The end of an era

Months passed, and Harry grew to quite enjoy going for a run. And being a registrar, well it was a stepping-stone.

"Well I'm done with that job," said Greengrass, coming into his consult room.

"Good," said Harry. She closed the door.

"So I've got a new business lined up," said Greengrass, taking off her robe.

Harry smiled encouragingly. 'Encouraging healer, hearing patient is about to stop doing something bloody dangerous to their health,' that smile.

"Now, I want to get back to normal" she said.

She started unbuttoning her shirt. Harry hoped her new job didn't involve sex-work, for her sake.

Harry tried not to react as her engorged, pointy-nippled breasts spilled out her undetectably expanded bra, and sagged. Harry reversed the transfigurations on her chest, one by one, and as expected, her breasts ceased to be so pointy, got smaller and stopped sagging, and she sighed "Ohhh the relief," she said, and looked down.

"Um… just a tiny little bit smaller," she said.

"Were they?" asked Harry – it was, he conceded, unlikely that she would be entirely comfortable being as-born now. Which felt better than 'enabling body dysmorphia,' which was a disciplinary offence.

"One cup-size, not anything insane," said Greengrass. Harry rolled his eyes and carefully transfigured them smaller a tiny amount.

Greengrass looked down at her perky breasts, smiled momentarily, and pulled on a different bra – black and lacy, and did it up, and pulled on her shirt. She looked… like she had a perve-able, perky bust under there. Well, she did really, as he'd just seen it. He'd be thinking of it later.

"Well, your back will recover," said Harry, trying to think like a healer. Or she could lie down a lot, on his bed, for example.

"I am so glad to see the end of them," said Greengrass, tucking her shirt in. Harry didn't argue that they were still technically transfigured. A little bit. And perky and… Harry remembered Voldemort full-frontal naked for a moment, and the shock cleared away the horny thoughts. One reserves the really strong treatments for desperate situations.

"Hold still, so I can do your lips," said Harry, mentally conceding that he'd have that fun, graveyard, Cedric, kill the spare, Voldemort, nightmare again tonight. Treatments had side-effects, after all. Strong treatments were effective but had worse side-effects. That was just medicine.

"I'll keep those," she said.

"Keep?"

"As I said in the first place, I always wanted mummy's lips. Now I have them. I'll keep that." she said.

"Um… your um… bum?" said Harry.

"Do you really need to look?" asked Greengrass.

"Erm" said Harry, and that seemed like taking professionalism a bit farther than his belief in himself could stretch. Or his ability to speak, for that matter. "I'll get Hazelgrove to undo it. She knows what you looked like before."

And that meant Greengrass having to wait around in reception for several hours while firstly, Harry got Hazelgrove clued in, and secondly she had time to treat something non-urgent.

Greengrass came back into his consult room eighteen patients later. None of them were attractive blondes. And several had gross and disgusting things going on. One had projectile vomited rather a lot. Such was life.

"Potter, a word?" she said, closing the door. He smiled politely and started updating her St Mungo's file. It needed doing.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Updating your file. It had notes that you'd had some cosmetic transfigurations done but that they were temporary."

"Oh," said Greengrass. "It won't have notes on what my husbands had done though, will it?" she said. And that was totally unexpected, like a water-balloon of something nasty landing on ones head. Or, just hypothetically, projectile vomit, again.

"What your husbands?" asked Harry, with a due sense of dread. This was Greengrass, after all. 'Witch most likely to have yet another terrible story from the past.'

"When I first married, I had a bit of a tummy. Just stress eating, you know," said Greengrass. "He wanted a taunt young virgin."

"The forty-something year old that had to take stamina potions," said Harry somewhat snidely.

"That took stamina potions to try to shag all day," said Greengrass, lifting her nose a little.

"So um, I could write that up I suppose," said Harry.

"We do have nice waists in the family – it was just a tiny Hogwarts podge," said Greengrass.

"Do you know what they did. Did they just shift things, or remove fat?" asked Harry.

