Harry potter and the descent into darkness

Chapter 10

"I started it last year. Early-on, actually," Harry mumbled, looking down at his hands and fingering at his wand.

"What! But... wait, when? And why didn't you say anything about it?" Hermione asked, her tone shifting to hurt, rather than surprised or disapproving. Ron was frowning and looking equally upset.

"I... I just couldn't. I mean... okay, do you know much about how one becomes an animagus?"

Ron shook his head, but Hermione, as expected, had an answer. "First you have to brew a rather complicated potion. The potion reveals whether or not you have an animal form, and what it will be. And then you have to go through months of meditative practice, followed by many months of gradual partial transformations of each of your individual limbs and body parts. Then –"

"Right," Harry said, cutting her off. "So the first thing I did was discover if I could even do it, and what my form would be."

"Right," Hermione said with a curt nod, prodding him on.

"Well, I sort of... freaked out, when I saw what my form was."

"What is your form?" Ron asked, finally speaking up for the first time.

"Er... a snake," Harry mumbled.

Ron's eyes went wide and his skin went pale.

Hermione had apparently already figured this out and didn't really seem surprised.

"Yeah... so, anyway, when I realized what my form would be I... I guess I didn't want to tell you. I didn't want to say anything before then because I didn't want to get my hopes up on the whole thing working only to discover I didn't have an animagus form at all. And then I go and find out my animagus form is a great bloody snake and I knew that it would weird you out," he said, looking straight at Ron.

Ron looked like he was about to protest, but Harry cut him off by continuing.

"I did the meditation and breathing exercises at night before bed, just... I don't know, just for the hell of it. I wasn't even trying that hard at it the first few months. It was mostly something to just keep my mind off other things.

"But during the summer, when I was stuck back at the Dursley's, I worked on it a lot more. I mean, I had nothing else to do. They locked up all my school things in the cupboard, and wouldn't let me leave my ruddy room most of the time. So I just laid in bed, practicing the animagus transformation."

Hermione gasped. "But Harry! We're not supposed to practice magic outside of school!"

"Yeah, but this doesn't require a wand, and I don't think it registers with the magical trace the way normal magic does. It's not actually cast the way normal spells are cast. In any case, nothing that I did ever resulted in a howler from the Ministry, so they obviously didn't catch on to anything.

"I didn't practice an awful lot the first month or so of school, but after I got dragged into the tournament, and you two ditched me, I had a lot more free time on my hands, so I refocused on my training. And then, after I got the clue for the second task and realized that I would need to go into the Black Lake, I figured that my animagus form could help me out a lot with the task, so I started working really really hard on it. I only mastered it three weeks ago, actually."

"I... I can't believe you didn't trust us with this, Harry," Hermione said as she looked over at him sadly.

Harry huffed. "It's not about trust. I just... I mean, yeah, I was pretty sure that you guys would freak out a bit about the snake thing, although I also figured that you'd get over it at some point. But mostly I just... I don't know why, but I just wanted to keep this to myself. It was like... this was something that my dad did. Sure, I found out later that he did it with his friends, but originally I just wanted to do it on my own. And after the way the two of you turned on me after Halloween I didn't really.. want to share it with either of you. And even after we made up, I had kept it secret for so long I just didn't know how to tell either of you."