Disclaimer; I don't own anything except the original characters
A/N; I know it's been a few months, and this chapter has probably been waiting that long too for me to edit it. Unfortunately I got bogged down in work. Anyway, I hope everyone has a good Christmas and an awesome new year :) Enjoy!
Chapter Twenty-Six;
Harry was generally cheerful, particularly since he had been de-aged, so it was somewhat odd to see him in a bad mood as they walked the rest of the way to the hospital wing. And it wasn't the tantrum-throwing, obstinate kind of bad mood Hermione had come to expect from him lately either. It was the sulky, broody bad mood that she had come to associate with his older self when he wasn't happy with something.
It was strange to see this sort of bad mood on a child. For all his ever-changing moods and constant upheavals, little-Harry wasn't really the sort to hold a grudge for very long. This kind of mood told Hermione, in no uncertain terms, that he was settling down for the long haul.
"Harry, Ron didn't mean it, you know," she said gently.
"Yes he did," Harry said stoutly.
Well, yes, he had meant every word he said, so it was a little hard to argue against that, particularly when he stated it with such conviction. Still, Hermione had to try, for Ron's sake.
"Ron's just..." she began, searching frantically for the right term.
"Stupid?" Harry offered.
"Yeah... we'll go with that," Hermione sighed, though she couldn't prevent her lips twitching slightly as she fought with a smile. "He just doesn't like a lot of changes, that's all. He'll come round."
Harry pursed his lips and looked the other way.
"Will you accept it if he apologises?" she asked.
"Maybe," Harry sniffed.
Which was as good as a 'yes' most of the time, in Harry's book. Hermione sighed somewhat in relief and shook her head. Ron really was an idiot, but she hoped he was smart enough to know to apologise to the eight-year-old.
A little glumly she pushed the hospital wing doors open when they reached them. Ron had been a little more mature this year, particularly with taking care of Harry, but when he got this irrational there was no way he was going to choose the smarter option.
"Ms Granger, Mr Potter, what can I do for the two of you?" Madam Pomfrey asked, looking up from a book she was writing in as they entered.
"Well, Harry needs glasses again, but his old ones aren't working," Hermione explained.
"I see," Madam Pomfrey standing up and moving to a white bed. "Hop on up here then, Mr Potter, and we'll have a look at you."
Silently Harry let go of Hermione's hand and he scrambled up onto the bed. Madam Pomfrey looked at the quiet, brooding child and then glanced questioningly at Hermione.
"He and Ron had... an argument," Hermione explained, wondering if explaining it as an 'argument' was truly suitable for what had happened.
"Right then," Madam Pomfrey said with a nod, pulling out her wand. "Now, Harry, I want you to look straight at the tip of my wand, okay?"
"Okay," Harry said, doing as he was told.
Madam Pomfrey muttered a spell under her breath and held the wand steadily pointed at Harry's green eyes. The tip briefly glowed a very weak blue and then went out. At first Hermione thought that was it and then Madam Pomfrey frowned and tried it again.
"Is something wrong?" Hermione asked tentatively after the third time the nurse tried the spell and got the same result.
"Nothing," Madam Pomfrey said, frowning.
Hermione waited for a moment, hoping that the woman would explain what had her so unnerved if nothing was wrong. But when Madam Pomfrey simply tried the spell again she realised she was going to have to ask.
"That's a good thing, right?" she asked. "That nothing is wrong?"
"Normally," Madam Pomfrey agreed. "But the spell should be indicating that something is wrong, and it isn't." She turned to Hermione. "How did you know that Mr Potter needed his glasses?"
"He was complaining about his eyes hurting," Hermione said, glancing at Harry, who was looking a little bored. "He almost ran into anything that was in his path; we had to lead him here. It was... a very fast deterioration from yesterday."
"I see..." Madam Pomfrey said slowly. She thought for a second and then conjured a smoky letter G in the air as she turned back to Harry. "Mr Potter, what letter do you see?"
Harry stared up at the letter and then he squinting, scrunching his nose up slightly as he did so.
"...C?" he asked tentatively.
Madam Pomfrey frowned yet again and conjured another letter, this time the letter R. "What about this one?"
"Uh... K? B? R? It looks like them all," Harry replied, squinting again. "I think?"
Hermione glanced at the letter. It was very clearly a letter R, no 'maybes' about it. At least it was the third guess. Still, it was a good indication of just how far his eyesight had deteriorated in so little time; he had been happily reading a book without any trouble just yesterday.
"So, he needs glasses?" Hermione asked, wincing slightly as she stated the obvious.
