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The Art of Self-Fashioning	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 26078 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 3
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Chapter Six—First Lessons (Part Three)
            “What did you think of the author’s point about the difficulty of human Transfigurations, Mr. Potter?”
            “Which one, Professor? There’s a lot of them.” Harry pulled out the notes he’d made and scanned them for a minute. “I did wonder why they said it was more difficult to transform yourself than others. You ought to know yourself better than other people, right? So it ought to be easier.”
            Professor McGonagall leaned back in her seat and smiled. She had invited Harry to her office when he came to return the third-year book she’d let him borrow, and now they were surrounded by wide-open landscape paintings and a portrait of a cat that looked larger and more intelligent than the typical cat. Harry thought it was a Kneazle. He didn’t get a good look, though, because the cat kept creeping towards Harry when his back was turned and then zipping away again when he turned around.
            “I meant the concept in general, but we can certainly begin with that one.” Professor McGonagall cleared her throat. “When you transform someone else, do you think you know and understand their body?”
            “You’d have to.”
            Professor McGonagall shook her head. “Not if you were Transfiguring them to stop them from attacking someone else, or as an offensive spell in battle, or to arrest them, which are the most common uses of such Transfiguration.”
            “Well, and practice in class, right?”
            “Even in my NEWT classes, I don’t allow that.”
            Professor McGonagall was sitting up and staring at him in the way that meant there would be no smile. Harry accepted that and simply said, “Okay, Professor. But if you don’t know their bodies well, what do you do with them?”
            “You simply imagine the form you want them to assume and stuff them into it.”
            “So you have to imagine that form well. But not them.”
            “Exactly.” Professor McGonagall sighed and sipped from her tea. Harry cautiously tried his. He hadn’t had much at the Dursleys’ or in the Great Hall, where he preferred pumpkin juice. He supposed it tasted all right. Spicy. “This is the main reason that human Transfiguration needs to be so tightly controlled. Most of the people who practice it don’t care about the person they’re transforming. They care for their own safety, or the exercise of their magic. And more accidents occur with Transfiguration than with any other branch of magic except Apparition.”
            “Okay,” said Harry, and felt something in him, that had been upset since he read that portion of the textbook, uncoil a little. It ought to be okay when it came to his parents, because Harry cared about them more than himself. “But then why is it hard to transform yourself?”
            “Close your eyes, Mr. Potter.”
            Harry felt all his wariness rising up in him in rebellion. That was the sort of thing Dudley said before punching him. But he obediently did it, and told himself that Professor McGonagall wasn’t the same as Dudley.
            “How many hairs do you have on the back of your hand, Mr. Potter?”
            “Which one, left or right?”
            “You are already giving the question more thought than most people do.” Professor McGonagall’s voice had the hint of a laugh in it. “But can you tell me?”
            “Um.” Harry tried hard to picture the back of his hand. But he got images that could have been his or could be someone else’s. He hadn’t spent much time looking at anyone’s hand except Dudley’s, usually when it was smeared with his blood. “No.”
            Professor McGonagall was nodding when he opened his eyes again. “People—most people—have the necessary level of care for their own bodies that transforming themselves sounds as if it should be easy. But they don’t have the knowledge. That’s what the Animagus process is about, getting you acquainted with your own body.”
            “I thought it was more of a spiritual thing. I mean, that’s what Grimseby says.”
            “You’ve read Grimseby already?”
            She sounded impressed. Harry looked at the floor. He didn’t want to be impressive. And so far, he hadn’t had a problem with than in his other classes. Quirrell rarely taught them anything that wasn’t pure Word, and Harry didn’t have much of a knack for Herbology—unlike Longbottom—and Snape wasn’t going to be impressed by him no matter what he did.
            “Um, that book mentioned it, so I looked him up.”
            “Do you know how rare that is?” Harry had to look up now, because the tone in Professor McGonagall’s voice was weird, and so was the smile she was giving him. “That a student would do extra reading on their own, I mean? I often tell students who want extra instruction to do that, but most of them would simply rather not.”
            Harry discovered he was blushing. It was unusual for him. If he blushed for all the things the Dursleys said about him, he would have used up his blood years ago. He shook his head and focused on their discussion. “Is it spiritual or physical, though, Professor?”
