Disclaimer: Standard stuff (I don't own anything, I won't be making profit, any resemblance to previously published content is purely coincidental, JK Rowling is the coolest, etc.). If I make any legal errors regarding copyrighted material, inform me and I will correct them immediately.
Harry Potter and the Lightning Scar
Morris Oshkosh woke up before dawn on July 9th, the morning after the new moon. He figured he should prepare a full breakfast, as all four of the teenagers could wake up ravenous as a result of their intense dreams. As he cooked (mostly on autopilot), his mind wandered, and he began to consider his current students.
He had helped scores of students achieve the animagus transformation over the years. This year's crop of students was special, though, as it included both his own daughter and a thunderbird animagus. He was not particularly worried about the former—most predator forms were somewhat more willful than prey forms, and were accordingly more difficult to merge with, but they were common enough to be no real obstacle, and Annie was extremely willful herself—but the latter was certainly troublesome. Magical animagus forms were rare and difficult to begin with, but a thunderbird brought perhaps the greatest possible challenge, even more so than a dragon (at least dragons were lazy—all a thunderbird wanted to do was fight and cause storms). A thunderbird could not be caged, and it could not be reasoned with; in fact, it was a minor miracle that the boy had managed to keep the beast contained within himself for so long. It was likely that his first transformation would be an extremely stormy night, as the thunderbird flew free for the first time; Morris would have to come up with some way of keeping the other students safe from him. Harry had probably spent his whole life subconsciously spending most of his energy and focus on keeping the thunderbird's power under control, once Voldemort's failed Killing Curse had roused the beast's fury.
That level of control, of course, would not last. For the entirety of this lunar cycle, the thunderbird would increasingly dominate the boy's dreams. Morris had resolved to begin instructing the boy in occlumency, to try to keep the intense visions from spiraling out of control. It wouldn't do to have him accidentally electrocute everyone staying at the inn, after all. Plus, it was a helpful discipline anyway, and the thunderbird's inevitably violent reaction (most likely rage and a counterattack) to any mental intrusion—now that Harry had begun the process of merging with the creature's spirit—would greatly reduce the amount of work Harry would need to do to master occlumency. An instruction in the fundamentals would probably suffice; once he had an understanding of how to organize his thoughts, the thunderbird would provide the raw power necessary to shield his mind. Annie and Andy, both having fairly powerful predator forms, would also find occlumency both helpful and somewhat easier than most people; Carla, with a relatively weak-willed (even tameable) prey form would likely find occlumency unnecessary to help with her transformation, and her form would be less helpful at occluding her mind.
A thunderclap startled Morris out of his ruminations; a storm had gathered outside and the unmistakable odor of ozone filled the air, even though the forecast had been clear. He had better get started quickly.
A few minutes later, Harry was awakened by a knock on his door. Shaking off the ringing in his ears and the tingle of electricity, he staggered over to the door and pulled it open, ignoring the fairly substantial static discharge as he grabbed the doorknob.
"Good morning, sir," Harry croaked, seeing Morris standing there with a serious look on his face.
"Sorry to wake you, kiddo, but it was getting a bit stormy outside. Get dressed and come down to breakfast. There's something I'm going to start teaching you all today, and we should start as soon as possible."
Ten minutes later, Morris and the four teens—all still barely awake and still feeling the last few moments of their vivid, primal dreams—began shoveling breakfast onto their plates, while Morris explained the basics of occlumency and why they should learn it.
"I'm not saying it's absolutely necessary, for anyone except Harry," he finished, "but it is generally a very useful skill, and it just so happens that it will help you merge with your form more...peacefully."
"Okay, dad," Annie said after swallowing a bite of eggs. "What do we need to do?"
"At noon, we'll go out to the wigwam," Morris said. "We'll perform another ritual—don't worry, it's much less tiring then the last one, pretty much just a chant and hallucinogenic fire, though you'll all have to wear the ceremonial clothes again." He chuckled as the teens groaned, before continuing. "There are a bunch of different ways to teach occlumency; for example, some people enter their students' minds to help build imaginary walls, while others—sadistic idiots, in my opinion—attack their students' minds with increasingly-powerful legilimency attacks to try to build up resistance. But, the way we're going to do it is going to take advantage of the animal spirit within you to help fight off intrusion. Carla, you might have some trouble with this, since horses aren't very...fighty...but this method will still be possible, and I think it'll be offset by the relative ease with which you'll merge with the horse, compared to the other three with their more willful predator forms."
Harry suddenly couldn't contain his laughter, and the others—including Morris—stared at him like he was mad. Calming himself, he managed to explain.
