
For some reason unknown to anyone but silly teenage girls, no one wanted to share the same room with a monstrous three-headed dog. No one could convince Professor McGonagall or the headmaster otherwise—to the point where they moved all of their stuff into another room and slept on the floor until the Headmaster arranged for me to have my own suite made out of the old Head Girl's rooms before they moved them up higher in the castle.
It suited me. You couldn't tell a wererat that being in the dungeon was a bad thing at all. We loved dark places.
There were all kinds of cool stuff to be found in the dungeon, too. Fungus, bat cousins, tasty insects, neglected and unguarded snacks—
What more was there to life?
I think Professor McGonagall was a little bit perturbed by the arrangement, but she and Lord got along like fire in a library. Lord seemed to sense that she was a cat, and well, Lord never tried to be anything but a giant three-headed monster dog with guarding proclivities.
He was, whether by instinct or design, a hater of felines.
It was ironic because he was perfectly fine with me, and I'd swiped his noses with my claws—
Who was I to understand the loyalties and social hierarchy of the triple-canine brain? Not my cheese wheel.
The dungeons, however, had another advantage other than the excellent ambience, and that was the impressive size of the doorways. All of them were huge, and that made it considerably easier for poor Lord to fit through them. Nothing frustrated the dog more than too-small doorways. It was bad enough when I slipped through a hole in the wall, and he couldn't. He'd just sit with his butt up against the hole I disappeared into, waiting for me to come back and chomp his rump to get back out.
He also had a strange fascination with killing mice—which wasn't what I'd normally attribute to large triple-headed canines, but maybe he just considered them a challenge. Also, mice were less likely to rise up in a hybrid giant mouse-form and swat him on the noses.
As far as I knew, there were no weremice. Werewombats. Wereseals. Werehedgehogs. Werebats. Werebadgers. There were rumours of were-rabbits, but dad said that was absolute rubbish. Yes, many kinds of wereanimals, just not weremice. Probably a good thing because territories were complex enough inside your own phenotype. I didn't want to fight weremice for my food caches anymore than I already had to hide them from sneaky, opportunistic corvids.
By far, however, we wererats were far more common (or rather more successful) than most other wereanimals. We had no solar or lunar triggers. We didn't rat out when excited or angry like the Hulk at a high society party—we were superiorly practical and pragmatic. Lions were social, but they had a tendency to murder each other over females and kill off the cubs of the previous leader much like their wild brethren. Their society was violent in the extreme. Axolotls just wanted to stay out of everyone's business and hide out in the water somewhere. Sloths were endangered because harpy eagles liked to eat weresloths just as much as they liked to eat normal sloths—
No, I was quite happy with my lot in life. I was clean and warm. I could fit into society without embarrassing myself, and I didn't have the instinctive territorial urge to pee in corners. I wasn't prone to violent rages simply because a human was around. I was feeling pretty confident as a success story and not a casualty to be posted in Were Monthly's periodical.
Oof. If you wanted to read wild stories before bed, that was where they could be found. Dad used to read them to me instead of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Who needed fiction when the truth was even crazier? This was even before my parents realised there was a magical world to make life even more whisker-twitching.
Ready to bathe, brush my teeth, and dive into my comfy warm nest (made wonderfully extra warm with the addition of a giant three-headed dog curled around it as a supplemental heat source), I was definitely going to call it a night.
Only—
There was something directly in front of my door.
Lord growled lowly, and I gave him a reassuring pat. Not everything warranted a giant three-headed dog to the face on first glance.
Usually.
I had certain moments when I wondered, especially after Quirrel in my first year and a basilisk in my second.
The definition of "one of the safest places in Britain" fell a wee bit flat after my experiences. Just ask me about flying on brooms.
No, thank you.
Flying death traps.
I sniffed the air a bit, moving my head back and forth slightly to get a bead on what I was seeing; unfortunately, neither my nose nor my eyes were being very helpful save to tell me that whatever it was was dark enough to be concealed in the shadows around my door.
I approached with the extreme caution bred into me by the constant threat of predation, but a part of me was trying to tell me that this was a school, not the dark forest. Still—Hogwarts had an extraordinary amount of predators for a school without even counting the human animal.
And I found myself face to face with—
An injured rat.
He looked dead. He smelled kinda dead. Definitely hadn't been taking care of himself very well. There was no scent of sickness, thank Ninkilim, but it was obvious that this rat had been through the wringer. Maybe even literally.
Lord seemed a bit suspicious, but I scooped the bedraggled interloper and took him inside.
Now, my mum would always say I had a soft heart, but my dad always said I had sharp teeth. Apparently, it was possible to be both at the same time as I wasn't about to let some poor rat croak in front of my door.
It was one thing to die fighting tooth and claw for what you believed in, your mate, your territory—but just dying in the middle of a hallway, well, I couldn't just let that happen. I didn't want some random owl coming by and murdering the poor guy at the lowest point of his life.
