Johanna Potter and the Whole of the Moon In Which I Get A Whole Lot Furrier, a harry potter fanfic

Chapter Nine: In Which I Get A Whole Lot Furrier

RandomFandom: Happy holidays! I got a new iPad for Christmas that I am updating this on! WOOT WOOT! Now, on to the story! Take it away, Johanna!

Johanna: *mock-salutes* Yes ma'am. *turns to audience* Okay, so I know you're all reeling from the shock of the last installment. Note the sarcasm. Anyway, I know how badly-written the scene with me screaming at everyone was—

RandomFandom: Hey! I knew that, but you don't have to say it right in front of me!

Johanna: As I was saying...*glares at RandomFandom* I know it's badly-written, but hey, that's how you know it's RaFa's! Harry Potter isn't badly-written, so she must not own it! *smiles very sweetly and flees from her raging authoress*

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I know what you're thinking. No, I didn't cry. I just sat there looking like a wide-mouthed fish for about five minutes. Then I said, "Well, the Prophet'll have a field day over this one."

At this, Angelina did burst into tears. She wailed incoherently and started hugging me very, very tightly.

"Um," I said uncertainly. "There, there?" A half-grin came over my face. "I'm sure that normally in this situation, I'm not the one comforting you, but since when have we ever been normal?"

Angelina choked out a laugh at that. "How can you be making jokes when...oh, Johanna!" She broke out in a fresh wave of tears.

"Well, she's making jokes because she has to. If she didn't, she would be crying ten times harder than you," explained George. I glared at him.

"Stop reading my mind, Weasley." The twins smirked at this.

"No, I'm serious. You don't wanna get on the bad side of a..." I paused.. "...of a werewolf."

It came spiraling down and slammed into me again. "I'm a werewolf," I said again. To my horror, I felt a prickling sensation in the backs of my eyes. No, I told myself sternly. Don't you dare cry. If you cry, they'll know how terrified you really are. That'll just scare them more. I took a deep breath. "It's okay," I said, talking more to myself than anyone in the room. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Really."

"How do you know we're worried about you and not the werewolf that bit you?" teased Fred weakly. "You haven't showered in three days. You probably tasted bad." I smiled just as weakly.

I opened my mouth to say something else, but no words came out. It was then that I remembered the adults in the room. I glanced awkwardly at them. "Er..."

Dumbledore got the message. "Come on," he said to McGonagall and Pomfrey. "Miss Potter needs some time alone with her friends."

When they were safely out of the room, I turned to my friends. Words tumbled out of my mouth without my brain's consent.

"I love you. All of you. I couldn't ever ask for better friends. Well, maybe I could, but I probably couldn't. You don't seem to hate me, as the rest of Hogwarts probably will. You're not that scared of me. You know I'm still me." I paused, looking nervously at them. "Don't you?"

"Of course we do, idiot," replied Charli. "Geez, you Gryffindorks are even stupider than I thought."

"'Stupider' isn't even a word," Angelina informed her. Lee looked surprised.

"It isn't?" We all laughed at that.

"But seriously," I continued. "You guys do know that this—" I indicated the wound on my shoulder. "—defines me about as much as this—" I indicated the lightning scar on my neck. "—right?"

"Of course," Charli repeated. "We don't care."

Angelina and Lee exchanged glances. Charli glared at them.

"Sorry, Anna," said Lee, truly sounding sorry.

"It's just that..." Angelina trailed off. "Well, now that you're..."

"You're not exactly..."

"Human?" I suggested flatly. They looked deeply ashamed. "No, no, no, it's okay," I continued, my voice growing bitter. "I know that when they whisper about me in the hallways, they're sort of whispering about you too. I know that it'll make you look bad to be friends with me." They opened their mouths, but I plowed on. "But do you know? Huh? Do you know how it feels to have every single eye on you 24 hours a day? Do you know how it feels to have everyone judge you because of a stupid scar? Do you know how it feels to nearly die at least once a day? Do you know how it feels not to know what your own brother looks like? Do you know how it feels to have a chunk of your shoulder ripped out? Do you know how it will feel to be a werewolf?"

