WARNINGS for this chapter: Graphic discussions of body horror, pregnancy, and miscarriage; implied bestiality; under-negotiated kink; under-negotiated non-monogamy.

Chapter 27: Sex in transfigured states

"Expecto patronum!"

Nothing.

"Expecto patronum!"

Potter's frustrated face was staring back at Draco from the mirror in the boys' bathroom, and was ruining all his attempts to conjure a happy memory.

Before his visit to Benveniste, which was by now a month ago, one memory that he thought made his wand at least quiver a little in his hand was that of him raising his own small army of three inferi. Now that he knew it was a fake, what was he left with?

He had tried to think of the moment when Monsieur Videl explained the history of southern constellations, and the strange feeling he had had ever since that the sky stood behind him. But he always stumbled over the fact that he was a Malfoy, not a Loubert, that Herman had cut ties with them, and whether it was their fault or Herman's, it could not have been a happy story.

Draco looked in the mirror again, sighed, and lowered his wand. He was alone. Myrtle had lost interest in bathrooms lately, and preferred to spend time wreaking havoc all over the castle together with Peeves. Draco listened, but could only hear water drip slowly from a leaky tap. The memory of yesterday's call to the broom cupboard with Ewen crept into his thoughts, and for a second, he wondered if he could quickly wank off in a cubicle.

In the course of his repeated attempts at both, Draco came to the conclusion that there was a lot in common between conjuring a Patronus and wanking. First, you had to get yourself into the right frame of mind. Then, there was the wand work. And finally, if it worked, well! But the first step was the most difficult.

Wanking worked slightly better than the Patronus, but only if he closed his eyes tightly and pictured himself being himself again. Any sensation, or lack thereof, that reminded him of Potter, any glimpse of what he was really holding in his hand put an end to it.

Ewen was not happy with this state of affairs. After tossing it over in his hands a few times, Draco even opened the Muggle book that Potter had borrowed from Granger and finally given to him after she had started asking questions.

"This book is not about us," Potter said, giving him the small paperback volume wrapped in newspaper.

Draco inwardly agreed when he read the title, In your own skin, but when he actually opened it, no, it was not about them, and it was not useful, but it had a certain mundane charm about it, and reawakened that feeling of anonymous safety he had had during the summer spent in Soho. Before he knew it, he finished three chapters.

Meanwhile, Ewen's attempts to get under his skin were not entirely unsuccessful. Every encounter was an ambush, with Ewen appearing suddenly out of nowhere and pushing him into a broom cupboard, or into one of the dark nooks in the dungeons. The element of surprise plus the thrill of pain, which Draco had not yet found a suitable corner in his mind for, but accepted silently, did the trick. It was Potter's pain after all, Draco thought, and enjoyed it.

As Ewen's surprise attacks became more frequent, Draco tried to raise the issue: What was the deal with Potter now? But Ewen replied with a shameless wink:

"You can't deny that Harry looks amazing these days."

Draco wanted to punch Ewen and to kiss him at the same time. Instead, he just stood there, powerless and speechless.

The deal with Potter ultimately levelled off at a silent gentlemen's agreement, by which Ewen basically shagged them both. In the public eye, Arling was still Malfoy's boyfriend, and Draco was kept in the shadows. On the bright side, Potter hadn't tried or even mentioned revealing their identity to anyone else yet. All in all, they reached an acceptable equilibrium.

Potter's face in the mirror had that disparaging look, like his father, when he was disappointed with his school results: 'You're not getting anywhere if you don't concentrate.' Draco closed his eyes and tried to focus on the thought of his days as Malcolm Drake in Muggle London. The wine, the laughter, the cellist, the chef, the neuroscientist, the guy from New York, and the feeling of being right there under everyone's nose, and yet far far away, where no one could find him.

"Expecto—"

The door of the bathroom opened.

"—Patronum!"

