Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Art of Self-Fashioning	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 26077 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 3
- 4
- 5
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four—First Lessons(Part One)
            “Hi. We didn’t really get introduced properly at dinner, with Iverson doing all the talking. I’m Terry Boot.”
            Harry nodded and accepted his yearmate’s hand. “Hello. Harry Potter.” He moved slowly through the Ravenclaw common room, staring at the ceiling. It was painted with stars. Some of them seemed to shine softly, echoing points of light that gleamed off the bookcases and the tables and chairs scattered around the room.
            Harry carefully studied the tables, but had to shake his head. It would be hard to work on what he needed to work on, here. There was next to no privacy. Anyone could just walk up to you and ask what you were reading. Maybe the library would have more hidden corners.
            “Something wrong?”
            Boot was still close beside him. Harry wished he’d had more friends in primary school, so he would know how to talk to him now. “No. Just wondering how much time we’ll actually get at these tables. The older students probably take up most of them, right?”
            Prefect Iverson, who’d been standing near one of the shelves showing some of the books to a first-year girl, immediately turned around and came over. “No, we’re always fair, Potter, I promise. Professor Flitwick has a list of the popular tables and books on the wall, see?” He nodded towards one of the windows, and when Harry looked closely enough, he could see the parchment list hanging on the wall beside it. To be fair, it was easy to miss with how high the windows were and all the decorations. “That means people have a schedule for when they get to sit where and when they get to read the books. All you have to do is add your name to the list. It’s impervious to Copying Charms and the like. And anyone who moves their name around or crosses someone else’s name out gets a talking-to from Professor Flitwick. He’s not very stern, but you don’t want him disappointed in you. It’s like disappointing a puppy dog. You ought to see his eyes—”
            Harry decided that if he ever wanted to know anything about Hogwarts, he could just mention a vaguely related subject to Iverson. And it was making an excellent distraction for Boot from Harry’s lack of small talk.
            He decided he might as well bring up what he’d wondered about. “What about the library? Is it as nice as this?”
            “Not as nice. Nowhere near as nice. We’ve got the best common room, Potter, don’t let anyone else tell you differently.” Given that Harry was completely uninterested in comparing common rooms with the other Houses, all he had to do was nod solemnly and widen his eyes. Iverson charged on. “The library has all these darkened corners where the light’s hard to come by. And the arrangement of the shelves is not logical. Here, all our books are in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. The best way to do it, without a doubt. And the library is under Madam Pince. Disappointing her is a lot more painful than disappointing Professor Flitwick—”
            “Don’t talk the firsties’ ears off, Fleamont,” said a tall, dark-haired Ravenclaw girl, stepping up beside Harry. She gave him a friendly nod. “I’m the other fifth-year prefect, Claudia Anorana. Come and see me if you ever need a map of the school. I had it memorized the first week I was here.”
            “Oi, Claudia, you did not.”
            “Perhaps you could show them their bedrooms before we argue about this?”
            Iverson flushed a little and nodded, leading Harry, Boot, and two other boys across the room to where a marble statue of a woman with clasped hands stood against the wall. Harry blinked at her. She looked familiar, and he assumed he must have seen her face in one of his books.
            “Rowena Ravenclaw, our House’s founder,” Iverson said proudly. The statue was already shifting aside to show stairs. “Up here are your rooms. This is where you’ll spend your next year. The beds should already be set up…oh, good.”
            Harry stepped into a room that was large and comfortable, decorated in blue and bronze like the rest of the Tower, and had a hearth with a merrily roaring fire off to the left. The beds were spaced evenly to the right. They were huge four-posters with curtains that could probably be pulled closed around them. Harry could see a door beyond the last bed. He supposed it led to the bathroom.
            “Your trunks are at the base of your beds. The beds have charms for comfort on them, but tell the house-elves if you have trouble. You can also drop your dirty clothes in the basket near the end of your bed, but if you leave them on top of your trunk, the elves will still come for them. The only thing is to make sure that you don’t—”
            “Fleamont. Professor Flitwick wants us to report to his office with the other prefects.”
