Chapter Text
It was a dark and stormy night.
It was a dark and stormy Sunday night.
It was a dark and stormy Sunday night, and it was Halloween.
It was a dark and stormy combination Sunday and Halloween night, and in Hogwarts’ newly conjured – or transfigured, or altered, or possibly built, though built seemed unlikely given the corners magic sometimes encouraged cutting – eighth year common room, a party was raging.
Draco Malfoy hadn’t been invited.
Well, no. That wasn’t entirely accurate. Technically, Draco had been invited. Potter had invited Draco. But that invitation had been a joke, obviously, and joke invitations were out of the running by default.
That Draco hadn’t sincerely been invited fell in line with expectations. He’d been raised to expect more for himself, and to take what wasn't given, but father couldn’t reach him anymore. Worse things had reached Draco, and could easily reach Draco again, with no guarantee of Draco surviving them the second time around; even if Draco had been invited to the party in good faith, he couldn’t have gone.
This was a small indignity. In the grand scheme of his life’s tatters, it was nothing.
Besides, Draco had other plans.
These plans required a fastidious nature. They required focus; they abhorred drunkenness; they were time sensitive, and weather sensitive, and made up of sensitive information. They were at home in Draco’s paranoia and perfectionism.
These plans bid Draco watch the skies.
The eighth year dormitories and common room could not be seen from the outside in. They were neither as high in the castle as the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw towers, nor as low in the castle as the Hufflepuff and Slytherin dungeons. Instead, they had been materialized in a part of the castle Draco was half sure he’d never seen before despite that feeling more or less impossible, a good few levels beneath the astronomy tower. If one proceeded to this apparently not impossible place they would find a portrait of a wizened wizard with a penchant for lectures that rivalled Professor Binns. One would hand over the password, which was thankfully always enough to cut a lecture short, as it gave the portrait no choice but to swing away from the wall, revealing penetrable stone either enchanted to be passed through or enchanted to be nothing at all with the appearance of stone. One could step through the wall behind the portrait into a vast – unnaturally, magically vast, given the castle’s layout – room lined on one side by stained glass windows, and on the other by all manner of potted plants and trees with silver and white bark, as well as oddly shaped staircases and walkways that led to the dormitories.
The windows were akin to two way mirrors. Instead of their external sides appearing as reflective glass, however, they made no appearance on Hogwarts’ exterior stone at all. It was a neat little trick that more or less made up for whatever interior decorator had seen fit to imbue the shared eighth year spaces with a blatantly Hufflepuff aesthetic lean.
Truly, the dormitory carried the spirit of Hufflepuff to an alarming degree. It had seemed to Draco something about the lighting at first – it was warm in spirit, if not in practice, though certain happenings had left Draco with a permanent chill and unqualified to comment – but then he’d begun to uncover little badger statues hidden between plants that far outnumbered – Draco had counted – any ravens or lions or snakes.
There was also a frightening amount of yellow. Yellow doors, yellow curtains, yellow sheets, yellow cushions on the window seat in the dorm room Draco shared with a handful of people he tried never to make eye contact with. It had been a tad nauseating at first – Draco was not against yellow, but neither was he for this particular shade range – but like all things, it only took some getting used to. One just had to stop struggling. They had to stop noticing.
Draco sat in his dormitory now, nestled in those yellow cushions on the window seat. His attention was split in too many directions. He was trying to read in the dimmest light possible so as not to miss the flash of lightning – not that the crash of thunder wouldn’t follow anyway, but it paid to be thorough in times like these – so he had to strain to read the book perched on his knees. This would have been manageable on its own, but there were also the not-quite-muffled-enough-by-the-door sounds of eighth year revelry to contend with, which the steady drum of rain against the window could do nothing for.
(Draco didn’t like to cast the sorts of charms that muffled or obscured sound these days. It was impossible, when met with an unnatural silence, to not wonder what might be coming for him.)
At least the book wasn’t a priority. He’d pulled it from a neglected library shelf when he’d run out of homework the night before, and while he could see in it some potential relevance for N.E.W.T.s, it was hardly necessary that he finish it in a night. Draco’s desperation knelt instead at the feet of a potential electric storm, which was to be the deciding factor in whether or not he could see his plans through tonight, or if he was going to have to wait for further dreadful weather with a chance of manifesting lightning.
Draco was of two minds about the lightning. He understood on one level that magic oft required patience, particularly where potions were concerned. He understood as well just how much could go wrong if every step of the journey he’d chosen wasn’t taken correctly. It didn’t need to be tonight. He had only been waiting a week; being forced to wait a bit longer had the potential to be good for him. Might take the edge off a bit. Might ensure he was in the right mind to take the final steps. Might grant more opportunities to review the plan he’d already been constantly and nervously revising.
