The Greatest Weapon 10

AN: Sorry about the long wait between updates...I hope this one makes up for it! Warning: mention and suggestion of genderbending. (Harry). Don't worry, this is emphatically not a fem!Harry fic. That is not to say that Harry won't have to be a girl... (Grins.) This should be fun!

The next few days were torture. Harry couldn't get away from the whispers, from the pitying looks, from the gossip that wreaked more havok in the halls than the poltergeist Peeves. It wasn't just the fact that his secret was now out, either- now he would be, even more than he had been before, an easy target for Voldemort and his minions. And he couldn't stop thinking about Rita Skeeter. She had not, perhaps, been his favorite person, but he had to admit that she was sweet in her own way (if unscrupulous) and she had helped him a lot, during his rhetorical campaign. And besides, no one (well, except perhaps for Voldemort or Bellatrix) deserved to die.

He was worried about his foster parents, too. He was only fifteen, too young to apply for magical emancipation, and he knew perfectly well that this weakness would give the Dark a perfect opportunity to exploit, even if he had hamstrung the movement with the help of Rita's acid pen. Galleons, after all, had a much stronger voice than words. And even had they not, he did not want any of Dumbledore's direct allies getting him either, or, God forbid, Dumbledore himself. The old man, after all, was not exactly trustworthy, although he would probably not be as bad as a Death Eater. Probably. And yet somehow, even with Rita's articles and his shady past, the Wizarding World still revered him as someone approximating a god.

Sirius's trial was still going through, too and Harry couldn't help but worry. The Ministry had been forced to clean up their act immensely, but that didn't stop him from wondering if all the closet Voldie supporters had been taken down.

Not only that, but if it had just been the revelations about his home life, his concerns about where he would go from here, and Rita's death he had to worry about, he might (might, mind you) have been able to cope. But now that Rita was dead, more reporters were filling up the hole that she had left behind, most of them even more unscrupulous than she had been (if that was possible). And most of them were not very complementary to him. The Prophet seemed still to be toeing the party line, making him and Dumbledore out to be mad and dangerous, or (even worse, in Harry's opinion) making him seem like a poor, mentally ill victim of muggle abuse, and using his example to say that all muggleborns should be taken away from their parents and raised by responsible wizards for the good of the Wizarding world. Not one of them covered the fact that Voldemort was still at large. Some of the reporters even blamed him for Rita's death, which hurt as much as it made him resentful. It was, after all, kind of true- he had put her in the line of fire- but their callus and mostly-untrue accusations scored him to the bone, and he couldn't do anything about them. Could he?

He said as much to Hermione.

"You could hire another reporter or two," she said. "Or give an interview or a statement, I guess."

"I'm not hiring anyone else to get k-killed because of me," Harry responded, voice shaking ever so slightly. "As for an interview, well...what do you want to bet that they're going to take my words out of context and make me out to be an even worse person than they already have? Or maybe they'll just use a quik-quotes pen and do away with what I said entirely!"

"They can't do that!"

"Can they? R-Rita did, and nobody ever called her out on that. And they've been writing fictional stories about me ever since before I was born. Either there's no Wizarding laws in place to stop that kind of thing from happening, or they just assumed- rightly- that nobody would be able to stop them from making money off of me because I'm an orphan."

"That's criminal!" Hermione's cry made everyone else in the library look around in startlement, and Madame Pince pursed her lips, looking as if she wanted to come over there and crack the over the head with her great record book for shouting in her library. Fortunately, she only called "Tone it down!" and went back to the pile of books for the Restricted Section that she was cataloguing. "I'm checking the laws on that," Hermione continued, eyes narrowed. "And anyway, even if you don't want to endanger another reporter, couldn't you still put something in the paper yourself?"

"Like what?" Harry asked, but he was beginning to grow interested. "I can't just send in a letter as Harry Potter, and they *probably* wouldn't listen to anything I sent in under a pseudonym... I mean, a letter to the editor is all well and good, and it would be great to start with, but I need something everyone will read..."

Hermione's cinnamon eyes began to shine. "I've got it!" she paused, then cast some anti-eavesdropping charms, despite the fact that they had already had one up. You could never be too careful, after all. "You could disguise yourself, and try to get on the Prophet staff. Then you could 'interview' yourself. People would read it, because it was an interview with Harry Potter, but you could make sure that no one actually twisted your words the wrong way, because you would be the interviewer!"

Harry stared at her. "Would that even work? They wouldn't just hire a random wizard out of the blue..."

"If you had access to the Boy-Who-Lived for an interview, they'd bend over backwards for you, see if they don't!"

"What if they find out who I really am? I mean, I don't want to just chug polyjuice, because then someone else would still be in danger, plus they'd get the credit for what I do. Besides, they'd figure it out if they suddenly had a contract to work for the Daily Prophet..."