He might not appreciate it, but I certainly did.
His eyes were sealed closed, and his breathing was more than just ragged. I'd seen pack mates after fights, and sometimes it took a while to recover from a really rough one. Mr Templeton had fought up to three challengers at once, and it took him a few days afterwards to get his wind back. The pack, of course, protected him afterwards because he'd won that fight fair and square. We weren't going to let some random upstart try to take him out after that glorious show of skill and tenacity. We'd end up like those bloody West Londoner rats—and no one wanted that.
This one's body was covered in scars and battle wounds, and I couldn't be sure if he'd survived an attack by the owls, the cats, or something else undetermined. I cleaned his wounds carefully, washed his fur, and used one of those nifty warming and drying spells on him before dressing the scratches and wrapping him carefully in bandages.
His fur was a sleek black with hints of blue, and I had to admire it quite a bit as I tended him. He was a bit on the thin side, having obviously not been the food hoarder specialist I'd become in my prime years of growing up in a rat pack.
Well, first things first, wounds dressed, fur cleaned, I tucked him into a divot in my nest where it would smell sufficiently ratty and perhaps give him a bit of comfort. I even left him a few of my coveted peppermint shortbread biscuits with a little food-oriented consternation—but Mum and Dad always said to share my food. It could be me out there next time, starving after a major battle.
I tended to my teeth, showered, and then changed into my rat form. It made the smaller bed seem like the lap of luxury, and with Lord's heads tucked in around me, warmth was never a problem. It was like having the whole pack nestled together on a cold winter's night, only I didn't have to wait for the pack or winter. It made me miss my pack less and ease the sting of being so far from my parents. It was all a part of growing up, I knew, but the human and the rat had different ideas on what was socially acceptable, sometimes.
I curled up next to the injured rat, knowing that it wasn't natural for a rat to sleep alone. You could put the rat into the city or the school, but we were always rats. There was comfort in numbers, warmth, and security.
My whiskers twitched as my nose worked, imprinting this stranger's scent into my brain for the future. I'd be less likely to fall on him in a food-hoarding frenzy and try to shred his ears or take a halberd to his spine. Manners and all that.
Don't ask me how I learned to wield polearms. It is a very long story, and it involved me sneaking into a museum and making friends with warrior rats on the inside.
But I digress.
Lord snuffled around us, and his heads moved to nestle both around and over us, almost like he was the basket and the lid to cover us.
I snuggled in contentedly nose to tail tip, yawned, and was instantly asleep.
It didn't surprise me much that I woke to the shortbread being gone along with my guest. I took it as a good sign, as being mortally injured usually does not mean escaping off into the night.
If he was any self-respecting male rat, he was probably feeling emasculated, so the usual reaction was to regroup in a manner that made you look less so. I wasn't male, so it was never in my makeup to posture like that, but I'd seen it happen often enough amongst the males in my pack.
I was just grateful that he'd survived the night.
Lord was chewing on three bones that appeared first thing in the morning as they always did, the school always making sure to provide for him. Whether it was about kindness or simply to keep him from chewing on the students and staff remained a mystery. The dog didn't mind either way, and he was busy worrying the meat off with his teeth, tearing the flesh from the bone with gnaws and slurps of noisy canine satisfaction.
"You didn't eat my guest, did you, Lord?" I asked the dog.
"Brou?" Lord answered me in triplicate.
I patted him on the head, rubbing his ears and under his chin, and he tail wagged.
I shambled off to brush my teeth and wash my face before breakfast. I had a feeling it was going to be all about drama, as usual, but like the roll of a dice, I couldn't predict what it was going to be until the moment arrived.
I had awoken to the most sensuous feeling of being warm and safe, and I immediately thought I had died and left the Earth behind. Nothing else could have explained it. I had never felt like that in all my life. Even when my da tried to shelter me after my mum left us—there was always this terrible feeling of panic and never knowing when our next meal would be coming.
Cokeworth was a cesspool of underpaid work and factory grinds. The homes were all old and crammed close together like sardines in a tin, the air was utterly foul, and the rubbish-strewn water was heavily polluted and akin to motor oil that came out of a car after way past the time for oil change.
One of the first things I did with accidental magic was purify the trout pond and grow a chestnut tree—it was how my da found out I was magical. He, of course, being the Muggle, had subsequently confronted my mum. She had confessed and soon after disappeared into the night.
The trauma of it brought me into what was my first, well, the second major revelation of my life.
I transformed into a rat and—gorged myself on the pantry contents until not a single crumb was left.
My da had picked my fattened rat body up, set me in his lap, and explained to me that while, yes, I might be magical, but I was also—
A rat.