"I just remembered how back in primary school, they were always telling us that drugs are bad," Harry said, still smiling. "Now it seems like all of my problems keep getting solved by a hit of the good stuff."
Morris grinned, while the others also tittered. "Yeah, you'll find out that these kind of hallucinogenic fires and the occasional herbal paste are roughly our traditional equivalent of potions. They're not necessarily better or worse, but each approach has its benefits and drawbacks, and each can produce effects that the other can't match. Originally, the recipes were all passed down verbally, but that proved unreliable, so eventually they were codified, and there are books available. You should pick up some of them—nobody will know about this kind of magic back in Britain, so you'll always have a bit of an advantage."
"Plus," piped in Carla, who had a part-time job at a combined potions and chemistry lab. "It's always useful to be exposed to another perspective on the same general kind of magic. That's why my lab usually analyzes experimental potions both magically and scientifically."
"Exactly," Morris said. "Anyway, take these; I wrote out the chant phonetically while you were all getting dressed. It'll help you get the sounds down, and we'll fix it to the correct rhythm later—the magic is more mental and less primal than the animagus ritual, so the pronunciation and rhythm won't be as intuitive. Practice while I get started on the breakfast crowd."
The teens spent the next two hours stumbling through the foreign-sounding words. Annie was not quite fluent in the Menominee language, but knew enough about the sound and structure of the words to help guide them in their pronunciation. It was much more difficult and awkward than the animagus ritual chant, and while the previous chant had been a relatively short and simple phrase, repeated over and over, this one was quite long and complex, and had very few repeating elements. They estimated that it would take about ten minutes of chanting, and it had to be done correctly and from memory (as the chant would be performed with eyes closed, so they couldn't read off the sheets). Annie didn't think it would be quite as difficult as the others feared, knowing that once they had put it to the correct rhythm, it would flow much more easily.
By the time they had the chant memorized, they were beginning to grow quite antsy—they were teenagers, and sitting around practicing a chant was nobody's idea of fun. Noticing this, Morris told them to take a break, but return by 11 AM in their ritual clothing to go out to the wigwam and practice getting the rhythm down with the drum accompaniment. As an afterthought, he remembered to tell them to shower before coming down, as physical tidiness would help them delve into their own less-than-primal minds. As though fearing that he would change his mind, they bolted upstairs to find a use for the next three or so hours.
Andy and Carla were not very subtle in how they would be spending free time, making a beeline for Andy's room and beginning to unbutton each others' clothing on the way; Harry noted aloud to Annie that for some reason, Andy had also taken a small jar of honey from the kitchen. Blushing and giggling, Annie took Harry's hand and led him to the fourth floor, where the Oshkoshes had their own quarters. After opening a ward-locked door at the top of the stairs by placing her palm in the center, she pulled him over toward a colorfully-decorated bedroom door, adorned with a finger-painted sign which read "Annie's Room." Annie grinned and pulled Harry through the door.
Harry looked around, taking it in. It was very...Annie. The walls were a warm, cheery goldenrod, and the carpet was an earthy auburn. Posters, drawings, and photographs of the Oshkoshes covered the walls, and a large white teddy bear sat at the foot of the bed. Her desk was covered in half-completed sketches, and a television sat on a top of her dresser, facing her bed. All in all, it seemed quite comfortable and homey—the exact opposite of the quarters Harry had had at Number 4 Privet Drive (though the Smallest Bedroom had still been a vast improvement over the Cupboard Under the Stairs). His 360º tour completed, Harry turned back to Annie, who was standing by the door, looking surprisingly nervous.
"Do you like it?" she asked, biting her lip shyly.
"It's brilliant," Harry declared, making sure she knew that he meant it. "Why are you nervous?"
"Well, it's my room," she answered, as though that made it obvious. Realizing by the look on Harry's face that he still didn't quite get it, she explained. "Everything in here was put here by me. It's a reflection of me...really, you could say it is me. Except maybe the bear; that represents my dad and the inn."
"Oh," Harry said, suddenly wondering if it worked in reverse, if he was somehow a reflection of the Cupboard Under the Stairs or the Smallest Bedroom. Realizing that his overlong pause was drawing out a tension which had somehow appeared, Harry hastened to add, with a crooked grin, "well, like I said, it's brilliant. I guess that means you're brilliant, too."
Beaming, Annie led him to the bed, and in short order, they were doing a passable imitation of Andy and Carla, repeating their experimentation from the previous night with enthusiasm. After a brief rest, during which the two cuddled in a not-chaste-at-all manner, they made good use of their teenaged stamina and continued their exploration.
