Intense pain.
A pounding heart.
Two kinds of heartbeats.
Even though Fleur Delacour had prepared herself for the Animagus transformation, she had to admit that the pain was something else entirely.
Let us go back to the morning of the twenty-sixth of June — approximately four hours before she drew her wand and drove Rita Skeeter out of the Great Hall.
At that point, she had no idea what those four hours would hold. Nor did she know that the process of becoming an Animagus would be quite so brutal.
Around eight o'clock, the bright early sun was swallowed by dark cloud.
Fleur Delacour had planned to take the day for herself.
The long tension of preparing for the Triwizard Tournament had finally broken. The maze, with its Death Eater and its endless dark creatures, was behind her. She intended to allow herself a slow morning — to lie on her cool linen sheets and stare blankly at the ceiling for as long as she pleased.
She was not going to breakfast in the Great Hall.
What was she thinking about, in those quiet minutes?
The maze. She was still turning it over — asking herself why she hadn't been alert enough, how she had allowed the Death Eater impersonating Ludo Bagman to get close enough to attack her.
And then she thought about a man. A decent-looking one, who had found her and then left.
Even now, recollecting it, she felt unsteady — unable to entirely separate memory from dream.
He seemed to have kissed her. A brief, fervent kiss.
The scene was too strange for the waking world.
Red sparks had been spiralling above them, trailing sharp, whistling sounds.
Then he had gone — abruptly — and wrapped her in a tangle of overlapping protective spells so thorough that when the real Professor Moody arrived, limping, alongside the broad-shouldered gamekeeper, it had taken them considerable effort to unravel the spellwork and reach her.
The real Professor Moody. Not the impostor she had faced for a year.
For reasons she couldn't quite articulate, Fleur could distinguish between them clearly.
She was still lying there, turning this over in her mind, when the light through the carriage window changed.
The clear sky was darkening.
She felt something shift — some instinct or awareness she couldn't name — and climbed out of the Beauxbatons carriage without pausing to change out of her silk nightgown, making her way quickly toward the Whomping Willow.
She was not surprised by what she found there.
The dark-haired man with deep, steady eyes, a straight nose, and a mouth that looked like it had once known how to be careless — Sirius Black. He wore a black shirt, open at the collar, no tie, sleeves loose, one hand in his pocket. He was standing beneath the now-still tree, gazing up at the overcast sky.
"You felt it too, didn't you?" He heard her footsteps, didn't turn around, and spoke in an easy tone. "There may be a storm today."
"Yes." Fleur moved to stand beside him, allowing herself one brief glance at his mouth before shifting her eyes to the spot of disturbed earth where the small bottle was buried. "Should we dig it up now?"
"Not yet. Wait a little longer." That slightly arrogant face turned toward her at last.
His eyes were bright as he looked her over, eyebrows lifting slightly. "If a single ray of sun breaks through the clouds — even a sliver — it will all have been for nothing."
"That makes sense," she murmured. "Haste makes waste."
Sirius said nothing, but the corners of his mouth curved slightly upward, as though he was in rather good spirits.
Together they looked up and watched the dark cloud deepen to black.
Before long, a strong wind arrived, carrying a chill with it. One or two drops of rain landed on her bare shoulders and darkened the hem of her moon-white silk skirt.
"Soon," Sirius said, a sharp clarity entering his gaze.
Fleur watched the sky in tense readiness, poised to move at any moment.
— Lightning split the sky.
Like a vast, silvery-white dragon tearing through black cloud.
Immediately following was a crack of thunder so profound it seemed capable of splitting the world open — crisp and roaring and overwhelming.
"Now!" Sirius moved to the patch of earth where the crystal vial was buried and began digging.
Fleur crouched beside him, watching. It did not take him long.
He drew out a small crystal bottle containing what appeared to be a mouthful of deep red potion.
"Good. Nothing's gone wrong with it." Sirius held it up briefly and smiled with satisfaction.