            “Coming, Claudia,” sighed Iverson as he walked back towards the door of the room. “She’s a pain,” he added over his shoulder, as if he thought it was a deadly important fact he had to impart right away, and then closed the door behind him.
            Harry found his bed, the second in line from the fire. The others all had animals, he noticed; there were empty birdcages near Boot’s trunk and the tall blond boy’s bedpost, and the other, shy-faced boy had a rat on his pillow that he sat down and promptly clutched for comfort.
            “You don’t have a pet, Potter?”
            Boot seemed to assume they were friends now. Harry didn’t bother to correct him. He shook his head. “I live with my Muggle aunt and uncle,” he explained as he took out his books and began to arrange them on the table next to the bed. It unfolded into a small bookshelf. “They don’t really care for animals.”
            “But Potter’s a pure-blood name.”
            That was the blond boy, who had flopped onto his bed and stretched his arms out as if he wanted to hug his pillow. Harry glanced at him. “I didn’t get your name,” he said.
            “Oh! Sorry. Anthony Goldstein.”
            “Michael Corner,” added the boy with the rat. He had put it down and turned around to sit cross-legged on the bed, as if he didn’t have to be as cautious around them now.
            “It’s a name,” Harry agreed. “But my mother is Muggleborn. And it’s her Muggle relatives I live with.”
“What happened to your parents?”
Boot made a large shushing motion at Corner, but Harry didn’t see the point in pretending. Maybe it would give them a reason for his quietness. “They got tortured during the war. They’re in St. Mungo’s.”
“Oh.” Corner turned pink, and hid behind a book he’d taken out, one on Potions.
            “Sorry to hear that, mate,” Goldstein offered. “My aunt, she’s a dragon, but she likes owls. And my mum is brilliant. And…”
            Harry let the words wash around him, just nodding now and then. Then Boot had to start talking about Quidditch, and Corner asked about everyone’s study habits, and Harry had to contribute a little. But it was pretty easy to ask a question about Boot’s broom or Goldstein’s family, and they were off and rambling. They talked almost as much as Iverson.
            Harry was glad when he could finally slip into his bed and close the curtains around him.
            I have to find a private place. It doesn’t sound as though the library is going to do it, not with an interfering librarian. But the castle is too big for this many students, anyway. Surely there’s some corner somewhere that no one would miss.
*
            Minerva’s mouth twitched a little as she watched the first-year Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs hurry into the classroom. This was one of her favorite classes, honestly, as much as she liked teaching her new Gryffindors and learning their strengths and weaknesses. The Ravenclaws were studious and often did well in Transfiguration because of how much concentration the subject needed; the Hufflepuffs were hard-working enough that they didn’t disrupt the class.
            She rose and stretched one back leg, then the other. She was sitting on her desk in her cat form, and new scents were filling her nostrils. Many of the first-years smelled like cloth, sweat, ink, and paper. After years of learning to separate them, Minerva could turn her head from side to side and bring a new scent more powerfully swirling up to her nose, if she wished.
            At the moment, she didn’t particularly wish. She sat down again, ignored the temptation to groom herself, and waited for the students to notice her.
            Only a few glanced at her, most continuing to look at the door. Harry Potter sat with his chin in his hand and his eyes fastened on her, though. Minerva wondered for a moment whether a natural talent in Transfiguration had enabled him to tell the difference between an Animagus and an ordinary cat. Some people could do that.
            But usually not without extensive training. Which there’s no way he could have had, not knowing what magic was until his eleventh birthday.
            Minerva turned her mind from the puzzle for now, and concentrated on the other students instead. There seemed to be the usual gaggle: the chatterers, the gigglers, the awed, the nervous, the confident. She wanted to say that Harry was unique among them, but that might be her fondness for his parents speaking.
            The number of people in the classroom at last matched the number of names she had on her roll. She stood up and sauntered to the edge of the desk, then sat and meowed to get their attention.