And the face of Rick Vaisey, blank with puzzlement, stared at Draco from the mirror. The puzzlement quickly changed to a disdainful grin. As Draco turned around, Vaisey entered, followed by Baddock, Goyle, and another three death suckers. They spread in a row facing Draco, arms crossed and jaws clenching.

"So it's true!" Vaisey said with a swing in his voice. "Harry Potter cannot cast a Patronus any more! Practising in the loo, are we?"

Draco didn't answer. He was not talking to the idiots.

"I heard the rumours, but I couldn't believe it. Potter, and no Patronus? But here we are!" Vaisey looked so pleased with himself, as if he'd just made a ground-breaking discovery. "This is curious, don't you think? Since the Dark Lord left you, no talking to snakes any more, no Patronus... What else? Oh yeah, even Weasley has dumped you. Don't you feel, erm, what's the word, impotent without Him? Don't you miss him?"

Draco couldn't help marvelling at the human ability to invent fantastic explanations for things they did not understand.

"You're over the hill, Potter, if you haven't noticed." Vaisey came closer. "No wonder that you now hang with Malfoy all the time. The losers' club."

Vaisey giggled and glanced over his shoulder. Baddock gave a contemptuous smirk, then Goyle, then the other three. Vaisey was waiting for a reaction, but Draco did not oblige.

"No? What is it then? Oh, you still hope to save him? Draco, the poor lost lamb! You're wasting your time with him, Potter. Don't be surprised if he makes it to Azkaban after all, just saying."

It sounded like Vaisey knew something.

"What d'you mean?" Draco said.

"Ha! You'll see," Vaisey shone up with glee. Finally he had got a word out of him. "Thing is, he's not as intelligent as his mummy. She knew exactly where to stop. That's why she got away with three years instead of—" Vaisey chuckled. "You thought it's because you saved her? No, it's because she's a tough bitch and can keep her mouth shut at the right moment. And Draco is a blabbermouth and a softie, and that's where he goes down."

This exchange left Draco deeply puzzled. Unfortunately, neither silence nor questions would provoke Vaisey to spill more beans, and Draco left the bathroom with the unsettling feeling that Vaisey knew way more about his mother than he did. Three years in Azkaban instead of what?

When Draco got back to the common room, he searched the crowd for the one person he trusted to throw light on the issue, and soon saw her sitting in a corner surrounded by three open books and two Weasleys. Draco made a beeline for the last empty armchair.

"Hi, Harry," Granger said with a sad smile.

Since the incident in the Room of Hidden Things with Ginny, each of the three had tried to be sweet to him in their own way. Granger had read up on homosexuality in the wizarding world and, when they happened to be out of the Weasleys' earshot, kept pointing out how much better the situation was here than among the Muggles. Ron would take him aside and assure him that they could talk about anything, anything at all, and that he was not angry or anything, because of Ginny. As for Ginny, she had started to train with unprecedented zeal and take his side in all the discussions in the team, as if she wanted to prove him the greatest Quidditch captain ever. But when the three came together, none dared to say much to him any more, let alone ask how he was doing.

"So, that girl," Draco said, peering into Hermione's eyes, "where did you say you saw her?"

"What girl?"

"The girl that looked like the witness in Narcissa Malfoy's trial."

Three flabbergasted faces stared at him.

"Are you all right, Harry? What happened?" Hermione said.

"Nothing. I'm fine."

"You've refused to speak about her for months, and now you're suddenly interested."

"Seriously! We've even started to call her she-who-must-not-be-mentioned," said Ron.

"Have you heard something new about Narcissa?"

"Er, no, I don't know, maybe," Draco hadn't expected that he would have to explain, "Malfoy has been going on about her, so I just... er..."

"Malfoy," breathed out all three with frustration.

Draco looked at Hermione with hope.

"Well," she said finally, "you shouldn't ask me where I saw her, you should ask Ron. I only saw a picture. Ron says he'd seen her somewhere for real."

