In his earlier Hogwarts years, Harry had thought of transfiguration like – maths. A subject that every witch and wizard had to learn, but one that would ultimately be useless in real life. When would he ever need to transfigure a gerbil into a teacup?

Now, he was thanking Headmaster McGonagall for all her efforts.

Even if transfiguration wasn't permanent – he could transfigure a tree branch into a mattress, and leaves into a pillow, and use cushioning charms and whatnot so that it would feel like a bed.

He took his clothes off to sleep – but he kept his wands nearby. Holly wand under the pillow. The Elder wand stayed in his ankle holster. He never took that off.

Harry made a small cage to put his shrunken titans in, and he left that in the corner of his treehouse.

:::

When Harry woke up in the morning, he used scourgify to clean his teeth and clothes.

He grimaced. It never worked as well as actually brushing your teeth, or cleaning clothes with soap and water – but in times like this, Harry had to make do.

What was he going to do now?

Harry still had no idea where he was. Judging from the state of the villages, Harry would probably have to reach a wall before he could find people who knew where he was.

In the meantime, he had a situation. There were hundreds and hundreds of these feral giants roaming the countryside, and wherever he was, the Ministry of Magic didn't seem to be doing anything about it.

Time to send a message to Hermione.

Harry pulled out the Elder Wand, and used it to form his patronus. The stag bowed and walked around his treehouse.

"Hey Hermione," he said, recording his message. "Don't know where I am, but there are giants that have been eating people here. I think I could be in Giant territory? Ministry's not doing anything about it. Maybe you can find me."

If one person could find out where he was, it was Hermione. She would probably try to cross-reference giant habitats with giant culture and find Harry purely through research. He hadn't wanted to use the patronus before because it would've been much easier to find out where he was, and then simply apparate home if it wasn't too far away.

Until then…

"Go to Hermione," Harry told his patronus. Instead of running straight into action though, the stag only tilted his head and looked at him quizzically.

"Didn't you hear me? Find Hermione."

His patronus still didn't move.

"Find Ron Weasley?" Harry said instead, raising an eyebrow. Maybe Hermione was being blocked by warding or something – not that Harry had ever seen a ward capable of stopping a patronus from passing through.

It didn't move.

"Ginny Weasley?"

When the same thing happened… Harry started to wonder.

"Point me Hermione Granger," he said this time, and the wand simply – spun around and around in circles.

"Point me Ministry of Magic!" he tried again. The wand did the same thing.

Point me was a very basic spell – you asked it to get you somewhere, and a blue arrow would appear, pointing in the direction you needed to go to.

Even if Hermione was very, very far away, there would still be a direction.

Harry looked at his spinning wand and realised.

Something was very, very wrong here.

:::

At his Firebolt's top speed, he could get to one wall in an hour.

He picked the wall behind him first.

Harry made sure to fly at a height far beyond what the giants could reach. He flew in a straight line, and when he made it to the wall, he dropped a hundred metres to stand on the top.

From the wall, he could see that the land beyond it only had more wilderness and giants. There wasn't a single village to be seen.

This wall was also unkempt. There were small holes through the wall and parts of it were crumbling, falling down. It hadn't been maintained in a while.

Underneath his Invisibility Cloak, Harry had the sudden fear that maybe the other wall was the same. That he was out here, in giant territory, with no humans around and no one to keep him company.

If that was the case, Harry was going to have to get his house up to scratch very quickly, and decide what to do about food. He hadn't eaten anything since breakfast yesterday. Even now, his stomach was rumbling.

With the knowledge that this wall led nowhere, he headed back to his Homebase.

:::

Food. This was not something that he could put off for much longer.

Accio to catch a bird on his broom. Stupefy to stun it.

Unfortunately, there was no spell that would allow a wizard to instantly remove the skin and guts of an animal, or one that would remove all the blood. If Harry had gone into the Dark Arts, he would've learnt the Entrail-expelling curse, and then he wouldn't have to go through all this trouble of removing animal guts by himself.

Harry used some of the leftover wood as kindling and Incendio to make a fire and soon he had Unidentifiable Bird happily cooking on a spit in his treehouse. He had to fire-proof the floor first, and the smoke was annoying – in retrospect, Harry thought that he should've cooked outside, and let the wind take the smoke away.

As it was, he had to keep casting Deprimo every now and then to blow the smoke away.

Once the business of eating it was done, he vanished the remains and scourgified his hands.

Now, he would think about going to the other wall.

:::

Harry was on his way to the other wall, when he heard a faint booming noise echo through his valley. It sounded like cannon fire.

It was enough to make him curious. What could have caused that sound? Was it an explosion? Actual cannon fire?

The giants he had seen so far didn't seem like they were capable of that kind of technology. They hadn't even progressed to using stone tools.

That left – human beings. Villagers who had survived the raids on their villages? Had they banded together and found a new sanctuary elsewhere?

The sound came from another forest of trees. It took him some time to arrive, and when he got there, a female giant with blonde hair was rapidly running out of the group of trees.

It turned Harry's head. That giant was fast! He was going to go after it and do the same thing as he had done with the other giants, when he noticed that there was blood on her hands.

Fresh blood.

That meant that there were people who were hurt, probably inside the group of trees.

Harry wanted to follow the female giant, but he couldn't ignore the possibility that maybe there was someone in that group of trees who was still alive. Then he had a moral obligation to help them out.