            “What’s that cat doing here?” one of the Ravenclaw boys sitting next to Harry whispered. “It has markings around its eyes. Huh. Like glasses?”
            “I think it’s cute,” said a Ravenclaw girl that, from her general resemblance to one of Minerva’s new Gryffindors, must be Padma Patil.
            “It can be cute all it likes, but it shouldn’t be on the desk, should it?” asked Susan Bones, remarkable for her resemblance to her grandmother.
            “I don’t know. I suppose that’s up to Professor McGonagall.”
            “If she ever gets here!”
            One Hufflepuff in the back row was starting to doodle with his quill on a piece of parchment. Minerva counted sixty heartbeats from that moment, and then walked to the edge of the desk and jumped off.
            On the way down, she transformed, clothes into fur and long legs into arms and claws retracting with that odd tickle they always gave when she changed this way and her feet settling flatter on the floor than they did when she walked as a cat and her whiskers sinking back into her face. She resisted the temptation to sneeze, as always, when they were gone and her sensitivity to air currents and smells went with them, and faced the class.
            Most of them looked stunned. Some had their mouths open or guilty flushes on their cheeks, probably afraid of what she’d overheard. Harry had a slight smile on his face, the kind that showed in his eyes more than on his lips. Minerva had sometimes seen the same thing in his mother’s eyes when she had cast a successful Untransfiguration, always the harder task for her.
            And of course Harry knew I was an Animagus. I told him myself.
            Pleased with the solving of one intellectual puzzle, Minerva looked at the first-years over her glasses and said softly, “I think you will learn quickly that what you think you are experiencing in Hogwarts is not always what is there. And Transfiguration is a subtle, boundary-blurring art. What you will learn here is that animals and objects are not always separate. Nor are humans and animals.” She was watching closely, and saw a few of the Muggleborns bristle, as well as a few pure-bloods. In their own separate ways, both of them had traditions that would make that statement peculiarly offensive to them.
            If you look in a mirror, you would see how much your own face resembles an ape’s, she wanted to tell them, but she ignored it. She reached for the roll and began to go down the list, pausing when she reached the name of the Hufflepuff who had doodled on his parchment. “Zacharias Smith.”
            He started and gave her an expression that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be guilty or haughty. Minerva merely raised an eyebrow and pretended to make a small mark next to his name. That unnerved some of them like nothing else.
            When she had put down the roll, she stood near her desk and surveyed them. So small. So young. Even smaller, she thought, than the Slytherins and Gryffindors. Both those two Houses seemed to have got all the tall first-years this Sorting.
            “Transfiguration is the most difficult art you will learn here at Hogwarts. It will be some time before you can manage even elementary transformations. You must master the incantation and the wand movements, as will be important in every other spell you cast here at Hogwarts, but more than that, you need to place a harness on your imagination. If you visualize a detail wrongly, what you create might be very pretty, but it will not be a correctly Transfigured object.”
            She turned to her desk. She had turned it into a pig when she had her first session with the Gryffindor-Slytherin class, but she felt the need to be mischievous this time, or perhaps it was only as a sort of gift to Harry, who seemed never to have blinked once as he watched her.
            To increase the surprise, she did it wordlessly, despite the extra effort that took from her. She would lecture in this class, and not permit any of them to attempt a Transfiguration until they had written at least a few essays.
            Commuto mensam pardum.
            The power flowed and flowered through her veins and struck out from her wand, wrapping around the desk. The class gasped in unison as gold and black threaded through the plain wood, and then—because Minerva could manage special effects when she had the inclination—the wood seemed to fly apart and reveal the animal underneath it, instead of simply transforming.
            The full-grown female leopard now standing in front of the class lowered her head and snarled. Minerva let them gasp and shout for a second, then waved her wand and intoned, “Commuto pardum mensam.” The leopard froze into a wooden statue, before her back grew larger and lengthened and some of the rosettes on her coat became the knobs of drawers.
