What if Harry Potter Was An Animagus

Darth Theorist:    / @darththeorist   Three Eyed Theorist:    / @threeeyedtheorist   Discord:   / discord   Voice Acting & Narration: Steven Waters ⁨@bobablackfly602⁩ Writing: Myself, @nicholasmartin6526, @khuz377 , @WatashiNoKuraiTenshi, and @PathofDragonsRadio Year three at Hogwarts begins under a heavy sky. The wizarding world is hunting Sirius Black, the man who escaped from Azkaban over the summer and has not been seen since. Newspapers carry his face on every front page. Aurors patrol the corridors. Dementors drift along the boundary of the school grounds. Harry returns to the castle with Ron and Hermione, settles into the rhythm of lessons, and tries to live around the warnings. One evening late in the autumn, Fred and George Weasley corner him outside the Gryffindor common room and press a folded piece of old parchment into his hand. They tell him to keep it close, tap it with his wand, and say the words. Harry takes the Marauder's Map up to his dormitory that same night and shows it to Ron and Hermione under his bedcovers with a candle between them. Names crawl across the parchment like ants. Every student. Every teacher. Every ghost in every corridor. Hermione cannot let it go. She turns the parchment over in her hands and reads the signature line three times. Messrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. Hermione (Thirteen, child, frowning): "Who are they?" Harry (Thirteen, child, curious): "I don't know. Just four blokes from years ago, I suppose." Hermione (Thirteen, child, frowning): "Four blokes who built something like this? I want to know who they were." She begins her search the next morning. Spends weeks in the library, working through old prefect records, detention logs, yearbooks, and house-cup ledgers. Finds nothing useful. The names appear nowhere. As if the four boys deliberately erased themselves from every official record at the school. Then one evening she stumbles into the Restricted Section by accident while looking for a book on protective enchantments. She notices a battered leather notebook wedged behind a row of dark theory texts, half-hidden by the shelf above it. The cover is unmarked. She pulls it out and opens it. The first page reads in looping teenage handwriting: Property of Sirius Orion Black, 7th Year, do not read or I will personally hex your nose off. Hermione sits down very slowly on the floor of the Restricted Section. She has found Sirius Black's school journal. Hidden in the Restricted Section as a teenage prank by the Marauders themselves twenty years earlier. The book has been sitting in this dark corner of the library for two decades waiting for someone to pull it loose. She hides it under her robes and takes it back to the common room. The trio reads the journal together over the next week, curtains drawn around Harry's bed, the candle low. The pages are full of teenage handwriting, sketches, jokes, and bragging. They learn the four Marauders were James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew. They learn Lupin is a werewolf and his nickname Moony came from the moon. They learn James was a stag Animagus called Prongs. They learn Sirius was a dog Animagus called Padfoot. They learn Peter Pettigrew was a rat Animagus called Wormtail. They learn the boys spent three years training to become Animagi to keep Remus company during his transformations. They learn the Map was a byproduct of that training. Hermione closes the journal and sits very still. She looks across the common room at Ron's bed. Scabbers is asleep on the pillow. Ron (Thirteen, child, confused): "Hermione. What is it?" Hermione (Thirteen, child, careful): "Ron. How old is Scabbers?" Ron (Thirteen, child, easy): "Twelve. He was my brother's before he was mine." Hermione (Thirteen, child, careful): "Rats live four years, Ron." The common room goes very quiet. The trio plans the capture for three days. They cannot let Scabbers escape, since a rat can slip through cracks no human hand could close. On the chosen night, they lock Ron's dormitory and place a folded blanket over the window. Scabbers is asleep on Ron's pillow. Hermione opens Sirius's journal to the page she has marked, where a younger Sirius sketched a rough Animagus transformation beside the words of a reversion spell scrawled in the margin. She lifts her wand. Scabbers wakes the moment she speaks the incantation, squeals, and tries to bolt for the gap under the door.