Harry was walking in a circle mumbling the animagus incantation for what would hopefully be the last time.
The clearing was protected from the harsh weather which seemed to extend from the top of the British Empire and Scotland all the way to Jersey.
After he finished the incantation he looked down at the potion in his hand and smiled tiredly.
With this, another thing would soon be checked off his overly long to-do list.
Only the personal curse creation with Snape, the Wolfsbane potion which he didn’t have that much input on and the Book of Eibon.
“Prost!” Dobby exclaimed as commanded and Harry took the shot like he was drinking a bottle of piss that someone had managed to ferment into being alcoholic.
The potion burned on the way down and Harry tried not to panic as the second heartbeat in his chest intensified and darkness started encroaching on his vision.
He sat down on the cold floor to prevent himself from falling and pre-emptively closed his eyes before his vision disappeared completely.
What he saw when he closed his eyes was a vision that felt more real than the visions he’d received even from even the biggest doses of psychedelics in his last life.
He was… Swimming through the ocean in weird bursts of movement rather than a continuous stream of agility.
The world was salty and dark, but he could see regardless with the help of his highly light-reflecting eyes.
Wait, highly light-reflecting eyes?
Well, he did seem to be a sea-faring creature, one adapted to low-light environments.
Harry was not aware of how long the vision lasted, but kept his primary focus on remembering his human form throughout.
Then, when he finally opened his eyes and looked at the rising soon and the cleared sky he cracked a small smile as tears streamed down his face.
“This… This is so dogshit,” he muttered quietly, wistfully, as he let the rays of the sun illuminate his face.
“Master?” Dobby asked worriedly.
“It’s alright, Dobby,” Harry said sadly as he raised his human hands in the sky and surrendered to the transformation.
The second heartbeat he’d been feeling over the last weeks became the primary one and everything swirled as he got smaller and smaller, the world becoming an absolutely indistinguishable burst of light.
Harry raised his claws into the air and screamed.
‘Whhyyyyyy!!!”
But what came out was more of a, “Blub, blub, glurk!”
A very quiet ‘blub, blub, glurk.’
After all,
Lobsters weren’t particularly well-known for their booming vocal chords.
-/-
Harry appeared in his first class of the day looking like an USSR secret police officer who’d just been asked to arrest an actual spy who would fight back instead of the innocent baker whose wife he wanted to bang.
Defeated, afraid, broken.
“You alright, Harry?” Penny asked as she sat down next to him on the bench all the way in the back of Binn’s classroom. “You usually… well, you usually don’t even come to History of Magic.”
“Do I look particularly crustacean to you?” Harry suddenly asked, turning his dead eyes towards his blonde friend.
Penny looked at him with a tilted head. “It’s not an adjective I ever really considered when thinking about you,” she eventually admitted.
“I don’t look much like a racoon either, do I?” Harry queried further.
Penny slowly shook her head. “Not that I can see.”
“Then why?” Harry pressed.
“Why what?”
Harry looked at his friend listlessly before simply letting go of his body and letting his head smash against the bench with a loud bang that startled the fourth year Gryffindor in front of him into falling from the chair he was tilting on.
“Bloody hell Evans!” the other student exclaimed with a curse as he got up with a red face.
-/-
Harry looked down at the food he’d plated up during lunch.
What did lobsters eat?
Plankton?
He’d never eaten plankton before, right?
At least not intentionally. Probably they were present in some small way in most fish.
Did lobsters eat fish?
What the fuck did lobsters eat?
“Mate, we’re worried about you,” Cedric said from next to him, a hand on his shoulder. “Talk to us.”
“Blub, blub, glurk,” Harry said, tears suddenly coming to his eyes, causing him to cover his face and quickly stand up.
He couldn’t handle it anymore.
He couldn’t be here.
He ran out of the great hall, one arm covering his face.
-/-
“I could have been a bird,” Harry said calmly as he stood atop the astronomy tower, right smack dab on the railing. An impressive balancing act when you really thought about it.
“Harry come down from there, please!” Neville shouted behind him, too afraid to approach. The boy had found him with the marauder's map wanting to discuss something.
Harry had other priorities.
“If I was an animal, which animal would I be?” he suddenly asked the younger boy loudly over the biting winds of the Scottish winter.
Neville hesitated, seemingly unsure. “A badger?” he asked eventually.
Harry turned his head to glare at the blonde. “Are you telling me or are you asking?!” he shouted angrily with a red face.