He placed it in her hand, stood, and said with some urgency — the lightning still crackling above them — "Come with me. Somewhere deserted. Open ground. Safe."
Fleur followed him quickly into the Forbidden Forest.
Through rumbling thunder, they made their way across wet grass and over moss-covered roots, occasional flashes of white light cutting through the dense canopy to illuminate the path. She heard rain pattering against the leaves overhead and felt the occasional cold drop fall from the boughs onto her silver hair, seeping through.
"How much further?" she asked, her unease building.
"Soon," Sirius said.
A stream appeared.
They followed it in silence for a while, the water murmuring alongside them, until they reached a clearing where the grass lay thick and green as a carpet beneath the open sky.
Sirius Black's expression had changed.
He looked around the clearing with a searching quality to it — a nostalgic look, as if the place held memories that cost something to revisit.
"What are you thinking about?" Fleur couldn't help but ask.
"An old friend." He gave a short laugh and offered nothing further.
His grey eyes dropped to the ground. Whatever had settled in them, he concealed it carefully.
"Begin — don't delay," he said. "Point the tip of your wand to your heart, speak the incantation — 'Amato, Animo, Animato, Animagus' — and then drink the potion."
"All right." Fleur's expression sharpened as she mentally reviewed the incantation she had been reciting at sunrise and sunset for months.
The rain was falling more heavily now. Without the shelter of the dense trees, it came down freely, wetting her hair and darkening the silk at her shoulders.
Sirius pushed a strand of soaked black hair casually behind his ear, managing to look entirely untroubled by the state of him.
He lifted his gaze to the sky and listened.
Another roll of thunder.
He composed himself, looked back at her, met her clear light-blue eyes, and said steadily, "If all goes well, you will feel intense pain and two rapid heartbeats. The creature you are becoming will begin to appear in your mind."
"The first transformation can be extraordinarily uncomfortable. This stage is also dangerous — some people harm themselves at this point." He studied her expression with care, watching for hesitation or fear.
"If you're afraid, it's not too late to turn back. But once you drink the potion, there is no stopping it. Becoming an Animagus is irreversible," he said.
"I'm not afraid!" Fleur glared at him. She uncorked the crystal bottle, sniffed it briefly, then raised her wand to her chest and recited the incantation, pausing only for a moment before the last word.
Then she saw the expression on Sirius's face across from her — that barely concealed smile, as though he was quite certain she would lose her nerve — and drank the potion without further hesitation.
She stood in the wind and rain, and waited.
The feeling came.
Two kinds of heartbeats. And sharp, rising pain.
Even having prepared herself for the Animagus transformation, Fleur had to admit that this was something else.
"Now I understand what pain is," she murmured, beginning to feel the tearing sensation inside her own body and the two violent rhythms hammering against each other.
And then she lost herself.
Fragmented feelings crashed through her like a Pensieve going wrong — flashing, flickering, colliding. The nerves in her mind seemed to snap one by one. Her capacity for rational thought collapsed.
What remained were images and sensation: rapid breathing, a hammering pulse, and those grey eyes she could see through her widening pupils.
"Don't be afraid!" The owner of those eyes was watching her intently. "Don't resist. Don't panic. Surrender to it."
"I can't—" Fleur cried out.
It was a terror from somewhere beneath conscious thought.
The human part of her was screaming — being wrenched, compressed, pushed out. Something wild was forcing its way up from the depths of her soul, arrogant and unrestrained, seizing the ground her humanity had occupied.
Reason was crumbling. Instinct was surging. They tore at each other in her mind — boiling and freezing, light and dark —
It was the edge of madness. The edge of collapse.
She wanted to scream, but her throat had closed. Her body gave way beneath her, and she sank slowly to her knees in the wind and rain, suffering in complete silence.
Those grey eyes seemed to watch her from somewhere beyond the darkness.
