A decade later, in the countryside in Derbyshire, many miles away from Privet Drive, in a grand old room adorned with 30-foot high ceilings from which hung two glorious looking chandeliers illuminated by candles and walls decorated with rich wood paneling and royal purple paint, portraits of many different people hanging from them and an ornate marble mantelpiece that effortlessly illuminated the whole room, its light dancing in a very expensive-looking golden mirror with an intricately scrolled frame that hung above it. In the very centre of the room stood a long and elegant table, upon which two children around the age of 10 leaned. One boy with platinum blonde hair parted at the side that played with his ocean blue eyes, a chiseled jaw and high cheekbones that were impressive for someone as young as he was, and a girl with coppery red hair that flowed down her back and shoulders like a graceful waterfall, framing her oval-shaped face spotted with freckles and illuminated her magical lavender eyes.
The pair were looking at a very large painting of a man with two women. The man was almost an exact replica of the blonde boy, except his hair was fading into white and was much longer, reaching the same place on his back as the young girls. One of the women had neat black hair with a stripe of dyed white running through it, red lipstick painted onto her face to bring out the paleness of her pearly skin; the other woman had messy and frizzy jet black hair and a deeper shade of red lipstick on her lips, apart from this, she looked almost identical to the first woman. In front of the adults, two children stood back-to-back with one of their parent's hands on each of their shoulders and giant grins on their faces. One of the children had unnatural and cursed features like red hair and purple eyes and the other had very regular blonde hair and blue eyes. The children stared up at the family portrait they had been waiting so long for.
"Lavina, look at how brightly your eyes shine in the painting. You look so magical!" The boy giggled. His words were slow and had a hint of constant mockery in it, although that was clearly not how he meant to sound.
"I know, Draco, it's so beautiful. Kind of a shame Aunt Bella had to be part of it, she looks so left out," the young girl said with excitement that turned into a saddened guilt as she stared at the woman with messy hair that seemed to stand awkwardly off to the side, glaring at whoever dared to looked at it.
The room filled with silence as the children watched the portrait for a little while before their parents gave a small smile and wave and walked out of the painting. Following suit, their aunt Bella followed without a gesture of goodbye and the children turned to face forwards and, in sync with the living ones, bent over a little to stick their tongue out before running out of the frame with wide, cheeky smiles plastered over their faces, leaving behind an empty painting of the sofa and fireplace that sat in their real living room. The children laughed at their exits from the portrait. Once their laughter had died down, Draco turned to his sister and asked, "Hey, do you want to play cat and mouse?"
"Sure, am I a cat or a mouse?" Lavina replied, stretching her arms across her body in preparation.
"Ummmm," Draco said, resting his fingers on his chin in thought and moving them away again after a few seconds to jump in the air and shout, "mouse!"
"Too easy," Lavina coolly said
"Fine then, instead of ten, you'll only have five seconds to hide. Starting.. Now!" her brother replied equally cool but excited.
Lavina started running out of the grand room and into the equally beautiful hallway, searching frantically for a place to hide. Her eyes found the door to the cellar, a cold, damp place lined in stone littered with boxes full of their parents' collections from their days as serving Death Eaters.
A perfect place for a mouse to hide, Lavina thought.
She dashed down the stairs and crouched low behind a pile of boxes, picturing in her mind the image of a mouse. She let the energy consume her, run through her body.
It didn't take long for her limbs to start shrinking, smaller and smaller until she was the size of a mouse, her hands and feet turned into tiny paws. Her nose merged with her shrinking chin to form a long snout with a small twitchy pink nose at the end, she felt her ears carry themselves to the top of her head and stretch and shrink into position. The last thing to come was her twig-thin tail that pushed itself out from the inside of her body. This process now was almost completely painless to her, definitely much less so than it was five years before when she first discovered her gift and used it to sneak out into the gardens to watch the sunrise every morning. She would just race back to the house and transform again into herself once she was safely inside, until her parents caught her after months of shooing her off their garden everyday. Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy, her parents, helped her to train her gift and push her body to numb the pain of the transformation. Now it's easier than breathing for her and she can block out almost any mind-limiting things, like pain or thoughts. Over the last five years even Draco had commented on how mind-numbingly safe he felt in her presence. He described it as being a little bit creepy but cool at the same time.
Lavina, now that she was transformed, finally had the freedom to come out of her human hiding spot and explore the wood-rotting crates around her. The first one she shuffled her way into was the one she had initially hidden behind, entering through a barely noticeable hole at the bottom. Inside was very dark and it didn't take Lavina long to run head-first into a very hard leather thing. Getting up onto her hind legs and feeling around the object with her paws, she discovered that they were books. The book stacked just barely within her reach burned her small paws as it grazed the spine.
"Stupid hexxed book. Be nice!" She squeak-lectured the inanimate object.
She quickly numbed out the burning sensation in her paw and continued exploring the crates around her. She found many strange things in them, lots and lots of stolen items from witches and wizards' homes that her parents killed, weird cursed objects that burned her, flung her backwards into the wall of the crate or made her head fill with a weird buzzing. Of course, they had a very small effect on her after the initial ache and confusion, what with her ability to just block it all out.
After a while, Lavina became bored with being hurt by the objects in the crates and decided to go look for Draco, who was clearly having a hard time finding her. She leaped up the stairs one at a time and wiggled her way out of the cellar and into the Malfoy's hallway. She sat outside the door for a few moments to look around her and regain her breaths, which were coming out as small squeaks that were hard to push out. The disadvantage to transformations: having the same durability as what you transform into, as Lavina acknowledged staring around the large and dimly lit area; squinting her eyes and tracing the lavish decorations. Her burning paws eased off against the cool stone floor that, from millimetres ahead of her, had a magnificent carpet covering most of the rest of the floor. The creepy, dead eyes of pale-faced people in golden framed portraits on the walls stared blankly at the door, as though they were waiting for somebody to acknowledge them and fall into the trap of being stuck talking to them for hours on end.
Her enhanced mice hearing picked up Draco cursing her, begging her to come out of hiding from the kitchen, which was a few doors down in the hallway, through the drawing room where they initially ogled at their portrait and through a heavy wooden door on the far side of the room. She giggled at the thought until she heard Draco say, "Lavina, it's not funny anymore it's been 3 hours. That's an hour and a half longer than you ought to have been hiding. This isn't fair, just come out you little rat!"
Lavina curled her mousey tail around her body in shame. She had no idea she had been in the cellar that long. Time must work differently while transformed as well as everything else.
She began picturing herself as a human once again and focused on cancelling out the pain as her limbs stretched back out to normal, her face rearranged itself and her tail was sucked back into her body.
"Draco! Draco, I'm here. I am so sorry, I lost track of time," Lavina yelled as she dashed into the kitchen to be met by a dig in the arm from her brother and a string of profanities even Lavina couldn't block out.
Once he had fallen silent the pair burst into fits of laughter as Lavina told him all about her exploration of the crates in the cellar.