For several long moments, Harry could not move. The bed curtains swayed faintly, stirred by a draft from the window. Somewhere in the distance, the castle sighed, pipes clicking, stone adjusting to the slow crawl of night toward morning. These sounds were painfully small... Enclosed... Flat.
He pressed his palms into the mattress, expecting, absurdly, to feel the living thrum of roots and soil beneath his fingers.
There was nothing...his chest tightened.
Breathe, he told himself, the way Neytiri had taught him when fear threatened to fracture thought into instinct. Slow. Deep. Listen to the body.
His body listened.
That was the problem.
It was too light. Too fragile. Limbs felt short, clumsy, the air dull and stale in his lungs. He became acutely aware of every weakness, how easily this body could be broken, how narrow its balance was, how muted its senses were. Panic flickered, sharp and dangerous, and he crushed it down with a control born of long years spent surviving war.
Years.
The thought landed like a stone dropped into water.
He closed his eyes.
Memories surged, not in fragments, but in vast, seamless stretches. The rhythm of a bowstring under his fingers. The warmth of a direhorse's breath. The ache of loss that never fully healed, only learned to sit quietly in the chest. Faces he could name without thinking. Songs he had sung beneath glowing branches.
All of it there. All of it real.
Harry bent forward, resting his forehead against his knees.
He did not cry.
He had learned, on Pandora, that tears were not always the answer. Sometimes the grief was too large for that.
Dawn crept in pale and grey through the narrow window.
When the dormitory stirred, Neville turning in his sleep, Dean muttering something incoherent, Harry forced himself to stand. His legs wobbled, unaccustomed to the difference in leverage and strength. He adjusted quickly, compensating without conscious thought...that, too, unsettled him.
In the mirror, his reflection stared back: messy black hair, green eyes ringed with exhaustion, a lightning-shaped scar faintly flushed as though irritated. A fourteen-year-old boy.
It felt like a lie.
Harry raised his hand.
For a heartbeat, just a heartbeat, his fingers wanted to be longer, stronger, blue-striped and tipped with claws. The sensation was so vivid he hissed, shaking his hand as though burned.
Magic stirred.
Not the wand-focused current he had known since first year, but something deeper. Grounded. Heavy. It sat low in his chest and gut, responding to emotion rather than incantation.
Harry stilled.
Very carefully, he reached inward, not with words or wand or spell, but with the same listening awareness he had used beneath the Tree of Souls.
Show me, he thought. Not a command. An invitation.
The world… tilted.
His vision blurred, colours bleeding outward as his bones screamed and reshaped. He bit back a cry, gripping the bedpost as his center of gravity shifted violently. Fabric tore as his body surged upward, muscles expanding, spine lengthening. The room suddenly felt impossibly small.
Then, stillness.
Harry stood hunched in the center of the dormitory, heart hammering.
Blue skin. Stripes. Long limbs folded awkwardly beneath the slanted ceiling. His tail twitched, knocking into a trunk with a soft thud.
He stared down at himself in stunned silence.
It had not been magic as he had learned it.
It had been… him.
Panic surged belatedly. He forced himself to breathe, to focus, to reverse the motion the way he had initiated it. The shift back was faster, smoother, though no less disorienting. Moments later, he was human again, gasping softly, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead.
No one had woken.
Harry sank onto his bed, hands shaking.
Animagus, a distant part of his mind supplied.
The word felt… insufficient.
The day passed in a blur.
Whispers followed him through the corridors, heavier now that the shock of his name from the Goblet had settled into something more suspicious. Ron avoided his gaze entirely. Hermione hovered, concern etched deep into her features, but Harry could not bring himself to explain, not the dreams, not the life he had lived in a single night...how could he?
In class, his magic misbehaved.
Charms responded before he finished incantations. A Levitation Charm sent a quill soaring into the rafters. Professor Flitwick eyed him sharply, saying nothing. In Transfiguration, his focus slipped and the hedgehog he was meant to transform into a pincushion grew halfway, then froze, trembling between states.
McGonagall's mouth thinned. "Mr. Potter. See me after class."
Harry nodded, unbothered in a way that would have alarmed him once. Authority had meant something different on Pandora.
That frightened him more than the detentions ever could.
The First Task loomed...Dragons.
The word did not carry the same weight it once might have. Harry had faced creatures that tore metal apart with bone and muscle, had hunted things that moved like shadows and struck like lightning. Dragons were dangerous, yes, but they were known.
Still, as he stood in the tent, listening to the roar beyond the canvas, something old and cold stirred in his scar. Voldemort, distant but aware. Curious.
He senses the change, Harry realized.
That, too, was new.
When his name was called, the noise of the crowd washed over him in a wave. He stepped into the arena and saw the dragon rear, scales glinting, fire licking the air.
Fear came.
He welcomed it.
Under its pressure, something inside him gave way.
Harry did not reach for his wand.
He reached inward.
The transformation tore through him like a storm, visible and undeniable. Gasps turned to screams as blue skin replaced pale, limbs lengthened, clothing shredded. In seconds, a Na'vi stood where a boy had been tall, powerful, eyes blazing with feral focus.
The dragon roared.
Harry roared back.
And somewhere high above, in a teacher's box suddenly gone deathly silent, Albus Dumbledore leaned forward, eyes alight not with shock, but with profound, terrible interest.