But all that remained of Draco’s ability to want for anything was was fixed on hope for a form that could sit by the common room fire without being hurt, or being threatened, or being embarrassed.
It wouldn’t change what he’d done. It wouldn’t put a stopper on his guilt. It was more likely, in fact, to provide Draco with more opportunities to marinate in said guilt. It would be another lie, another betrayal in its own way. Draco’s hope was an animagus form that was small and inoffensive and habitually given to curling up by a fire. Or he’d be blessed by something that didn’t feel the cold quite so badly as he had since Azkaban, or something better at sleeping than he currently was.
It would be a betrayal to himself as well, he knew. A denial of certain vital aspects of his penance.
Yet Draco wasn’t sure he would survive without it. On some days, better days, Draco judged this conviction as being a wrong-footed departure from the stoicism he now worked hard to cultivate. Just a result of his penchant for the dramatic. But there were other days. Days in which Draco felt the weight of the kiss’s potential, and wondered if it would really be so bad. Days in which Draco gazed up at the astronomy tower and imagined a different sort of escape. Days in which Draco wished his parents would forget him entirely so that it wouldn’t hurt them if he fell.
But Draco couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t obliviate them. It would be too selfish. He existed for them, would continue to exist for them, but he knew he didn’t really make them happy. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was stuck, and a coward, and selfish, and his failure branched out into so many contradictory lines. And they were stuck, too, with him.
He couldn’t do anything. But he could do this.
He’d been told in the past that he was rather catlike. There was a fair chance that was what his form would be, according to the research he’d done on his way to this step of the process. One couldn’t always predict an animagus’ form, but they could hazard a guess by factoring in both the magic and the personality of the aspiring animagus. Though Draco didn’t enjoy the thought of getting cat hair everywhere – it had a tendency to Draco’s nose itch – cats were certainly inoffensive and sleepy enough to suit his purposes. They were rather agile, too, and some mostly dormant part of Draco that had once not only stomached riding a broom, but had loved it, saw appeal in that agility.
Difficult not to daydream about such things. Since Azkaban his focus was so difficult to wrangle that Draco was sometimes driven to tears – hidden, always – by the simplest of class reading. It was difficult to be set on something you knew you couldn’t really have, and couldn’t really bring yourself to want, and that was how Draco felt about life now.
This was the only star left to follow.
As he’d fallen into the daydreaming – he’d begun letting it take him during his month spent hiding the mandrake leaf constantly hidden in his mouth – he’d only let himself think small things, careful not to set himself up for disappointment. A field mouse, a starling, a cat, a pygmy owl. As he sat cradled in yellow and waiting for lightning, Draco let the feeling that success might be around the corner get away with itself.
Perhaps he would be something rare. Something powerful. Something that couldn’t be caught. Most animagus forms were more on the mundane side, of course, but in his research Draco had uncovered fragments of evidence that this wasn’t always the case. There was a muggle story dating back to antiquity, for example, which told of a girl cursed by Hera – Zeus had, as per usual, been at fault – to turn into a skeletal horse at night. The story went on, as stories like it usually did, to detail her gruesome and ironic death. There were also two tapestries which seemed to depict a man becoming a unicorn, and a relief which depicting a king becoming a griffon.
This had all been in a book about muggle and wizarding society intermingling in the past. The chapter on animagi had been lush with primary sources, but the whole of the text had been interesting to Draco. His father would have tortured Draco for even daring to set eyes on the cover, but after devouring it from that cover to the next, Draco found his father’s hold had lessened. Only slightly, and maybe not enough to count, and maybe not for good, and all of that had made Draco feel guilty anyway, but it had been... something. Not a bad something.
The point was that Draco’s form really could be anything.
Which, Draco realized as he re-positioned one of the window seat’s daffodil coloured pillows, might present a serious problem. Up until now he’d been trying to focus on the most likely worst case scenarios, like being eaten by a cat should he happen to be a mouse, or getting splinched between human and animal form, or being allergic to himself. But what if he were too big? Too noticeable? Too dangerous by nature’s design?
If he wasn’t something that could lie by the common room fire, that was all very well and good, but what if he were something that could shatter walls?
Not that Draco thought he would be. He felt he had the bearings of a small to medium creature. But he couldn’t really know until it was all over with, and it was better to account for those problems now than later.