Finally, covered in sweat, they had worked off all the lust that they could muster at such an early hour, and spent the remainder of the time until 10 AM chatting lightly about things they could do and places they could go over the next month. At 10, Harry went downstairs to his own room to shower and change into his ritual clothing; he killed the remainder of the time until 11 AM chatting with Gadsden and trying to get the snake to understand that what he and Annie had been doing was not "mating," and she wasn't going to be laying any eggs for him anytime soon. He spent more time than he was proud of awkwardly trying to explain human anatomy to the snake, who eventually ended the discussion by declaring that humans were a primitive species with overly-soft skin, weird fur, and entirely too many appendages.
Rolling his eyes, Harry proceeded downstairs to meet the others a bit early, and ran into Annie, who had been on her way to his room to collect him. Once again barely covered in her beaded leather-and-string ceremonial clothes, she proved irresistible to Harry, and he, in his beaded leather loincloth and feather headdress, apparently proved equally appealing to Annie. The two kissed and groped against Harry's door for the next several minutes, until Carla happened by, bouncing distractingly with every step. Blushing but entirely unrepentant, Annie and Harry fixed their clothing, and followed Carla downstairs, where Andy was already waiting and looking quite pleased with himself for having had the foresight to get down first and then have a frontal view of Carla descending the stairs in her tiny attire. Carla simply rolled her eyes and dragged "Chief Winnie the Pooh" (who grinned and licked his lips lasciviously at the nickname) out to the Jeep. It turned out that the drums required for this ritual were larger, and were placed in the front seat, allowing both pairs of teens to double up in the back seats. Harry raised an eyebrow at this, realizing that the bed of the small truck was definitely large enough for the drums, but a twinkle-eyed grin from Morris in the rearview mirror told him that the older man was okay with the teenagers being teenagers.
As Annie had predicted, the addition of the drums made the recitation of the ritual much easier. After several dry runs, it was time for the real deal; as Morris's watch struck noon, he tossed an ingredient bag into the fire and the teens—arrayed around the fire pit in the wigwam—began to chant to his drumbeat. This chant was much more sedate and steady than the intense, wild animagus ritual chant, and did not increase in tempo or volume throughout the ritual. As the bright-blue smoke from the ingredient bag began to take effect, Harry's eyes began to glaze and cloud over, and his mind became strangely quiet. Still chanting, he allowed his calm, relatively-logical consciousness to reach across the jagged gulf in his psyche toward his deeply-seated primal subconscious, which writhed tempestuously.
His goal as an animagus would be to eventually join those jagged edges together and move his body and mind seamlessly across the divide, but the purpose of this current ritual was to simply build understanding of both parts of his own mind. Once he could consciously know what his subconscious felt, he would be able to detect any encroachment into his mind, and begin to expel the intruder by focusing his willpower on the trespasser's removal. This, of course, was where the raw power of his primal, strong-willed thunderbird form would come into play; once Harry had detected an intruder into mind, the thunderbird would begin its assault with everything it had.
As the chant drew to a close, Harry found himself quite relaxed; despite the thunderbird's initial rage (it had reacted violently to even Harry's own consciousness breaking into its territory within his subconscious, so he didn't envy an actual intruder), he felt as though his mind had shuffled and straightened itself like a well-organized deck of cards. He seemed to be aware of more of the information filtering through his senses, and he felt more in control of any visceral reactions he might have to the world around him. Finally, at the last drumbeat, he opened his eyes to a world filled with brilliant color, and the last instant of the shadows upon the curved walls of the wigwam as the fire died showed not only four human shadows, but something...more, lurking within each shadow, indistinct in form but obvious to everyone within the wigwam.
With only the light provided by the still-glowing embers, Harry looked across the wigwam to Annie, meeting her dark, glittering eyes and seeing behind them that same vague aura which he had glimpsed beyond and yet within her shadow. Her eyes widened in awe, fear, or some combination of the two at whatever she beheld within the windows to Harry's soul, before each teen—in concert with their own subconscious—sealed away their secrets, leaving, to the outside world, only eyes.
While a tall Native American taught four teenagers in Wisconsin a series of meditation techniques to help them learn the mental discipline of occlumency, a small, balding man with a pinched face and prominent front teeth scurried back to his Romanian hideout with a frantically-squalling infant in his arms. All of the other ingredients were lined up in the small cottage, which he had taken the hard way from a young muggle couple, though the man had gotten off a shot with a muggle weapon and had injured Wormtail. He supposed he should have ensured the man was dead before starting on the woman like that, but in his defense, the muggle really should not have survived so long after a point-blank reducto to the throat. Anyway, the second spell had finished the job, and a few healing spells and potions had repaired the damage caused by the bullet that had glanced off his forearm. He had kept the muggle woman alive for a few more hours, and then gone off in search of a baby he could use.
