"Afraid?" he repeated incredulously. Tiberius shook his head and let out a short, mirthless laugh. "It isn't as though anyone forces you to go live as an animal for months once you become an animagus. If I'd turned into something useless, I would have just moved on," he said. It wasn't a lie, either; he hadn't invested much personal stock in becoming an animagus, except to prove that he could. He would have achieved that regardless of what he turned in to — though he may have been reticent to transform in front of her if he had ended up as something embarrassing.

"I suppose if I was a fish I might have suffocated and died," he said with an unconcerned shrug. The possibility really didn't worry him too much — at least not now that he could safely discount it ever happening to him. It was easy in retrospect to seem confident about the transformation, but she knew that he'd failed it once. Luckily, she would never get a chance to see the note he'd written before attempting it, to realize just how seriously he'd considered the possibility that he would fail again and die.