He'd expected to have to explain that early on, but for some reason known only to magic, magic had suppressed the ability until I was old enough to do magic. He'd thought—I'd been a "bald rat" as they call those who are born to wererat parents but never shift. He'd hoped—maybe I would have been. It would have made things so much simpler.
Then, I turned out magical, and it was complicated again.
Da had moved us to Cokeworth to get the furthest away from what wererats ever wanted to be close to. It stank. The water was foul. The food was stale before it even hit the plates. The stench of the factories would cover up his scent (and mine) to any wayward old "friends" that might have come looking for him.
My da wasn't exactly proud of his past, and he'd done his level best to go the straight and narrow, even if it meant having less.
His "swarm" as he called it, was more like a gang, and he refused to call it a pack because everyone in it was out for themselves. He'd told me that a real pack wasn't something he'd ever experienced, and that it was probably a myth told by young does to their pups to make them feel like life wasn't entirely worthless. That's why he'd run off and married a nice young human girl—
Who had turned out to be a witch who couldn't handle that her son was going to transform into a beast.
Da did his absolute best for me, but we took care to never stand out amongst the crowd. He was always afraid that his old swarm would catch up to him and take me out so he had no reason to remain in Cokeworth.
Because of that fear, he didn't teach me as much as he perhaps should have. My only role model was him, and he was not one to take risks by showing me the ropes outside of the house.
Too risky.
I never doubted him, but I wondered how many wererats there really were out there. He made it sound like they were practically swarming outside the door—like those disaster obsessors who build impenetrable bunkers for the next nuclear strike thinking the end of the world was coming one way or another.
When I got my letter for Hogwarts, Da was relieved.
He said I would be much safer in the magical world. I think he believed nothing could be worse than Cokeworth no matter the risk.
At least I wasn't beholden to some stupid lunar cycle like the bloody werewolf. Da did say that most tales about were-whatever were involving werewolves, and werewolves were the one utterly mental were out there. The human was so out of touch with the wolf and vice versa that they couldn't tell their arse from a hole in the ground. They went around randomly biting people, and—worse probably—they were notoriously contagious.
It was almost as if no one ever wanted to be a werewolf, so the werewolf had to have some way to reproduce, but it was all a bad idea.
So, Da said, in his most Captain Obvious sort of way, "Don't befriend werewolves. They're trouble."
Hell, I could barely make one friend, let alone more than one, and I didn't think I was just going to fall into a werewolf pack and get myself adopted, so I thought I'd be pretty damn safe from that.
And then I'd met Lupin on that one particular night when I'd allowed my stupid self to be led on by Sirius Black.
Fortunately, as a wererat, I couldn't become a werewolf-rat, so provided I survived the actual attack, I would have come out without lycanthropy—but old Albus just had to protect Lupin from persecution and made me swear not to tell anyone.
I wasn't scratched or bitten, which was probably a good thing. I can only imagine what kind of questions would have come as a result, starting with "okay, so why isn't he turning into a rabid moon beast like every other person attacked by werewolves?"
Dumbledore tried to paint it like he was doing ME a favour, but I'd learned pretty early on that the only genuine care Albus had was for members of his old house.
He said he cared for me, but I was always doubtful and suspicious. Actions speak louder than words, after all.
But, being a wererat did have a few interesting advantages.
Natural Occlumency, for one.
I'd learned to tweak it a bit using magical study, but the one thing the human mind just can't figure out—is the hybrid mind. It doesn't really do that well between genders, either, but the multiple species barriers were real.
So, at least the old man would only have a craving for really stinky cheese on occasion when he attempted to use his Legilimency on me. I usually tried to think of creating strong compulsions to gorge on Limburger and the absolutely stingiest tear-inducing onions he could find.
Watching the old man turn green when he supposedly wasn't supposed to be doing anything adverse always made my inner rat very happy.
Nosy old bastard.
But waking up next to another rat—and not just any rat, an honest to Merlin wererat because it would be an extremely cold day in Hades before Hogwarts started teaching actual rodents—was something I never in my life thought would happen.
Why had I been so compromised?
Well, let's just say I'm not very good at being a rat. Horrible role model. I didn't know how to read what my whiskers were telling me, and I could barely filter through the cacophony of sound whenever there were people in the hallway.
I'd barely managed to escape one of the school owls, and then this fat, grease-covered rat not only stole my snack but also tore the ever-loving shite out of me as if it was the last food on Earth, and by the gods he was going to eat it before me.
Thing must have had a pretty bad night before he laid into me, too. He was already bleeding from some altercation.
The she-rat, however, had apparently cleaned me up, dressed my wounds, kept me nice and warm, and then tucked me into her nest for the night with some food nearby in case I woke up and was hungry.
Those peppermint shortbreads might have been manna from Heaven as far as I was concerned.
And I woke up warm, safe, and surrounded by three drowsy heads of a giant dog from Hell.
