Chapter 3:
Female Initiative
Edited/Proofread by Demon Ging
Something about sitting down with a blank roll of parchment spread out in front of you really gets the noggin jogging.
The complete mental blankness that Harry always felt upon starting an essay was like a deep meditation beneath a tranquil waterfall. Being in the library enhanced this feeling with the melodious odor of books, both old and new, the slightly rotting wood of tables and what he now recognized as the olfactory evidence of students sneaking in for a proper shagging the night before.
Yes. He could see why Hermione felt so at home studying in the library, minus that last bit.
His mind purified and subsequently dirtied, Harry started on Hagrid's impossible assignment.
Five ways to utterly, totally, meticulously, viciously and single-handedly murder a Hungarian Horntail with four spells or less.
By Harry James Potter.
Now there's an eye-catching title if ever there was one. Still, the pink-faced cherub who occupied his right shoulder and bore a striking resemblance to his bushy-haired friend reminded him of the importance of proper grammar. And so he re-titled it.
Five methods for single-handedly slaying a dragon utilizing four spells or fewer.
Now all he had to do was ignore the freckled redhead of a devil on his left shoulder and his suggestion to skive off doing the essay in favor of a broom ride over the forbidden forest.
Hagrid's restrictions limited him to spells he could cast directly at a foe or that could manipulate the boulders of the arena. He decided to start with the boulders, as casting spells directly upon a dragon was about as effective as pissing on the gargantuan reptile.
An hour of 'Sermo Revalio's later and Harry had five feet worth of notes on every spell to do with boulders, stones or rock imaginable. He'd even managed to list them by difficulty and whether they were charms, transfigurements or a combination of the two.
Working his way down the list from least difficult to most difficult he came up with plenty of ideas on wounding or repelling a dragon, and even for protecting himself. Stone-hardening charms could make them much deadlier projectiles when banished. Stone-sweating(eww) charms would make them more fire-resistant and thus more effective shields against flames.
The first fatal idea came to him in the form of a stone-to-clay spell, which was a bit advanced but only because it had a basis in both charms and transfiguration. It did exactly what it sounded like. It liquified a stone into the texture of clay for ease of moulding before re-hardened into the mason's desired shape. The biggest obstacle for him learning the spell was that it was Inca in origin and hadn't been Latinized.
Fortunately, Madam Pince was a polyglot to rival even Barty Crouch's alleged linguistic abilities. She even specialized in prehistoric languages, a fact he learned upon asking her for the language section.
"The Quechuan language is rather easy to pronounce, Mister Potter." She had said. "The Stone-like-Water incantation is simply said as Rumi Ipa Unu."
Harry tried it on a miniscule pebble he peeled from beneath his shoe and it worked beautifully. Hogwarts really should start requiring students to own different shoes for indoor and outdoor activities. Maybe install lockers in the entrance hall for said purpose? It sure would make keeping the castle floors clean an easier task.
But then again, fuck Filch.
His idea was simple. Liquify a boulder. Banish it to entirely enclose the dragon's head, mouth and nostrils. Then re-harden it. The dragon would then suffocate or, if Harry waited until after the imaginary foe caught its breath in preparation for another stream of fire, burn itself to death internally. He could even add a hardening or heat resistance charm to the stone muzzle afterward for good measure. He was allowed a fourth spell after all.
Harry spent the afternoon practicing the technique at the edge of the path to Hogsmeade. A small henge circle sat near the trailhead which arithmancy and rune students used for practicing... something. Today he was using it to practice something himself.
He quickly discovered that the stone to clay charm was much more difficult to cast on the larger standing stones than a grain of sand, but when he finally got it down banishing it the way he intended was easy. It took some practice before he could keep it all in a single mass as it flew through the air and coated the pine tree he was using as a target.
By the time he finished, several of the timbers sported the most surreal decorations. The liquified stone had dripped onto most of the branches and pine needles before he could harden it. It looked like somebody had dripped opaque wax from a giant candle onto it.
That ought to confuse the shit out of somebody.
Hopefully nobody traced it back to Harry or else Pomfrey might come complaining to him about having to remedy bald spots from all the head-scratching.
