Atropos → george weasley

xxvii. metamorphosis

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twenty seven

metamorphosis

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No class had ever frustrated Ottilie more than Divination.

So badly she wanted to Divine the future—look into tea leaves or the lines in Millicent's palm, and see the meaning. But, no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn't do it.

She was worse than just bad, she was completely hopeless. What had happened to her prodigious understanding of magic?

"For your near future..." Millicent fanned out the deck of tarot cards. Ottilie picked one and turned it over. Millicent winced. "The Hanged Man."

"Is that good?" asked Ottilie sarcastically as Millicent flipped through the textbook.

"I mean, he doesn't look like he's too upset." Millicent glanced over the card. The hanged man did, in fact, merely look bored. "It represents lack of growth."

Trelawney was prowling through the classroom and seemed to overhear Millicent. She leaned over to get a better look at the card. Ottilie assumed she was about to be told it meant she'd be decapitated or burned alive or something in the near future.

"It's upright. Yes, the Hanged Man represents stagnation, but being upright means metamorphosis, my dear. Metamorphosis is a good thing."

"I don't think Gregor Samsa saw it that way," Ottilie muttered as Trelawney drifted off.

Though Ottilie put little stock into Trelawney's predictions, what was said on that day made her think.

Was she starting to stagnate? She'd spent so much of her first year drinking in information as fast as she could find it. But, now, she'd mostly given up on exploring the castle. She certainly wasn't using any escaped trolls as a distraction to steal books from the library.

She was at a dead end. The books she'd found in Knockturn Alley were fascinating and did give her some useful information, but they didn't really answer her questions. 

It was like she was giving up. Letting the adults win—allowing them to determine what was best for her.

Even if she was awful at Divination, this prediction would be accurate. She'd force it to be. Something needed to change.

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Ottilie woke up the morning of October thirty-first feeling determined.

She'd stayed up all night looking over the parchment with her handwritten notes for the process of Animagus transformation.

Never before had she thought much about the potion recipe itself, having taken it at face value. But, now that she had a little more experience with the theory behind potions, she noticed a couple of things that could be improved.

(For example, pressing the mandrake leaf before tearing it so the excess scopolamine would have greater muscle relaxation effects prior to transformation; or using only four pinches of lovage rather than five due to its counter-effect on the main metamorphosis agent, fluxweed.)

In the morning, Ottilie's eyes were bleary and itchy, and she had an awful headache after hours of making corrections by wand light. She stacked the various potions books she'd used to research the effects and interactions of the ingredients and then hid her work away safely. She then trudged to the Great Hall.