A/N: Written for the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry challenge, Transfiguration year 1. Mandatory prompt: write about a known animagus in HP. Optional prompts used: people, history, way, art, money, information, government, system, thanks, person

Beetle the Reporter

She might have been born a human, but something about her repelled others of her kind. Like bug spray, she used to think – as though she was some sort of insect not worth the slime off their robes. Which worked to her advantage on occasion, because they'd think she was beneath their soles and let their guards down – and then she'd be able to see or find out something interesting to file away for future use.

That was how she got around, in the end. Blackmailing people with information found out on the fly and getting her way, because she was nothing otherwise. And she made a name for herself like that, eventually going on to build her career, and life, around that one little talent she had: being unnoticed.

At some point during it all, she took it a step further. Took that insect analogy and became one herself. It took years: two years, but she did it, without anyone ever catching her. Because it was illegal, what she'd done. The first of many things illegal. But the government didn't care about those other legalities: they had a system, yes, but they needed people above the system too. People like her, who could get information without talking – though she knew how to talk, mostly to cover things up.

Her history in blackmailing came in handy time and time again, and her ability to slip into unseen cracks even more so. She didn't care what sort of person that made her – because she wasn't much human, in the end. She didn't socialise; she grabbed with a tongue studded with webs – though she was more a beetle in the end.

They said an artist starved for their art. Well, she had starved enough: the two things that had gotten her through her teenage years became her art, and it was thanks to them she now had a name for herself: a name that couldn't be so easily brushed aside or forgotten.