Author's Note: This one's a pretty short chapter, but an update was needed! Also, fun fact about this story: I originally wrote it under the title "Eden" which was the protagonist's original name. That version will never see the light of day because I wrote it when I was about 14 and it is so cringeworthy that I can hardly stand to look at it for reference. Trust me, nobody needs to see that. We're all better off with this version, even if it may take a bit longer to upload chapters.

Content warning: Coarse language.

CHAPTER 6

This Will Be Our Year

REMUS

"Do you think it'll hurt?" Pete asked in a tremulous whisper. We were walking one by one through the dark passage that lay under the Whomping Willow, a huge tree that was planted on the school grounds in our first year. Placed where it was to obscure the entrance to the passage that was intended for me alone, so my nightly transformations would go unnoticed by my schoolmates.

The passage ended some distance away, under the town of Hogsmeade. We climbed upwards through a hole in the floorboards and into the ramshackle house on the hill in the village. The locals, as well as other Hogwarts students and staff, had taken to calling it the Shrieking Shack, and had attributed the monthly cacophony of growls and howls, and tearing and crashing, to ghosts. They had evidently not noticed, or simply had not considered, the absence of such sounds in the summer months.

I emerged from the passage first, and turned around kneeling at the opening. I hoped to be able to graciously offer a hand to Daisy and help her as she climbed out. But the next person to appear was Sirius, and then James, so that when Daisy did climb out, it was to their waiting hands, not mine.

She rolled her eyes at them as they performed exaggerated butler acts, extending their arms with a flourish and a bow as though they were footmen helping a lady from her carriage. When Pete came up after her, they tried to push him back down into the hole with their feet.

"You nervous?" I asked Daisy. We were standing apart from the others. Pete was still struggling to make it out of the hole, and Sirius and James were making a commotion as they protested his entry and shoved at him with their feet. Daisy was dusting herself off with her wand. She looked up at me with a secret smile.

"Yeah," she said. She glanced sheepishly at the others, as if not wanting them to hear.

"Me too," I said. She looked surprised. "You're my best mates. And you're all doing this for me. What if something goes wrong? I mean, nothing's going to go wrong. But, you know."

Daisy nodded.

"I guess it would be weird if we weren't nervous," she said. We both looked over as Sirius and James finally let Pete in. In fact, they were now hoisting him upwards, each holding onto one of his arms. They were all laughing, though Pete looked a little sweaty and flustered.

"We already knew they were weird," I said and Daisy laughed, bowing her head in agreement.

"Weirder than us, anyway," she said.

The others joined us then, Pete now squished between James and Sirius, who were still clinging to his arms. It reminded me, bizarrely, of Tweedledee and Tweedledum, with a small and slightly terrified Alice sandwiched between them. Daisy shot me a look, clearly trying not to laugh, before turning to walk up the stairs. I tried not to smile too much to myself as I followed her.

Upstairs there was a large bedroom complete with dilapidated furniture and mouldering linens and window hangings. There was a four-poster bed, an armoire, a chest of drawers, even a couple armchairs and a sofa with matching ancient upholstery. The whole place was a fucking tip, to be honest. There were lots of drawers in this room though, which was why we had chosen it to store all of the necessary ingredients and supplies for the various steps of the spell that would turn my friends into animagi.

I rummaged around in the chest of drawers while the others seated themselves in a circle on the dusty floor. I could hear Daisy muttering the charm to blow the dust away. She seemed to be getting quite good at that. She would hate it if I pointed it out, but her parents definitely instilled in her a need for a certain level of cleanliness. It was too bad her hair never agreed to be neat and tidy. But of course, that tangled mass of frizzy blonde curls, the unmanageable mess that always gave Daisy so much grief, was one of the things I liked best about her. It spoke to some essential quality of hers, an unruliness that lay beneath the refinement enforced upon her by the rigid society to which her parents belonged.

Daisy was twirling a curl around one of her fingers when I joined the circle. I seated myself awkwardly between her and James, she smoothing her skirt over her knees, he prying at a loose floorboard with his fingertips. Sirius and Pete sat facing us, Sirius leaning on one elbow with his legs stretched out to the side, Pete sitting cross-legged, holding his feet.

"What now, Daddy-O?" Sirius asked me.

"Please don't call me that again," I said. I laid a handful of items in front of me; the necessary materials and a roll of parchment which contained the directions and ingredients. I unfurled the parchment and scanned it a couple times to confirm the order of the steps. I flicked my wand and sent four small glass vials to each of my friends, each one stoppered with a cork and containing a delicate silver needle that glinted in the light that radiated from the tips of our wands.

