So, I'm trying to clean up my documents for about the fiftieth time, and I actually found a small one-shot that even I might tentatively label finished. This is a Harry Potter ficlet, and I believe I was attempting to make a go at writing comedy - and it's a couple years old, completely unedited, etc.

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Five Hogwarts Animagi That Never Actually Happened

“Fish face.”

“Very creative,” George panted, awkwardly flopping himself out of the water.

“Fiiiiishy,” Fred cackled.

“At least we’re by the lake,” Lee said. “Or we’d have had to spray you or something.”

George didn’t respond because he was busy trying to figure out how to use his limbs again. Fred didn’t say anything because he was staring at his wand with an unusual amount of concentration, and Lee readied himself to throw another fish into the water - where Fred would have to remain until he figured out how to turn back.

Three years of work because of something a bloody piece of parchment had mouthed off about. It had said something like, “I bet you couldn’t even turn something into a canary, much less turn yourselves into animals. Pffffft.”

The Weasley twins had managed the canary thing months before, and were even planning on marketing their canary cakes or whatever they were to the school. And now they had finally managed to shift into Animagi - possibly, with Lee dragged in for kicks, and also because he was the best at Transfiguration in their year besides Lauren Donnelly in Hufflepuff, who would almost certainly have turned them in three years prior.

Lee grimaced as Fred’s features started to shift... and stretch.

“No way,” George whined.

Fred’s body twisted, and Lee fervently hoped that Fred wasn’t going to turn into anything bigger than a swordfish, because that would probably attract the giant squid’s attention and the squid was prone to eating anything without a human face.

“You know,” Lee said to George, “If he turns into a giant squid, I might just kill him.” Lee cocked his head at Fred and decided that he wasn’t slimy enough to be a squid. “Or a whale.”

George stared in envy, and Fred’s nose stretched across the shore before he suddenly sprang up on four legs and his body bloated and rumbled.

Fred the Amazingly Freckled Elephant was quite a bit larger than the tree they were hidden behind, and Lee could see a couple of Ravenclaws pointing at them across the lake. Fortunately, they probably thought that it was just some Transfiguration experiment or assignment or something. They looked gullible enough to believe that.

George weakly shook a fist at Fred, and attempted to prop himself up on an elbow and banging his head on the ground for his trouble. “You rotten backstabbing traitor! How dare you be bigger than a werewolf! I’ll have your head for this!”

Fred the Elephant snorted, and turned himself around twice before he sat flat on his behind. Someone across the lake whooped, and Fred smacked George’s face with his trunk.

“Your elephant snot won’t make up for your duplicity, sir, and I resent-” George paused as Fred the Elephant began to downsize, “your cheek. Actually, I resent all bloofy four of them.”

The rest of Fred’s transformation was over before Lee could have snapped his fingers, and to avoid having to listen to their undoubtedly witty banter, Lee began to focus on his own transformation as soon as he could make out Fred’s manically smirking face.

Becoming an animagus was dangerous mostly because of the experimentation involved. You had to have someone else transfigure you into every animal you could think of so that your mind could learn the shape of the animal, which could take decades, for the truly motivated, and then you had to let your magic transform your body into the form you were most suited to. And if you didn’t have a match, you could wind up as some strange chimera, unable to transform back into a human, or you could explode into a billion pieces.

Lee was fairly confidant that they had managed to cover every type of animal possible in one way or another over the past three years. Or he wouldn’t have let them try it with him, anyway.

The bickering washed over him as his body seemed to cool dramatically, quite unlike the other transformations he had accomplished with a partner. Usually, he felt like he was melting in unbearable heat when he was transfigured. This was almost... pleasant.

He couldn’t see his body anymore because his eyeballs had been temporarily displaced, but he could feel the gravel against his skin, but he was disturbingly unable to tell whether it was the skin on his back or the skin on his stomach.

And then Lee was looking up at Fred and George, and he felt wrinkled and dry and his eyes were on top of his head.

“Trevor! There you are!”

The ground disappeared under Lee’s feet as someone levitated him away from the twins, who were caught in a momentary - and priceless - expression of bug eyed horror and humor.

“Neville, that’s not-”

Lee twisted in midair, croaking angrily. George had managed to stand up, and was wobbling in place while Fred splorfled on the ground.

“You’re using Trevor for your experiments!” Hermione exclaimed.

Lee’s stomach twisted - well, he thought it was his stomach, it could have been his tongue. Neville Longbottom, on his own, would have been easy for the twins to save him from. Hermione Granger would probably figure out what they had been doing, and report them to McGonagall, and they would be arrested. She was scary smart like that; he had seen her figure out a seventh year level rune sequence in her third year and subsequently report Jamie Kirkpatrick for attempting elaborate sex rituals with her boyfriend and failing miserably. Hermione had then proceeded to claim that the reason the ritual had failed was because they had used the wrong type of ink.

