Disclaimer: Don't own, so please don't sue, because I'm poorer than lint
Chapter Two
Harry and his dormmates were panicking. And it was not the usual hands-covering-mouth oh goodness me, what has happened kind of panic: no, this was full-fledged running round the room, yelling obscenities, yanking hair out by the root, rocking back and forth in a corner, gaping in disbelief at snickering mirrors kind of panic. To put it plainly, it is the type of panic that could only be created by five seventeen-year-old boys who have each awoken to the horrifying realization that, at some time during the night, they had all been turned into girls. Obviously, they were not taking to this new realization all that well. Ron Weasley was currently perfecting the art of pacing round and round the messy room, his freckled face pale and his new basoomers bouncing with every stride his lanky legs took; Dean Thomas was standing in front of the hardly-ever-used full-length mirror, dividing his attention between gaping with wide eyes at his chest and shouting for the bloody magical mirror to stop laughing at him; Seamus Finnigan was standing in the middle of the room, using every context of the words fuck and knockers at the top of his lungs, even coming up with lines such as "fucking fucked knocking fuckered knock-knocks!" as he tried to put into words exactly what he was feeling about the whole situation. Neville Longbottom, the most forgetful boy of the group, was sitting on his bed, arms wrapped around his knees, swaying back and forth while murmuring the properties of dragonsbane under his breath, over and over again, his eyes glancing fearfully down toward his new bosom every five seconds before snapping back up with a mighty jerk of his neck; and Harry Potter … well, poor Harry was standing in between his and Ron's beds, his glasses askew on his nose and his hands tugging rather violently at his black hair as he tried to figure out how to get him and his friends out of this dilemma.
Unluckily, Harry was not getting very far in his musings of making himself and his dormmates male again, as he was too busy thinking thoughts such as, If this is Malfoy's doing, I'm going to knock his bloody teeth in,and, Merlin's beard, these things are heavy. The green-eyed boy just couldn't seem to wrap his head round the fact that he was now a girl – well, a boy with girlie parts, at any rate – and what with all the extra jiggling his body was currently doing, the amount of time necessary to come up with the simple solution to their problems was nearly doubled. When it did finally hit him, however, Harry abruptly stopped his attempts at manually receding his own hairline, and nearly slumped down onto his bed, he was flooded with such a massive wave of relief. It was so simple – so sodding simple – how hadn't he thought of it before?
Hurling – and yes, the situation did in fact warrant hurling, in Harry's opinion at least – himself into the path of Ron's frantic pacing, the green-eyed boy grabbed his taller friend by the shoulders, shook him roughly, and yelled, "Hermione!" into the redhead's desperate face. He managed to stop Ron from continuing his desperate pace, which was a relief as he was about to pace a hole through the stone floor, but the other boy was now giving him a very confused look.
"Harry, I think the curse has addled your brain," the redhead said slowly, in his much higher-pitched voice. "I'm Ron, not Hermione. Don't let the basoomers confuse you, mate."
Harry rolled his eyes impatiently. "I know you're not Hermione, Ron," he said in exasperation, eyeing his friend's still flaming red hair pointedly. "What I'm trying to say –" and here Harry shook the taller boy's shoulders for emphasis " – is that Hermione will know what to do! She's sure to know how to switch us back to blokes!"
Ron's eyes immediately widened, and relief swept over his pale and freckly face, the tension Harry felt in his shoulders lessening slightly. "You're right," he breathed, and Harry tried very hard to ignore how much of a – well – girl Ron had sounded just then. "Of course she'll know what to do. She's Hermione! She knows everything!"
"Right," Harry said. "So all we have to do is go down to the common room, find a girl to give Hermione a message in the girls' rooms, and then –"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Harry," Ron interrupted, his face switching back to panic. "You want us to actually go down into the common room? Like this?"
Harry paused uncertainly, realizing and sharing in Ron's hesitancy, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and this was certainly one of those desperate times.