            When the leopard was a desk again, Minerva turned around and nodded to them. “An expression of the power of Transfiguration. You may have read about the defensive or convenient uses of Transfiguration; they are certainly the ones most emphasized in biographies on Chocolate Frog cards. And using animated furniture to guard a house or creating a table out of dust to hold a cup is certainly useful.
            “But one can also utilize Transfiguration for offensive purposes. Think about the ability to Transfigure the ground at an opponent’s feet into ice, or acid, or a pit of fire, or a nest of vipers. Think about, if you were locked up in a prison cell, Transfiguring a rat into a monkey that could climb through the window and hand you the key. Yes, Mr. Smith?”
            “That would mean they would have to let you have your wand in prison, though, right, Professor?”
            Minerva almost smiled. At least the boy had spirit and a proper sense of respect, when he wanted to use it.
            “That’s correct, Mr. Smith. Although wandless Transfiguration is possible in moments of extreme emotion or extreme training. But I want you to keep your mind open to possibilities. I would never discourage imagination. It is only that the imagination must be properly trained and disciplined, or you could end up with a one-legged, pink leopard that could only hop awkwardly at your foe.”
            That raised a giggle from Patil, Bones, and a few of the others. Minerva looked back at Harry. He was sitting bolt upright, and his eyes were so bright it was hard to look at them.
            Minerva had to smile as she turned and added the first of the theory she wanted them to take notes on to the board. James would have been so proud to see his son as a Transfiguration prodigy—which Harry seemed to be well on the way to becoming.
*
            Harry finished scribbling down the last of the notes, and shook his hand a little once he wasn’t holding a quill that would spot the whole parchment with ink. Then he stood and folded up his notes, stuck them in the outer pocket of the bag he’d bought in Diagon Alley, and walked towards the front of the classroom.
            There were some things he wanted to ask Professor McGonagall.
            “Aren’t you coming to lunch?” Boot called from behind him.
            Harry gave him a smile he hoped looked natural. Boot was still under the delusion that he and Harry were best mates. “Yes. I just have to ask Professor McGonagall something. It’s confusing, you know. Being raised by Muggles.”
            Boot nodded sympathetically and rushed after Goldstein, who was talking about a Quidditch play. Harry turned back to Professor McGonagall. She was watching him with calm eyes that had a bit of a feline glow to them, Harry thought. He wondered if they also shone red when she was in the dark.
            “You paid close attention, Mr. Potter. I could see that. What was it you wanted to ask?”
            Harry took a deep breath. His heart was still hammering, the way it had been from the moment Professor McGonagall asked them to start imagining the possibilities of Transfiguration. But he would have to take care not to show that.
            “I just wondered if there was a common theory behind all kinds of magic, Professor. I mean, do Charms and Transfiguration have a lot in common?”
            “They certainly do. They’re the most Wand- and Will-based classes that you’ll take as a first-year.”
            Harry stared. He had read those words in his Transfiguration books from Diagon Alley, but he hadn’t found definitions. It was hard when the authors were sometimes using them in different ways than just “wand” and “imagination,” and then sometimes using them to mean the ordinary things, anyway. “What are Wand and Will, Professor?”
            “It’s a bit advanced for first-years.” Professor McGonagall studied him through her glasses. “And it’s only one way of looking at the theory, in any case. An older perspective. You’ll find books that talk about it in much more modern terms.”
            “I want to hear your terms, Professor.”
            “If you’re trying to flatter me, Mr. Potter…” But Professor McGonagall let the thought trail away before Harry could deny it, shaking her head. “No, I think you wouldn’t do that. At any rate. The theory is complicated for first-years because it can be hard for them to tell the different components apart.
            “But there are three aspects to the theory: Wand, Word, and Will. The movements of your wand during the actual casting of the spell are the first one, but also the little movements of your body that you make when you adjust your position, lift the wand, bow before a formal duel, and so on. All of them affect the spell’s success. Are you following?”
            “Perfectly, Professor,” Harry breathed. He felt as if something had opened up inside him and was absorbing the words. He understood them better than he had ever understood anything in his life.
