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“Ominis!”
Cold, bony fingers brutally tugged Ominis into consciousness, their grip on his arm just as merciless as their jostling.
Ominis blinked his reluctant eyelids open; the remains of his dream dissolved into reality.
“Sebastian?” he mumbled, squirming under the sheets, patting around for his wand. “What? What’s wrong?”
Sebastian was kneeling on the edge of Ominis’ four-poster, looming over Ominis like a night hag from one of Marvolo's mean bedtime stories. But his kneecap, which dug into Ominis’ thigh, was painfully human.
“I just had an idea,” Sebastian said, way too loud for the hour. “You have to hear this.”
“I really don’t, Sebastian.”
Ominis abandoned his search and opted for placing a pillow on top of his head instead, burrowing underneath it with the resolve of a squirrel late for its hibernation period.
Sebastian yanked the soft cover of the pillow away, and replaced it with that of his hand.
Ominis wondered briefly whether it was the case that he loved Sebastian despite how much he peeved him, or whether Sebastian was so annoying precisely because of Ominis' love for him.
“Listen to me. You know how some wizards can turn into animals?”
“Yes, Sebastian, they are called animagi, and we learned about them in third year,” Ominis said, summoning some semblance of coherence back from sleep's realm. “Why do I have to talk about them right now? It’s the middle of the night. Go back to sleep.”
“What if you could do that?”
“That would be neat, but right now I would rather—”
“Ominis! What if you could do that, and then you could see?”
Ominis froze, mid-pull on his covers.
His brow softened as Sebastian’s words sunk in. He slid one arm through a gap in the blanket's cocoon; it found Sebastian’s wrist and closed around it.
“I don’t think so, Sebastian,” he said, smoothing the harsh edges of his rejection with a mellow tone. “I doubt it works like that. Do you want to come over here?”
He lifted the corner of his duvet in an invitation. Some of the sleepy warmth escaped through the crack, but Sebastian quickly replaced it with his own.
The lack of hesitation with which Sebastian settled next to him still never failed to make Ominis' heart quiver.
Sebastian organised his limbs in the small space with an excessive amount of squirming, and finally arrived where he wanted to be; his arm was thrown across Ominis’ chest, his head tucked in its usual spot underneath his chin, and his freezing-cold foot was lodged between Ominis' calves. His hair smelled pleasantly homey — it always did.
Ominis relaxed instinctively, and felt himself slip away inch by inch, as the familiar comfort lulled him back into sleep; sadly, Sebastian clearly had no intention to allow that.
“What’s the harm in trying, though?” he asked, poking Ominis between the ribs. “Worst case scenario, you will end up with the ability to turn into an animal. We should test it.”
Ominis hummed and let it vibrate against the top of Sebastian’s head, pressing a kiss there when it faded. He tugged the blankets up snugly over Sebastian’s shoulders.
Ever since Sebastian resolved to turn his undepletable curiosity away from the Dark Arts and directed all of his enthusiasm towards any and all other knowledge instead, Ominis found that his ability to refuse him was diminishing at a worrying rate.
“All right. I will think about it. Now will you shut up and sleep?”
Sebastian nodded, but as Ominis drifted back to sleep, it was to the sound of Sebastian’s short, controlled breaths, and the cogs of his mind turning.
***
The next day was a Sunday, and Ominis woke up alone — the side of his bed cold and long since vacated. He sighed, pulled on his robes, put the weight of his life with this impossible man back onto his shoulders, and commenced his search.
When he walked into the Undercroft, he nearly tripped over a book. He swore under his breath, and stumbled back, only to step and slip on another one.
“You could have told me to keep away, rather than set traps for me,” he said with reproach, balancing on one leg.
“Ominis!” Sebastian’s animation was loud and obnoxious, coming from the distant finish line of the ridiculous book-themed obstacle course. “You’re finally awake!”
“Some of us need their beauty sleep.”
“You know you don’t!”
An exaggerated gagging sound was joined by a warm hand on Ominis’ forearm, closing around it, and guiding him through the room.
