What? Another one so soon?

Yeah well don't get used to it: I'm dumping what I had already started last year. I'm missing a full chapter after this one, and then I have some material that's ready, some that needs work... Next chapter needs to be written from scratch so it'll probably be longer.

And now, for a completely unrelated question:

Do you guys think trigger warnings are important? Right now I'm thinking even asking the question is sort of a spoiler... Usually, I'm completely against them, but that's just based on how I like to enjoy stories...

Great, so now everybody's assuming the worst and you'll just be completely underwhelmed by what actually happens... So here's what I'll do: I'll leave it at that, and if you absolutely want to know why I'm asking, you can just check out the ending note real quick.

Harry and Hermione were walking in silence side by side. She had a few random books pressed against her chest. She didn't actually need them where they were going but they comforted her, and gave her hands something to hold on to. She kept her gaze firmly fixed in the direction of her slow but purposeful stride, her head held high and her lips lightly pressed together. In fact, the only thing that betrayed her inner turmoil was a regular but infrequent twitch of her lower lip, which occurred when she flexed all of her self-control in a concerted effort to refrain from chewing on it.

She would not look at him.

She would not look at him even though it seemed like a really good idea. The left side of her vision – where she knew she would find him should she choose to turn her gaze which, let me reiterate, she would not do – was subtly attractive, somehow. The light coming from that direction seemed a bit brighter, but at the same time more comfortable for her eyes. It was enticing, and she knew that her eyes would wander in that direction by themselves as soon as she would stop thinking about it.

So she didn't. Except when she had to concentrate on refraining from chewing her lower lip, of course. Fortunately she managed to limit these momentary lapses of reason to furtive half-glances, not even registering in her brain as she immediately blinked her eyes into submission.

So far, she hadn't been caught. But she had noticed that he was fidgety. When Harry was fidgety, of course, he wouldn't actually fidget. No: one knew that Harry was fidgety because his hands moved less than usual. His fingers looked a bit more stiff and his hands carried around them an air of unnatural motionlessness. One recognised fidgety Harry by his overcompensation of restraint.

Because Harry was a mostly restrained person.

Except of course when his hands were pressed possessively against her lower back while his lips drank hers with a fiery passion. She felt the hair on the nape of her neck rise with the sound of a sizzlingly sharp intake of breath running along its curve. She bit her lip to prevent the sound from escaping, but this time her eyes kept true.

She was still unused to the feeling of her neck being exposed...

Alright, so yes she had her hair up; no it had nothing to do with what he'd said about her shoulders. She'd just decided to do that this morning. On her own. For no particular reason.

They hadn't actually talked. Ron had kind of stopped everything, she had escaped like the courageous lion she was, and when she'd come back she'd just blushed, given him the egg while robotically repeating what Cedric had told her, and ended her tirade on 'good night', all in a single breath, before darting for the stairs. She had bravely avoided him all day, and now was the time for their joined detention.

When he'd asked her to the ball, she hadn't really questioned his intentions. He said 'best friends' and she assumed he meant... Sure, his weird half-denial when he'd asked if he fancied her had been a bit suspect, but she assumed he was trying to spare her feelings... It had been kind of cute, in a depressing sort of way: a sort of teasable mishap. But then she had actually teased and he'd blurted out... Oh god! And she had... But she didn't even know how...

She tried to stop thinking. It didn't seem to be working anyway. Every sentence her brain conjured ended up in images, tactile remanences, and half-evoked feelings.

Harry and Hermione entered Prof. McGonagall's office only to see her hunched over her desk, crushing something in what looked like a clay crucible. The whole office smelled of herbs and smoke.

"Sit." She told them, not looking up from her preparation. They walked to the front of her desk only to realise that there was no chair there.

"No, no. You'll sit on the floor. Over there." She gestured to a fairly large square of the floor behind them, where a comforter had been laid, covered with a sizeable amount of coloured cushions. A small wooden bowl in the centre was letting out powerfully odorous smoke.

"Sit crossed legged, backs straight, facing away from each other and not too close to one another. Then close your eyes and proceed to draw long, deep breaths in the incense."

McGonagall's no-nonsense tone was even more no-nonsense than usual. They complied, a bit nervously at first, but the smell was very relaxing. They soon found that their perceptions took way more space in their minds. They weren't heightened, just bigger. Their thoughts, on the other hand, were more difficult: almost as if they were propagating through some sort of molasses. They were stirred out of their daze when McGonagall laid two wooden bowls in front of them, each with a dark green, thick substance in it.