"Ron, we haven't got much of a choice here," Harry said, staring into his taller friend's panicked eyes. "I don't want to be seen like this by anyone else as much as you don't, but we can't very well wait up here forever, hoping that Hermione will randomly pop in for a visit! We need her to help, and the only way to do that is to go down into the common room and find a way to get a message to her."
"What, you leaving for the common room, Harry?" Dean interjected, dragging himself away from his argument with the snarky mirror to look bewilderingly at the green-eyed boy. At Harry's affirmative nod, Dean only shook his head and muttered, "You're braver than me mate. I'm not stepping on those stairs 'til this goes away."
"Me neither," Seamus piped up, his Irish lilt sounding very odd with a distinctly female voice, not to mention being hoarse due to all the previous yelling. "I'm not moving from this spot until these –" he gestured frantically at his chest " – go away and those –" he gestured much lower "– come back!"
"Purple, spiky leaves!" Neville squeaked fearfully.
"They've got a point, mate," Ron murmured to Harry, though he was staring rather perplexedly at Neville.
"Yes, because arguing with mirrors, yelling fuckering fuckheaded fuckwading fuck-knockers until you turn blue and spouting nonsense about sodding plants is really going to help solve everything," Harry snapped, his already-frayed nerves beginning to sizzle at the hopelessness of his dorm mates. "Yes, all right, so we've all got boobs –" the boys around him all collectively shuddered, "– and have lost much more important parts, but what do you expect to accomplish up here? If we change things back to the way they were, then we've got to take action, and that means actually leaving the dorm room."
When none of the other boys made any motions of agreement, Harry threw up his hands in frustration and said, in his soft, feminine voice, "What's gotten into you lot? We're Gryffindors! We're courageous and brave! We jump into things head first, not cower in our dorm room, afraid to journey into our own common room! We're more Gryffindor than this! Come now, are we men, or are we mice?" Seeing all the baleful glares being sent his way, Harry mentally backtracked to what he had just said, and winced at his choice of words.
"All right, bad comparison," he said apologetically, "but you do understand what I'm trying to say, yeah?"
The faces around him all remained pale and uncertain. Forcefully keeping himself from thumping all his hesitant dorm mates on the head with a textbook (or his basoomers, he thought a bit hysterically), Harry gritted his teeth, counted to ten, and then breathed out, very slowly.
"All right," he sighed, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, "seeing as you ladies aren't willing to change yourselves back, I suppose its up to me to go get Hermione's help myself. If you'll excuse me." Turning to the door, he was almost out in the corridor before he threw back over his shoulder, "You know, I don't really fancy telling Hermione that you lot had been cursed as well. I could just as easily tell her that you've all got flu and are sleeping off the effects. She need never know that you're up here, jiggling in misery and missing your willies."
Harry had barely touched the top stair before he heard his friends scrambling through their bedroom door behind him.
"You're a cruel, cruel wizard, Harry," Dean said solemnly as the five boys slowly descended the staircase leading into the common room and, in most of their opinions, impending humiliation.
"Just be thankful Fred and George aren't at Hogwarts anymore," Ron muttered with a distinct shudder. "This is Christmas come early for them." Harry quite agreed with Ron, and had to keep himself from shivering unpleasantly at the thought of some of the antics the Weasley twins could subject him and his dorm mates to if they ever heard of this.
Luckily for the boys-turned-girls, when they entered the common room, they found it completely void of any other Gryffindors. Harry was momentarily taken aback by the sight of an empty common room, as that had always been a rare occurrence in Gryffindor, what with the over-keen early risers such as Hermione Granger, Harry and Ron's best friend. The fact that Hermione wasn't sitting in her favourite armchair, the table in front completely covered in her colour-coded notes, was another cause for concern, and Harry was just wondering if perhaps his bushy-haired friend had gone down to breakfast early without him and Ron when rather loud yells and shrieks suddenly sounded above the boys' heads. Jumping in alarm, the five boys all spun around to face the stone staircase that led to the girls' dormitories.