"Fleur Delacour! You have to hold on! It's too late to go back now!" His voice cut through the thunder. "Think about the creature — the animal you are becoming!"
Humanity. Beast. Humanity. Beast.
The scales tipped and swung, over and over, between boiling and freezing, between light and dark, tearing her back and forth —
Fleur gasped, shaking, eyes shut, and tried to reach through the blinding pain toward the image in her mind. The animal. The animal that had appeared there.
Sirius Black watched her from a short distance, his body tense and ready. He knew what could go wrong — he had seen it before. In the disorientation of a first transformation, the animal's instincts could overwhelm the mind entirely, triggering a panic response that led to self-harm, or harm to whoever was closest.
He would not allow that.
He had to see his student through this safely.
Her moon-white nightgown was being absorbed into her body.
He could see the transformation beginning — unmistakably, irreversibly. Silver hair becoming fur, spreading along her spine. Slender fingers sharpening into claws. Fine hair appearing across her oval face; the straight nose stretching forward, lengthening into a pointed muzzle. Small ears rising to points —
With a sound of anguish, Fleur Delacour vanished from the clearing, and a silver-white animal lay where she had been.
Even with everything he had expected, Sirius was briefly, entirely still.
It was a remarkably beautiful creature. One could almost call it otherworldly.
It had the clean, elegant face of a fox — erect pointed ears, a curling tail, a long tapering muzzle.
It was nothing like the image of the formidable Beauxbatons champion. And yet even Sirius, who was not easily impressed by appearances, could not deny that it was one of the most striking creatures he had ever seen.
It was a silver-white dog — agile, tall, fine-boned, and fluid. A purebred silver fox.
At that moment, the silver fox opened its eyes.
Those almond-shaped azure eyes found Sirius immediately, like arrows. They were full of confusion and fear and gathering wildness.
Then it was on its feet, shaking the rain from its coat — and a flash of raw, uncontrolled ferocity crossed its expression.
That look brought Sirius entirely back to himself.
"Don't panic!" he called to her through the thunder and rain. "You're doing brilliantly. Stay calm—"
But she had already bolted.
She disappeared from the clearing at extraordinary speed, gone before he could react, heading directly toward the densest part of the forest.
Sirius's expression changed sharply. He knew that direction. If his memory was correct, the Acromantula colony's territory lay that way.
In the pouring rain, a great black dog appeared.
He crossed the rain-lashed clearing in a few enormous strides, gathered himself, and launched forward after her — leaping through the downpour with single-minded focus, intent on reaching her before she lost herself entirely in the Forbidden Forest, or ran headlong into something that would not distinguish between a lost Animagus and prey.
A young golden unicorn that had been sheltering under an oak had been peering cautiously out at the clearing. In the flashes of lightning, it saw a beautiful silver-white dog come racing toward it.
Closer, and closer still. The blue eyes of the silver dog had a wildness in them that made the unicorn shrink back beneath its branches.
Then a black dog seemed to drop from the sky.
It caught the silver dog mid-stride, bore it down onto the grass, and held it. The silver dog writhed and howled — a sound so vivid with fury that the unicorn trembled even under the shelter of its leaves.
The black dog barked urgently, a steady, insistent sound, clearly trying to reach her.
The silver dog snapped and bit, unresponsive to it.
The black dog held on. It did not release her. It did not flinch. It simply stayed, pinning her in place, refusing to let her run.
The unicorn, had it understood the language of dogs, would have heard the black dog urging with desperate concentration: Don't be afraid… find your reason… you are stronger than the instinct… you can push it back…
Fleur Delacour was, even in human form, a deeply feeling person — sensitive, proud, and quick-tempered. The animal side of her transformation only amplified what was already there, pulling the wild and unguarded parts of her to the surface.
The silver fox struggled fiercely against the black dog's hold. She bit down hard. She raked with her claws. The black dog made small sounds — more of surprise than pain — and did not extend its own claws in return. It simply absorbed it. And held her.