"I wasn't suggesting polyjuice. There are other ways to disguise yourself, you know, even to create a false identity if necessary. The goblins could be helpful too, maybe; we just need to research this."

"The goblins?"

"Yeah, you don't want to falsify records without involving the goblins; they get really pissed off, or so I've heard. I've only been to Gringotts a few times, since I don't exactly have a vault. Goblins are fascinating, though; have you heard-?"

Harry cut her off. "So even if I did have an alternate identity, what would I do then? Somehow I don't think just waltzing into the main office of the Prophet is a good idea?"

"I'm pretty sure you just have to send a query letter. If they follow up and schedule an audience, you're good to go. If not, send another query or bribe some people in charge. If all else fails you could just buy the whole thing out."

"Um. Say that again?"

"Query, send a follow up if they don't reply, try bribes, or buy it out and publish whatever you want."

"How on earth would I buy out the Prophet? I barely have enough in my trust vault to cover my Hogwarts years!"

Hermione stared at him. "First off, there's the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. You could just render it and sell it through the goblins; it's worth a whole lot. Secondly, you're the Boy-Who-Lived. You could seriously borrow however much you wanted from the goblins, or pretty much anyone else, too. People have probably also sent you gifts and things. Besides, I researched your family. You're one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, which means you're from one of the richest and most powerful families in Wizarding Britain. You could also ask Sirius for help; he'd probably jump at the chance to help you buy out the Prophet! He'd think of it as the best prank ever. So yeah, I think you could do it if you have to."

Harry stared at her, shell-shocked. "I didn't...I don't..."

Hermione's eyes softened, and she reached out and pulled Harry into a hug. "We'll figure this out, Harry. We probably won't need to buy it out anyway, not if we can figure out how to disguise you and give you a believable name. We'll just make sure that the Prophet hires you."

"But wouldn't they just see through it? How deep would the disguise have to go?"

"Well, we'd have to mask your magical core, that's for sure. Otherwise, probably some aging potions and then maybe some potions to change your skin tone and hair color, maybe even some spells to temporarily change your face... You can't just go around looking like an older Harry Potter, so it'd have to be pretty deep. And maybe use muggle makeup for your scar?"

Harry was about to make some reply to that when an idea hit him with all the force of a very large freight train. It'd have to be pretty deep... "Hermione, what if my disguise was female?"

The girl whipped around, actually dropping her muggle pencil. "What?!"

"It's just an idea," was Harry's self-conscious reply. It was, after all, a very odd idea, and he definitely didn't want to become a woman (no offense to Hermione) but an identity that was totally unlike his own in every way could definitely come in handy. Even if it had breasts, however uncomfortable the thought. "I mean, no one would really expect a grown woman would be the 'Boy-Who-Lived' in disguise, not least because no one would expect me to willingly become a woman."

Hermione stared at him for so long that he thought that he'd broken her, and then finally squealed. "Oh, Harry, that's a great idea! Let me just find some literature on how to turn into a woman, and then we'd have to change your basic looks and magical signature, and then we talk to the goblins, and-"

"Hold on!" Her enthusiasm was actually rather worrying. First things first, start with the articles. Harry still hadn't thought the whole woman thing through. He knew better than to say that, though. "If we're going to put all this effort into making an elaborate disguise just to pull the wool over the Prophet top editor's eyes, we got to figure out what I want to get into the newspaper in the first place. And what's a query?"

"A query letter is a letter saying what you want to write and why the Prophet (or whatever newspaper you're pitching) should publish it. As for what you want to get into the newspaper, you'll have to figure that one out on your own. So how about you write the articles you want to publish, and I start working on a disguise?"

"That...sounds good, actually." Harry pulled his 'art sketchbook' out of his bag and frowned down at it, thinking. What did he want to publish? Well, the interview would be first, and he would have to cover his home life, Voldie, his Death Eaters, Dumbledore, and the adventures every year at Hogwarts; that was what the public would want to hear, and he also had to make sure that everyone knew Voldemort was back. Then, too, he would need to run an article about Dumbledore, and one about muggleborns, and one about muggles in general, and one about dark, light, and grey magic, and so on, and there were multiple social issues that he would eventually like to address. Oh, and he also wanted to ream the Wizarding public out for letting the Prophet and Flourish and Blotts make money on slander and fantasies written about an orphan. The interview would have to be first though. Dear Lord, writing an interview of himself was most definitely weird. But then, on the one-to-ten weirdness scale, turning into a woman definitely surpassed that...

Meanwhile, Hermione was silently summoning a stack of law and glamor and disguise books, and had already pulled out a muggle notepad. And Harry felt, deep inside his soul, that this might just give them the backing and plans necessary to win the war. He could do this. For his friends. For his teachers. For the Wizarding World. Hell, even for Rita. He was certainly good enough at writing...no all he had to do was make the public read what he wrote, which wouldn't exactly be easy. Still, if it was easy, it wouldn't be worth it, would it? Even if he had to have breasts to do it.