This chapter was inspired during a late-night fridge raid with RM. I do not own HP, in any way shape and/or form.
Switched
October, 1995
6th year
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Jo was pretty sure this day could get worse. She wasn't sure how exactly, but still, it could be worse. She'd been assisting Leili with a new potion that morning and while she wasn't sure what the intended outcome of this potion had been, she was pretty sure after it blew up in their faces that this… wasn't it.
"Oh no," Jo said as the cloud dispersed. Leilani started to say something but was interrupted by the door opening.
"What's happened?" Skye asked, standing in the doorway.
"Nothing," Leili said.
"A potion went wrong," Jo admitted from her seat on Leili's bed.
"I have shared a room with you two since we were eleven. I can tell when you're hiding something, spill." Skye demanded.
Jo heaved a sigh, "I was experimenting."
"You were experimenting?" Skye asked.
"Yes, I was experimenting and the potion went all kablooie in our face and we may or may not have kind of…"
"Switched bodies."
"Swit—you mean you are Leilani?" she asked the one who looked like Jo.
"Guilty."
After a moment of darting eyes and mental wheels turning, "PFFFT! BHAHAHA! OH MY GOD!" Skye guffawed.
"I'm not sure this is funny…" Jo said.
"Mostly embarrassing," Leili agreed.
"No, no, this—this is hilarious! Good jobs girls, good job," Skye applauded.
At first, underneath the embarrassment of such a result, Leili was thrilled; she'd always wanted to be taller! She could reach things on the top bookshelves now, look people full in the face, but then she was constantly hitting her head on things. Her elbows stuck out further than she remembered and she was constantly tripping over her comparatively clodhopper-sized feet.
Jo on the other hand, bemoaning her shortness: "I'm a midget!" she wailed.
To which Leili replied simply, "Hey!"
After an hour or so of being Leili sized, Jo had discovered some advantages to her newfound smallness: she could fit almost anywhere. Every nook, cranny and trunk that was empty Jo found and climbed into.
"I fit!" she'd proclaim happily.
A few hours after the accident with no end in sight Jo-in-Leilani's-body realized, "We have a problem, Leili,"
"I'll figure out a way to reverse this, don't worry."
"That's not the problem."
"What?"
"I have a date with Marcus today."
"Oh no…"
So Jo-who-was-actually-Leilani went out to meet Marcus. He went to take her hand and Leili used Jo's body to raise her wand and stick it in Marcus' chest.
"Nope! Nopenopenope. Nooooope," she said.
"What's the matter?" he asked, suddenly suspicious.
"Iiiiii may or may not be who you think I am."
His tone was suddenly all dread as he said, "What." It wasn't a question.
"Jo's body. Leilani speaking. Hi. Jo is in the library trying to figure out how to switch us back. I came out here to cancel or postpone your date. We figured you wouldn't accept it if it came from Jo who looks like me and that if I could just get it over with fast enough, you might not notice. Obviously, it didn't work."
"I'll help you look."
Taken aback, Leili blinked Jo's eyes at him in surprise. "Thanks."
He grunted at her. He was weirded out by this whole situation: the girl walking beside him looked like Jocelyn, sounded like Jocelyn but most definitely did not move like Jocelyn. The voice was hers but the way she spoke wasn't, except for the odd phrase here or there.
Two hours later in the library, "Ok, I found a way to switch us back."
"Thank Merlin. Do it," Jo sighed, rubbing Leili's eyes. Leili had a pair of reading glasses for cases of eyestrain, but she almost never wore them.
Leili cast the spell and it worked. They were back in their own bodies! But they weren't out of the woods yet: it didn't stick. They switched back and then switched back again so they were once again in each other's bodies.
"Jo?" Marcus ventured.
"Nope. Still Leilani."
Marcus grumbled something inaudible.
"Leili, do you remember how you made the potion that did this?"
"I think so. Why?"
"We're going to re-do it."
"Find me when you're back in your own body." Marcus told Jo.
"Yeah, sure, bub," they parted ways outside the library, the girls going back to their dorm and Marcus going they didn't care where.
They pulled out Leili's spare cauldron and all the ingredients she'd used and went to work. Unfortunately, they had no idea where she'd messed up. They reworked it and it didn't explode.
"Where did I go right?" Leili moaned. She poured the new potion into a vial, cleaned out the cauldron and shoved it under her bed again. "OW!" Leili's pain rang through the room as she tried to sit up while her head was still under the bed.
"You ok?"
"Fiiine. Ow."
"Sit down before you hurt yourself."
"Too late," Leili sat down with a thud.
"What did you hit this time?"
"My head. Your head? Again. We've got to find a way to switch us back."
"Well, the library didn't help. Reworking the potion that did this didn't help."
"That leaves us with 'phone a friend'."
So that's what they did. They went down to the Hospital Wing—they'd have gone to Professor Sprout, but she wasn't in her Common Room office.
"Ah, ladies, how are you?" Madame Pomfrey said.
"We're fine," Leilani-who-was-really-Jo answered. "We do have a problem though."
"Potion went wrong on us. We switched bodies. Can you get us back to, well, us?"
While the matron headed for the medicine cabinet, Leilani-who-only-looked-like-Jo peered over her shoulder at the two heavily bearded, bickering old men.
She grinned at them, "What happened to you two?"
"It's his fault," they declared pointing at each other.
"Mister and Mister Weasley tried to hoodwink the age line around the Goblet of Fire with an ageing potion," Madame Pomfrey explained. "Like all the others who try it, it backfired. Here, drink this. Drink all of it. It won't taste very good but it'll put you right."
Jo scowled Leili's face at the vial while Leili pinched Jo's nose shut and downed the potion.
"Now go sit down, it may take a minute and I don't want you falling over when it takes effect." The girls did as they were told and each sat down on a bed opposite the twins.
"Leilani," Fred said.
"Huh?" Leili replied raising Jo's eyebrows.
"What did you do?"
"Oh, I was trying to make an Invisibility potion. Something went wrong. Instead of making someone invisible, it made me switch bodies with the nearest person, Jo. So I guess it kind of worked? It didn't make me invisible but could allow me to be in two places at once—sort of."
"Emphasis on sort of," Jo snickered.
Suddenly the room went into a free spin around the girls. It was a little like one of the rides at a rollercoaster park where the rider was strapped upright into a person-sized cage with support bars just below shoulder height to grab onto when the ride—shaped like a giant wheel—spun and dipped at ridiculous speeds. With a surprisingly physical shove that threatened to knock Jo over and did knock over Leili, it passed and they were themselves again.
"Did it work?" Jo asked in her own voice. She grabbed for her ponytail and pulled it so she could see the color of her hair. "It worked!"
"I'm me again!" Leili crowed. "Yay! I've never been so happy to be short in my life!"