In auror training, you were worth less than nothing if you went after the enemy, and as a result, their victim died. If they died because you were too busy trying to run after the bad guy, and you forgot to take the innocents to a hospital… It showed that you had the wrong priority.

This was the same situation.

With one last look at the female giant, Harry entered the forest, keeping a lookup for the sight and scent of blood.

:::

The first person that he saw was a man. He had been tangled in his wires and hung limp from a tree. Harry cast a diagnostic charm, just in case, but it told him what he already suspected.

The man was dead.

The next few were all the same. Dead. Dead. Dead. Some of them were still intact. Others had missing heads, missing arms, torsos cut in half.

The carnage was as bad as some of the things he had seen as an auror. It ranked with the necromancy cases, the attempted demon summonings, and the human trafficking investigation.

All of the dead people were wearing green cloaks. They had an emblem on their cloaks, white and blue feathers overlapping. They had white pants and black boots, and a majority of them also had a machine strapped to their hips. Harry wondered what it was used for.

Harry was this close to leaving the forest and continuing on his way – it didn't look like he could do much for these people, afterall – when he saw a young woman lying at the base of a tree.

Judging from the blood splatter, she hit the tree at a higher height, and then slid down all the way to the bottom. Her body, like the others, was drenched in blood.

Harry grit his teeth and did the diagnostic charm. Her spine had snapped. There was a head injury, she had hit the tree face first, and her cheekbones had caved in from the impact. Blood was pouring out and –

She was still alive. Barely.

Harry couldn't believe it. He landed his broomstick, knelt beside her and took her pulse quickly, and while it was very, very faint, her heart was still trying frantically to pump blood around her body.

He looked at her again.

Harry wasn't a healer. He didn't know how to treat injuries beyond the basics, and his only healing spell was 'Episkey.'

What he did have was skele-gro in his magical first aid kit. It would not be pleasant, because Harry would have to vanish the bones first, and Harry didn't know if muggles could survive that.

She also had a head injury, and that could go either way. This girl might still die.

Harry had only really wanted to find out where he was, so he could go home. He wanted to help people, but he didn't want the responsibility of having someone die on him again. He didn't want to use up his potions when he might need them later, and when the girl could die regardless.

Was that selfish?

What would Hermione do?

…

Hermione would've probably shoved him over and started yelling – Harry! Why are you thinking so hard about this! You have to at least try.

She would probably be quite mean about it too, he thought ruefully.

Dumbledore would tell him again, that we all had to choose between what was right and what was easy. He would talk to Harry about the quality of mercy.

With that thought, Harry sighed and looked around, double checking that there were no muggles around. It probably wasn't safe to move her too much – she had lost quite a bit of blood – but at the same time, apparating with a person this heavily injured was just asking to be splinched. How could he focus on having all the right body parts appear where they needed to be, when her spine was broken?

He grabbed a blood-replenishing potion first and poured that down her throat. He had to do something about that first, because it was the first thing that would kill her. Once that was done, he petrified her, locking her body into stasis where it wouldn't deteriorate. He shrunk her down so he could carry her away from the trees.

Then he got to hopping back to his treehouse with his new (and first ever!) patient.

:::

The skele-gro seemed to be doing its job. When he vanished the spinal vertebrae, Harry had been worried, because it seemed like the backbone was a very important series of bones to lose, but everything seemed okay so far.

It wasn't just her spine. Her collarbone had snapped. Her ribs and pelvis were a complete mess, having shattered into many different piece, and Harry hadn't noticed the first time because it was all under her cloak. Her hips had dislocated. There were also various hairline fractures throughout her arms and legs.

She hadn't just hit a tree face first, and then slid to the ground. Something had mashed her into a tree from behind.

What Harry was really worried about wasn't her bones. That would be fine in the end. Harry didn't have a spell to repair broken bones, so they were going through everything the slow way, vanishing the bones, and then regrowing all of it. At the end of the week, though, her skeleton would be flawless.

Harry was worried about internal injuries. The organs in her abdominals, her lungs, her diaphragm. Her spinal cord. Harry didn't have spells to deal with them either – if he ever got hurt, her healers at St Mungo's did their thing and most wizards and witches were right to go home straight away, provided that no dark curses had been used. Physical injuries were nothing for those healers, no matter how severe.

So all Harry could do was pour blood-replenishers and healing potions down her boneless throat and hope for the best. He had tried Episkey a few times with the Elder wand, but he didn't know how much that would help, since it was only a minor healing charm.

It was fine for skin. All her cuts were closed. She wasn't leaking blood through the skin. Her bruises didn't seem to be getting any darker, so Harry hoped that meant she wasn't haemorrhaging into her body cavities either.

"I really need to learn a spell for ruptured organs," Harry said to himself, sitting back down on the floor.

The sun was setting. He could tell from the way the light was falling through the leaves. It had been a long day, and again, the only thing he'd had to eat all day was the bird.

Did he need an IV drip for the girl? This was massive trauma. She wouldn't be getting up anytime soon, and he'd probably need to get her to eat something.

He looked at her again. It was a good thing she was out cold, because as it was, she was a naked sack of jelly lying on a transfigured sheet on his treehouse's clean floor.

If nothing else… if she died, he could clean her clothes and then wear them. They were only a few inches apart in height.

:::