The Greatest Weapon, Chapter 12

"Right. Ok. So this is the test run, right?"

Hermione nodded, then handed Harry one of the bottles of altered potion. "Right. We're just testing the alternative polyjuice right now, to see if it works and how long it lasts. Then, once we've straightened that out, we can try it with some sort of aging spell or aging potion, so you can be the correct age."

"It would have to be aging potion," Ron interjected. "They might cast 'finite' on Harry to see if he is underage, you know. Aging potions are harder to detect, though; they'd have to give you the whole chemical test, which they wouldn't do unless they suspected something."

"Damn," Hermione muttered, making the eyes of both of her companions go wide. She was not, after all, a witch known for any kind of crude language or profanity. "We don't know how an aging potion will interact with the disguise potion, and it could cause a chemical reaction that could kill Harry, or it could make the duration of the disguise potion longer or shorter, or it could just do something else entirely. Then we'd probably have to go to St. Mungo's, or Professor Snape."

Harry swallowed hard. "Is the aging potion really necessary, then?"

"Yeah. They'll probably wonder why you're not at Hogwarts if you come as a woman the same age as you are now," Hermione told him. "I just wish we could use an aging charm!"

"Well, we can't." That was Ron. "But speaking of wondering why you're not at Hogwarts, they may want to know your credentials. Like, you don't even have your OWLS yet. What are we going to do about that?"

"Shoot! I didn't think about that," Harry said, frowning at violet, gold-shot potion. "Maybe they'll want an interview with the Boy-Who-Lived more than they'll want credentials?" he said hopefully.

"You can't keep thinking of that as your best offer," Hermione told him. "I mean, sure, they'd love that, but if it's all you have to offer..."

"Yeah, yeah, I know; I've got some other things lined up too," Harry told her. "But I'm still thinking that that's got to be the juiciest thing I have."

Hermione's look was slightly disapproving, but she made no more comment on that front, only looking back at the notebook in her hand. "Maybe you could take your OWLS early."

"But what about NEWTS?"

"Bribe Ms. Marchbanks?"

Ron looked as though he was about to faint. "'M-'Mione?"

"Grow up, Ron. I didn't sink all this work and all this expense and all this planning into this just to be put off because Harry doesn't have the right grades on the right arbitrary Ministry-assigned tests. If we need scores, we get scores. While I'm the first to say that he should get them legitimately, there's no possible way that he could get his NEWTS within the year, which is, I assume, the timeframe we are going to need. That said, you could try for your DADA NEWT, since you are miles past what that Ministry bitch was trying to cram down our throats. It'd take a good bit of studying, but you could do it, and I know that there are war-time laws that allow you to request to keep your actual test scores secret, and just use whatever final grade you got for whatever you need the credentials for."

Both boys stared at her as though they had never seen her before. "Y-you think that they're arbitrary?" was all Ron could come up with to say.

Hermione thumped him. "Yes. Standardized testing is important, because you'll need the grades later in life, but at the end of the day, they're just a bunch of marks on a paper. They don't reflect how much you've actually learned, they don't help you in the real world, and they sure as hell aren't fun to take."

Ron's mouth was gaping wide open. Hermione reached out and shut it. "What, did you think I liked taking exams? Wait, don't answer that," she added, seeming to realize what Ron was going to say. "Point is, we need to test this potion, and then we need to research aging potions- I'll do that part, don't worry- and after that we need to help Harry get his act together. Get him female clothes and some sort of credentials, and then maybe make sure that he knows how to act like a woman, too."

"He'll need to learn how to apparate, too," Ron broke in, once the shock had slightly worn off. "I mean, he might need it to get away from Death Eaters, and an apparation license is also sort of a type of credentials; sort of like a...um...driving license, is it called? For muggles?"

Hermione was nodding while Harry's head swung back and forth between them, as though he were watching a Quidditch match. Finally, the boy could not hold back any longer. "Um, guys? I'm kind of right here..."

"Oh, sorry Harry!" Hermione said, at once apologetic and almost effusive. "Um, so I'll just make a list and we can take things one step at a time. So, are you going to test the potion?"

Harry gulped, staring at the phial in his hand. "Um, yeah, I guess?"

"You don't have to do it if you don't want..." Ron interjected. He still seemed rather weirded-out about the whole "girl thing".

"No, I...I'll do it." Harry took another glance at the potion, braced himself, and drank the entire vial. Almost at once, a searing, agonizing pain ripped through his body, and his guts squirmed with agony and nausea, and he stumbled and fell, scraping his knees on the hard Chamber floor. Ron and Hermione were instantly at his side.

"Harry, are you ok?"

"What do you think, you bloody idiot?" Harry panted, the words warping in his mouth as said mouth twisted with the change. Harry thrashed, pain worse than in his visions washing over him again and again...and then, as abruptly as it had come on, all of the pain stopped at one and the same instant. Harry got to his feet slowly, helped by the other two.

"Um...how do you feel, mate? Can we get you anything?" asked Ron cautiously, obviously remembering how Harry had snapped at Hermione for asking a very similar question.