"The physical evidence suggests so," Madam Pomfrey agreed, and then she tried the spell from before again. She sighed. "The magical eye test, however, does not."
Hermione blinked and tried to come up with a logical reason why a spell Madam Pomfrey had likely used hundreds of times before (well, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration...) would tell her Harry's eyes were fine when they were so clearly not. She came up with nothing.
"I don't understand," she said finally.
"I'm afraid I don't either, Miss Granger," Madam Pomfrey admitted. "The first time I could have explained away as miss-casting it. However... every time the result is the exact same. It should be telling me his eye prescription, and I cannot give him glasses unless I know what his prescription is."
"Do you have any muggle equipment that would work?" Hermione asked.
"I'm afraid not, though part of me wishes I did," Madam Pomfrey said, shaking her head. "Unfortunately it wouldn't work here at Hogwarts."
Of course. Hermione couldn't believe she had forgotten that; she felt like she spent half her life reminding Harry and Ron of that very fact because neither of them would read Hogwarts, A History.
"Then what are we supposed to do?" she asked.
"The only thing we can do," Madam Pomfrey said, and cast a summoning spell. A box zoomed out of her office and she opened it to reveal many different pairs of glasses. "We try every pair until Mr Potter tells us they work for him."
HPHGRWHPHGRW
Despite the fact that his stomach had been complaining not that long ago, Ron realised, as he walked down the stairs, that he wasn't actually hungry anymore. This, he could admit to himself, was more than a little strange; it would usually take something incredibly drastic to keep Ron away from food, and it would usually have to pull him kicking and screaming.
Still, he turned around anyway and began making his way to the transfiguration classroom, passing other students on their way to their own lessons. It was as he passed a second year Slytherin that he realised that his current problem was all to do with Harry.
Admittedly, recently, all his problems had to do with Harry, but this one was special. Not only was the boy mad at him, but an eight-year-old had shown more maturity than him. He would be seventeen soon... Hermione would never let him live it down.
Ron huffed to himself. It was all very well and good if Harry wanted to make new friends, but did he had to make friends with the Slytherins? Everyone knew that they were a bunch of sneaky, no-good, traitorous...
'And how many Slytherins do you know?' asked a little voice in the back of his head that sounded remarkably like an older Harry.
It was difficult to answer that one truthfully, because Ron didn't know that many Slytherins, really. He knew Malfoy, Parkinson, Crabbe and Goyle, and Snape, of course, and he knew of You-Know-Who and his Death Eaters... but that was all really. He didn't know any others.
'People have been Sorted into Slytherin and graduating Hogwarts longer than you've been alive. There's no way to know what every single Slytherin in the world was like.'
Grudgingly Ron could admit that this was true. And, yes, maybe there was a good Slytherin here and there. After all, there were bad Gryffindors; just look at Peter Pettigrew!
Still, he didn't feel comfortable with his best friend, who was currently a vulnerable kid, befriending a Slytherin.
'It's too black and white. Slytherin doesn't mean evil, nor does Gryffindor mean good.'
"Shut up," Ron groused aloud.
"Excuse me, Mr Weasley?"
Ron's head shot up and looked at his Head of House, who was staring at him in some consternation. Realising that she thought he meant her Ron hastened to explain and hopefully get out of a detention.
"Oh, um, I was just thinking something I didn't want to think and I was... telling myself to shut up," Ron said, mentally reviewing the statement and realising that it didn't sound quite sane.
"I see..." McGonagall said. She looked at Ron piercingly. "Mr Weasley, your current distraction wouldn't have anything to do with your altercation with Mr Potter near the hospital wing, would it?"
Ron wished, more than anything at that moment, for the floor to just open up and swallow him whole. He couldn't believe she saw that. Maybe someone passing them by would be kind enough to just cast a Vanishing spell on him?
"I was just... I need to... I didn't..." Ron paused and deflated, giving up on trying to pull a reliable excuse from his already slightly muddled mind. "Yes, professor."
McGonagall made a sound in her throat that could have been either understanding or condemnation, depending on how it was translated. Ron decided, for his own peace of mind, that it was understanding. He shifted slightly under the intense stare she gave him.
"Mr Weasley, we often find that the conundrums our minds cook up are usually not quite as serious as they would have us believe," she said finally. "It is the simplest answer that is the best, and always the hardest to find."
Ron's first thought was to wonder when McGonagall had started channelling Dumbledore. Then he tried to work out what 'conundrum' actually meant. Upon realising that it was better translated as 'problem' (and he wondered why she couldn't just have said that in the first place) he turned his thoughts to working out the riddle that was in her words.