The unicorn trembled under the oak for a quarter of an hour.
Then the rain began to ease.
And the darkness in the silver fox's eyes began to recede.
Her gaze cleared — that particular quality of confusion and terror, burning and frantic, quieted into something slower and more familiar.
Blue eyes. Calm and present.
As Fleur came back to herself, she found the steady grey eyes of the black dog looking back at her, and felt the animal fury in her chest begin to settle.
She was surprised, dimly but distinctly, to realise she could think. Even in this form, she was still herself.
She could understand, now, what Sirius was saying to her in a series of short, low barks: Don't panic. Don't be afraid. You've done it. You're almost there. Imagine your human form as clearly as you can. You need to come back.
The silver fox blinked.
And obeyed.
In the drizzling rain, she transformed back — awkwardly at first, then with increasing certainty — into a French girl in a soaked moon-white silk nightgown.
She lay catching her breath at the edge of the damp grass and realised, with a small shock, how close she had come to the dark wall of the forest.
The rain was soft now, settling cold and light against her face and hands. She paid it no attention.
Through the oak bushes nearby, a pair of luminous, panicked eyes looked back at her.
A unicorn.
She stared at it for a moment, everything else briefly forgotten.
Then a lazy male voice came, clear and slightly rough: "Congratulations. You succeeded."
Fleur drew her gaze away and found the handsome face above her. There were fresh scratches on it — several, across one cheekbone and jaw — which did precisely nothing to diminish it, and somehow made it look more interesting than it had before.
She smiled and extended her tired arm toward him. "What happened to your face?"
Sirius reached down and pulled her to her feet. When he heard her question, his expression darkened immediately.
"Fleur Delacour, you are an absolute menace. I should have anticipated this. You were already biting people at the Black Lake, and now you've added scratching to your repertoire," he said, with considerable feeling.
Fleur looked at the bite marks on his rolled-up sleeve. Her bite marks. Quite deep.
"I'm so sorry," she said, with genuine remorse. "And — thank you."
"You have a great deal to thank me for." Sirius frowned, still somewhat baffled. "In all honesty, I've never seen an Animagus lose control to that degree before. Not once."
"How many Animagi have you actually known?" she asked.
"Quite a few," he said lightly. "But none of them could match you for sheer chaos."
Once she had properly recovered herself, Fleur considered the problem analytically. "It's probably my bloodline. Veela magic already carries an irrational, extreme side. Perhaps that amplifies the animal instinct during the transformation."
As Veela beauty was magnified, so was their temper.
An angry Veela could transform into something entirely different — something sharp and dangerous, with fire in its hands.
"That's plausible," Sirius said, deciding not to debate it further. "You'll need to practise. A great deal of it." He glanced over at the clearing. "By the way — your wand is still over there. We should go back for it."
Fleur nodded and walked back with him through the fading rain.
After a moment, her curiosity got the better of her. "I've been meaning to ask — where exactly did you learn to perform the Animagus transformation?"
"We taught ourselves," Sirius said casually.
Fleur caught the word immediately. "We—"
"Me and some friends," Sirius said.
"Is one of them the one who took three years?" she asked curiously. "Did you all learn together?"
"Not him," Sirius said quickly. "Someone else. My best friend. Extraordinarily gifted at Transfiguration."
"Oh?" Fleur's interest sharpened. "How did the idea come about? This isn't standard Hogwarts curriculum, is it?"
"Because of someone else entirely," Sirius said, and smiled, lost briefly somewhere far away. "We wanted to help him."
He was back in his own past.
After Transfiguration class one afternoon, James had stayed in his seat instead of jumping up immediately, fiddling absently with his wand, watching the red-haired girl across the corridor with the expression he always wore when he thought no one was watching.
"Hey," James said, still not looking at Sirius. "We should think of something for Remus. He needs friends with him during the full moon. We need to help him through his furry little problem."