“Well. I think Grimseby is in fact an impressive theorist, Mr. Potter, but under the rubric of Will, Wand, and Word, he spends far too much time concentrating on Will. Yes, Will is an important factor in the Animagus transformation, as it is in all Transfiguration. That does not make it the sole factor. One must also learn one’s body, and learn the correct ingredients for the transformation potions, and learn how to be silent. That requires Word.”
“Why? If it’s silent, I mean?”
            “You have to know your own body so well that you can find your way back to your proper shape,” Professor McGonagall said simply. “That involves knowing the shape of your fingers, the height of your knuckles, where you are at all times in relation to the objects around you, what is ‘normal’ eye-height for you, how sharp your senses are, and what you cannot know about yourself.”
            “How can you know what you can’t know?” It sounded like a riddle to Harry.
            “I mean that you know about your own lack of knowledge. So you don’t attempt to delve into them too deeply or worry about them. If, for example, your Animagus form was a swan, you wouldn’t be able to know how you swam in your own body with webbed toes, because humans simply don’t have them. It would be useless to spend time worrying about it. You would have to know about the length of your toes and the way you swam without webs, though.”
            Harry nodded. He thought he could see, and he also thought that he knew now why more people didn’t use Transfiguration in healing. It was really bloody complicated, that was why.
            But he wanted to ask about something else he had read in Grimesby. “Animagus transformations aren’t the only way you can Transfigure yourself, though, right?”
            “I would advise against trying to change yourself the way you would another person, Mr. Potter.”
            “No. I mean.” Harry swallowed. This came too close to his own goals, but so far Professor McGonagall seemed to be assuming he had a more theoretical interest. “Could you change your fingernails into claws, or something? Without changing all the way into a tiger.”
            “Only if you had the knowledge,” said Professor McGonagall, shaking her head. “All the knowledge. Your body, and the spells, and the knowledge about what kind of animal you were transforming into. And that knowledge is even harder to acquire than the knowledge of your body, because books on Transfiguration elaborate on the behavior of whole bodies, not the parts of animals.”
            Harry had wondered whether there were books like that published by wizards, or if he would have to get Muggle books on animals. He was glad to know there were wizarding ones. He had plans for transforming objects into animals.
            “Mr. Potter.”
            Harry blinked and looked up again. Sometimes he thought he thought too much around Professor McGonagall. He would sit there and plots would turn in his head, and he would forget there was an adult in front of him. Uncle Vernon’s punishment for that kind of thing, for ignoring him, would have been terrible.
            Professor McGonagall was bending towards him, and her face was soft and bright with concern. “I notice you don’t have many friends,” she began.
            “Oh, Terry and the rest of the Ravenclaws are all right,” Harry told her. “No one much cares that I was raised by Muggles.”
            Professor McGonagall nodded, although she looked vaguely disturbed. “I only thought,” she said persuasively, “that you might find a friend in Miss Granger, one of my Gryffindors. She’s also interested in books and advanced knowledge, and she’s good at Transfiguration.”
            “We sit at the same table in the library sometimes, Professor.”
            Professor McGonagall brightened. It was one of those truths that seemed to imply so much more than was real, and Harry saw her accept it.
            In truth, he did sit and study with Granger. It was fine when all she was looking for was a quiet place to revise. It became worse when she wanted to talk, because all the things she wanted to tell him about, like facts from Hogwarts, A History, Harry already knew.
            “Good, then. Wonderful.” Professor McGonagall smiled at him again. “Because as much as this is a school and a place to study, something my Gryffindors are apt to forget, it’s also a place for making friends and living your life.”
            I’ll have my life back when my parents are out of hospital. “I understand, Professor.”
            “Good. By the way, if you’ve read Grimesby, you might try…”
            And she talked about other books, and Harry made notes, and listened, and absorbed.
*
            He’d finally found a good place where he could practice his Transfiguration spells. It was a classroom, or what he thought had been a classroom because of the old tables in one corner, off one of the damper dungeon corridors. Harry spent a week perfecting his Locking and Silencing Charms before he moved in and set up his little workshop.