"What is it?" Hermione asked, not knowing whether she was referring to the liquid in front of her or to the pleasantly incapacitating incense.

"It's a magic imbued form of a South-American plant called Ayahuasca." Came the reply. Harry probably didn't know what that was, but Hermione should have been worried. She tried to be, but failed miserably.

"Oh. Okay." She enunciated serenely, "So are we going on a mystical journey using hallucinogenic drugs, then?"

"A hallucinogenic potion, technically. A journey to find your true self and its animal form."

Harry wasn't feeling very good. There was a large, ornate, oppressive, heavy-looking door looming on his right. It didn't move, yet it was always a few feet to his right whether he walked, ran, turned his head... Maybe it was the door of McGonagall's office, seeping into his vision? He couldn't see it very well from a side glance, but he didn't think it looked like an office door.

The rest wasn't much better. It looked like the forbidden forest if the forbidden forest had been much more alive. A sort of soft, silky, greyish grass covered the ground, the undulating trees had a white glow to them, and it was all bathed in the fresh daylight of a bright morning, even though the sky was pitch black. His professor had told him to look for a guide. He looked around. No one... Except for this annoying door, but he didn't want to open it. So he walked, and the door followed.

Hermione couldn't have predicted that this thought would one day cross her mind, but she really didn't like this library. It was too dark, the shelves were too tall, the corridors they formed were too labyrinthine, and the old books were all blank. All they had were titles but the letters kept shifting... It was completely dark and she didn't have a wand. She had entered Prof. McGonagall's office in her robes, but she was now wearing one of her usual muggle outfits. It made her feel sharply out of place in the distinctly magical library full of old grimoires and scrolls. Her only source of light was a perfectly mundane lantern, rattling in her hand as she waved it left and right in her search. What self respecting witch brings an actual flame – no matter how firmly the lantern was shut – in a magical library? And what was she searching for anyway? Everything looked the same...

Walking into the forest made the forest thicker, whatever the direction he picked. Including backwards... That was about the only observation Harry had made thus far. And he thought the forest looked alive because of the grass and the motion, but he had yet to encounter the trace of any animal. He'd only used his eyes, up to now... So he decided to use his other senses. He crouched to feel the grass between his fingers: it was really thin. Almost like hair. He closed his eyes, sniffed around, tried to listen for sounds... There were none.

No! Wait... There was... some sort of slithering whisper on his right... He turned towards it and listened again... It was on his right again. Always on his right... From behind the door?

She was reading the blank books. Not only was she reading the blank books, it was taking her an excruciatingly long time to finish every blank paragraph, as though she were suddenly bad at reading or something. She was growing increasingly frustrated with this vision quest.

There was a sudden noise behind her, like a throat being cleared if a throat could somehow be snarky. She turned to find someone she hadn't thought about in years.

"Hullo there, weirdo. I'm your guide."

"You? You're my guide? In a library? You? Olivia?"

Olivia was the girl who had made her primary school unbearable. Why would Olivia be her guide?

"Well, this is only what you chose for yourself, weirdo. I know what kind of animal you are and I'm here to make you realise it. Spoiler alert: it's puny, insignificant, and weird looking. Like you!"

Olivia had grown up. Her straight blonde hair had grown browner and much frillier and her green eyes had darkened several shades. Her teeth were more protuberant than than she remembered, but she'd always seen her with a retainer anyways... Still there was no mistaking it. She'd recognised her instantly, and even if she'd had a doubt her tone said it all: it was definitely Olivia. And Hermione was horrified to see her dressed in a Hogwarts uniform.

"I know what you are", Olivia taunted "'cause I made you that way."

Harry approached the door. He really didn't want to touch it. He didn't want anything to do with it. He had to approach it walking like a crab, because it would not budge from the right hand side of his body, on the edge of his vision. He hated the door. The slithering sound increased as he approached it. His own mind's resistance increased as well, but he finally noticed that it wasn't him.

It wasn't him who wanted to be as far away from that door as he could. It was someone else. Or maybe it was that lonely forest. Alive, but lonely... Empty of life, like the Boy-Who-Lived-When-His-Parents-Didn't...

Was that silent forest supposed to be his guide? A guide to where? There was only this door...

Why did the Forest-Who-Lived hate the door so much?

He found the handle by touch, gathered his determination, and pulled.

Minerva was watching the proceedings like a hawk, an enchanted scarf on her face to filter out the fumes. Under proper supervision, this stage was relatively safe. Difficult on the soul, certainly, and it was very possible to irreversibly fail, but it was a fairly safe trial over all. The whole Animagus detention wasn't very legal, but she should be able to deal with any mishap herself; something would have to go really pear-shaped before she'd ask someone else for help.