"I'm not saying anything of the sort! It's just— it's just— a feeling. Like, something familiar, a familiar face."

"Yeah. A déjà-vu," said Ginny.

"Think, Ron! Go inside your memory! Where is that face? Is it light or dark there? Is it warm or cold?"

"Merlin's beard, I don't know!" Ron curled up defensively in his armchair. "I wish we had that picture."

That picture! Draco didn't have that picture, but maybe he had something that was almost as good.

"Wait!"

He sprinted up to the dormitory, dug in his bed, shook out his blanket, and out fell the Muggle book that so reliably helped him to fall asleep every night. In your own skin. He pulled the newspaper wrapping off it. In an endless loop, the witness was taking a swing and planting her claw in Knox's eyebrow on the yellowing page of the old Sunday Prophet.

Draco hurried downstairs and put the picture on the table in front of Ron. Ron stared at it with tension, but without any sign of progress, until Ginny pulled the newspaper to her side and turned it around.

"I've seen that face before too," she said, and frowned at Ron.

The Weasleys stared tensely at each other. Ron narrowed his eyes, turned the picture around again, looked at the witness, then at Ginny again, but this time like he was seeing something in her eyes he had not seen before.

"Did we see her together?"

Ginny pulled the picture back to her side, and her eyebrows arched slowly.

"Not her!"

"No, not her. The girl!"

"Where?" Draco asked.

"At the Burrow."

"Not at the Burrow!"

"No, not at the Burrow. Near the Burrow! She was with Scabbers."

"Who?" Draco asked.

"Scabbers."

"Pettigrew. Peter Pettigrew."

"WHO?"

Ron and Ginny stared at each other, spell-bound.

"It was— When was it? In the summer after my first year."

"After my second year, yeah."

Ginny turned to Draco, and Ron to Hermione.

"Scabbers kept running away and we tried to find him."

"And then we found that girl. At the creek!"

"She was playing with Scabbers."

Draco was confused, but didn't dare ask questions. Scabbers? Pettigrew? What had Pettigrew been doing at Weasleys' place? Pettigrew could turn into a rat, that much Draco knew for sure. Had he been Weasley's rat?!

"And then I blinked, and she disappeared," said Ron.

"She didn't!"

"She did!"

"I didn't blink, and I saw what she did!" Ginny said. "She turned into a rat, and dived into the bushes!"

Silence fell between them.

"Are— are you sure?" Draco said. He was positively overdosing on rats.

"Yes!"

"She was younger than us and she was wearing rags. We told mum, but we never found her again."

"She was younger than twelve and an Animagus. Not bad!" Draco said, trying not to miss a single stirring in Hermione's face.

"That's impossible," Hermione said firmly, her eyes locked with his. "Impossible."

The next morning, Draco was sitting in the stands, squeezed between Weasley and Granger on one side and Weasley and Boot on the other and making a half-hearted effort to cheer for the Hufflepuffs. Hufflepuff was playing Slytherin. After winning against Ravenclaw with a spectacular score and with good old Summerby back on the broom as Seeker, they hoped to land first place in the Quidditch cup, and were now raging in the air like it was still war. The Slytherins were fighting back with silent fury, like death was not a question of if but who.

Until the Snitch finally made its appearance. At once, the Slytherins lit up, and then it was clear: They were here to die for Sabrin Gibbon. Beaters, Chasers and Summerby were being bludgered out of her way, as she swept along like a tsunami. Even Ginny tensed up, watching her soon-to-be opponent.

Draco couldn't take his eyes off Sabrin either, but something in her obsessed grimace reminded him of her mother down in the Love Room of the Department of Mysteries, and his thoughts started wandering around the lower levels of the Ministry—the archive, the courtrooms, and the detention cells in the dungeons—and away from Quidditch.