"Fine, actually, except a little dizzy," Harry replied, taking stock of his new body. He slowly turned around to face the other two...

"Oh my goodness," Hermione burst out, at the same time that Ron made a very interesting choking noise.

"Um. Mate. You, um. You look good. I mean-"

"Ron," Hermione began acidly, "best to quit while you're ahead..."

Harry was still trying to steady himself, as it seemed that his center of balance had changed, what with becoming taller and female. "Well I guess that answers if I look ok. Can I have a mirror?"

Hermione conjured him/her one, and Harry stared into it with interest. He/she had long, wavy black hair, deep brown eyes, and somewhat tanned skin, what with having some of Parvati's DNA, and if it wouldn't have been totally creepy, Harry might actually have had a crush on him/herself, especially due to the fact that the uniform which had been perfectly fine on Harry Potter was now much, much tighter. Harry blinked a few times, surprised by the long black eyelashes that he/she now had. It was quite disconcerting to have a bust (and his/hers was rather bigger than he/she would have liked, seeing as half of the DNA had come from the well-endowed Lavender Brown) and it was equally so to have nothing between his/her legs. He/she could already feel a blush heating his/her borrowed cheeks. "So, um, it works?" he/she commented, slightly unnerved by the velvet alto of his/her voice.

"Clearly," was Hermione's reply. "So anyway, right now all we have to do is wait for it to wear off, to see how long you have to go between doses. The recipe said an hour, right?"

"I think so," said Ron, to whom the question had been addressed. "That's what the recipe said, right? You tell me, you're the one who read it over five times..."

"Oh, hush you. So anyway, we are going to wait an hour and see if it wears off. If it doesn't wear off naturally in a day, we're probably going to have to go see about talking to a mediwitch, but it should be fine. The only other things we'll have to worry about are going to be problems when it wears off, like your hair stays longer or you still have breasts after everything else is fine," (Harry yelped at that, and Ron looked distinctly worried) "and problems with your hormones, because women need a whole different set of them, and the changes back and forth will probably give you a hormonal imbalance."

"Right," was Harry's shaky reply. This was sounding better and better, wasn't it.

The potion did not wear off in an hour. It was very lucky that they had chosen a weekend to try out the potion, because Harry was still emphatically Esmeralda Grimm, (the persona he had constructed with Ron and Hermione) when Hermione's wand-alarm had gone off. And thus began a harrowing period of waiting. Hermione dug the textbook out of her bag, but upon rereading the recipe, she found that the part which had described the results had been splashed liberally with the potion in question, sometime in the distant past, and she could read only the word 'one'. One what? It was obviously not one minute, or one hour, but it could be anything from one day to one century, and they had no way of knowing how long it would be, since Hermione's page-cleaning charm had not managed to clear away the crusted potion, and a scourgify would be too strong.

So, having nothing else to do while they were waiting, Hermione ran over her list, and they began to do the things that they could do. She gave them extra parchment and made them do their homework before anything else, and then she began helping Harry get into his persona as Esmeralda.

"No, not like that Harry!" Hermione frowned, looking at him. "You need to swing your hips a little more, and let your hands bump your hips when you're walking fast. Think about how a girl would walk."

"Is this better?" Harry said, walking across the Chamber and then back. Ron's eyes had by this time glazed over, watching, but Hermione was nodding, scribbling on her notepad as if she was tabulating every swing of Esmeralda's hips and every little tiny motion of her head as she walked.

"Yes. Put your chest out a little more though. You want to look confident, you don't want to slump like that."

Esmeralda obliged.

"Good, that's better. I think you've got the walk down. You just got to practice that a few more times."

Esmeralda walked back and forth down the Chamber another few times before at last stopping next to her friends, sitting down on a conjured chair and rubbing one hand through her hair.

"That's another thing."

"What?"

"That thing where you run your hand through your hair. That's all you, Harry. It's not a very feminine mannerism, and it's also pretty much your signature move. Anyone who knows what to look for will know that Esmeralda is you. You might want to try tapping your nails on a surface or chewing on your lip or blinking or something."

"Maybe twirling a strand of hair? That's something Ginny did a lot when she was younger," Ron suggested, bringing his eyes away from Esmeralda's cleavage with some difficulty.

"I'll try. It's not something I do consciously," Esmeralda said, with a little shrug. "Can we stop this right now? I mean, I swear that we can do more acting practice, but I'm probably going to go insane if we have to stay here in the Chamber all day."

"Well we can't go out into the castle at large while you're looking like Esmeralda, Harry," Hermione told him. "We can stop the acting lessons if you want, though; maybe we could start to work on your query."

"I finished that," was Esmeralda's reply. "And if we're going to be staying in here all day, what do we do about dinner?"

"We could call a house elf," Ron said. Then, at Hermione's sharp look, he added "or 'Mione or I could go get a basket from the kitchen and bring it back here, since we aren't the ones who are female right now."

"Ron!"

"Or...oh!" Ron suddenly straightened, blue eyes sparkling. "You still have the Marauders' Map?"

"Yeah," said Esmeralda cautiously. "What do you have in mind?"