After he finished writing out the full process he invented, Harry quickly came up with two more that were rather similar to the first.
Method two involved conjuring water and banishing it into the dragon's lungs as it took a breath. Drowning it almost instantly. Method three was a combination of the first two, but instead of death by drowning he would surround the dragon's head with the water, freeze it, and then charm it to be unbreakable.
He considered a fourth method where he would cast the bubble head charm he'd seen the trainers use, but instead of using it on himself he would cast it on a dragon, freeze it, then harden it as well. He somehow doubted the charm could be cast on the magically resistant creature, not that he'd be required to demonstrate any of these techniques on a live subject, but he would prefer to come up with techniques that actually worked.
Besides, he was getting bored of coming up with roundabout ways of killing via asphyxiation.
He wondered how nobody had come up with these methods before. Everyone knew that a dragon's eyes were their most obvious weak point. Did it never occur to someone that the same is true for other orifices? Fleur at least recognized this and magically attacked hers by means of an enchanted lullaby.
Why wasn't she close to him in the lead again?
His fourth idea was to somehow cause massive internal bleeding by forcing a multitude of pointy objects down an enemy's throat via a banisher. His first choice of objects were metal jacks, the ones used for the children's game. Problem was, he was restricted to four spells. He could conceivably blast a boulder to smithereens and transfigure the pieces into jacks one by one, but he would quickly exceed his alloted casting count.
With a little guidance from the elderly librarian, who he was fast coming to appreciate, he discovered the caltrop spell. It turned any loose rocks or pebbles into sharp, pointed caltrops. It was intended to be cast ardently behind a wizard as he fled from horseback pursuers, but it would work for his purposes.
And so method number four amounted to; blast the boulder, turn rubble into caltrods, banish down dragon's throat. Or up its anus. Wait. No. It's a lizard. Their ugly bits are called cloaca.
How did he even know that? Whatever.
Harry needed one more method and didn't want to try counting number four as a two parter based solely on which end of the digestive system one targeted. His mind kept drifting back to the stone to salt spell. The Marauder in him wanted to somehow get around the assignment rules and find a way to use it anyways.
Oh right! Salt poisoning.
Method five. Stone to salt. Stone to clay. Banish down throat and into stomach. Brilliant!
Trying to get two or three paragraphs out of each method really strained his verbosity, but three and a half years of writing two thousand-word essays that could be expressed in a single sentence hadn't gone to waste. By dinner, his task was finished.
Little did he know that while he had sequestered himself in the library, the more feminine half of the student body had started a revolution.
"So apparently I'm going to the Yule Ball with Lovegood."
Harry paused in his assault on the delectable carrot-ginger soup to respond as eloquently as possible to Neville's impromptu statement.
"Who?"
"Luna Lovegood." The normally shy boy said. "She's a Ravenclaw in the year below us."
He pointed to a nearly albino girl from the table closest to them and Harry could find no reason for the dour tone Neville had adopted for the statement.
"You mean Loony?" Ron clarified. "What would possess you to ask that nutter to the Ball?"
Unfortunately, Hermione was elsewhere and so Ron and Neville went gloriously un-kicked. Harry considered striking them under the table himself for disparaging the blonde. She looked like a sweet girl from where he sat. Her demeanor seemed shy and yet somehow open and welcoming at the same time.
"I didn't!" Neville said defensively. "She asked me! What was I supposed to say?"
Fortunately, Ginny came to the rescue and smacked both of the boys on the back of their heads.
"Thank you, Ginny."
"No problem, Harry," She said with a smile as she took a seat between the two and across from him. "And you said exactly what you were supposed to Nev. Luna is wonderful and you should feel lucky to be going with her."
Neville grumbled something about radishes and cork necklaces. Harry thought it wise not to ask.
"I'm just mad she asked you first. I was seconds away from doing the same," Ginny said offhandedly, making Neville blush and Ron sputter.
"Wait, what?" Her brother demanded.
The youngest Weasley shrugged.
"The rumors around Neville being a good dancer are all my classmates can talk about. Well, half of them," She explained with a shrug. "Apparently you made a great impression during your lesson."