Easiest answer? There were never easy answers to problems like this, were there? If there was an easy answer, then he wouldn't have spent the time it took to walk from the Hospital Wing to here with whirling thoughts and discarded solutions.
He hated Slytherins, because they had made their lives hell, and because the vast majority of them were Dark and would-be killers. And then this Mason comes along, a fairly decent bloke, who upsets the applecart. Maybe the Sorting Hat just made a mistake with him?
But he couldn't rely on that either. If Mason was in Slytherin, then it was for good reason. Just as Ron was in Gryffindor for good reason. There had been something in him at eleven that the Hat had decided suited the house of snakes best.
But he was a Slytherin.
"You are still thinking too hard about it," McGonagall said disapprovingly, breaking into Ron's thoughts. "And I am sure everything you are thinking has to do with you, does it not?" She smiled slightly and put her hand on his shoulder. "Think about it, Mr Weasley."
She turned and walked away, leaving Ron more confused than ever. Of course he was thinking about himself, he had to try and work out his own hatred of Slytherins, and how this was effecting his judgement maybe just slightly, and how...
'No, wait.'
He was thinking too much about himself? There was a clue there, and Ron thought he might, finally, have figured it out.
Because it wasn't about him at all. His reaction didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, did it? Because Harry was the one that had accepted and befriended Mason.
Was he really going to throw away Harry's friendship over a petty argument like this?
The thought hit him with the force of a sledgehammer and he almost dropped his bag. Harry needed him right now, he needed Ron to be there and support him. What good was Ron if he was running away to sulk at the slightest notion that something wasn't going to agree with him.
Harry was Ron's best friend. Which meant that he needed to be where Harry was.
It wasn't a conscious decision. In two seconds he was turning away and striding in the direction of the Hospital Wing, not caring about missing Transfiguration or breakfast anymore.
Harry needed him, and that was all that mattered.
Not too far away Professor McGonagall walked into her classroom and smiled. She wasn't entirely sure, but she had a feeling that Ron Weasley wouldn't be in her classroom today.
HPHGRWHPHGRWHPHGRW
Sixteen.
Sixteen pairs of glasses, and they were still going. As she watched the process and aided when she was needed, Hermione appreciated muggle technology in a way that she never had before. It wasn't always reliable, but it made life a lot smoother sometimes!
Harry was looking particularly bored, swinging his legs slightly off the side of the bed as he waited and tried on various pairs of glasses. He didn't really want to wear glasses to start with, but anything that would get rid of the headache that was beginning to form was starting to look good to him.
"Madam Pomfrey, do you think the ageing potion might have something to do with this?" Hermione asked as they worked.
"I had considered," the matron admitted. "I think it is a combination of the original potion and the potions that he has been taking since. Think about it this way, Miss Granger. Mr Potter's body was already well-aware that he needed glasses, but suddenly he was changed to his younger self, before he had ever needed them. Now, as he approaches the age of his original self when he first received his glasses, his body is reminding us, in the only way it can, that something isn't right. Of course, we did already know that, so it wasn't needed. What is blocking my spell, I believe, is the magics that have intertwined Harry's original past self, his older present self, and his younger present self."
Hermione nodded slowly. She understood, though she hated how this had made their job that much more difficult.
"So, what happens when he returns to his original age?" Hermione asked cautiously. "Won't he need to change prescriptions then?"
"More than likely," Madam Pomfrey agreed. "But I cannot say what will happen then."
Suddenly the doors of the Hospital Wing swung open, causing the three of them to look up, half glad for the distraction. A sheepish red-head poked his head in the door and Harry's eyes narrowed slightly; even his blurry vision couldn't mistake that shade of red.
"Uh, hi," Ron said with a weak smile, stepping fully into the wing. He cleared his throat and turned to his younger friend. "Look, Harry, I'm sorry. I thought about it, and I decided that I have to trust you to make your own decisions. When – if – it goes wrong, then I've got your back."
There was a moment of long silence as Harry stared at Ron. Then he broke out into a smile, beaming at his best friend.
"Okay," he accepted happily.
Hermione gave Ron a look that clearly said 'be grateful he's eight; any older and you know he would have held a grudge'. Ron grimaced slightly but nodded in acknowledgement.
"So, what are we doing?" he asked, looking around curiously.
"Finding Harry a pair of glasses by trial and error," Hermione explained, picking a pair out of the box. "Here, Harry, try these ones."
"Better," Harry said cautiously after he had put them on.
"At least we can rule out roughly half of these, then," Madam Pomfrey sighed, tapping the box with her wand and causing some pairs of glasses to shuffle forwards while the others shuffled back.