The boy who lived defensively raised his arms. “Crow, you’d be a crow!” he shouted quickly.
Harry turned around again to stare at the dipping soon. “I would make a great crow!” he shouted angrily. “The best crow. My plumage would be so clean! I’d be the smartest crow. The best flier!
“Yeah, yeah!” Neville screamed from behind, seemingly worried that disagreeing would cause an accident to occur.
“I would be going bawk, bawk!” Harry shouted with tears in his eyes. “Bawk, bawk, eat worm, I’d eat the worms, it’s better than plankton!”
“Harry, come down!” Neville shouted again, starting to sound genuinely afraid.
Harry spread his arms, each hand holding one end of his robe, as the sun dipped fully below the horizon.
The robe created the effect of it seeming like he had two great black wings buffeting behind his back.
“Bawk, bawk, bawk!” he screamed angrily at the winds, at the gods, at fate, it was unclear.
-/-
“Do you know why you’re here?” Snape asked in a low voice as Harry sullenly sat in the man’s office, crossing his arms like a particularly handsome bodybuilder.
“Why are any of us here, really, what’s the point?” Harry asked bitterly, receiving a scathing glare from the professor.
The professor sighed, brought up a hand to rub at his temple and extended the other to slap the newest edition of the Daily Prophet onto the table.
“The Unlikely Heroes of Hogwarts Vanquish Basilisk!” the headline read. “That article you were telling me about finally came out,” Snape said dangerously.
“So what?” Harry asked. “You didn’t even bother involving yourself in the interview, so I did what I had to do.”
The defence professor’s eyebrow twitched dangerously while his lip curled. He looked down and read from the paper.
“It was in a bustling London cafe where the dashingly handsome and limitlessly eloquent Harry Evans told me about how he and his trusty sidekicks Neville Longbottom and professor Snape found the chamber of secrets to finally deal with the danger within.
It was a story fraught with danger, intrigue, and matchless heroism from Britain’s foremost duellist who is still suffering from unjust allegations from abroad for his defence of justice and love on the stage of legends.”
“The stage of legends?” Snape asked sarcastically. “The U17 duelling competition?”
“I am not the man who gave this interview,” Harry said slowly while shaking his head, looking down at the stone floor.
“Who are you then?”
“I’m just his shadow, a remnant of what I once was.”
The professor leaned his head back. “I now understand that it is not only for protection that we must dispense with any larger plans until you turn, at least twenty years old. Perhaps by then the hormones will stop addling your head.”
“Do lobsters even have hormones?” Harry questioned quietly.
Snape paused and narrowed his eyes, dots connecting behind the dark orbs. He suddenly froze and stared at Harry as if seeing him for the first time.
“No…” he muttered. “That can’t be.”
Harry looked away, at the bare walls of the office, refusing to meet his gaze.
“You, you complete the animagus transformation, at fourteen?” Snape asked, obviously baffled.
Harry quickly shook his head. “There is no transformation!” he exclaimed, angrily, jumping up from his seat and looking at the ceiling. “There is no secret pedophile island, and there is no war in Ba Sing Sei!”
Snape for his part simply threw his head back and laughed.
“A lobster!” he guffawed like an asthmatic horse.
“Screw you!” Harry shouted, finally looking at the man whose face was turning a dangerous shade of red.
The professor kept laughing.
Harry turned to leave after the laughter did not abate for a full ten seconds.
It was as he neared the door that Snape fired his last shot. “Where are you going?” he asked as laughs still racked his body. “Retreating into your shell?”
Harry opened the door and slammed it shut behind him.
He raised a hand and slammed a fist into the wall next to the door.
“That’s it,” he hissed furiously.
“I’m going to Azkaban, tonight, increased guard or not, fuck it! This form better be useful for something!”
“A lobster, hahahahaaha,” the professor's voice rang out from the door behind him.
Harry stormed off angrily.
“You’ll see!” he screamed into the empty hallway.
“You’ll all see!”
“You mess with the crab, you get the stab!”
-/-
AN: Big reveal, perhaps you are starting to notice my philosophy, which is that it’s not the form that makes greatness, but the content. Had Tom simply kept him name, becoming Dark Lord Tom, then that name would have become feared. Similarly, it is not that Harry would benefit from having a cooler form like snake or raven, but rather that the raven or snake would benefit from being associated with harry.