It was quite obvious that all the yelling was coming down the girls' staircase, and though Harry spared the brief thought that he really didn't fancy being slid onto his arse for attempting to climb the stairs, as what had happened to Ron their fifth year, he knew that he couldn't keep himself from going up to help, or at least make sure that Hermione was all right. So, straightening his shoulders (which was much more difficult than he remembered), and steeling his Gryffindor bravery, Harry quickly strode to the stairs, ignoring Ron's bewildered question of, "What're you trying to do, mate?" or Dean's, "That staircase'll never let you up, Harry."
Harry had expected the stairs to immediately turn to a stone slide the second he placed his foot on the bottom step, therefore it came as quite a surprise when nothing of the sort happened. The stairs stayed just as they were; not a single pebble even quivered, and while this made the task of getting up to the girls rather easier, Harry felt a vague stab of indignation that the magical staircase now thought of him female. Shrugging off the feeling, he quickly made his way up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and nearly knocking himself out with his breasts in the process. When he reached the landing that led to the seventh-year girls' room, Harry couldn't help but feel smug at the thought of being the first bloke in his year to actually make it up here. The sensation didn't last, though, as his pesky little inner-voice reminded him quite cheerfully that he currently had boobs, and that that was the only way he had made it up the magical staircase in the first place.
That's beyond the point, Harry thought to himself, even as he hurried to the door marked Seventh Year and knocked. The point is that I've made it up here before Ron has, and he's got a girlfriend.
No one answered the door. Harry supposed that the girls were all too busy yelling to bother with such things as letting him in, so he hesitantly jiggled the handle and pushed against the door. Peeking his head inside the room, Harry managed to say, "Er, Hermione?" before his brain caught up to what his eyes were seeing and he promptly dropped his jaw to the floor.
Scattered about the alarmingly tidy dorm room were the three – well, Harry supposed he couldn't technically call them girls anymore, as they all looked quite different from what he had seen of them last night. Lavender Brown was standing in the middle of the room, tears streaming down her much more square face as she screamed bloody murder, her infamous shoulder-length blonde hair now barely reaching to her ears, and her widely-acclaimed bosom having completely disappeared; Paravti Patil was standing in front of their floor-length mirror much the same way as Dean had been, though her scruffy upper lip was trembling slightly as she gazed in avid horror down at her groin area, obviously terrified out of her mind at what she saw hidden beneath her nightgown; and Hermione was sitting on the floor near her trunk, an alarmingly large tome propped on her knees, her now-shaggy brown hair flopping about her newly-masculine face as she frantically flipped through pages, her bloodshot eyes completely crazed.
At the rate that his friend was flipping through the pages, Harry knew instantly that Hermione had no idea what had happened to them, and that did not leave the green-eyed boy with a pleasant feeling at all. If anything, it made him feel even sicker than before.
Up in the girls' dormitories, hearing doors slam opened and closed beneath him as younger girls-turned-boys rushed confusedly into the common room, all either crying or screaming; standing in a room where three seventh-year, nearly fully-trained witches stood completely gob-smacked at this new development, unable to even acknowledge his presence; watching as one of his best friends – the smartest witch he knew – searched desperately for an answer to whatever had caused this, Harry knew then that this was more than just a prank, or a spell gone horribly wrong.
They had all been the recipients of an intentional curse.
They had all just been thrown into a situation that had turned from bad to the absolute worse.
They were all screwed.
Author's Notes: And there's chapter two. I wasn't completely happy with it, in all honesty, but I think it's working for now. I realise it took me a long while to actually get that out (wow, just over two thousand words, the world should be shocked) but in all honesty, I haven't much time. Being an architect student is really time consuming, and while I'd love to have this story as a priority, as I'm quite fond of it so far, that's just not going to happen. Sadly, writing is more of a relaxing thing for me, not a desperate need, so while I'll attempt to get chapters in within six/seven days, I can't really promise anything. Don't worry though, I'm fairly stubborn, and so I'll probably end up finishing this story just to spite myself! So, until next time!
PS: Review….please? I like reviews almost as much as chocolate, and that is saying A LOT.