In retrospect, he mused, he probably should have just Imperioused the woman and had her tell him if she knew anyone with a suitable child, but she had been sobbing so loudly and annoyingly that his master had told him to just kill her. His master was weak (physically, of course, not magically, never magically, to even think so would be death), and couldn't countenance the irritation, so Wormtail had decapitated her and drained her blood for use in the complex ritual to create a homunculus, then set off to the nearest hospital.
After stealing the child (which had of course gone wrong, and he had needed to Obliviate two nurses and murder a young mother), Wormtail returned to the cottage with the spoils of war. Upon entering the cottage, he stripped the baby and unceremoniously dropped it into the cauldron filled with a boiling mixture of blood, snake venom, and powdered vampire fangs. Ignoring the screams (which soon turned to bubbles), the rat-like man cleared his throat and began to chant, eyes a sharply-glinting crimson, in a dialect not spoken since the pharaohs ruled in ancient Egypt. Wormtail actually had no idea what he was saying (though he assumed it was nothing particularly nice), as his master was currently speaking through him, having moved from the now-dead snake on the floor to his body as soon as he had cleared his throat to begin the chant. As the chant ended, darkness fell upon the cabin—the electrical lights and candles had not gone out; rather, they were simply drowned out by the darkness which pervaded every cubic inch of the small house. As suddenly as it had come, though, the darkness retreated into the cauldron, and a cold, high, unnatural laugh rang out, echoing flatly from within the cauldron.
Author's Note
Wormtail is an interesting character—in most fanfiction, he is a pathetic loser in every sense of the word. He hangs onto his more powerful, more intelligent, more talented friends (the other Marauders, and later the Death Eaters), and consistently retreats at the first sign of danger. On the other hand, he's quite wily, as he seems to have found a viable strategy and exploits it for all it's worth; his cowardice allows him to be an excellent spy (as who would expect the weakling of duplicity?) and "defeat" Sirius Black. Plus, being "dead" for over a decade has allowed him to expand his contacts in the criminal underworld (after all, being "dead" would be a very useful quality for many criminal organizations). In my interpretation of the storyline, he has used that time to build up a small but useful operational slush fund while maintaining his cover as the Weasley pet rat, with which he is throwing "henchmen" (in this case, mercenaries, other low-ranked Death Eaters, and general criminal scum, rather than people with any loyalty to him personally) at Sirius and Remus to try to delay them in his race to first meet, and then secret away his erstwhile master. He may have been the weakest and dullest of the Marauders, but he was still a Marauder, and thus possessed at least some measure of cunning, which he uses quite effectively even in canon, and will probably use more effectively in my story. We may find, as clumsy and seemingly-incompetent as he may be, that he is nevertheless an effective servant for Voldemort, if for no other reason than his life depends upon it.
Also, you all might notice that I did not publish this chapter yesterday; that is because I didn't finish until today. As I suggested when I first began writing, it was only a matter of time before the "chapter per day" schedule became unsustainable, and I've reached that point. After all, I do have other things going on in my life. That said, I will most likely be publishing a chapter every two or three days. On the plus side, they'll probably be more polished (which means less frantic ninja-editing right after I post a chapter and then immediately notice an error). A beta...well, I haven't really looked into it, and to be honest—and I'm not trying to be arrogant here, I'm just stating what I feel to be the truth—I think there are other writers who need a beta more than I do, and there is a finite supply of betas to go around. I know that my writing skills and stylistic choices leave much room for improvement (which is one of the main reasons I am writing fanfiction in the first place), but other than the occasional fatigue-induced typo or omission, my writing is typically at least technically sound, so I'll leave the very limited and valuable time of betas to those authors who can benefit more from their efforts, especially since the addition of a beta would reduce the rate at which I can publish content. Given the toss-up between publishing rate and a marginally-more polished draft, I think I'll land on the side of publishing rate, at least for this story. Perhaps in future stories (and I do have a few planned), I might revisit the issue.
A note for our readers who may not be familiar: "Winnie the Pooh" is a stuffed bear, who is a character in a very famous book series by A.A. Milne, which was later turned into an extremely successful Disney franchise. Pooh is obsessed with honey, so she may be alluding to Andy's bear animagus form and/or some creative use of the jar of honey that Andy had brought from the kitchen for use in their free time. I'll let you all use your imaginations.