Chapter 2: A welcome visit
It was a testament to the Dursley's complete and utter disregard for Harry that any changes went completely unnoticed for about six months. She didn't even really notice until she woke up in her cupboard at around midnight four days after the event that changed her life. She needed to clean her mattress where she had soiled it and desperately needed a drink of water. She crept out of the cupboard with her mattress in tow and used some paper towel to clean it off as much as she could. She had a quick drink of water in the kitchen and then made her way quietly upstairs to run herself a quick bath. The snoring of her uncle and cousin drowned out any noise from running the bath and she was able to shed her dirty smelly clothes and ease painfully into the water. It wasn't until she was sitting in the water and washing herself that she realised that there had been a change, a rather dramatic one. At first she was terrified that a part of her body was missing. She sat in the hot bath shivering in fear, the desire to scream warring with the fear of what would happen if she did. Tears ran down her cheeks at the worry and anxiety that swelled inside her. Eventually though, the feelings of dread lessened and the hot water induced need to pee increased. Her anxiety dropped when she felt the stream of urine come from somewhere. She managed to collect herself enough to finish cleaning and get out of the bath to drip dry, she daren't use one of the towels on the rack for fear that her aunt would realise that she'd had a bath in the middle of the night.
Harry's hair grew longer and when Aunt Petunia tried to cut it a profound sadness came over her. A profound sadness that disappeared the following morning when she awoke to find that her hair had resumed it's previous length overnight. Aunt Petunia didn't like that and when Uncle Vernon found out, Harry spent another week healing in the cupboard.
Try as she might, however, Aunt Petunia's haircuts didn't stick at all. In the end she tried clippers and Harry went to bed crying with a shaved head. In the morning however, her raven shoulder length locks had returned. After that, Harry had occasionally caught Aunt Petunia staring angrily at her head but she didn't try anything else.
When she returned to school and the teachers called her 'boy' she tried to correct them, but that only resulted in her being laughed at by the entire class and a letter sent home to her aunt and uncle. A letter that resulted in another week of recovery in the cupboard.
When she was let out, her uncle commanded her, "now no more of this nonsense boy, if I hear just one more time that you've been telling teachers this 'girl' nonsense, you'll be staying in the cupboard for the rest of the year! Now go and cook breakfast!"
Harry didn't want any more beatings, so she didn't correct the teachers anymore when they misgendered her. Life went on for Harry, as it always seemed to have, until the day that the school nurse came to visit to check for nits.
Even though Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon had never taken Harry to see a doctor, they couldn't stop Harry from seeing the school nurse (although if they had prior warning of her visits they would have been sure to have made sure Harry didn't go to school.)
"Potter, Harry," she called and Harry followed the nurse into the small store room that doubled as the nurses' office when she visited. She was very pretty and was young, just fresh out of her training at King's College Hospital in London. She had failed her biology O levels at school, barely passed at College and was quite happy to find a secure job where the most she would have to worry about was how to recognise lice and their eggs.
"Well now," the nurse said as she put on her latex gloves, "you have such lovely long hair for a boy, I wouldn't be surprised if we found some nits in there."
"I'm not a boy," Harry corrected her, "I'm a girl."
Harry felt that the restrictions on not correcting a teacher obviously didn't apply to the school nurse.
The nurse picked up her clipboard in puzzlement, "no, it says here that you're a boy and your name is Harry, Harry's a boy's name."
"Oh," said Harry, surprised and paused in thought a moment, "that makes sense. I should be Harriet then."
"No, silly," the nurse said, kindly but still very confused, "you can't just decide that you're a girl. You don't have the right bits."
Harry was even more confused, but wondered if the 'bits' had something to do with the changes she had experienced earlier in the year, "what bits do girls have?"
The nurse blushed a little, "well, for starters; boys have a penis."
"Well there you go then," Harry said as she pulled down her pants and underwear, "see? No penis."
The nurse went to collapse into her chair, but missed and fell heavily onto the floor.
"But…" she stuttered, "but, why are you wearing boys clothes? Why do the school records say that you're a boy?"
Harry shrugged as she pulled her pants back up, "I don't know? Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon probably told them that I was a boy."
The nurse frowned, "wait right here please Harry," she said before she disappeared out of the office.
Harry could hear her calling her teacher through the door.
"Harry is a girl," she could hear the nurse say.
"Oh, this nonsense again!" The teacher responded, "don't listen to a word the little liar says."
"No," the nurse insisted, "Harry is a girl."
"No," the teacher responded condescendingly, "Harry is a boy."
"I know the difference between a boy and a girl!" The nurse exclaimed loudly and Harry could hear the tittering of her classmates sitting in the next room.
"What I want to know is why she is dressing like a boy, has a boy's name and why her school records show her as a boy?" The nurse demanded.
"What on earth is going on down here?" Came the strict and demanding voice of Headmistress Roemmele.
"This bimbo nurse thinks that Harry Potter is a girl!" Harry's teacher exclaimed.
"Bimbo?" The nurse exclaimed, shocked.
"Not this again!" Headmistress Roemmele asked, "I thought he had stopped with that nonsense. He's just a fairy, Miss Greengrass. Probably wants to be a girl. With a bit of experience, you'll soon learn not to believe every word that comes out of a child's mouth."
Harry heard a strange sound, almost like a growl before the door was yanked open and the young nurse pushed her teacher and Headmistress Roemmele into the room.
"What is the meaning of this!" The Headmistress demanded, but the nurse just gestured towards Harry.