I was nearly shouting by then. My friends were staring at me quite apprehensively.

"Well, I do. I'm gonna keep having to go through things for the rest of my life. And if you wanna stop being friends with me for it, GO AHEAD! I DON'T CARE! BUT YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO KNOW HOW IT FEELS TO BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO IS SCARED OF SOMETHING THAT BARELY AFFECTS ME OR ANYONE!"

They looked near tears. Heck, I was near tears and had been since long before I flipped my lid. But I kept going.

"BUT YOU WANNA KNOW THE WORST PART? YOU'LL HAVE TO KNOW HOW IT FEELS TO BE REJECTED BY ONE OF YOUR BEST FRIENDS TOO!"

That was what did it. I burst out sobbing hysterically. My friends let out breaths they had been holding since I went into caps lock. They didn't rush to comfort me, of course. I wouldn't console somebody that had been screaming like a banshee at me. I spluttered out an apology through my tears.

"I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! I just th-th-thought you were scared of m-me! That was just so horrib-b-ble that I got so ma-ad and sad and I-I-I took it out on you! I kn-know that you didn't s-s-s-say that you didn't want to be fr-friends with me anymore, I j-just—" I couldn't go on any further, and I don't even think the understood what I did manage to say.

From your own ample background knowledge of the series in which my li'l bro is the protagonist, you can probably tell that my behaviour was quite similar to that of said li'l bro. In the book chronicling my seventh year and his fifth, to be precise. Like brother, like sister, eh?

Especially then. I hadn't gotten a chance to digest the fact that I was a werewolf before my friends acted differently toward me because of it. It really hurt, because I thought we would be together forever, through thick and thin. We were, but the fact that that even showed a sign of changing stung.

I was jolted out of my wracking sobs as a sharp pain ripped through my shoulder where the werewolf had bitten it.

I guess it hurt just as much on the outside as it did on the inside.

I stayed in the hospital wing for almost a month. Madam Pomfrey dumped all kinds of potions and salves on my wound, but the pesky thing kept reopening. It only bled a tiny bit, though, and that was a good sign.

My friends gave me chocolate and Every Flavor Beans and things like that, as was the custom at Hogwarts. I really, really like chocolate. I don't know if it's a werewolf thing or what, but so did Professor Lupin. But you'll have to wait like a good boy/girl/puppy for the fifth story in this series to hear more on him.

Anyway, I basically scarfed chocolate, lazed in bed, kept forgetting about my shoulder and trying to move my right arm, and grew back into my old mischievous, flippant, sarcastic self.

That is, until That Night.

You know the one I'm talking about. The night that's inevitable for all new werewolves. The night that's the reason everyone is terrified and hateful of them.

Yup. I'm talking about my first transformation.

It fell on a Wednesday. Everyone was still at dinner when Madam Pomfrey led me out to the Whomping Willow.

"What does the Willow have to do with my thing that I have to do?" I demanded (I was still a bit too nervous to say "transformation," especially when it was about to happen for the first time).

"You'll see," replied Madam Pomfrey cryptically (I like that word. It sounds cool). She Wingardium Leviosa'd a branch from the ground and lifted it over to the base of the tree, where it poked at a knot on one of the roots and the tree froze mid-swing. It looked like something out of a drawing or Muggle picture. I lifted my hands and made a frame around the tree with my thumbs and index fingers. I then remembered where I was and yanked my head out of the clouds.

"What you need to do," Pomfrey informed me. "Is go down that hole right there, and follow the tunnel to the stairs and into the Shack."

"Shack?" I repeated confusedly.

"Shrieking Shack," she explained. "It's not really haunted, we just told everyone that because there was another werewolf several years ago, and we had to explain the screaming and howling." Strangely enough, the phrase, "screaming and howling" didn't make me feel any less nervous.

I didn't ask why she wasn't going to go with me. I knew perfectly well that she was scared of me.

