Infinitely Six

Animagi, the Last

One of Vi's polaroids: From left: Remus Lupin, Sirius Black, Peter Pettigrew, and James Potter. Taken by Violet Doyle, Iris Brooks is laughing behind the camera. 

Code names. James had been throwing ideas about for what seemed like a millennium and yet couldn't decide on one. As they grew increasingly more ludicrous we opted to help him before we got stuck with something like 'glimmer'.

"Like your fur!" James had told Iris. She told him that her fur did not glimmer and even if it did there was no way she was going with a nickname like that. Upon this proclamation, he had screwed his brows up in concentration. "Shine!" He exclaimed,  causing Madame Pince to glower down her nose at him and her to assist him in his nickname assigning. 

Personally, I had never researched anything so thoroughly. I skimmed almost every book about names in the library. I had made a list of all the available names. They were either too short, too long, too many vowels, too many consonants, or too much of everything. Sometimes we just couldn't even imagine ourselves calling each other the names. Fang, Beorthwulf, Hoof, Aporia, Colo, Luna, Odyessy, and plenty of others. It was quite frankly annoying. We already had managed to pick one out for Remus. Moony had come so easily and it was so catchy. We could all imagine calling him it. Needless to say, it stuck and we had our first name, even though Remus pointed out it had nothing to do with the history of werewolves whatsoever.

We were now trying to figure out James' code name.

"We could just call you antlers," I suggested to James who shook his head.

"Doesn't have a good ring to it," He said. "Maybe another word for antlers could work?" Remus thumbed through a book that had a diagram of a deer skull on the front. The library was full of students studying for their last exams of the year, so we were sitting on the floor in between shelves. Books and papers and manuscripts were stacked around all five of us. Some piles so tall, they towered over our heads.

"Crown? Royal? Tine? Coronet? Burr? Umm... I dunno all these terms aren't really nickname material," Remus muttered, shuffling through an assortment of age-worn papers.

"Are you kidding? Royal sounds amazing!" James said excitedly.

"No way are we doing that," Iris said. James frowned and pushed his glasses up his nose.

"Why not?"

"Your head is already big enough," She rolled her eyes. Remus snorted and James shook his head.

"Fair enough," James said, grinning. "But do you have any other ideas?" Iris frowned, thinking hard.

"What about prongs?" I suggested. All five of us thought, running the name through our heads, imagining the word as a nickname. Remus nodded.

"That works," He said and wrote it down on a spare piece of parchment. The other two came almost as easily. Wormtail from the most obvious reason, his tail sort of looks like a worm, to the history of the man/rat myth from Greece that supposedly could be lured using worms. Sirius was dubbed as Padfoot because of his padded feet and also because of the story of the quiet man who ran around stealing from houses in Latvia who was never caught but was said to have a loyal dog at his side. The myth was called Padding Footsteps.

But then there was me. I was more difficult. I was a dog, and I couldn't put a finger around any of the names that I thought of. "Maybe just Shepherd? No, that doesn't sound good. I'm an English dog...eng...Enge (en-gee)?" I thought, thumbing through the pages of the book I was reading. "Enge, Engie" I repeated in my head. It stucked. 

"Hey, Remus, could you put Enge down for me?" I asked him. He thought about it for a moment, then wrote it down on the piece of parchment. I looked over at Iris and saw her flipping through a book of myths. She found a story on the brothers Romulus and Remus, who were raised by wolves. 

"Vi, how does Romulus sound?" she asked me. "What about Roman? It sounds better to me," I said. Remus overheard and agreed, nodding his head.

"Fine with me," She said. Remus wrote it down on the page. "So now we have Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, Prongs, Enge, and Roman." 

"We need a celebratory picture," James said, standing up. I gathered my books and stuffed them into my bag. "I'll get my polaroid" I said. "Wait for me at the edge of the black lake."

I sprinted back to my dorm, grabbed my camera, then walked to the Black Lake. Everybody was waiting for me. "I don't really want to be in the picture" Iris said, sitting down on a large rock behind me. I shrugged. "Hey, Vi! Can you get a picture of us?" James shouted, standing on the edge of the lake with the other boys. I nodded, then held the camera to my face. They jumped up and I snapped the picture. The camera spat out the underdeveloped picture of James, Remus, Sirius, and Peter in midair. I grabbed the pen in my pocket and scribbled some words onto the bottom of the photo. 

"Let's get this on our bulletin board" Sirius said, shaking the picture. I smiled. The board was covered with an assortment of random pictures.  We walked back to our dorm and I pinned the now developed polaroid onto the board with a pin. 

(A/N) 

Sup, it's Casian, AGAIN. This is the end of the animagi arc. Next chapter will definitely get interesting....