She knew they were doing something very difficult. From the outside, though, it was quite boring...

Until something suddenly went as pear-shaped as was conceivable.

It began almost innocuously with Harry's face. His eyes and brow remained completely relaxed, but his mouth twisted into an ugly expression. It opened with surreal slowness, wider and wider until it was just slightly larger than should have been possible. Minerva had simply never seen such a strange reaction. She didn't know what it could mean.

The mouth started screaming suddenly, two discordant pitches at once, rage and pain intermingling in a chaos of sound; the teapot on her desk blew up.

Hermione's face whipped towards the direction of the scream. It came from far away, down a corridor she hadn't noticed before. She immediately abandoned Olivia to run in that direction. The corridor turned left; so did she. Olivia was already waiting for her around the corner.

"That's not the way, you know"

"I know, shut up" She hadn't even slowed her sprint. After another turn, Olivia was there again, sitting on a pile of books by a shelf.

"You shouldn't do that, it's not part of the vision"

"Shut up!"

Another sprint. It was a long one. The scream became louder.

"You can't ever come back here if you manage to leave, weirdo."

This time she didn't even bother answering

"Oh my god, it's like you want to fail or something, this is hilarious."

"Shut up you insufferable cunt!" She'd really wanted to say 'know-it-all', but hadn't dared.

After the last turn, there was only a dead end.

"Hah!" Olivia said from behind her. "You even failed at failing. Girl, you are cracking me up." The corridor ended on a massive ebony set of bookshelves on which opalescent rows of books were neatly arranged, like as many carnivorous teeth. She tried to climb it but the large books prevented her from grabbing the shelves, so she took one, pulled it out – with great difficulty: it seemed almost rooted there – and threw it behind her. It had cut her hand. They were sharp like teeth too! The emptied space on the shelf started bleeding under her fingers when she grabbed it to pull herself up. She ignored the pain, ignored her wounded hands covered in blood, and repeated her actions. Pull out a too– book, grab the shelf, pull yourself up, etc. She climbed slowly, the blood from her fingers mixing with the one from the shelves. Her arms and legs were soaked.

Olivia had finally shut her ugly, misshapen, disgusting face.

Minerva was trying. She was throwing everything she knew at the boy to wake him up. The bezoar had been swallowed whole, the specific antidote against Majahuasca too, and now three stunning spells had disappeared in his mouth. She'd have to call someone. Already. She almost cursed internally.

Who, though? Poppy? Albus?... Both?

Now what? Hermione's eyes had started glowing behind her eyelids – that was more expected but way too quick! And at the worst possible time! She threw a handful of Floo in her waiting fireplace and called for help.

Hermione had finally reached the place behind her eyes. From there she could see. She saw McGonagall's office in weird colours, distorted shapes... She saw the teacher crawling on all fours approaching the roaring fire in the chimney head first. The gruesome suicide she imagined panicked her for a second, before she remembered the existence of Floo. But the idea of her teacher crawling on the floor to burn her own face off wouldn't leave her distraught mind. Finally, she saw Harry.

He was covered in snakes.

Ethereal, slimy, black snakes were pouring out of his forehead and open mouth, muffling his screams. Not muffling them enough.

She twisted her body and leapt on him, pinning his shoulders to the floor under her weight, and proceeded to swipe at the snakes, careful not to nick his face with her fingernails.

Claws?

The snakes only flowed even more intensely. She killed more, mauling, clawing, biting and spitting away with more and more ferocity. Their blood covered her skin – fur? – Some were biting her paws – err, hands! –, her arms, her legs... She ignored them for now, but she'd have to shake them off at some point. She could still hear his screams; as long as she could hear his screams he was breathing.

She didn't know how, but he was.

A black ooze had started rolling down on his face, dragged everywhere from his scar under the slithering bellies, extending the blackened lighting bolt on his forehead in thick Lichtenberg figures all over his skin and clothes and sometimes on the comforter below them.

Minerva pulled her head out of the fire to witness a thoroughly escalated scene. Hermione, still delirious from her experience, straddling Harry's prone form, her hands clawing at something just above his face. No. No time for this new development.

"Stupefy!"

She dodged with what Minerva recognised as a clearly feline agility, and the spell hit Harry, to little effect. Hermione locked eyes with her and let out a raucous snarl which melted into a short, gravelly roar, before getting back to her task with abandon. She seemed conscious enough to be at least convinced that she was helping, rather than genuinely trying to eat his face. Minerva was officially at a loss.