"Harry…" She began, then corrected, "Harriet, could you please show Headmistress Roemmele. Apparently she won't be satisfied without a demonstration. Don't be shy now, we're all girls here."
Harriet looked worriedly between her teacher and Headmistress Roemmele, she didn't want to be punished further should news of this reach back to her aunt and uncle.
Headmistress Roemmele sighed, "go on then boy, the sooner we get this over with, the sooner I can have this idiotic nurse sacked."
Harriet shrugged and proceeded to undo her pants once again.
THUD. The sound of her teacher hitting the ground in a dead faint was pretty much ignored by the slack-jawed Headmistress Roemmele, but the nurse promptly began attending to her.
That's how Harriet found herself sitting in Headmistress Roemmele's office with the nurse in the chair next to her, trying to explain that she had no idea why the Dursley's would have submitted paperwork for her as a boy, or why she wore boy's clothes.
When Headmistress Roemmele shooed them out of her office the nurse ushered her back to the store room to sit down and have a talk with her.
"Harriet," she asked, "why do I get the feeling that you weren't being completely honest with Headmistress Roemmele?"
Harriet blushed at being caught out, but the nurse so far had proven to be so much more worthy of her trust than any other adult she had ever come across, "they don't believe me when I tell them what really happens and I get punished, so I tell them that 'I dont know'."
"What do you mean?" The nurse asked.
"Well, they didn't believe me when I told them that I was running away from Dudley, that's my cousin, and the next second I was on top of the school room," Harriet confessed, "and they didn't believe me when I told them that I was getting so angry at my teacher that I wished her silly wig would turn blue. Headmistress Roemmele wouldn't believe me if I told her that I really did have boy's bits at the start of school but they changed when I told my aunt and uncle that I was really a girl."
The nurse was as white as a sheet as she stammered out her next question, "Harriet? Do strange things often happen around you?"
Harriet thought for a moment, "like how every time Aunt Petunia cuts my hair, it's all grown back by the morning? Even when she shaved it all off that last time?"
The nurse nodded woodenly and seemed to go deep into thought. Just as Harriet was about to say something, she stood up suddenly and said, "come with me Harriet."
The nurse escorted Harriet back to Headmistress Roemmele's office, while Harriet waited outside the nurse went into the office and told the Headmistress, "I'm taking Harriet out to the… hospital. To get checked over."
Harriet didn't hear a response, but the nurse exited the office and escorted Harriet out to the staff car park where she opened the passenger door of a small baby-poo green reliant robin.
Harriet buckled in as the nurse entered her vehicle and started it, the engine rumbled… reluctantly, to life. On the way Harriet and the nurse chatted about all sorts of things, nothing seemed to be a topic that would get her punished. The longer they talked and the longer the nurse went without getting angry at her, the more Harriet opened up. It was only when the car crossed over a large river and Harriet happened to glance out of the left hand side window to see Big Ben looming up into the sky at the end of Westminster bridge did Harriet realise that they had driven all the way to London. The car came to a shuddering and loud stop out the front of an old run-down pub. The trade sign hanging above the door depicted some sort of bucket with water coming out of a hole in it's base. Once the nurse escorted her inside, Harriet came to a sudden stop. The inside of the pub looked very strange indeed. Everybody was dressed very strangely and she could have sworn that there was a broom sweeping the floor by itself moments before she did a double-take.
A man standing behind the bar, polishing glasses with dishrag took in their clothes and said, "are you lost miss?"
The nurse explained, "sorry, no. I just need to borrow your floo to make a call if you don't mind?"
"Not at all miss, not at all," the bartender said jovially, "use the one on the left then, the one on the right has been acting up a little lately and you'd be just as likely to have someone try to come out of it mid call."
"Thank you," the nurse said as she directed Harriet to the leftmost fireplace. Harry watched in wonder as she took a small pinch of powder from a bowl on the mantelpiece and threw it into the fireplace.
"Greengrass Manor," she said clearly as the flames in the fireplace lit up with a green light and grew up to take up most of the fireplace. Harriet looked around in shock, but nobody in the pub seemed to be paying the odd behaviour of the fireplace any mind so she turned back to it just in time to gasp in shock as a woman's face appeared in the flames and demanded "who is it?"
"Hello Cossima, is my father home?" The nurse asked the fireplace.
"Oh," the woman, Cossima, replied disappointedly, "it's you. I'll fetch him for you."
The woman's face disappeared and was replaced a few moments later by the bearded face of a man, "Nance," he said, "I told you never to floo here, what if the girls saw you?"
The nurse sighed and said resigned, "I know. I'm sorry, but I had no idea who to call about this."
"About what?" The man demanded.
"I'm working as a nurse… a, uh… mediwitch, and I've come across a young girl in the muggle school who's been showing signs of wild magic. Her relatives have been treating her, uh… like a house elf," the nurse explained, "she doesn't belong with them."
The man in the fire peered at her, "is this her?" He asked, but didn't wait for an answer, "what's your name girl? Who are your parents?"
The nurse prompted her to speak up, so Harriet took a slight step forward and said, "I don't know who my parents were, Sir. My aunt and uncle said that they were drunks who died in a car crash, but my name is Harriet Potter."
The man's eyes widened in the fire and as she turned around to look at the rest of the pub she became aware that all conversation had ceased and everybody was staring at them.
AUTHORS NOTES:
Thank you SO SO Much shoppingnull, IcyDoom, Baca11131 and kayserzacharias for the follow!
Thank you IcyDoom for the favourite!
Also, probably should have mentioned in chapter 1: Eff you jkr.