"It's a Hogsmeade weekend, remember?"

Esmeralda did remember, mostly due to the fact that Ron had done quite a fair share of complaining that they were missing a Hogsmeade meeting to try out the potion.

"We can just sneak out, provided 'Mione has her permission slip."

"But what about Harry's?" Hermione asked, her recent disregard for rules obviously only going so far. "I'm going to assume that your relatives never got around to signing the thing?"

"They didn't, but think about it! First off, if I'm not Harry Potter, we won't be mobbed by autograph-seekers and Dark sympathizers, and this will also be a good way to test my disguise as Esmeralda. Secondly, we can do some shopping and whatnot and get the stupid female robes that I'll need if I want to get anywhere with the people at the Prophet headquarters."

Hermione appeared to be wavering, fiddling rather nervously with the non-drip quill in her hand.

"And anyway, if I've never properly explored Hogsmeade. Never even really been to Honeyduke's, beyond sneaking out through the basement..."

"Oh, fine. But I'm not taking the heat if you're caught, Harry. And for the record, I don't think this is a good idea. You could just randomly change back in the middle of a transaction."

"If I haven't transformed in the hour that we've been here, it stands to reason that I probably won't have to worry about it for at least a few minutes longer," Harry objected. "And if I start to feel like I'm going to change, I'll just hide in the loo under a silencing charm until it passes and then sneak out under my cloak and we'll go home."

"C'mon, 'Mione', live a little!" Ron, of course, expostulated.

Hermione gave a reluctant nod. "Ok. We'll do it."

Without further adieu, the three of them cleaned up the potion residue, put away their stuff under protective wards (just in case) and left the chamber, with disillusionment, muffling, and obscuring charms layered over them, (since they didn't quite all fit under Harry's invisibility cloak anymore). They then made their way to the statue of the humpbacked witch (ensuring that they did not get in anyone's way or run a risk of being spotted by watching the now-activated Marauders' Map) and then slipped out into the Honeydukes' basement and let the cloak fall behind them.

The shopping trip was the most fun that Esmeralda had ever had in Hogsmeade, not that he had had many experiences there. First they raided Honeydukes, (read, bought most of the store until Hermione started telling them horror stories about bad teeth, to which Ron had responded by holding up a package of Tooth-Flossing Stringmints and one of Cavity-Filling Caramel) and then they went to Tomes and Scrolls, where it was Hermione who went overboard while Ron and Esmeralda poked around and picked up a few books on DADA, Quidditch, ingredient preparation, and history (Esmeralda) and Quidditch, COMC, and chess (Ron). Then they went poking around in various dusty little shops, and Ron found a nice secondhand sneakoscope and some decent dress robes. After that, Hermione dragged Esmeralda into a cosmetics shop, telling Ron that they would meet up with him at the Three Broomsticks, since he definitely didn't want to go clothes and makeup shopping with the two.

What followed was a rather harrowing three hours as Hermione taught Esmeralda how to apply makeup of any given sort, what was permissible at an interview, what was permissible at a formal party, what was ok at a more informal party, and what was unacceptable, as well as a few tricks to cover up bruises, scars, and eye bags, and a few more tricks that were just fun, like fading two eyeshadow colors into a sort of ombre and making one's lips look redder and fuller when you didn't have red lipstick. Then she got Esmeralda some personal items and, after that humiliating adventure, dragged the newly-made girl off into a clothing store (Golden Pimpernel Wares) and got her some serviceable and modest dresses (mostly black, grey, brown, and navy) as well as an emerald gown that seemed designed to make an impression and all the brightly-colored things that Esmeralda would let her, a purse, and a few undergarments that made the girl blush a pretty shade of scarlet. The rest of what they got was more androgynous, but Hermione had rightly said that the stuffy Prophet and Ministry workers would probably think that Esmeralda was getting ideas "above her station" if she tried to wear men's clothing, due to the uptight attitude that most of the Wizarding World still upheld.

In fact, the only problems they encountered the entire trip came when Esmeralda had gone to buy some jewelry to match the new emerald dress (at Hermione's insistence) and found that she didn't have enough galleons left. She was about to get a Gringotts draft, in fact, when Hermione realized that to do that, she would have to give the shopkeeper her actual name, so they pooled galleons instead, with Esmeralda promising to pay her friend back as soon as she could access her vault. Then they went to get ice cream at Fortescue's.

At last, they met up with Ron, who had ordered at least four butterbeers in their absence and looked just the slightest bit buzzed with the weak spirit. "What took you so long, you two?"

Hermione gestured to a flushing Esmeralda, who was wearing her new green dress (which had, of course, been struck by laundering charms) as well as some emerald and gold jewelry (not much, since she hadn't wanted to wear anything bling, girl or not) and a hibiscus behind the ear. Ron wolf-whistled, and got smacked for it.

"Seriously, mate, you clean up well," Ron said quietly to a now deeply red Esmeralda. "Did you find some good stuff?"

"Sort of. Ish. Still sort of new, you know," Esmeralda muttered, shifting from foot to foot and picking up her bags. "It...can we head back to the castle?"