Albus stepped out of the chimney and didn't even pause

"Stupefy! Impedimenta! — !"

His third incantation had been lost to a blood curdling roar. Planks of the wooden floor creaked and tore upwards in a splintery crash, shielding the two teenagers from Albus's onslaught of magic. Hermione's swipes grew a bit less forceful; it looked like she was tiring herself.

The flow of serpents wasn't getting any slower, but Hermione was more and more physically exhausted. She was distantly aware that she was crying. She shook off some of the snakes attached to her body; when she went back to it, the venom had managed to put her arms to sleep.

'She's tiring herself out' she distantly understood what the silver haired ape said. 'Ignore her and try to help Harry'. Couldn't they see that it was the snakes' venom making her lose control of her body, rather than exhaustion?

She leaned down and continued her with her fangs, biting into as much darkness as she could, trying her best to dodge the ones that tried to bite back...

Eventually, after a very long and yet dishearteningly short time, she collapsed on him. Her upper body had finally lost its battle against paralysis. By then, though, he had actually progressed; his mouth had closed, stopping both the screaming and the flow of serpents. Only his scar kept bleeding snakes but those were mostly slithering upwards, away from her and onto the disgusting comforter. She heard hurried steps, muffled by the venom-induced nausea.

"What the..." Poppy should be instructed to never begin a diagnostic with that ever again "He's doing this! Subconsciously I think, if only because he doesn't seem very awake..."

"What is it?"

"Some sort of rejection, he's expelling something... That black ooze... What in the world did you give him?"

"Nothing that would produce that!"

"What the..." Someone really ought to tell her not to say that "She's not asleep, she's paralysed! Look she's still conscious, she's – what in the world is that girl doing?"

Hermione couldn't do much anymore. The paralysis was spreading. Her fur was mostly crusted in coagulated blood, and most of her abdomen was asleep. She could still lick his cheek affectionately, so she did. It felt natural in her desperation, for some reason. She used the few muscles she still had under her control to nuzzle closer to him, pushing her forehead against his head.

Unable to do more.

Paralysed.

Useless.

Terrified.

He was going to die.

Panic gripped her stomach with a cold, twisting, iron fist.

"I suggest we step back. In fact, I think we should exit the room." Albus calmly proposed, interrupting as Poppy tried fruitlessly to pull the mostly paralysed girl away from the catatonic boy: she was incredibly heavy – even for magic – and her breath was accelerating to a clearly impossible rate.

"What?"

"Her magic is bubbling up, I believe it's about to lash out. His is already active." Two bursts of accidental magic in the same place could have some spectacular interactions. The three of them scurried away from the two teens and into the corridor, Albus resting his back on the door as it closed behind him.

There was a sound like a solid ball of glass being broken in two, a white flash from under the door. The stone floor shook under them and the door itself inflated as it was pushed outwards despite Albus's efforts, letting out screaming jets of black smoke. After a few seconds, it was over as abruptly as it had begun, and Albus waited no time in heading back in the darkened office, Minerva and Poppy on his heels.

The floor, walls, and ceiling were covered in pitch black soot. Only a small disk of floor around the two teens had been spared, suggesting that they had been the source of all that darkness.

Poppy hurried to them waving her wand about. Hermione was half-draped over him, face nuzzled in his neck; it would have been cute if it weren't so... so–

"She's asleep. She doesn't even seem paralysed anymore"

Minerva let out one half of the breath she was holding.

"He's... Unconscious? His magic is still very much active... I think it's repairing something... In any case, it seems the urgency has passed. Whatever it was. Cibeiria."

Both teens were raised off the ground as if on an invisible stretcher. Minerva let out the rest of the contents of her lungs as she collapsed on a pitch black chair, raising a plume of soot.

"I don't know what kind of detention that was, Minerva, but I think it was a tad much." Albus half-twinkled as he followed Poppy out. She'd catch up with them as soon as her heart rate allowed it.

The trigger-warning question was a code! :D

Check out the first letter of each sentence of the beginning note, starting with 'Do you guys...'

Yeah, we have fun here. Also I don't like spoilers so I'm not going to make it easy for you to spoil yourself, am I? I mean have you seen what passes for summaries in my fics?

Alright so maybe I shouldn't have put this at the end of the chapter if the point was to prevent spoilers. Maybe I just wanted to do a cryptic trigger warning...

Oh and there is also one instance of 'language' I should maybe warn Americans about, but who really cares about that?

Cibeiria Cibaria, popular latin for stretcher.