Harry remembered that. His dorm-mate had absolutely humiliated the rest of them during McGonnigal's unexpected dancing lesson. Harry never would have known his friend could move so gracefully, nor for that matter, lift a full-grown woman with such ease if he hadn't seen Neville practically toss their head of house like a Quaffle before gently catching and lowering her.
He doubted the student body would ever see the stern professor so flustered for the rest of their natural lives. Harry imagined the other heads of houses holding similar lessons in the other common rooms and found himself embroiled in an internal debate on who would have been a more interesting spectacle; Snape trying to teach the samba to the serpents or Flitwick trying to teach salsa to the ravens.
"And Perkins asked Seamus just after I snagged Dean." Ginny finished.
"You asked Dean Thomas to the ball?" Ron clarified.
"Yup yup," Ginny said smiling. "And you'll never believe it, but Padma and Parvati asked the Slytherin goons."
Harry was decidedly lost.
"Which ones?" He asked, ignoring the itch in the back of his mind that he was missing something odd about the conversation.
"Crabbe and Goyle of course! They didn't actually expect the oafs to say yes, they must have thought it would be funny to pick on them. They aren't laughing now."
That didn't sound particularly funny to Harry. Not at all. It actually sounded rather mean. Asking somebody out expecting them to be too shy or self-critical to say yes? Had they done it publicly hoping to humiliate the boys in front of the whole school? Somehow Harry doubted that the worst of Voldemort's lot would do something so cruel.
Harry had no love for his dumb-as-dung classmates, but that was cold.
"I say they got what they deserved," Neville, who, by the look of anger on his face had a similar thought process to Harry. "Let's see them go to the ball and be miserable or cancel and have the whole school know how petty they are."
Hell yeah!
"I swear to god, if they ghost on those two I'm going to slip them, Filch and Snape sleeping draughts and make sure they all come to in a particularly cramped cupboard - Bare as the day they were born." Ginny said in a way that made it hard to tell if the prank idea had just come to her or if she'd spent all day planning it.
It also left no doubt as to whether or not she'd actually go through with it.
Harry knew of a certain cupboard beneath a certain set of stairs in a certain house on Privet Drive that would be perfect for the task.
"You should invite Peeves to do the honors of waking them," Ron suggested with an infectious grin
"Yeah. That blasted poltergeist would get the word out about Filch and Snape's pederasty faster than a Roman runner." Harry further suggested as he caught whatever disease was making all their faces look like skulls from the nose down.
"Pederasty?" Ginny asked confusedly.
"Yup. I imagine those two will find it rather difficult to get jobs in education after being caught nude in a broom closet with Crabbe and Goyle."
"I meant the Patils!"
The next day saw an explosion in activity among the female populace of Hogwarts.
What started as a one-off occurrence turned into a trend as Lavender Brown made the rumor mill spread a matter of fact instead of conjecture - for once. As word got around that Harry had agreed to go to the ball with the first girl to ask him, not to mention Lavender's subsequent experiment in growing a metaphorical pair and asking Ron out, the rest of the student body followed suit.
Hermione would go on to explain to anybody who would listen that Muggle schools had events called 'ladies choice' where the girls were REQUIRED to do the asking and boys were forbidden from making the approach. It was supposed to be something to do with inspiring self-confidence and initiative in young women. It didn't work, but that was the idea.
"Well, being required by an authority figure to ask boys with the threat of punishment isn't a very good motivator." Ginny had countered over lunch. "But the prospective reward of going to the ball with Gryffindor's most sought-after bachelors -" she paused to indicate Ron and Harry " - definitely would. You know. Stick vs carrot."
"Wait. I'm a sought-after bachelor?" Ron had said.
"Yeah! He's a sought-after bachelor?" Harry had repeated, thumbing his best friend.
The glare Ron sent his way was priceless.
Ginny could only sigh and nod her head in confirmation.
"Why me?" Ron asked.
"Yeah, why hi- owe!"
"Thank you, Hermione."
"Because, Ronald," Ginny explained, obviously uncomfortable with the prospect of her brother being desired by other women. "You are tall."