"Alright," Ron said, moving closer. "I'll help."
For about five minutes the three worked in silence except the occasional mutter when little to no results were yielded. Suddenly, though, Hermione thought of something.
"Madam Pomfrey, what age will Harry be when he takes the last potion?" she asked, her hands pausing in the act of pulling out yet another pair of glasses.
"A good question," Madam Pomfrey said absently as she handed Harry another pair.
"Wow!" Harry exclaimed suddenly, his eyes wide. "It's really clear again!"
"Found them!" Ron cheered, who had found the last five minutes to be very, very dull.
"Good," Madam Pomfrey said, tapping the box again and making it close up again. She turned to Hermione then. "In answer, Miss Granger, we don't know. Obviously he was sixteen when he was deaged. To age him any more would be making him miss out on a year on his life, in a way, so we believe that he might be aged back to the age he was when he first took the potion. Does that make sense?"
"Yes," Hermione sighed, watching as Harry jumped down off the bed. "It will be weird though; Harry was always the youngest, but if that happens then he'll be almost a year younger than us!"
"More, for me, if he hasn't gone back by March," Ron pointed out.
"Right," Hermione murmured.
"Miss Granger, don't dwell on it," Madam Pomfrey advised. "After all, we have yet to find the final potion. Now, off you go to class."
"Can I read too?" Harry said excitedly as they walked out. "'Mione, please?"
"Of course, Harry," Hermione said.
"Bloody hell, you're corrupting him, Hermione," Ron moaned, his voice fading as they left the wing.
Hermione's voice got fainter and fainter as she reprimanded the other teenager and Madam Pomfrey smiled. She felt, personally, that this had been the best thing for Harry. After all, he was so much happier now, happier even that the wide-eyed eleven year old who had been in awe of magic and a place to belong.
Yes, this couldn't have been better for him, and she intended on seeing him right through to the end.
HPHGRWHPHGRW
"Are you sure, Albus?"
"Positive," the headmaster sighed tiredly.
McGonagall's forehead creased in concern as she glanced at the report on Dumbledore's desk. So far they had kept all news of Harry leaking by subtly checking all owls that were sent out with the help of the House Elves. But now, it seemed, Voldemort had somehow gotten hold of this knowledge.
"Now what?" McGonagall asked quietly.
Dumbledore glanced at her. Voldemort had been so quiet recently as he planned and occasionally sent his Death Eaters to attack and terrorise, though they had managed to keep this from most of the children, particularly Ron, Hermione and Harry – they had quite enough on their plate. However they both knew now that Voldemort would try and seize this opportunity.
"We wait," he replied. "And protect Harry has best we can."
McGonagall nodded resignedly. It was, truly, all they could do right now.
Coming Up; Chapter Twenty-Seven: As Ron and Hermione suspect something important is happening Harry begins to explore more magical abilities, resulting in distracting them completely.
Thanks to;
honore, theoriginalolive, lily2010, Cream, Blood-MoonO230, Soappybubbles, I Just Won A Free Toaster Oven, HappilyBlue, MissiYoung, greenharper, Cred-Spero-Fides, AngusH, kookookarli, CatWriter, hebahz, Start,, FallenHope-Angel, Danyael Prince, Memory25, childofflameandwave, Callyn Daniels, shiftyless, Bruder-aus-Osten-und-Westen, Karou WindStalker, vinkunwildflowerqueen, Mikee, the bushy haired know-it-all, ArianaRae, Wonderbee31, Princess Aziza, smores503, Teufel1987, ParvisSira, CeKhay
There's so many of you following this, and I am sorry that I keep making you wait so long between chapters. Just a few brief points to answer since I didn't get a chance to answer each review individually;
I've had a few people asking about Voldemort lately – he is on his way, he was just running a little later. I started this story before the sixth book came out (though I started posting, I think, in 2006) and I have made the executive decision to either not mention Horcruxes or to have them destroyed on the side. Either way, a show down is coming, and certain characters are going to be very instrumental in the coming parts :)
Just to remind you all that Harry will be returning to his normal age, though not before the end of the school year. Don't worry, I have a plan, and believe me when I say Hermione's influence hasn't been all for naught
I had a question or two about pairings – it will go no further than what has been alluded to. As such you may all make up what you like, I don't mind. But no one will be paired before the end of the story; after all, Harry is currently only eight and that would be slightly strange!
I think that's about it. Thanks for sticking with me so long; the rest of the story has been planned out for the most part (though I'm open to adding any ideas people might have if necessary to the plot) so all that remains is to write it. I aim to be better at updating next year and to get it finished with the next year too!