            “Word is the incantation, of course. But it also relates to the words that you speak before and after the spell, your pronunciation of the Latin, and the way you’ll echo the words in your head when you learn nonverbal magic.
            “Will is the trickiest component to master. In Transfiguration, it mostly relates to the imagination.” Professor McGonagall nodded to her desk. “Before I could master the spell to turn my desk into a leopard, I had to know exactly what I wanted the leopard to look like. And I had to train myself in wanting.”
            “Wanting,” Harry echoed. I’m good at wanting. I know what it’s like to want food, and want to escape from the Dursleys, and want parents more than anything.
            “Yes. For that moment, and that moment alone, I had to want my desk to turn into a leopard—that exact leopard—more than I wanted to keep breathing, so that I could use all my breath in the Word.” Professor McGonagall smiled at him. “You can see why Transfiguration can be complicated to master.”
            “Yes,” Harry mumbled. “So all three of those work together?”
            Professor McGonagall inclined her head. “But not all your classes use them equally. Potions is an art consisting almost entirely of Word for first-year students. You’ll be following Professor Snape’s instructions in brewing. He won’t let you use your wand, and your Will is only important in that you have to learn how to concentrate on the ingredients of the potion.
            “Flying, on the other hand—you haven’t had your first lesson yet?” Harry shook his head. “It requires almost pure Will. You use a surprising amount of body movements, but not in conjunction with your wand, unless you’re playing Quidditch. And the Word is little use except if you’re actually studying Quidditch plays. You have to want the broom to jump into your hand. I’m sure Madam Hooch will have you use a word at first, but you don’t need it.
            “Astronomy, like Potions, is an art of the Word. You have to learn the names of the stars, the relationships of the constellations to each other, and what the various rotations of the planets indicate. Herbology is Word-based alone until you get into the upper years. Then Professor Sprout will start letting you use your wand for spells that water the plants, protect you against dangerous ones, and so on.”
            “What about Defense?”
            Professor McGonagall gave the barest grimace. “Defense is an art of the Word for the younger years. You have to learn about curses before you can counter them, and you’re not generally allowed to cast anything but the simplest curses in the confines of a school anyway. As it should be,” she added quickly. “Never imagine that I don’t approve of this state of affairs, Mr. Potter.”
            Harry smiled a little. “But eventually, it involves Wand and Will?”
            Professor McGonagall nodded. “Yes. As does Charms. And Transfiguration.”
            “But Transfiguration is the best, right?”
            Professor McGonagall laughed a little. “Can an artist not be proud of her art? Yes, Mr. Potter, I do think it is. It makes the greatest demands on the Will, for reasons I have already told you. The Wand and the Word are simpler to learn, but they must work together perfectly—and a Transfiguration on a human being, gone wrong, could be fatal. Imagine if you were trying to help someone hear better and sharpen his ears, and in the middle of the spell you got a flash of what he would look like with rabbit ears instead.” She gave him a sharp glance. “Human Transfiguration is forbidden to students younger than third year, Mr. Potter.”
            Yes, I do have to keep it quiet in case she tries to stop me. Harry had no intention of waiting until third year. And anyway, he wouldn’t be putting anyone else in danger. He had known and accepted from the beginning that if he wanted to perfect the art that would heal his parents, he had only one human subject he could safely practice on: himself.
            He had one more question to ask, though, before he would have to go back to pretending to be just an ordinary student who wasn’t more interested in Transfiguration than anything else. “When you turned the desk into a leopard, I felt—it wasn’t magic, I think? Something else, brushing through the air above you? Or hovering around you?” Harry hated the way he was stumbling. It was hard to put into words, though. “Like an aura.”
            Professor McGonagall straightened up sharply. “The fourth component.”
            “What, Professor?”
            “It’s not supported by the classical theory. With Wand, Word, and Will, you can replicate the results. Other people can do them, and the same way once they’re taught,” Professor McGonagall added, as though she thought he wouldn’t understand her. “But if there is a forth component, and not all theories agree there is, not all people feel it. The ones who do don’t report it the same way. So it’s not included.”