Scary smart.

If little thirteen year old Hermione Granger could figure out sex rituals and the like, it was extremely unlikely that fifteen year old Hermione Granger couldn’t connect Fred and George experimenting with animal shapes to the animagus transformation - there were certainly plenty of witnesses over the past few months willing to attest to the twins' sudden interest in transfiguration.

Fred was pleading with Hermione for the return of their subject while George stared creepily at Lee and muttered some things to Neville about, “Unforeseen side effects,” and Neville was pulling his hand back from where he was about to grab ‘Trevor.’

Hermione sniffed in irritation and disbelief, flicking her wand and turning Lee over in midair. He croaked loudly as she made a show of inspecting him for Neville, proclaiming him to be fine... “Or else,” she attempted to menace Fred, and the wind blew her hair around her face like a wild halo of destruction.

To Fred’s credit, he only looked mildly menaced.

Neville was relieved by Hermione’s endorsement of Trevor’s good health, and cupped his hands securely around Lee.

Lee stewed in annoyance, vowing his revenge on the Weasley twins, and their children, and their children’s children as Neville and Hermione trooped up into the castle. They headed straight to the Gryffindor dorms so Neville could drop ‘Trevor’ off, and Hermione could find Harry.

Being carried around at an arms length was making Lee nauseous, and Neville was giving him no opportunity for escape. Yet.

Katie Bell swooped past them, strangling her hat as if she imagined it was a Weasley’s neck, trailing steam from her ears and fingers. She paused just as she passed them, and abruptly whirled around with a falsely cheerful, “Hermione!”

“We just saw them by the lake,” Hermione said conspiratorially.

Lee gulped as he saw Katie’s bloodthirsty expression from between Neville’s fingers. The Blood Blisterpod that Katie’d been given during practice had just ensured that he would have no backup. Katie was liable to put the twins in the Hospital Wing.

“There’s Harry,” Neville waved his cupped hands somewhere to the right.

Lee croaked again in protest.

“Thanks, Neville,” Hermione sounded relieved. “Here,” she passed him a vial, “Three drops on Trevor and three on your trunk will keep him in your room for a month. Unless you want him tied to something else, like your robes or something.”

Lee stilled in horror.

“CROOOOOAK.”

“Was that Trevor?” Parvati showed up out of nowhere and sent Lee jumping out of his skin. But, unfortunately, not out of Neville’s hands. “You should get him looked at,” she said sagely, wandering off.

“I’ll do that,” Neville said to her back, sighing as she left without giving any sign of having heard him. “Well, come on Trevor. You’re getting a bit old to be running off all the time anyway.”

Lee felt a pang of sympathy for Neville, who no one seemed to listen to as they walked down the hallway. Sure, a few people stopped to say hi, but they all rushed off because they had better things to do.

His sympathy vanished as soon as Roland Weller flew by backwards on his broom (there was no way the second year was getting on the Ravenclaw quidditch team, Lee noted), knocking Neville backwards, and loosening his grip enough that Lee could leap free.

Jumping as a toad felt glorious. He easily leaped eight or nine times higher than his own height, and could cross yards at a time if he pushed himself. At Neville’s shout or realization that he had lost Trevor again, Lee was already four meters away and vanishing in a mouse hole in the wall.

Lee scraped against the stone ceiling in the small tunnel repeatedly as he tried to learn how to control his jumps - he only needed to find a place where he could transform on his own. Without witnesses. And if Lee remembered correctly, this was one of the holes in the stonework that the twins had found that let out into somewhere in the dungeons - they’d never told him exactly where they’d set their fireworks loose, but they had managed to lose thirty points from Gryffindor without actually being caught.

And then Lee fell.

Down through the ceiling, and he knocked over a bottle of something on the way down... and when Lee managed to orient himself, he saw Professor Snape staring down at him. And Lee saw the ink spilled across the parchment.

“Twenty points from Gryffindor,” Snape hissed, eyes dilated in rage.

Lee fled for his life, dripping black ink behind him. He felt Snape’s door blast shut behind him, and was convinced that Snape was quite possible following him to chop him up into ingredients.

After three minutes of panicked flight, Lee realized that Snape hadn’t left the office at all, and Lee was outside of Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom.

Lee debated going in or not - on one hand, Myrtle might tell someone about his illegal transformation, but on the other hand, he really really really wanted to be back in his body. Right now.

So Lee crawled under the door.