This was related to a problem he was already well acquainted with worrying over: his plan to use the room of requirement. It was functional, and as far as Draco knew, rarely saw use since the battle. Nobody was likely to walk in on him were he in there, and he couldn’t afford to be walked in on when first becoming whatever it was he was going to be.
But he couldn’t go in. He’d tried and failed to force himself, but he couldn’t go in.
Of course Draco knew he’d forced himself through worse, so even after trying and failing, he’d told himself that he’d be able to do it when it became absolutely necessary – which it could very well do tonight – but maybe it was really better not to.
He wasn’t likely to be caught in the room of requirement, but nobody would be out in weather like this.
The only problem with the idea – barring cold and rain – was that Draco might turn out to be a prey animal. A mouse. A ferret, even.
Though if Draco’s form was ferret, he’d welcome being eaten. So that was fine.
He wasn’t allowed to panic during his transformation, or things could go wrong, and he was possibly more likely to panic in the room of requirement, so-
A flash filled his vision.
Lightning? Was it finally here? Finally time?
Draco pressed his forehead to the window, breath held as he squinted into the dark. Just as thunder rumbled over the highlands, he extinguished his light source – just in time to see a bolt of lightning make ground in the forbidden forest.
Draco’s heart had begun to beat at a rate that registered distantly as irresponsible. He let out his held breath because he had to. The breaths that followed it were shallow and sharp. It was time, and he didn’t know where to go.
But you do, he told himself, strict and detached as marching orders. Get the fucking phial.
He could get the fucking phial. He would get the fucking phial.
Draco pushed himself violently to his feet. He left his book on the window seat and hurried to his trunk. He pulled out a few layers’ worth of his warmest clothing, unwilling to risk a coat alerting anyone to his plan to leave the school. Once he’d squeezed into the layers – they were a bit loose on him, which almost made up for how stiff that amount of fabric made one in the joints – Draco pulled on his robes. He was sure he looked at least a little ridiculous, but with any luck most still awake would be too drunk to notice.
There was a long moment in which Draco stood in the dark with his hand on the doorknob, frozen in fear at what lay beyond it, but then he banged his head gently against the wood of the door to wake himself up and forced himself to open it, to move through it, to move down the walkway and into the common room proper.
Everyone was very drunk. Draco, not fond of counting his peacocks before they hatched, didn’t trust them not to overstep rather than ignore as a result, so he was careful as he picked his way through the chaotic sprawl of eighth years.
He crept around a snogging pair so enjoined that it took him a few beats too many to register that said pair was made up of Longbottom and Luna. More distracted by this than he should have been, Draco promptly tripped over Weasley and Granger.
“Sorry,” he said, casual in a way that ought to have clued Granger in to his overcompensating.
“It’s fine,” said Granger. Her voice was worryingly sober, as were her eyes – eyes that Draco hadn’t meant to catch. She couldn’t have been entirely sober, mind, if the slow way she seemed to register who’d tripped over her leg was any indication. She was petting Weasley’s hair. Weasley, thank Merlin, appeared to either be asleep or on the verge of it. “Oh. Malfoy? Harry was looking for you.”
Draco made a noise of acknowledgement that was really a noise of dismissal. “I’ll talk to him,” he lied, and strode away.
As he moved for the exit of the common room it was with version of the same fear he’d always felt running up from the manor basement as a child, spurred by the unshakable belief that something malevolent was gaining on him. Then he’d been frightened of monsters; now he was frightened that a hex might stop him in tracks he couldn’t afford to be stopped in.
He made it out. He breathed a sigh of relief. He ducked into an alcove and cast a disillusionment charm, raw egg feeling slipping down his body. It was painful, waiting for it to take him over. Painful, being still. But when he started to move his anxiety did not so much disperse as it did shift. It was painful to think he might miss some critical sound. Painful to hear his own breath; his own heartbeat; his own footsteps; the rustle of his overly thick clothing.
There were easy explanations for everything that he could dispense if he were caught on the relatively short journey to where he’d stashed the phial. The clothing might have looked odd, but Draco had been to Madam Pomfrey to seek help for the cold that had permeated him in prison and never left. Draco had also complained to Pomfrey about a mental fog, which had been more of an issue at the start of term but still, in his defence, visited on occasion. His excuses would seem legitimate, should he need them.
Not that certain people would care a lick how legitimate they were, but Draco didn’t think he’d be expelled over this. It would be fine. It wouldn’t be fine, but it would be fine.
Contrary to his expectations, he reached the bathroom without incident. “Evening, Myrtle,” he stage whispered as he crossed to the gap in the wall hidden behind one of the toilets. “Happy Halloween.”
There was, confusingly, no reply.