Rats. What did his mother have to do with rats? The baby surrounded by rats in the memory that Potter had stolen from the archive? Why was his mother's name written on that vial? The girl that got rid of all the rats in their basement was a rat herself, as it turned out, and she knew Pettigrew, yet another rat, way before she arrived to eliminate his offspring, and way before they were nursing Him in Albania. Rats, rats, rats everywhere! And his mother, in the middle of Courtroom number eleven, chained to the chair, and saying 'No!'. What was she saying no to? What was there in Snape's house in Cokeworth that was worse than years in Azkaban? Draco wished he could rewatch that memory, and now regretted that Potter hadn't stolen it after all, but had only borrowed it.

The stands exploded with boos and swearing, and green and silver banners flew up in a narrow sector on the other side of the pitch. Slytherin must have scored a goal.

Ginny's gaze was fixed on Gibbon, unblinking. Ron was standing and chanting 'Baddock, you're so brave! Piss your pants and miss a save! Baddock, you're so brave!' together with Boot. Draco swung his legs over the bench behind Ron's back, and edged quietly out of the roaring crowd.

Two rat Animagi gallivanting together all over Europe! Weasley and Granger didn't seem to realise it, Draco thought, crossing the Entrance hall, but he knew that Pettigrew was also there with Him in Albania. When Weasley and Granger had first told him on the train that the girl had been sighted there, he hadn't given it much thought. But now it looked like they had been showing up together all over the place. What had Pettigrew had with that girl? How had she become an Animagus? Even if Pettigrew had somehow taught her the skills and had taken her through all the rituals by the age of twelve, how likely was it that she would end up a rat, like him? And why would he do it in the first place? By the time Draco reached the Gryffindor common room, he had convinced himself that all that could only be explained by blood ties, and was wondering if the Animagus form was hereditary.

The common room was empty but for a group of first-years playing Exploding Snap in a corner, and a couple of fifth-years revising for their O. . Draco looked around and saw the book lying on the sofa by the fireplace. It had gone through so many hands that the cover sat loose and the pages were dog-eared, but the title still shone in warm gold: The Magic of Sex. No one was reading it, and Draco seized the opportunity.

As he had worked out from eavesdropping, the book had an excellent coverage not only of the recreational, but also of the procreational side of the matter. It had to have something on Animagi. Draco heaved the book onto his lap and opened the table of contents.

But the table of contents was too impressive to stay focused on one key word. The chapter on Sex with non-humans capable of consent had a long list of sections: Sex with Giants (size matters!), Sex with Elves (strongly deprecated!), Sex with Vampires (once in a lifetime!), Sex with Goblins, with Veela, with Merpeople, with Centaurs... Centaurs? Oh. Centaurs! Draco sighed. All those things blood purists were missing out on. Draco's daydream was dispelled by the flap of the portrait hole and he slammed the book shut.

"Ah, here you are!" Hermione said, climbing in. "Why did you leave?"

She was alone.

"I thought I'd get no other chance to check out this masterpiece." He opened the book again, relieved, as Hermione sank into the sofa next to him. "Trying to find something on Animagi and their genes." He quickly flipped the pages away from the Centaurs.

"You also think she was Pettigrew's daughter?"

Draco had not gone that far in his deliberations, but now thinking about it...

"She could be agewise."

"Animagus is a learned skill though. It's not like you can just inherit it from your parent. And she was too young. The earliest known age at which a child became an Animagus is thirteen, and those were students at Uagadou."

"Uagadou?"

"The most famous wizarding school in Africa. They don't do much else than transfigure until they can do everything else in animal form."

"So? Unprecedented doesn't mean impossible."

"But she was homeless! How do you expect a child to learn anything so advanced when they have no home, don't go to school, and are just surviving?"

"It increases your chances of survival though. Probably the only useful thing Wormtail could teach her." Draco leaned back and sank deep into the sofa's cushions. "But, a bit lucky that she ended up a rat, like him, don't you think? Imagine she would turn into a cat, or an owl. That would be unfortunate!"