"I'm listening," Sirius said, leaning back in his chair. "What exactly are you proposing?"
James watched the girl disappear around the corner and said, as though his mind were elsewhere entirely, "Tell me, Sirius — if you could become an Animagus, what would you choose to be?"
Sirius smiled. He had already known, in that moment, exactly where this was going.
"Something big, at the very least," he said. "Otherwise, how are we supposed to keep up with that great hairy menace?"
"Exactly." James grinned. "I'm going to be a stag. I intend to headbutt him straight into the Black Lake."
In the gentle rain of the Forbidden Forest, Sirius smiled — and felt his eyes sting in a way that had nothing to do with the weather.
"Sirius?" Fleur's voice brought him back.
She was looking at him with a slight frown. "Are you deflecting? I still don't understand how becoming Animagi would help your friend. It doesn't obviously follow."
"Oh, it helped. Believe me," Sirius said, and something warm came into his voice. "It was a golden age."
"But who was this friend you were helping?"
"You're asking a lot of questions," Sirius said, and his voice became careful. "That's my friend's private business."
"What could I possibly do with it?" Fleur said simply. "Aren't we friends?"
Sirius glanced at her.
Friends.
Was that what she considered this to be?
Not the undefined, complicated thing they had been doing — testing each other, pushing, concealing — but a friendship?
And that kiss in the maze. Had that been friends, to her?
He looked at her face and didn't know how to answer.
"We know each other well enough by now, don't we? You could trust me a little more." Fleur glanced back at him. "At least — tell me how long it took you."
"One year."
"Ha!" Fleur looked absolutely delighted. "Sirius Black, I took considerably less time than you!"
"You heartless student," Sirius said, with great dignity. "For your information, we didn't have the benefit of a thorough and gifted teacher who could walk us through every technique and shortcut that no book mentions. The Hogwarts professors wouldn't hear of students attempting something this advanced, and there was no one to teach us. We had to work it out from scratch — hypothesis, experiment, failure, discard hypothesis, begin again. Of course it took longer."
The rain was down to a soft drizzle now. Fleur smiled at him as they walked — a real smile, bright and unreserved.
"No one to teach you?" she said, unable to resist. "Didn't you tell me once that you could simply find any relevant book in the library and learn from there? That sounds rather like boasting, with hindsight."
"Capricious, thankless creature," Sirius thought, with something very close to fondness.
"For your information," he said, somewhat sharply, "the Hogwarts library's coverage of Animagus transformation is extremely thin, and the crucial techniques aren't documented anywhere accessible. We were left to figure out everything on our own. It was genuinely dangerous. Several times it nearly went very badly wrong."
"Several times?" Fleur asked, with a shade of real fear in her voice — thinking of what she had just experienced. "What if something had gone wrong? What if there had been a mistake—"
"Extremely dangerous. Yes. There were a few very close calls," Sirius said, with the offhandedness of someone who has decided those memories are not worth dwelling on. "But James never gave up."
"James?" Fleur asked. "Your impossibly talented friend is James? Oh — wait—" She stopped.
Her voice stopped too.
Because she had turned to look at him, and she had seen his face.
He was smiling. But his eyes were wet.
She remembered, suddenly and completely, that Harry's father — James Potter — was dead.
Sirius Black's best friend was never going to become an Animagus with him again.
"I'm sorry," Fleur said, quickly and genuinely. "I shouldn't have pushed. Sirius — don't—"
"It's all right." Sirius stopped walking. His voice came out rougher than usual. "Jaime would be proud, I think. The techniques he worked out were good enough to carry a student through on her first attempt. That's — that's something."
"Yes," Fleur said quietly. "It is."
"I want to thank my two teachers," she said, after a moment. "One of them is here—" She rose onto her toes without thinking about it, and reached up to his cheek, and gently wiped away the tears there.