My mouth had gone very dry and I wasn't confident in my ability to talk, so I looked over the parchment again and cleared my throat a couple times. When I looked up again, everyone was watching me expectantly. I suddenly felt myself gripped by fear and uncertainty. This was so much more than an exam, it was more than a challenging essay topic. No matter how confident I might be about my coursework, there was absolutely no guarantee that this would succeed. This was advanced magic, seriously advanced. The years of research and preparation the five of us had done did nothing to assuage my concerns either because, in our research, we had encountered more than a few attempts gone horribly wrong. And nowhere in our research had we come across a successful attempt by subjects as young as us.

"Gimme that," James said. He snatched the parchment out of my hands and glanced over it. "Three hairs from the head, three drops of blood from the finger," he read off. "And we have to repeat this phrase three times before filling the vials, then say it backwards three times after putting the cork back in."

Sirius grabbed the parchment from James before he could finish.

"Then we make a little cocktail for ourselves," Sirius said, "by adding this 'essence of us' to that potion we brewed up last year. Where is that, anyway?"

"Right here," I said, waving my wand to summon a tray on which balanced a bottle of dark purple liquid, and four empty cups. I set the tray down in the middle of the circle. "It's been infused with the light of nine full moons. This is exactly the shade of purple it should be." I swished the bottle a little. "The right viscosity too." I put the bottle down again and took a deep breath, not wanting to look up and make eye contact with anyone. I could feel myself beginning to sweat.

Pete eagerly grabbed the parchment next.

"Then we drink it," he breathed.

"No," Sirius said, rolling his eyes. He took the parchment back. "We stir it with out wands, three times clockwise, three times anticlockwise, then three times clockwise again."

"Oh," Pete said. "Then we drink it." He reached for the parchment again to check, but Sirius held it aloft, grinning.

There was a pause while everyone swallowed the last gulp of potion, then looked around nervously. In that split second, I was gripped entirely by the fearful certainty that it had all gone wrong and I had just been instrumental in fatally poisoning my best friends. Then they began to change. Daisy and Pete began to shrink rapidly, sprouting fur at an alarming rate. James and Sirius likewise grew fur, but instead of shrinking, they started to grow. They each went to all fours as a pair of forelegs replaced their arms.

The transformation ceased just as suddenly as it had begun, and I found myself seated among silent animals, all four of them looking for all the world as though they were merely an odd assortment of wild animals. To my right sat a small white rabbit, with an unruly mop of fur on its small head. It looked down at its own body, then crossed its front paws daintily. To the right of the rabbit was an even smaller creature, a rat with brown fur and a long pink tail. Its nose and whiskers twitched nonstop as it peered around the circle. Next to the rat was an enormous dog with huge paws and a shaggy coat of black fur. The dog seemed to suddenly become aware of its own tail as it stood up and promptly began to walk in circles as it tried to grab the offending appendage. Kneeling between the dog and myself, and largest of all, was a white stag, nearly fully grown. If it had been fully grown, I'd probably have been speared by its antlers. As it was, they came uncomfortably close to my face. We'd have to remember to leave a little more space the next time they transformed.

"Remus, you're huge!" Pete's voice squeaked out from the rat's mouth.

"First time anyone's ever said that to him," said the stag beside me in James's voice. It stood up, and I ducked to avoid the antlers.

"And the last," said the dog in a voice slightly more gruff than Sirius's. The bark of laughter was more or less the same.

"Everything is huge," Daisy's voice spoke. "And loud!" The rabbit's ears swivelled about as its wide eyes stared around the room. It stepped a tiny paw forward, pink nose and whiskers testing the air. It made a couple tentative hops, gazing up at James and Sirius's intimidating forms. Behind Daisy, Pete was testing out his hind legs, standing erect and using his tail for balance. Two long yellow teeth protruded from the rat's mouth.

"It worked," I breathed. "It did work, didn't it? You can all turn back, right?"

"Oh no," James said. "I'm stuck! I can't turn back! You've ruined me!"

"Don't be such a dick," Daisy said. She was herself again, sitting next to me, looking just as she always did. Then suddenly, there was no rat, and instead Pete was crouching on the floor, eyes wide in silent amazement. Next, Sirius and James replaced the dog and stag that had been there a moment before.

I sighed deeply.

"It's all right," Daisy said to me. "I think we did it."

"Fuck," Sirius said. "We're animagi."

"Cool," said James.