... That was it? Indeed, Ron was the tallest in their year and the year above them with the possible exception of Blaise Zabini. But he was as unapproachable to girls as Daphne Greengrass was to boys. If she was the ice queen of Slytherin, he was certainly the ice emperor of Hogwarts in its entirety.
Still, that seemed a bit superficial. Sure, his peers would obsess over the appearance and, er, assets of a girl but it wasn't usually - emphasis on usually - regarding a single physical feature to the exclusion of all others. They usually obsessed over the entire package, so to speak.
"And some would say funny. Which might also have something to do with it." Ginny admitted.
"Hey. Cheers to that, eh Ron?" Harry said, raising his goblet for Ron to smash his own against, which he did with a whoop.
Seeing normally shy and withdrawn girls walk straight up to their classmates and reveal their long-kept secret affection for the whole world to see was certainly surprising. Even more surprising was the dumb disbelief these girls had when the apple of their eyes inevitably said yes.
It was only after seeing this for the twentieth time that Harry realized girls must understand boys as poorly as he himself understood girls. Did they really not know how starved of female attention and affection boys were? That they thought a boy would ever say 'no' to a girl - any girl - asking them out?
One of Aragog's daughters could put on a (very custom) dress, descend from the forbidden forest, walk through the front doors and proposition Ronald Weasley and the ginger would be miraculously cured of his arachnophobia before declaring his undying love for her! Firenze's niece, which Harry imagined existed for the sake of the comparison, could do the same first three steps and proposition Draco Bloody Malfoy and he'd certainly accept the ill-advised mare's offer—Pureblood ideology forbidding such unions be damned.
Hell, a wayward breeze could rustle the dying leaves of the whomping willow in such a way as to elicit a sound that vaguely resembles a woman's voice saying 'Please go to the Yule Ball with me?' and the average full-grown wizard would say yes!
All in all, though the entire debacle of Hogwarts completely upending gender norms in the lead-up to the Yule Ball was a surprisingly fun, entertaining and educational experience for everyone.
It wasn't until the last day of term that he finally had his long-anticipated confrontation with Sue.
As was becoming the norm for him, Harry found himself in the library when it happened. He had just turned in Hagrid's essay, fully expecting to have it returned with full marks when classes resumed when he decided to do a bit of antagonizing.
He had already made a spare copy of the essay and rewrote it in such a way that it functioned more as a training manual like the ones he'd seen in the WW2 history books.
He fully described methods for practicing and applying his dragon-slaying techniques and even paid Dean a few sickles to make ink illustrations for each method, under the condition he keep it all hush-hush of course. It was basically a six-page booklet of loose parchment with a blank cover, save for his infuriatingly messy signature sprawled across it.
The skyscraper-sized stack of loose parchment he was using to make duplicates of the original manual had dwindled as the stack of completed manuals grew. That was when she sat next to him.
She didn't greet him. She didn't ask what he was working on. She didn't—thankfully—jump onto his lap and strip him naked for the entire Ravenclaw population(and Hermione) to watch. Nope. She just sat beside him and cracked open a book on Zimbabwean history.
Harry was ashamed of it, but he most definitely stiffened at the sight of her, and not in a fun way.
He glanced back and forth from her to the remaining pages, but she didn't meet his eyes. Feeling his shoulders relax he went back to transfiguring the loose parchment into booklets and performing the note duplication charm.
She still hadn't looked up when he finished.
"So?" Harry broached nervously.
"Sooooo?" She responded in what might have been nervousness as she finally looked up from her reading.
He was starting to get less creeped out by the way she looked at him without moving her head or neck. Starting to. He also noted that she had not turned the pages a single time since she'd arrived.
"How did you know to wait for me in that hallway?"
Her jaw actually dropped at his question. It was the most expressive face he'd seen on her to date.
"Really?" She balked. "That's the part of the whole thing you want to know?"
Harry shrugged.
"I mean. I figured I'd start slow. Kinda like how you didn-... you know what I'm not finishing that joke," It was too hurtful, and too easy, of a jab to make. "Yes, that's what I'd like to know."
She huffed in obvious annoyance and put her book down with a mechanical economy of motion.
"I tagged you with a tracking charm that first day." She explained simply. "And projected your movements onto a three-dimensional graphing box."