“I swear,” their friend said. “He is absolutely feral today. Please control him.”
“What are you reading about?” Ominis asked, settling down cross-legged on the floor.
He reached for the closest book. They truly were sprawled around everywhere. A quick tap of his wand against the cover informed him that it was A Collection of Essays on Animagical Transformation 1800-1850.
But of course.
“Did you know that—“ Sebastian asked.
“No,” Ominis said, sending their friend into a laughing fit. Ominis could tell they were flipping through a book too; their elbow kept bumping into Ominis’ arm. “Oh, Merlin, are you in on this, too?”
“It’s a decent idea,” they said. “Why not try it?”
“I said I would think about it,” Ominis said, frowning in the direction of Sebastian’s focused shuffling.
“Well, I thought about it for you.”
Ominis sighed, and rubbed at his face, pinching the bridge of his nose; he searched within himself for all his emergency reserves of patience.
“Fine. What did you find?”
“Nothing much so far,” their friend said. “But Sebastian dug out this book by— who was it again, Sebastian?”
“The name doesn’t matter! Mathilda Something. What matters is that she was able to cure a couple of wizards who had been blind since birth, and she has amazing insight on everything! For example, you are going to have to work on developing depth perception first, so that you can— But! I am making notes, I will show it to you when I have everything.”
Sebastian sounded so excited, his words losing half of their syllables in their mad race out of his mouth, that — no matter how hopeless Ominis deemed this exercise — he couldn’t restrain an affectionate smile. He couldn’t help but give in, just a little.
“And I am wondering whether, if this does work, you will be able to see colour. But from what I have found, most animals seem to have sufficient photoreceptors and cones, so unless you become some kind of a fish, you should be fine,” their friend said and, Merlin, their exhilaration was just as blaring.
There was an echo of their enthusiasm causing a ruckus at the bottom of Ominis’ stomach. What if this could work?
No, surely it couldn’t. He'd considered all of his options before, laid them out and pulled them apart, ruminating over them extensively; he’d decided that to harbour any hope would be foolish. Curses weren’t meant to be so easily bypassed.
The defeated sigh that slipped out of his throat clearly wasn’t privy to this knowledge.
Sebastian’s familiar footsteps approached him. He crouched down, his hands coming to rest on Ominis’ shoulders.
“Will you try it?” he asked.
“Do you truly care for my answer?”
“No,” Sebastian said. His thumb pulled Ominis’ mouth open and something bitter was shoved inside it.
“What the hell?" Ominis mumbled, trying not to choke. “What is this?”
“A Mandrake leaf. You need to keep it like this for a month. If you spit it out, or swallow it, we will have to start again,” their friend explained, absent-mindedly, interrupted by the whisper of the tuning pages.
“Right,” Ominis said. The leaf scratched against his palate, quickly softening as it soaked up his saliva. “And how am I supposed to eat?”
“You can have pumpkin juice,” Sebastian said. A heavy volume landed in Ominis’ lap. “Now get on reading.”
***
During the next full moon, Ominis found himself sitting in their friend's vivarium; the gentle breeze in his hair and the faraway cheerful chatter of mooncalves would have been pleasant, if not for Sebastian squirming and jittering on the bench beside him.
“Are you sure it's not cloudy?” Sebastian asked for the hundredth time. “I can see a cloud there. That’s a cloud.”
“It’s a fwooper flying, you idiot,” their friend said, as calm as the night was. “There’s enough moonlight. Come on, Ominis, hold it here and spit that out.”
Their hand guided Ominis’ arm up, so that the glass vial was placed underneath his mouth at the right angle.
Ominis spat out the Mandrake leaf with infinite relief, and promptly spat on the grass again, trying to cleanse his mouth of the taste.
“I swear, I am never going to recover my appetite after this.”
“Don’t be a baby,” Sebastian chided, ruffling Ominis’ hair, and taking the vial out of his hand. The caress was an effective distraction — Omnis barely managed to blink in the moment it took for it to turn vicious, and pluck out what felt like a whole strand of hair. “Come on, put the rest of the ingredients in.”