And inside the bathroom a hag was laying across the sinks. Or a woman so ugly she might as well have been a hag.

The skin on her face was so wrinkled that it looked as if someone had taken a mop and turned it into someone’s face, yet her skin was drawn tightly across the bones on her wrists and fingers. Her long brown hair was matted and tangled, and there were bald patches on the top of her head. She was wearing gray robes that were tattered enough that they might as well have been rags, her feet were bare, but her legs were loosely wrapped with brown cloth.

Or bandages drenched in blood that had dried, Lee half expected.

As soon as he had moved into the room, she had tilted her head at him and stared, with wide, unblinking eyes that seemed horribly familiar to Lee.

She bared her teeth at him - yellow, pointed teeth that made him recoil, before she leaned over the edge of the sink and shifted into the form of a scrawny, mangy, foul cat.

Mrs. Norris was an animagus.

And she was going to eat him.

Lee took off once again, and Mrs. Norris yowled.

“What is it, dear?” Filch came from around the corner, wielding a broom as if it were a hefty sword like Sir Cadogan’s. “Foul, disgusting students beasts!” and something struck the wall just above Lee’s head as he jumped around a corner.

“Oh!” a girl said as Lee was scooped up and dropped carefully into a bag.

Filch ran past the girl after Mrs. Norris, who seemed to have found a student to harass.

Lee slipped over the girl’s books, and couldn’t suite get the leverage to get to the edge of the bag to slip out. He resigned himself to waiting for the girl to open her bag so he could make another bid for freedom.

Though he was grateful to her for most definitely saving his life. Mrs. Norris - or whoever she was - was terrifying. Actually, Lee hoped that the ink he’d landed in when he’d fallen in Snape’s office was all gone, or dried or something, because he didn’t think that getting the girl’s books covered in ink was appropriate thanks for saving his life.

Then again... she was probably trying to return him to Neville.

Did he really look that much like Trevor?

While Lee ruminated on the question, the girl seemed to pass through a crowd of students, climb three flights of stairs, and stop twelve times to speak to people. He couldn’t hear what she said, but she seemed very polite, at least.

And then she finally opened her bag, and he hopped right out.

He took a moment to watch his rescuer, who didn’t seem to notice or care that ‘Trevor’ had escaped her bag. Instead, the blond Ravenclaw girl continued to speak to the suit of armor she had stopped at, and pick a quill out of her bag to tuck in the back of the armor’s helmet.

To his shock, the suit of armor seemed to glance around nervously before bowing to the girl.

She blushed, and curtsied in return, before twirling around and continuing down the hallway as she tucked a rolled up bit of parchment behind her ear.

Lee stared as she walked out of sight, and then looked around the abandoned hallway. He was pretty sure he was somewhere on the third floor... and he just needed to find a closet or something to change back in.

He jumped around the corner warily, looking for any sign of where he was. There weren’t any portraits that he could see, or windows, but there were dozens of elaborate tapestries lining the hallway. Chances were, he’d be able to find an empty passage behind one of them.

Lee hopped behind the tapestries, and stilled while Peeves came through. Peeves had twisted himself into a loose spring-coil, and was cheerfully bouncing between the walls.

A gaggle of Slytherin girls passed through next, fussing over their assignments, and Lee decided to take a left when he ran out of tapestry covered wall. Lee hopped across the armor gallery, where the Ravenclaw girl who’d saved him from Mrs. Norris was complimenting a suit of armor on its shine and lack of Heely - whatever that was - and past the trophy room, where a Hufflepuff sixth year was on his hands and knees shining one of the cases.

Lee decided to make a run for it, and crossed three more hallways and the charms corridor to get to the statue of the humpbacked witch. He leaped onto the witch’s back and looked back and forth before he maneuvered his legs to tickled behind her ear - the only other way to open the passage was a password - and dropped down into the tunnel that led to Honeydukes’ in Hogsmeade.

Alone at last, Lee spent a few minutes forcing himself to remember how to trigger his transformation back into a wizard.

With a great deal of focus and a few twists, Lee was back to normal. He sighed in relief, and managed to clamber back up into the still open passage. He wobbled on his feet when he slid down on the other side of the witch, but was otherwise completely fine. His skin was the right color, his body seemed like it was in the right shape, he had all his clothes and his wand, and-

“Lee!” Neville called miserably from where he’d just rounded a corner, “Have you seen Trevor?”

Lee, fed up with Trevor’s existence, replied, “CROAK!”

Just in time for Fred and George to skid into sight with Trevor clutched in George’s hands.

“Trevor!”


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In retrospect, I don't believe there was a fifth animagus. I just pretended there was, and that people had missed it when they read through.