            He sat there with Latin books, and absorbed things. He understood now why some of Professor McGonagall’s spells sounded different than others. Latin had different forms for words if they were the subject of the sentence, doing the thing, or direct objects—accusatives—which were affected by the subject. The professor was using two accusative forms instead of only one, or none at all, which a lot of more “modern” wizarding spells did. Grimseby’s Latin in Transfiguration explained that, like just about everything else, the Latin words you used influenced your imagination. Two accusative forms of the words probably helped Professor McGonagall think about transforming one object into the other. After all, they weren’t doing it of their own free will. She was doing it to both of them.
            Harry decided that he would do the same thing. And with the Latin books in hand, it was fairly easy to find out what the accusative form of a word should be, and learn it that way in his spells instead of the way that some of his first-year textbooks tried to teach him.
            He also did what he had to do with the Word part of the spells, since Will was no problem. He recited Latin words for body parts to himself, and he lay back and studied his hand in front of him and thought about what it looked like, how it was pale and red in different places, what directions his veins turned, how long his fingers were.
            He had decided that his left hand would be first.
*
            Life settled into a routine for Harry. He went to class, he talked with Boot and the others in Ravenclaw until they were satisfied and left him alone, he went to the library during his free periods and read as much as he could about Transfiguration and Healing, he went to his classroom whenever he could and practiced, and he wrote essays in the spare time he had around that. The essays weren’t that hard, mostly boring. Once Harry figured out that most professors wanted you to just say things from the books in your own words, it became a lot easier.
            Other people did their routines, too. Boot complained about his family. Granger tried to tell him things he already knew—but she did at least like to listen to things Harry knew that she didn’t, and she would usually go and get a book if Harry recommended one to her, which meant she would read and be quiet instead of bothering him. Goldstein joked with Harry. Corner became gradually less shy around the others, and Patil less righteous. Iverson never did stop talking, but that was okay, since he was also easy to distract.
            Finnigan hauled Harry over to the Gryffindor table sometimes, and Harry felt sorry for Longbottom, who was a pale martyr. Malfoy sneered and tried to trip Harry up. Snape sneered and docked him potions in Potions and assigned him detention.
            Professor McGonagall smiled at him and talked with him. Professor Flitwick told Harry that he needed to work on his Charms a bit more, and assigned him one extra essay when Harry failed utterly to understand some of the wandwork that separated Charms from Transfiguration. Most of the other professors just looked through him, or—well, they saw him, they read his essays and advised him when he did something wrong in class, but he wasn’t important to them the way he was to Professor McGonagall and, for some reason, to Snape.
            Things fell into patterns that Harry knew and could use or enjoy or avoid or duck as he needed to. There was only one exception.
            It was an annoying one. It wasn’t like Harry knew ahead of time that it would bother Boot.
*
            Their first flying lesson was with the Hufflepuffs, and Harry had to listen to bragging from everyone. Apparently they all had brooms of their own and chances of being chosen for the national Quidditch team in a few years. Harry didn’t begrudge them that. He just got irritated when they tried to involve him in their bragging.
            “Don’t you care about Quidditch at all?” Boot was saying in despair as they walked down towards the pitch.
            Harry was watching the sky, and the shapes of faint birds that cut the air. He thought they were crows. He was thinking about how he would grow crow wings from his back, and how they would be different from a raven’s.
            “Harry!”
            “I don’t, no,” Harry said. “I was raised by Muggles. They never played it or let me know about it.” Some small part of him was pleased each time he could make the Dursleys useful like this.
            Boot sighed. “Well, you might like flying. I don’t know.” His tone said that flying was of no use without Quidditch.
            Harry didn’t care. He was mildly interested when Madam Hooch told them to hold out their hands and say “Up!” to have the broom jump into their hands, though. It was one of the few spells he had heard so far that wasn’t in Latin.
            Boot and Goldstein had their brooms in seconds. Corner struggled for a minute, but eventually got it into his hand on the third try. Zacharias Smith was already proclaiming loudly how bad these brooms were compared to the ones at home, which he didn’t seem to see was making Madam Hooch frown at him.
            “Harry?”
            “What?”
            “How did you get your broom in your hand that fast?”
            Harry shrugged. Professor McGonagall had been right about flying being an art of the Will. He could say the word, and he had so people wouldn’t think he was a freak, but he didn’t need to. He willed, and it was there.