“Do I want to know where you got them?” Ominis asked, as both of his friends busied themselves with something clinking and simmering.
“No,” they said in unison.
Ominis sighed again.
***
“All right, no, this is just ridiculous,” Ominis said, swatting Sebastian’s hands away as he tried to brush through his hair one more time. The pouring rain kept dishevelling Ominis’ fringe, plastering it to his forehead, careless to Sebastian’s ideas of a respectable hairstyle. “It doesn’t work like that, Sebastian.”
“It might,” Sebastian said stubbornly, fixing the collar of Ominis’ dress robes. His fingers lingered on Ominis’ collarbones, as if he needed to smooth them out as well. “Just because no one wrote about it, it doesn’t mean —“
“My animagus form isn’t going to be clever and agile, just because you put me in Quidditch gloves and some fancy — Is this a monocle.” Ominis jerked back when something cool and glass jabbed at his eye socket. “Sebastian, no. If anything, the magic is going to be offended that you are trying to cheat it.”
“Stop being boring,” their friends said, pressing something long and curved into Ominis’ reluctant grasp, something that felt like… Ominis scowled.
“I am not transforming while holding a bloody banana.”
“Why not? Do you know how useful opposite thumbs would be? You are going to have to learn to associate what you see with the shapes you can feel, so if you transform into a bird, for example—”
“Maybe you should take off the Quidditch gloves,” Sebastian said suddenly, with apparent anxiety. “I’m going to go get something else.”
“Do you really think this is going to affect what animal form I become?” Ominis asked their friend, once the sound of Sebastian’s footsteps faded out behind the portal door.
They snorted.
“Of course not. But this is just too good.”
Ominis winced again. It was almost entirely an act, but there was a hint of legitimate sourness to it, too.
“I just don’t want him to be disappointed,” he said, fixing the monocle.
“Sebastian? Disappointed with you?”
Ominis shrugged. He rolled his wand in his palm, feeling its weight, and thinking for the umpteenth time this last month that he wished there was a way in which it could offer him more than just the hazy shapes, so all their efforts wouldn’t be necessary – so he wouldn’t have to sit here now, terrified of failure.
“It’s not like my blindness doesn’t affect his life, too.”
Their friend sat down beside him with a long, heavy exhale, which had by now become their signature sound, and which Ominis liked to think was significantly inspired by his own sighs of exasperation.
“Listen,” they said. "Sebastian is being… Sebastian. He’s excited. He isn’t trying to fix you. He’s just trying to give you an opportunity. I know we have been forcing this on you a bit, and I really think you should try it, but if you don’t want to—“
“Of course I want to. I just don’t want to find out that it doesn’t work.”
“I understand.”
“No, I mean — It isn’t like I am missing something. I haven’t lost anything. I’ve always been like this. I am intrigued, yes, and of course I would like to be complete—“
“You are complete.”
Ominis waved them off. He had no need for meaningless comfort.
“I know, I know. I am just saying that I am not going to be devastated when it doesn’t work. But Sebastian will be. You know he will. And I guess, in a way, it was easier to never try it, so that I could pretend that there was always some option left.”
“We can think of other options, though,” their friend said softly, and Ominis knew they would, with the same certainty that assured him the sun would rise the next morning. “But I do understand. Let’s just give it our all, hm?”
Our all.
Even if this operation didn’t succeed, if Ominis ended up unable to transform at all, or remained blind in his animal form, this would never fade. The fact that they did this together, as a team. As friends.
Chewing the Mandrake leaf was worth its every bitter second, if only Omnis could store this feeling away, keep it somewhere in a private compartment of his brain to marvel at whenever he pleased.
This feeling of being supported, however savagely. Of being loved.
It was still at the forefront of Ominis’ mind when Sebastian came back, forced him into a pair of elvish gloves instead, and pressed a quick kiss to his lips, before ushering Ominis to stand in the middle of the electrical storm that was wrecking the vivarium.
Ominis pressed his wand to where his heart was swelling in his chest, and muttered the incantation.