            “Does it have a name?” Harry knew he’d felt it. Like lightning, like breath.
            Professor McGonagall slowly nodded. “My professors called it the Wild.”
            “What does it do? How is it different from Will?”
            “I must emphasize, Mr. Potter, that you are not to practice this on your own.” Professor McGonagall bent down a little as if she thought she’d be able to see the truth in his eyes.
            But lots of people looked Harry in the eyes and didn’t see the Dursleys. So he just nodded earnestly and lied, “I promise, Professor.”
            “It means,” said Professor McGonagall, reluctantly, “that you feel the will of the animal you create. It happens only with animal Transfiguration, or human, if you are changing a human into an animal—also not allowed. You didn’t sense it when I changed the leopard back into my desk, did you?”
            Harry shook his head. He knew he hadn’t. And he hadn’t sensed it when Professor McGonagall turned back into her human form, either. He hoped he’d get to see her turn into a cat, and maybe feel it then.
            “Yes. Well.” Professor McGonagall folded her arms. “This is a controversial idea in Transfiguration theory, Mr. Potter. If the animals we summon have their own will, their own—sense of wildness, to explain why it is called the Wild, then perhaps we should not change them into something else, or change them back into what they originally came from, or simply make them cease to exist at the end of a lesson.”
            “But most people don’t think they have anything, do they? Because you said most people can’t feel it.”
            Professor McGonagall nodded. “And I must admit that I do not sense it in every animal Transfiguration. Not when I change my desk into a pig, for example, as I did in another lesson. I can only surmise it is because the pigs I Transfigure are not wild animals. If I chose to want a wild boar or a warthog, then perhaps the Wild would be there.”
            “That’s another reason Transfiguration is so difficult, isn’t it?” Harry mused, his mind skipping along paths he hadn’t ever traveled and yet which felt perfectly natural to him. “Because even with the same spell, people still get different results. One person would have a pig, and another one a warthog, and other people’s leopards wouldn’t look exactly like yours. Or someone could have a leopard cub instead of an adult.”
            “Very good, Mr. Potter. Five points to Ravenclaw.”
            Harry snapped back to the present. Professor McGonagall was looking at him with a faint, pleased smile, and attention. Harry swallowed a little. That was the last thing he wanted. How was he going to make poor marks in Transfiguration class now?
            As if she’d heard the thought and wanted to mock it on purpose, Professor McGonagall reached behind her desk and drew out a heavy book. “The third-year textbook. I’d enjoy a conversation with you about any questions you have after reading it.”
            Harry took the book. He didn’t have any good reason to reject it, and anyway, Professor McGonagall wouldn’t understand if he did.
            “Thank you, professor.”
            She smiled and shooed him out. “You’ve let me keep you here talking too long, Mr. Potter. Lucky for both of us that it’s lunch now.”
            Harry slid the book into his satchel and walked out of the classroom, head spinning a little. If Professor McGonagall was going to pay special attention to him and ask him questions and expect him to do well, he had a problem.
            But then he began to think about what he’d learned in class that day, Wand and Word and Will and Wild, and he shook his head. That wasn’t a problem. It was an inconvenience, and he’d handle it somehow. After all, so far Professor McGonagall only knew he understood the theory. That wasn’t the same thing as being good at spells.
            And the only thing that was a problem, the only thing that mattered, was thinking about how he was going to get his parents back.
*
Kain: Exactly. And the amount of hell he’s prepared to go through is staggering.
Neville has been trained, but he still has self-confidence problems. You get to see some of what Snape thinks of him in the next chapter.
Other people will come to think Harry is their friend, if that makes sense? Like Terry and Seamus. Harry does not necessarily think it back.
Harry’s role is glancing to the plots of the books at first. Only in fifth year does he really get involved.
- 3
- 4
- 5
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Art of Self-Fashioning