Sirius went very still. Her warm fingers moved across his cold face, and he let them, having forgotten entirely to object.
Then Fleur placed her hand against his chest, looked up into his blurred grey eyes, and said, softly and steadily, "The other one is here."
The impact of it moved through him immediately — a tremor that spread from his chest outward, cutting through the grey desolation in his eyes like lightning through cloud, and two more tears slipped free from his pupils before he could stop them.
He looked at her. As though seeing her properly, for the first time.
She was looking back at him as though she already understood what it cost.
"Yes," he said, unsteadily. "He has been."
He tried to smile at her. It only made the tears come faster.
The French girl caught the two hot tears that fell against her palm, closed her fingers around them, and kept them.
"He is watching you," she said, tilting her head slightly, her voice melodious and certain. "He might want to see how you choose to live. I never met James Potter — but a man of that kind of talent, a man who would risk everything for the people he loved, would never accept his best friend wasting his life in grief. I am quite sure of that."
Through his blurred vision, Sirius could see the bright, undimmed blue of her eyes — like a clear sky opening up somewhere overhead.
"Sirius Black," she said, with that particular air of proud and slightly provoking certainty, "you are going to make every day from this point forward extraordinary. So that the James Potter who lives in your heart will always be proud of you. Otherwise, he will absolutely look down on you."
This should have irritated him.
It didn't. It made him laugh — something real, breaking through the wet and the grief, surprising him.
"I will," he said, voice steadying, trembling first and then growing firm. "I will."
The rain eased.
The Forbidden Forest brightened slowly around them, and birdsong began again.
They made their way back.
It didn't take long to find the sandalwood wand lying in the wet grass of the meadow, covered in water droplets.
Sirius had recovered himself.
He looked at Fleur as she retrieved her wand with the expression of someone who had found a lost treasure, and allowed a small, private smile.
"A strong recommendation for the future," he said. "After you've transformed, keep your wand stored somewhere safe that you can find after returning to human form."
"Yes." Fleur held the wand and felt a retrospective chill. "Now I understand why you chose somewhere deserted."
She sneezed.
Sirius glanced at her — a brief, assessing look — and said, "If I were you, I would cast a Warming Charm and a Drying Charm on yourself."
It was at this point that Fleur noticed her thin silk nightgown had been completely soaked through by the rain and was clinging rather thoroughly to her.
Her face went warm. She kept her expression entirely serene and cast the spells on herself with perfect composure.
Sirius turned away and cleared his throat.
"Overall — not bad. For a first transformation," he said, to the trees. He paused to compose his expression. "But you have considerably more difficulty managing your temper and your animal instincts than most. You'll need extensive practice before you can trust yourself. You don't want to accidentally transform in public and start alarming people."
"Obviously not," Fleur said. "Suppressing the animal instincts is not nearly as straightforward as you're making it sound."
She was still, somewhere beneath the surface, feeling the echo of what she had been in those wild minutes — that rage, that terror, that uncontrolled freedom.
"You've completed the hardest part," Sirius said, and he turned back to look at her properly again. "I'll continue to work with you when you need it. Before long, you'll be able to move between forms with just a thought." He glanced ahead, back toward the edge of the forest. "For now — eat something. You've used a great deal of energy."
And so, still somewhat unsettled, Fleur Delacour took Sirius Black's advice, returned to the Beauxbatons carriage, changed into her light blue school robes, made her way to the Hogwarts Great Hall for lunch — and met Rita Skeeter.
Her animal instincts moved before her reason did, and they taught the woman a lesson.
Her subsequent rational justification — that she was quite pleased with how it had gone — seemed to her, upon reflection, entirely sound.
That is the full account of how Fleur Delacour, on the morning of the twenty-sixth of June — the morning Bagman died, the morning Fudge and Dumbledore openly broke — with the generous and unflinching help of Sirius Black, and the invisible teacher who would live on in his heart forever, successfully became an Animagus for the first time.