"Safe" should never come in the same sentence as "a giant dog from Hell."
It did, however, very quickly narrow down where I was and whom I was with rather quickly.
Hermione Granger was the only one authorised to have a Cerebus familiar at Hogwarts (or the entire UK for that matter, as Greece is really touchy about that kind of thing).
At least that entire situation made me warm on the inside because I got to see Hagrid crying like a little baby as if we'd kicked his puppy and then run over it with the Knight Bus.
At least Granger had a good handle on the beast, from what I could tell. It didn't go around trying to eat anyone as long as Granger was there. Seemed much more mellow when his person was around, which was probably Hagrid's biggest mistake in all of his animals. He liked to have them around and then let them wander off and do whatever they pleased while he obsessed over something else. Meanwhile, said whatever would invariably wander off and try to eat someone.
Oh, well, it's just misunderstood, is all.
Right.
He was a bloody menace. His hybrid beasts, even more so.
As much as my very soul screamed that I should have stayed right there in that warm nest and greeted her properly rat to rat, I, instead, ran away as if I owed that witch a hefty sack of galleons and half a library.
Like a bloody coward.
Part of me said that I couldn't afford anyone knowing my secret, but if she was a wererat, she probably had a sneaking suspicion that she was not alone anymore. Whether she knew it was her potions professor, however—now that remained to be seen.
I had a feeling my secret wouldn't be mine for long. Granger, unlike the brainless bottomless pit that was the ginger idiot and the boy-who-thinks-his-father-was-a-sodding-hero, was not an imbecile.
She would figure it out as easily as she did all the puzzles guarding the Philosopher's Stone. Like the basilisk. Like brewing Polyjuice—
And now that my stupid traitorous body knew what it felt like to wake up next to another rat feeling safe and warm, I just wanted to fast forward or rewind back to that blissful moment just as soon as possible.
Especially since I had the sneaky suspicion that Granger had a much better sense of what she was than I did. Da never wanted me to draw attention to myself, and maybe he had all the right reasons, but it had made me superiorly unprepared for life as a supernatural rodent species where everything almost literally wanted to eat me in my animal form.
Short of her turning up petrified and looking like a cat-girl, she didn't arrive in the infirmary with battle scars. Me, on the other hand, I couldn't even take a walk down the sodding hallway without getting into fights with rats that were far more violently inclined than myself.
Maybe, I was just a little too preoccupied with other types of violence to be able to channel it effectively in my rat form. The Dark Lord returning, bloody Albus' endless tasks—
My sorrowful attempts to learn had only earned me a royal arsekicking by one of Hogwarts' resident vermin—
I was a mess.
I was a grown man without even the most basic survival skills that the average rodent possessed. I'm not really sure where that placed me on the evolutionary scale. Maybe somewhere beneath dreadful but not quite troll-worthy. I was still alive, after all. That had to count for something.
At least I managed to make the full shift instead of being stuck with rodent whiskers and a naked tail at the Head Table. Schools were ripe with scandalous rumours and stories as it was. My reputation relied on being seen as intimidating as fuck as well as a complete and utter bastard. It was really hard to be a bastard when people were too busy laughing at you. Well, at least until you murdered them, and that in itself was an entirely different problem socially.
Still, the Slytherin in me was telling me that, at least in rat form, we weren't exactly going to have long, terribly exhausting conversations. Maybe I could get away with meeting Miss Granger rat to rat under the cover of plausible deniability.
Might even learn something.
I grimaced. What the hell was my mind trying to get me into?
No.
No!
It would be far too risky. Too—
But much like the taste of those absolutely delectable peppermint shortbreads—I desperately wanted the company I had been denied for so many years.
Damn it.
I was so doomed.
End of Chapter One
A/N: My beta (see: Dragon of Torture) inflicted upon me a blurb from a supposed writer who I can only imagine was either not of legal age to be on a fanfic site, was the ultimate troll, or someone who had zero self awareness or respect for others. Their two stories, both which manage to spell every word longer than 4 letters wrong (wait, no they spelled like liek, so they f'ed that up too), focus on the size of boobs, the shape of their apparently perfect body, and the fact they were a "weerwolf." (Now, I like my creature stories, but yeah—no.)
Now, I'm usually not "that guy" who looks down on new writers, but I feel that if you don't have enough respect for yourself and others to at least use spell check (or get a beta) for the majority of your story (sleep deprivation issues aside) then maybe you shouldn't be posting while under the influence of alcohol and/or other mind-altering substances. If they were a troll, well, let's just say they actually managed to be even worse than the writer of the infamous "My Immortal."
I will now attempt to Scourgify my brain and write about cute, furry, kleptomaniacal wererats.
If you happen to see Dragon, throw a heavy mug at her for subjecting me to this horrible story. She deserves no pity.
Dragon ducks a hail of airborne coffee mugs and flees for her life.