***
He came to sprawled out on the wet grass, in the snug arms of a warming charm. Sebastian’s hand was a heavy, grounding pressure on his forehead; his voice was mingling with the wind.
“—bloody cat, I told him to stop getting his head in my lap, but of course he had to—”
“But it worked! And he has paws!”
Ominis grumbled, trying to sort through his jumbled memories of the past few minutes; the palm slid into his hair.
“Ominis? Are you all right? You fainted for a minute there.”
There’d been a sensation of shrinking, his bones screaming as they got condensed tighter and tighter, as they folded in on themselves – only to grow, morph, reshape… And then he’d forced his eyes open, and there came the assault on his senses, the odd smells, the weird angle at which the ground rested under his feet, the unnatural arch of his spine—
“We think perhaps it was a bit overwhelming,” their friend said, their voice coming from somewhere behind Ominis’ head. Ominis was too disoriented to locate it with any precision.
“That’s a bit,” Ominis choked out, “of an understatement.”
“Well, how was it?” Sebastian pressed, leaning in closer. “Could you see?”
“Sebastian, Merlin, give him a minute—“
“It was… different,” Omnis said, reaching out, his arm heavy and languorous as it attempted to wrap itself around Sebastian’s neck. The pounding behind his ears climbed towards a crescendo again.
He urged his mind to focus enough to recall the hazy shapes he’d glimpsed before losing his consciousness. They weren’t that dissimilar to what his wand was capable of supplying, but they were also so much more.
He smiled.
“Yes, I think so.”
He grunted when Sebastian threw himself on top of his body —which felt bruised everywhere and turned inside out — and began kissing him with so much desperation that Ominis struggled to keep up. He did his best to try, anyway.
“I’m a cat?” he asked against Sebastian's lips, pulling away when their friend finally cleared their throat pointedly after what, for them, must have been a few excruciatingly long minutes.
“You’re brilliant,” Sebastian said, and tried to kiss him again.
There was a tell-tale wetness on Omnis’ cheeks, although his own eyes were dry. He guided Sebastian’s head into the crook of his neck to protect him from the embarrassment he would inevitably feel in retrospect.
“Thank you for talking me into it,” he said. “Thank you both.”
“You’re most welcome,” their friend said. “Now let me leave before I am scarred for life.”
Ominis was almost completely lost to the comfort of Sebastian’s embrace and, in kind, to the warm flow of sheer, potent rush of happiness spreading through his body, claiming every inch of it faster than a paralysing charm— when their friend interrupted them again, shouting something from the portal door.
Ominis’ tried to focus around the giggle bubbling up n his chest at the way Sebastian’s kisses kept getting interrupted by grins and words of praise and promises, offered right into Ominis’ mouth.
“—talk, and not so you could traumatise my pets! And not on my grass, for Merlin’s sake! Go kiss somewhere else!”
***
It was overwhelming.
They had to keep Ominis' Re-Orientation Sessions — as their friend had named them — frustratingly short, because Ominis had to alternate between feeling objects with his hands, and trying to memorise their image with his cat eyes; the strain the constant transformation put on his body was beyond exhausting.
They had already gone over spheres and cubes, and some small, familiar objects Ominis knew well — such as his wand or his quill. He rubbed his small body against them, bumped them with his head, and tried to feel them out with his paws as well, as much as their limited precision allowed.
It was easier to gauge objects that had a contained space — right now Ominis was trying to understand the contrast of the dark spots scattered all over a creamy piece of parchment paper.
There was a simplified illustration on it — the “Mathilda Something” book indicated that it was a useful exercise to try familiarising yourself with the two visual dimensions this way.
It was an intricate process, and much more demanding, because someone kept pulling at his tail.
He turned, and bit at what he knew was Sebastian’s hand. His aim was a touch off, but his teeth closed around flesh. Success.
“Ouch!”
It wasn’t exactly disappointing; of course it wasn’t, nothing about this experience could possibly be. Yet, there was certainly something unnerving about the fact that he knew he could see glimpses of his friends' faces all the time — and yet he couldn’t quite distinguish them from the background.