"Well, that's not so surprising!" Hermione said. "People that are close can have the same Patronus! Like your mother and Snape, remember? They both had a doe. Or Tonks got a wolf when she fell in love with Lupin."

"Erm, but, the Patronus? We're talking about Animagi."

"Yes, but there is also a more than random chance that the Animagus form and the Patronus are the same. Like your father's! His Patronus was a stag and his Animagus form was a stag too. And now your Patronus is a stag, and your—"

"Was," Draco couldn't help correcting.

"It is, Harry! You're just going through a difficult phase! Your Patronus will be back! It will be back as soon as you let Malfoy alone, if you ask me," Hermione puffed out, rolling her eyes. She looked like she had much more to say on the subject. "Anyway, your Patronus is a stag, and who knows? If you cared to become an Animagus, maybe you would be a stag, too, like your father?"

"So you're saying, if she is Pettigrew's daughter and if she is an Animagus, then it's not surprising that she is a rat Animagus, like him."

"That's right, but! I think it is very unlikely that she is, or was, an Animagus to begin with!"

"But she was! Ginny saw it!"

"I don't know what Ginny saw," Hermione said noncommittally. "It could be— It could have been something else."

She took the book from his lap and opened the chapter Sex in transfigured states. She turned a few pages, ran her finger down a couple of paragraphs, and stopped next to a moving picture of two mating rabbits.

"Here," she shoved the book back onto his lap, "read this!"

Draco leaned over the book and started reading.

If a female Animagus transforms during pregnancy, the embryo or foetus transforms together with her. This is largely unproblematic as long as the mother's Animagus species is live-bearing and the time spent in the transfigured state is short as compared to the gestation period characteristic for the species in question (see gestation periods of common Animagus forms in Table 113). The onset of labour in the animal form usually means a miscarriage for the human—

"Wait. This is about female Animagi. You're not saying she also had a rat Animagus for a mother."

"No. Read on."

"All right..." Draco shrugged and turned back to the book.

—and should be avoided at all costs. But if the mother bears the child to term in human form, no health risks for the child are known. The only peculiarity Animagus mothers sometimes have to deal with, especially if they transfigured frequently during pregnancy, is that their newborn children keep transfiguring spontaneously to their mother's Animagus species after birth. This might be shocking if you are unprepared, but harmless if you know what is happening. Episodes of spontaneous transfiguration become rarer in the first three months of the child's life and usually disappear completely by the age of one year.

Draco looked up at Hermione, wondering if she had opened the right page for him, but she stared at him imperatively without a shade of doubt in her face.

"Read!"

Draco obeyed.

That is, if the mother conceived the child in human form with a human male. If the child is conceived by the female Animagus in animal form with a male of her Animagus species—

Oh no. Draco's stomach twisted at the idea. He skimmed over two paragraphs detailing the horrors of cross-species pregnancy, which, to top it all, usually ended in quadruplets, pentuplets, and sextuplets, unless you were a horse or similar.

The saddest thing about such pregnancies, however, is that the living beings that are created in this way are essentially non-human. Even if they stay in human form in their mother's womb for the whole duration of the pregnancy, they usually revert to animal form within hours after birth. But that, unfortunately, is not the end of the story. What is even more devastating for their mothers, is that they retain the ability to spontaneously transfigure back to human for a much longer period of time than their human counterparts, sometimes for their entire life (which is, depending on the species, usually much shorter than that of a human). This has led to numerous attempts to prolong their human states with the help of protective charms and potions, but no means has been invented so far to grant these individuals a full-scale human development. Even if they are able to master human speech, they rarely reach a stage at which they can fully understand human ethics. Therefore, they are categorised as beasts from a legal point of view, and all attempts to stabilise them in human form are nowadays considered unethical, and since the Decree on inverse Animagi451 are also illegal.