            “You did it fast, too.” Boot had no reason to be staring at him like he was a Muggle all of a sudden.
            Boot shook his head and started to say something else, but Madam Hooch said, “Now, I want you to sling your leg over the broom and start to rise. Gently! If you go fast, then I’ll ground you at once.”
            Some people flinched like a grounding was a beating. Harry thought they needed to learn something about life.
            He put his leg over the broom, and waited patiently until Madam Hooch signaled. Then he rose.
            The feeling that swept over him was indescribable. It was like—like he had known all his life that there was something missing, but not what it was. Like he had known instinctively he should have another direction to walk in, but only this class had shown him what the direction was.
            Because now he had it.
            His will and his magic seemed to flow through the broom beneath him, not like a wand but like the broom was a new body part. Harry flung his head back, and the broom moved with him. He didn’t wobble. He just spun.
            “Mr. Potter!”
            Harry spun smoothly back to Madam Hooch, who was hovering in front of him. She frowned at him. “Go slowly, Mr. Potter. We can race in a moment.”
            “Okay,” Harry said. Madam Hooch moved away to help Lisa Turpin with her grip, and Harry watched her fly. It was like that, he thought. Fast and whipping. That was the way he should be flying.
            But he did have to wait, until everyone was hovering to Madam Hooch’s satisfaction and she came back to the front of the class and looked at them like a hawk.
            “Since some of our students seem to want to race,” she said, and looked off to the side, “I propose a contest. Mr. Boot, Mr. Potter, will you fly over here in front of me, please?”
            Harry dipped a little as he flew, because he had to make a swoop or he would just fling all caution to the winds and zoom off on his own. Boot looked at him with compassion as he eased up next to Harry. “Don’t worry. You’ll get better at it as time goes on.”
            Harry blinked, and then realized Boot thought his dip was just evidence of fear or something like that. He tried not to smile. “Yes, I know.”
            “Race to the Whomping Willow,” said Madam Hooch, and pointed towards an enormous tree on the edge of the Forbidden Forest. “Circle above the tree, not around—it’s easy to provoke—and then come back to me. Pay attention to your form.”
            Harry wondered for a second why a tree, of all things, would be easy to provoke, but then Madam Hooch blew her whistle. Boot sped away in front of him, bent over the broom as if it was a horse and he was whispering things in its ear.
            Harry didn’t need to bend over. There was no broom. There was just him. He took off the chains that he’d been keeping on his speed.
            The world blurred.
            There was up and there was down and there was the Whomping Willow, and everything else was unimportant. Harry soared straight past Boot and then around above the Whomping Willow. It was torture to stop there, but grace to make the circle. Harry felt as though he’d never understood things about wind until now, the way it could hit his cheek and make his eyelashes flutter.
            He smiled.
            He bore back, and passed Boot, who was still on the way there, and came riding straight at Madam Hooch. She held up her hand. Somewhere in the midst of his exhilaration, Harry remembered he was supposed to stop. So he did.
            But it was torture, like someone had locked him in his cupboard on a bright and sunny day. Harry sat back with a soft gasp and shook his head.
            Madam Hooch eyed him for a long moment, then nodded. “Most impressive, Mr. Potter,” she said. “I daresay that your House Quidditch Captain might want you to try out for the team.”
            Harry blinked and touched the broom. “I don’t know anything about Quidditch, though. I don’t want to play. I just like flying.”
            Madam Hooch’s face softened a little. “Well. You’ll learn plenty in this class.”
            “Harry!”
            Harry turned his head. Boot was beside him again, and he pointed one accusing finger. He was very red in the face. “You said you grew up with Muggles!”
            “I did.”
            “No one raised by Muggles could fly like that!”
            “Well, I was and I did.”
            Boot just looked at him with betrayed eyes. Harry felt like they were back in the Charms classroom that morning weeks ago after the breakfast where he’d sat with the Gryffindors. Except this time, Harry really didn’t understand what he’d done, and he didn’t feel inclined to do what Boot wanted just so he would stop talking about it.
            “I’ve known plenty of excellent Muggleborn flyers, Mr. Boot,” Madam Hooch intervened just then. “I’ll thank you to remember that who you’re raised by has nothing to do with innate skill.” She turned and smiled at Harry. “And you, Mr. Potter. That was a stunning display. As I said, you may want to speak to your Quidditch Captain.”