“Sebastian, leave him alone! How old are you?!”
“Seventeen,” Sebastian deadpanned, and promptly pulled at Ominis’ tail again. “And he is just too funny.”
Omnis hissed at him.
“All right,” their friend said, their voice trembling with a chuckle. “You have a point.”
Ominis hissed at them, too.
He then jumped up and flung himself into a cheerful run around the room.
They kept the space almost empty, devoid of any needless distractions. There were only a couple of objects spaced out across the floor, and Ominis entertained himself trying to comprehend how they got larger as he got closer to them. Perspective was fascinating.
When he ran out of strength, he curled himself into a tight ball, and let Sebastian pet him behind the ears — which he couldn’t stop from twitching in appreciation.
There were a multitude of surprising advantages to his new cat life.
***
“And that's Cassiopeia,” Sebastian said, pointing at the sky. “Ouch, stop that, you will make a hole in my robes again with these claws.”
Ominis meowed to signal that he couldn’t care less, padding in another circle across the nest he had kneaded for himself into Sebastian’s lap to find a more comfortable position.
He titled his head up to glance at Sebastian — and there was his face. There were his eyes — brown, and his hair — also brown, but a different shade, and his mouth — pink, and his beauty — all of the colours combined.
A thin red scar cut through his cheekbone. Ominis still felt a pang of guilt whenever he caught sight of it, or felt it underneath his human fingers. Trying to feel out Sebastian’s features with his paws had been a silly idea; it was a much better one to rely on which parts he knew were likely to move.
“Do you think I spent so much time yesterday studying that inane astrology book just so you could stare at me the whole time?” Sebastian asked.
Ominis bumped his ribs with his head — wishing briefly that he could squeeze himself through them and live inside Sebastian’s chest, maybe taking a look at his organs while he was making himself at home — and meowed in confirmation.
“You’re hopeless.”
It was, overall, a painstaking process.
Half a year had lapsed since Ominis’ first transformation, and he still wasn’t able to name the majority of objects upon seeing them for the first time. But their lines had become more tangible to him. He could now connect them together, sorting them into familiar categories, and deduce more and more about them by only using his sight. A mug was a mug, no matter its colour or size.
He wasn’t certain how much this new ability could make his life easier in strictly practical ways, but the potential was endless.
It was all he could do not to abandon his studies completely and fully dedicate himself to his late night walks or his explorative lessons in the Undercroft and the Room of Requirement.
Or to this.
He transformed, still sprawled across Sebastian’s lap. Sebastian toppled back onto the grass, thrown off-balance under the added weight which came with no warning.
He laughed; Ominis chased the sound with his mouth, Sebastian’s visage still engraved on the inside of his eyelids. Their kisses tasted the best this way, and Ominis would never stop being grateful for getting to savour them.
“Have I already told you today that you are a genius?” Ominis asked, pressing his lips to where he now knew the scattering of Sebastian’s freckles was. He traced them with his tongue, and imagined he was doing so with impeccable precision.
“Ew,” Sebastian complained, squirming. “And yes, you have. But you can tell me again.”
There’d been a time, not so long ago, when Ominis would have never dared to hope he could have something like this. When he couldn’t dare to imagine such comfort existed out there in the world, not to mention that it would appear within his reach.
This effortless affection, this exhilarating intimacy. The unshakeable promise of more, the promise of years upon years to come, filled with new experiences, all of which they could bring to life and then conquer together.
In a way, this gift was more unexpected, more miraculous than that of sight.
It made sense – and it made the world appear just a touch less chaotic – that they were both offered to him by the same person.
“Forget it,” he said, revelling in the way the rumble of Sebastian’s laughter migrated straight to his own chest. “Even this room soon won’t be able to contain the size of your ego.”
He leaned in to place a careful kiss on Sebastian’s eyelid.
"But I guess I could say thank you instead.”
"I love you," Sebastian mumbled, and Ominis didn’t need his sight to know his eyes were glowing with it.