"And you can check after classes and if there is a nearby Bob we can go kill it and if there is a farther Bob it will have to come closer or wait till a weekend when I know how to turn invisible."

"Okay," he says agreeably. "How do you kill 'em, anyway? It is a special you thing, or a learnable thing? Because I mean, if I can learn it, I definitely want to."

"I... don't know if you can learn it. I am pretty sure it has to do with how I couldn't do the regular kind before. It's a mindset thing. I can try to explain it if you want?"

He shrugs. "Sure, okay."

"Dementors are a death thing," says Bella. "Obviously people die other ways, almost all of the time, but Dementors are sort of - about death. Almost like how unicorns are about purity - except you aren't in magizoology - I don't know. Does that make sense though, that Dementors are about death, bad in the way death is?"

"...Yeah," he says thoughtfully. "Yeah, it does."

"I'm not sure what casting a regular Patronus is like so I don't know if my guesses about regular ones are right, but they're all animals except mine, mine's a person, mine is shaped like a kind of thing that can know what death is and that it's coming if it thinks about it. Thestrals and eagles and owls can't do that. I think a regular Patronus is saying 'not yet' - kind of -" She sticks her fingers in her ears, "la la la, I can't comprehend mortality, I am a happy cartoony creature!" - she puts her hands down. "And Dementors aren't death itself, they're just about it. You can stop thinking about one thing if you think about another thing hard enough, you can stop being scared if you think about happy things hard enough, regular Patronuses seem to me like they might be the magic version of that?"

"Maybe," says Feral. "I dunno. That part doesn't make as much sense to me."

"Well, I don't know," shrugs Bella, "I can't do a regular one, this is me speculating about why mine is person-shaped. I bet you I don't turn into a Generic Humanoid if I learn to be an animagus."

"Yeah, probably not," snorts Feral.

"So regular ones are, 'la la you can't scare me I am a guardian animal'. And Glowy Person is like, 'I got a good look at you, and you know what, fuck you'."

He giggles.

Feral laughs. "Sure," he says, unflopping out of his chair.

"...huh," says Feral. "And that does it?"

"I concentrate on how I'm going to fix things, most especially Dementors, and I cast the spell and I get a glowy person," confirms Bella.

"How'd you figure that out?"

"I wasn't sure it was going to work," says Bella. "I thought about the Dementor a lot after we first saw it, though. What it looked like and how it made me feel and how I wanted to kill it. And once I was full up on chocolate - I didn't even eat that much of it - I felt kind of - like - like I was a critter it's a really bad idea to corner, does that make sense? You know how some kinds of animals won't attack you but if you hem them in you are not going to make it home intact - the Dementor sort of had me cornered, or Death did, or something, and that was a bad move. I'm rambling - just - it was the thing I thought of that seemed like might work. Especially based on what thoughts gave me mist when I was trying to do a regular Patronus."

"Huh," says Feral. "Yeah, I have no idea how to do that. It kind of makes sense, but it doesn't make sense for me, you know?"

"Yeah. I mean, if this was a systematized thing lots of people could do and figure out and teach then probably it would have been done already."

"We're both a little weird," says Feral, with an affectionate grin. "You definitely win Most Weird, though. Having an Animagus or a Patronus be a magical creature is rare, but it's happened."

"Do I get a prize for winning?"

"Sure," he says, and hugs her. "There's your prize."

She giggles.