He needed something to allow him to search all the houses at once, so that no one would think that there was anything odd about him searching Gryffindor house as well. He would conduct that search himself, to give him better control over the situation, but it could appear he was being unfair.
...
He would have to take Severus with him; he would play the role of the good Auror, whilst Severus would be the bad one. On the bright side, it would put the ever-gloomy professor in a better mood after losing all chances of winning the Quidditch Cup this year with his own godson in the hospital wing. However, Minerva would cause problems at the idea of the hated Potions master harassing her students and searching their private belongings, especially with the troublesome twins always up to mischief.
Severus would have a field day. Minerva would have to be sent to the Slytherin dungeons to make it seem fair. That way, if Severus did get out of hand with taking points and assigning detentions, Minerva would be able to retaliate accordingly. Who else could be sent with her though? Filius would be a fair and acceptable choice to most everyone, and he did have a passable knowledge of the dark arts.
He sighed at that; it was a shame that Alastor was disabled. The Auror would have been perfect for this particular job. With Alastor on the case, Slytherin house would have been cleansed of dark material, and all without endangering Severus' position. The rest of the staff could then be divided up between the other two houses without any problems. Both Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff house showed below-average readings for the presence of dark magic, so he doubted that they were responsible or housing anything truly harmful.
'But first he would need an excuse, a pretext to allow him to act, otherwise this was all academic anyway,' he noted soberly. He quickly realized that waiting for an acceptable excuse that would please the masses may result in a student's death. 'Perhaps he could engineer one?' he mused. He continued trying to come up with a scenario to allow his plan to proceed before a sly smile formed on his lips. He had a plan.
...
(Ravenclaw Dorm Rooms)
Things had changed. He had changed, he realized, as he moved deeper into his own subconscious mind. He carefully peeled away the layers as he approached where his inner animal spirit lay in his mind, his unrealized animagus form, a primal reflection of him at his very core. The mental fog slowly cleared, the surroundings gradually coming into focus, just like opening his eyes first thing in the morning.
He had spent months dutifully meditating on his bed each night, trying to determine why he wasn't making any further progress in connecting with his inner animal spirit. For months he had made little progress, but then he had a sudden and decisive breakthrough.
The first breakthrough in discovering his animagus form was shortly after New Year's Eve. It had a lot to do with making peace with his newly awakened sexual instincts and desires and the increased hormones starting to flood his body and mind, beginning the inevitable biological change from being a child to that of a man.
He had been fighting it, resisting it, and eventually trying to utterly eliminate the new feelings and urges with his occlumency. He quickly came to realize how impossible and futile the effort was and had made peace with the fact that it was a change he couldn't control, nor should he really.
He had been subconsciously fearful of it, at the loss of control, even if he knew from an intellectual standpoint what was happening from his own research and studies. This fear and his subsequent actions had been holding him back from reaching his inner animal spirit. He would have to thank Sirius for his advice and guidance in overcoming this barrier, this irrational subconscious fear he had of being out of control in any way.
His light-hearted godfather had known just what to say to help him to both recognize and relax his own controlling nature. He had always been self-sufficient growing up, but this was one instance that showed how truly valuable it could be having an adult guardian in his life who cared about him and had an interest in ensuring his continued development.
His second breakthrough had come from developing a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a parselmouth and what the snake truly represented in magical terms. He had to dismiss any preconceptions that he had about snakes, from both his childhood in the Muggle world and his brief but satisfying time in the wizarding world.
Both had had strong negative opinions about the species. He realized he had to let go of the subconscious and irrational fear of being stigmatized and abandoned by his family for being a parselmouth.
What he had shared with Tonks in the library had elements of truth to it (the best lies always did); the fear of being alone again after finally having a family had been holding him back from accepting this ability for what it truly was, a gift. He had to let go of what he had been raised to believe as a Christian, that snakes represented evil, the forbidden.
Instead, he had to adjust his beliefs to what the druid and pagan cultures saw the snake to represent: knowledge, especially mystical knowledge, of rebirth and restoration with the shedding of their skins.
That had been the final piece of the mental puzzle. Once those issues were recognized and those parts of himself accepted, he started to again make progress. Recognizing these things were holding him back prompted some serious soul-searching, an intense and objective examination of himself, where he tried to acknowledge and accept both his positive and negative personality traits, the very things that made him who he was, both the good and the ugly.
To say it was a pleasant experience would be lying, but there was something truly cathartic and empowering about it. An accurate evaluation of his psyche and what made him who he was was an important step in the animagus process, but animals did not have complex emotions like those of a human. His self-image needed to be broken down to its most fundamental parts to understand his animal spirit.
Only once he had made peace with the many parts of himself did the fog clear, revealing that he was in dense woods, knee deep in snow. The cold winter wind battered his face, his skin stinging under the assault, his breath cooling quickly in the cold air and forming small clouds of visible mist. The snow was harsh, bitter, and utterly relentless. Any animal that lived and thrived here would have to be able to endure, survive, feed, and prosper in this unforgiving environment, just like he had with his relatives.
He knew what he had to do without even being told; he had to find his inner animal spirit and bond with it. He knew that it could take days or even years of searching his animal realm, but it was a trial of worthiness, a test posed by his animal spirit to judge him. Following his instincts, he wandered through the harsh snow-covered forest, looking for his inner animal but found nothing; his inner animal was elusive, unseen, private, but it was out there.
This was what the animagus potion actually did in a more timely fashion; it forced an immediate confrontation between the spirit animal and the conscious mind. Because the meeting was forced, rather than the natural result of intense meditation and candid self-reflection, even after the magical identified and met their animal spirit, they would often have problems afterwards achieving the final, complete transformation.
Even if they did, they would never be as close with their inner spirit. The connection between their human and animal form would never be as deep if what the book said was accurate, and that was something he very much wanted out of this process. His instincts then told him to go left, up the hill through the snow-covered trees. He obeyed and turned left and forced himself through the deep snow drifts.
A wounded pine tree caught his attention; its bark was torn off revealing the brownish yellow wood underneath, with a set of deep claw marks tearing through it. He pressed his small, child-sized hand against the cold tree, his mind finally registering the sheer size of the wound as he compared his hand to the claw marks.
He somehow knew that his inner animal spirit had done this; it was marking territory, marking the boundaries of its kingdom. His eyes scanned the surroundings, hoping to find more evidence of his animal.
...
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