Footnote 451 read:

The term Inverse Animagus, which is often used to describe these individuals, is misleading. Inverse Animagi are not Animagi. Their ability to transform into humans is not a skill, but a condition subject to treatment whenever it causes distress to the animal or related humans. Cases of Inverse Animagi learning to control their transfigurations were reported in the past (see Yakubu 1939, Pereyra 1942, and Pereyra & Yakubu 1948). However, since the enactment of the Decree in 1955, attempts to 'humanise' these animals, including all forms of magical training, have been prohibited by law, meaning that no new insights into the matter are forthcoming. See Wiggleswade (1992) for recent legal cases.

Okay. This was fascinating, as much as it was appalling, and Draco could see what Granger was getting at. The girl was not an Animagus, but an inverse Animagus. But a mother was still missing in the picture.

"Are you saying that Narcissa's witness was her mother or what?"

"No. Read."

"Can't you give a brief summ—"

"No, I can't. This is too disgusting. Read!"

Draco turned the page.

Also a male Animagus can impregnate a female of his Animagus species, if he mates with her in the transfigured state.

Absolutely! Draco could confirm that. The hundreds of little Pettigrews at Malfoy Manor had been the living proof. Now they were finally getting somewhere.

As far as we know, the offspring resulting from such a union is invariably an animal without any magical properties. No confirmed cases of inverse Animagi originating from Animagus fathers are known. However, Ngoy & Abdullahi (1989) found that between 0.5% and 0.9% of sperm cells produced by male Animagi in animal form showed a pattern of shape-shifting between human and animal spermatozoa, while about half of the animal egg cells fertilised by shape-shifting spermatozoa also underwent spontaneous transfiguration in laboratory conditions. For ethical reasons, such cells have never been implanted in a female of the respective species, so it remains unknown whether the animal would be able to bear the foetus to term and give birth to an Inverse Animagus. It seems that that would largely depend on whether the foetus would keep transfiguring spontaneously in the uterus of the animal. If not, the chances of successful pregnancy are reasonable, meaning that it is possible albeit very unlikely for a male Animagus to father an Inverse Animagus. On the other hand, a spontaneous transfiguration of the foetus in the body of the animal would likely lead to a miscarriage, and in the case of significant differences in body size to the animal's disadvantage, also to fatal damage to the inner organs—

Okay, Draco did not need to know all of the details. What he had learnt was quite enough.

"So? Your theory is that Pettigrew made an Inverse Animagus with a run-of-the-mill rat, and taught his daughter to control her transfigurations? That sounds about as probable as him making a normal human child with a normal human woman, and then training the child to become a normal Animagus." Draco was playing sceptical, but at heart he already agreed with Granger. The baby in the rat nest suddenly made a lot of sense.

"What normal human woman would do it with Pettigrew?!"

Granger had a point.

"Besides," she continued, "After we talked about it yesterday, I went to the library and checked out that Pereyra and Yakubu book."

"And?"

"It's not just about training Inverse Animagi to control their magic. It's a bunch of case studies, about their lives, everything: development, health, stabilising them as humans—it was not a crime in those days. And also training. It's amazing! But anyway. Thing is, Inverse Animagi don't live as long as humans. It's sort of between their animal and their human life expectancy!" She looked at him like it was the last word on the matter, and he was supposed to figure out the rest.

"Er. That means?"

"Isn't it obvious? They age early! As a rat, she would be dead in one, two, three years at most. As long as she transfigures regularly to a human, she can live longer, but only up to a point. She might be sixteen, but then she's a very old rat!"

Now it clicked.

"You mean, the witness."

"Yes!"

"She is not her mother, or aunt, or..."

"No!"

"She is her."

"Yes!" Hermione's eyes gleamed with excitement, and an agitated blush burned on her cheeks.

The pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The witness, the girl, and the baby—they were all the same person, or the same thing for that matter. Draco heard a billow of annoyed voices growing by the second. The Gryffindors were spilling into the common room, and judging by their waspish disposition, Slytherin had won.