            Harry only nodded to make it look as if he would. Then he hovered off to the side as Madam Hooch chose Patil and Zacharias Smith to race.
            “It’s not fair, you know.”
            Harry glanced at Boot. “What isn’t fair?”
            “You’re so good at flying, and you don’t care about Quidditch.” Boot faced him and leaned forwards on his broom again, but this time he just folded his hands above the bristles and put his chin down on them with a deep sigh. “And you’re good at Potions, but you don’t care about the bad marks and detentions Snape gives you. And you’re so good at Transfiguration that you get to do advanced lessons with McGonagall—”
            “Professor McGonagall.” It popped out before Harry could stop himself.
            “Oh, stop sounding like Granger. Anyway, why don’t you care more about it?”
            Harry sighed. Give a little to get a little. Give a bit of information to make Boot go away and stop bothering him. “You want to know what I care about? I care about my parents. I want to know what life would have been like if I could live with them. I wonder all the time if they would be proud of me. If I end up being good at Quidditch, well, Professor McGonagall said my father was good at Quidditch. I would only be happy because I’d be close to my dad. Not because I like Quidditch.”
            Boot’s face changed as he spoke. “Oh,” he said finally. He swallowed, and tried to say something, but ended up repeating, “Oh.”
            Harry nodded, and turned to watch as the second race finished up, Patil leading.
*
            Flying was a joy and a wonder, but also a distraction. The real joy was when Harry was lying on his back in the abandoned classroom with words swimming in front of his eyes and spells in his head and his wand flowing like an extension of his arm.
            Because he was going to get his parents back, and then he would be happy.
            Near the end of the term, with Christmas holidays around the corner (Harry had signed up to stay at school, and Professor McGonagall had promised to take him to St. Mungo’s), Harry knew he was ready. He felt as he had when he was flying, clear cold air in his lungs and tingling in his chest. He stood up and faced the far wall where the desks were piled. Behind him, his little conjured fire shone, providing him with plenty of light and a shadow silhouette of his wand movements, so he could watch them as extra reassurance.
            He swallowed some of the clear cold feeling and recited the spell he’d pieced together out of Transfiguration hints and Latin declension paradigms.
            “Commuto ungues hominis ungues tigridis.”
            There was a long moment of stretching and pulling, and Harry looked at the shadow before he looked down at his hand.
            It hurt. But Harry knew pain. He had clenched the fingers of his left hand and thought about the pain he felt when they curled. He had thought about the time Dudley had slammed his fingers in a door and almost broken them, remembering it as perfectly as he could. He knew the height of his knuckles and the look of his nails now.
            He watched as his fingernails hooked and curved, pale and long now, and then they were sharper at the ends than normal. The little half-moons at the bottom of his human nails vanished. His hand widened and grew blunter, because Harry knew that he could claw something better if he didn’t have just ordinary fingers with claws growing out of them.
            The pain faded. Harry lifted his hand and admired the soft glow of the claws in the firelight for a moment. They were almost the same color as his human nails, but more ivory-like, without a sheen of pink.
            Then he turned towards the stone wall. He could have practiced on parchment or cloth first—he had samples of both here—but he wanted to see something else.
            He ran at the wall. It felt like he was flying, again. And then he leaped, and brought his hand down as hard as he could, and scored his claws down the stone.
            It felt so different from the way it would have felt if he’d been trying his own nails against it that Harry jolted. And then he heard the soft scree and saw a single spark fly free.
            When he stepped back, there were five long, pale scratches down the stone wall.
            The dungeon classroom echoed with Harry’s laugh of joy.
*
Kain: Thanks! McGonagall would be even more irritated if she knew exactly what Snape was doing to Harry, but since the last thing Harry thinks of doing is complaining…
Oh, believe me, Harry’s obsessive focus on his parents definitely has its weak sides. It’s just that, from Harry’s POV, it’s difficult to convey what they are because Harry has very good reasons not to think about that.
You’ll get to see another scene of Draco trying to harass Harry in the next chapter. Poor Draco, that is not his day.
I think Terry does care about Harry just on his own. However, he is also mightily puzzled by him and would like to figure out the puzzle.
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The Art of Self-Fashioning