It's funny—if you had told me last year, or even a month ago, that several people, including my own friends, would be terrified of me, I would have said that they were absolutely right to be so. The twins would have been doubled over with laughter at the thought of me being scary. Angelina and Lee would have scoffed and said, "As if." Charli would have said something Slytherin-ish like, "Freckle-faced, idiotic Gryffindork with a lisp that's only about a head taller than me. Yeah, I'm terrified."

But now, everyone was walking on eggshells around me (Charli and the twins don't count because the twins have been my best friends since we were three and Charli...well, she doesn't even march to the beat of her own drum, she skips to a xylophone or something). And it was all because of a lousy little nip (okay, fine, I got a chunk ripped out of my shoulder) and something similar to what every girl is gonna have to go through sometime. Yes, I'm comparing being a werewolf to that. Deal with it.

Oh, sorry, I got sidetracked. So anyway, I slid down into the creepy dark tunnel to a place that everyone said was haunted without a second thought. Must be the Gryffindor courage kicking in, I thought. I wandered down through the tunnel for a good long while, before coming to a little set of stairs. I climbed them and voila! there I was in the Shrieking Shack. I noted that I would have to undress unless I wanted my clothes torn to shreds. Not that I really cared about the fate of my old Weird Sisters t-shirt and already-ripped jeans, but I had to wear something on the way back in the morning.

And so I sat back and waited.

It's not a very pleasant thing, waiting. Especially if it's for something you're dreading. The clock seems to go both faster and slower, and you can't decide whether you want it to slow down so you can put it off, or speed up so you can get it over with. So I was stuck alternating between thoughts of No! Stop! IdontwannaIdontwannaIdontwan na! and Come on, moon, just come out and turn me into a monster already!

All these thoughts and more were racing through my head as I bit my lip and peered out the window. No moon yet. I sat back and let out a breath. I wondered vaguely what my friends were doing right then. I thought of how much this was going to hurt...

And then the clouds pulled apart.

Silvery light hit me like a fist and my body went stiff. I started shaking hard. I gasped for breath as I fell over and twisted helplessly on the dusty floor. Fur sprouted from my skin and my fingernails sharpened into claws. My bones snapped and bent. My face morphed from the pointy, freckled thing it had been into a long, slobbering, terrifying wolf.

My last human thought was I bet I look good as a wolf and then all I thought was how much I wanted the feeling of flesh tearing beneath my fangs and blood spattering over my claws.

Kill...eat...kill...eat...

I didn't remember falling asleep, although that may have been because I didn't really remember much of anything. I blearily opened my eyes to painfully bright sunlight and pain in general. I was extremely embarrassed when I realized that Madam Pomfrey was there and I didn't have any clothes on. I flushed and glanced around for where I had put my clothes. Madam Pomfrey seemed to recognize my embarrassment and looked away until I was dressed.

After we had gone inside and Mme. Pomfrey gave me my healing potion, she said I was free to go. As I was leaving, I paused, turned around, and peered into the mirror. I looked the same as I ever had. Untidy dark-red hair (the only difference was that it was short). Round hazel eyes with yellow flecks. One hundred and six freckles (I had counted them once for some reason) splotched all over a small, pointed face. Tiny little nose. Stick-outy ears. Bony arms and legs (splashed with fresh bruises from last night). Determinedly flat chest (oh come on, I was thir-freaking-teen!). Royal blue Converse trainers, untied as always. Thin red lightning-bolt scar at the base of my neck (which everyone seemed to think was my defining feature).

And yet everyone was treating me as if I was a different person. I knew why, I just wondered why.

Why should I be different just because I'm different?

I turned and walked away without looking back.

Johanna: TA-DAAAAAAAHHHHH! Transformation chaptah! I think the transformation scene was actually sorta well-written, don't you? Why don't you tell us in a review? *turns to glare at RandomFandom* There. I said something that had no death threats or lies. Are ya happy?

RandomFandom: Wouldn't you be?

P.S. Some of you may remember that the last paragraph or so from the sneak peek in the epilogue last book. RaFa changed a few words and added some. Just letting you know of that extremely important fact. Again, note the sarcasm. Toodle-oo.

P.P.S. Review.