Ah. Wait. He recalled Myrtle mentioning a Deathday Party on Halloween. She must still have been there.
Well, that was alright. Probably for the best. It would have been worse to find out his potion had failed with a witness, even if that witness had been Myrtle. Draco hoped she was enjoying the party as much as it was possible for someone like Myrtle to enjoy a party.
He retrieved the phial on a held breath, praying desperately to whatever might listen to him that it be right.
It was. Thank Merlin, it was. The liquid within the phial was the perfect shade. A deep, bloody red, fit for consumption.
Only probably fit for consumption, said the voice in his head that liked to keep him up to date on all that could go wrong. Might just kill you. Or turn you into an abomination.
“But I don’t care,” Draco muttered under his breath.
That probably helps, said the voice. Apparently it was feeling unusually conversational.
From there, Draco let his legs carry him. Up the stairs, out of the castle, over the grounds, all the way to forest’s edge. This was long enough a journey in torrential enough a rain that Draco was, by its end, quite soaked. His layers had done a decent job of ensuring he was not soaked down to the marrow, but his robes and hair and outermost clothing and any exposed skin might as well have been soaked in the black lake.
Wand to heart, though. It had to be wand to heart. Draco was not about to fail on a technicality.
Draco pulled off layer after layer, folding and piling them atop the grass, until he stood only in trousers and an undershirt. For a brief spell he toyed with the idea of opening the phial ahead of time, but the threat of a bad reaction with rainwater saw him chucking the notion into the proverbial bin. If speaking the incantation and downing the potion was a sequence that had to be done quickly and seamlessly, someone would have mentioned. Draco would know – he’d cross referenced various accounts and guides to ensure he wouldn’t end up only half furry (or worse).
“Fuck,” said Draco in a stuttered hiss. A cold like this worked fast; his teeth had been chattering since the moment he’d shed his layers. “Fuck fuck fuck,” he went on, and then, after a few steadying breaths, voice as clear and steady as he could make it, Draco spoke with intention: “Amato animo animato animagus.”
It was an incantation that had struck him as too light and frivolous for its stakes at first. It was, in essence, a bloody tongue twister. But he felt the weight of it now as he uncorked the potion, vanishing it down his throat in one long swig.
He gasped, wand falling from his grip. His body twisted as his heartbeat was crowded by another, smaller, heartbeat. His remaining clothing fused with his skin as his vision was brought low. Losing track of his limbs was the worst of it, and it was then that panic nipped most dangerously at his heels – or lack thereof.
This was... not ideal. Should it take him too long to transfigure back to human, the cold would do him in. And taking too long was typical of first timers – any prospective animagus knew that. And Draco ought to have put more weight on it.
Stupid. Unbearably so.
Well, thought Draco derisively, rain and self-loathing sluicing off his scales, at least I’m not a bloody field mouse.
It was difficult to think beyond the wrong turn he knew he’d taken. He tried to focus on what he knew about reptiles and the cold – snakes in specific, as he seemed to have morphed into a comically small constricting sort that had about as much to fear from avian nighttime predators as the average field mouse – but all that he could remember was immediately dismissed as being either vague or useless. The ethical collection of potions ingredients from serpents wouldn’t be any help to Draco here.
The answers he needed lay beneath his scales: Draco was giving in, slow and sure, to lethargy. Thoughts were slowing, were slipping free of complexity. There was a warm thing in the grass. Draco coiled around it, feeling the hum of magic reverberating through his jaw and all along the length of himself. This would not sustain him, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t nice.
If only it were mammalian. He would like very much to give a firm but not quite suffocating hug to something mammalian. He could leech off its heat awhile as he worked on transfiguring back to a thing with arms and legs.
As he sluggishly considered the highs and lows of constricting hugs applied to small mammals, Draco grew too distracted to track how tightly he’d coiled around his wand; its snap reverberated through Draco so violently that at first he was stunned out of realizing what he’d done.
He uncoiled himself. The wand had splintered terribly, with three bad breaks dispersed across its length. Its core held it limply together.
He couldn’t carry it back to the castle without hands. But... he could hide it, and...
It was difficult to plan what with the fog of lethargy that had settled over his mind. Hiding it would be enough. He’d wake early, or skip sleep altogether, and come back out in the morning to where he’d left it. No hope of moving his discarded layers to the treeline, but he could manage dragging the wand over.
Experimentally and ever so carefully, Draco shifted into position to coil the tip of his tail around the broken thing. This seemed to do no further harm, so Draco took his next step in pulling it over to a hiding place. He left it in a pathetic little heap it ought never to have been able to form and started for the castle, well aware even in his haze that he had no time to lose.