Now it was Harry's turn to stare at her with a gaping mouth.
"Huh?"
She huffed again but dutifully withdrew a glass box from her bag. It looked a lot like one of those plastic cubes they use to teach math in primary school, the big hundred-count one that had grooves in it similar to graphing paper. This one was transparent save for the blue, repeating, graphing lines on the X, Y and Z axis and would have been used to represent a thousand.
There was a pair of oddly shaped lines zigzagging through it. They were identical, save for one being red and one being blue, and reminded him of an ant tunnel.
"This is a three-dimensional graphing box." She explained. "It is an arithmancy aid and represents three-dimensional space. I put a tracking charm on you, and enchanted this to create a diagram of your path."
Harry squinted at the box and tried to imagine the layout of Hogwarts, something he was very good at doing. Sure enough, the two lines perfectly matched the path from the entrance hall, up the grand staircase to the fourth floor, through the secret passage and into the common room. It was a rather impressive bit of magic. He wondered if he could somehow combine the Marauder's map with one of these.
"And then you cast the same tracking charm on yourself and repeated the pattern?" Harry clarified. "Observing the graph as you did so?"
She nodded and gave him that same, almost imperceptible, smirk.
"I tagged you with the charm each day you practiced your little electrolysis charm on the lake, brilliant bit of spell modification there by the way."
"Thank you."
"And you always took that same passage between the fourth and seventh floors."
Harry nodded. This was some post-Hermione level cleverness here. He should create a Granger scale from one to ten with one being equal to solving Snape's logic puzzle. This would easily register as an eight, perpendicular to brewing polyjuice potion as a second year and just one notch above realizing the Chamber of Secrets held a basilisk.
"Okay. That's incredibly brilliant and all, but..." Harry paused to collect his thought. He knew he wasn't the most diplomatic speaker during even the most comfortable conversations, which this was definitely not.
"I'm sorry," She confessed.
He stared at her. She had apologized in the same monotonous, yet somehow beautiful, voice she always did. There was no sign of sadness or remorse on her face either, not even a teary eye like he expected.
Despite her mechanical way of talking and expressing he still somehow felt, knew, that she had meant it. That accursed instinct to comfort her rose, unbidden, like a roaring lion in his chest.
"It wasn't my intention to do all of that." She went on. "I only wanted to steal a.."
She paused to glance around, somehow looking bored with her drooping eyes as she did so.
"A kiss." She finished when she decided nobody was listening in.
"Okay. But why?"
"Why did I want to kiss you? Or why I didn't stop there like I should have?" She clarified.
"Both? Either?"
She sighed and for the first time since he'd met her did away with proper posture and slid into her chair as she slouched.
"You killed that Horntail," She said simply. "It was kinda hot."
Harry lost a battle with the blush that rose to his cheeks at that. He thought he was above the childish reaction, but apparently losing your virginity did not in fact inure you to such things.
"As for why I went too far. Well. I've never felt that way towards a boy before. So when I started, I just couldn't stop." She explained.
Harry chose not to point out the unintentional hint at lesbianism in her choice of qualifier in that statement.
"I also had another reason. An actual reason. But I don't wish to talk about that." She finished her confession. "Especially since I may have been mistaken in my conclusion."
Harry didn't know WHAT to make of that one. Unfortunately, fate decided to interrupt before he could even attempt to parse the enigma that was Sue Li, or even decide whether or not to accept her apology.
"Um. Harry?"
He instantly recognized the voice but looked up to verify the arrival of his fellow champion just the same.
"Yeah, Cedric?"
He glanced between Harry, Sue and the veritable mountain of paper manuals before going on.
"The judges want us for an end-of-term interview." He explained, clearly unsure if he should say anything in front of the pale girl. "They've got a lot more reporters this time."
Harry nodded before banishing the fruit of his labor into the expanded trunk he borrowed from Gred and Forge. He couldn't help feeling slightly excited about interviewing with reporters that weren't Rita Skeeter.
"Alright. Lead the way," Harry said, trying to silently convey to Sue that he intended to finish their conversation later.
He recognized the irony of trying to communicate nonverbally with a girl who seemed totally incapable of conveying anything nonverbally herself.
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