"You know perfectly well there's no fat on my belly," said Greengrass. Harry wrote that up. "So the erm… narrowness?"

"Inherited, and lots of pole work" said Greengrass. Harry tried desperately not to imagine that, and immediately blotted his notes. He'd have to fix that later. His left hand shook, but at least he didn't need it to write.

And she must have been watching his hand, because she waited till he had started again before she said "And then Valenko said I had a saggy arse. 'British saggy-arse' he called it." she sighed "So that meant another trip to the clinic, and a week in seaweed wraps drinking potions." He blotted his notes again.

"So that's not natural?" asked Harry, right hand shaking a little.

"Oh please!" said Greengrass "While I don't have before and after photos, all they did was lift it. Course, its smaller these days, because exercise." Harry wrote it up as cosmetic alterations to fat on the gluteus maximus. And tried not to remember the view.

"Would you like to go back to looking… more as you did?" asked Harry with trepidation.

"It's a bum, Potter. I sit on it. Blokes evidently like looking at it, personally I've seen some amazing bums at work," said Greengrass "I suppose I'm lucky Valenko hadn't seen or couldn't pay for a bubble butt." Harry wrote that up as 'no evidence of resulting body dysmorphia.' And did not make a mental note to go to more muggle strip clubs. Honestly.

"With the transfigurations Hazelgrove did," said Greengrass "Why couldn't you just undo them. We undid transfigurations in class."

"As I said before, with magical people, your magic tends to hold you to your shape. But that's based on your self-image. There's a very advanced self-transfiguration called the animagus transform, where you find your inner animal, and do a sort-of whole-body self-transfiguration. Professor McGonagall used to turn from a cat into herself? Remember that?" said Harry.

"Hang on. She… was doing transfiguration, as a cat?" asked Daphne.

"It's complicated, but remember I said your magic tries to keep you being you?" said Harry. Daphne nodded.

"Well, animagi like Professor McGonagall have two self-images. They go from one to the other, and well, it's not as simple as a full-body undirected transformation. They literally have to learn how to turn their hands into cats-paws, tendons, bones, and so on. You could imagine it takes a long time to learn that," said Harry. He'd investigated it because his dad and Sirius had done it. It was, Harry had discovered enormously difficult, and quite medically risky. Medically inadvisable, if you wanted to say that. Harry had stopped reading when he found out that Professor McGonagall hadn't accidentally erased her mind by turning her brain into a cat brain by mistake. There was a bunch of transfiguration trickery exploiting the incomplete nature of any transfiguration, space expansion charms, and obviously, having two self-images, but also leveraging the hindbrain, ritually modified to be also, in her case, a cat hindbrain.

"I thought she just turned into a cat. Wow. So she was… is I suppose, amazing at transfiguration." said Greengrass, "I didn't know."

"My father learnt how," said Harry. "He learned before he finished school. I'm not sure exactly when, but before NEWTs."

"So you're a chip off the old block then," said Greengrass, "you turn into something"?

"A sleeping human. It's very rare though," said Harry sarcastically. The whole thing was, in his opinion medically inadvisable, and symptomatic of using MAN and mental bifurcation to power the whole process. As St Mungo's generally failed to successfully treat about one witch or wizard a year who'd done something horrific to themselves trying to pull it off, he felt that it was, if anything under-regulated. (There was, and he could not forget, a thirty-four year old wizard in Long-Term spell damage with the mind of a cat, in an otherwise normal human body.)

Greengrass chuckled, "Hey um, thanks Potter, you've been really helpful."

She frowned, "I didn't like looking like that though, surely you could have used an undirected transfiguration."

"But you knew you looked like that. It's all in the self-image," said Harry. "One of the reasons all the very old witches and wizards have wrinkles and grey hair. Otherwise we could transfigure it away."

"But… they know they're old?" asked Greengrass frowning. Harry nodded.

"And as they get older, their magic plays a bigger and bigger part in their health," said Harry, "so messing about with transfigurations get fiddlier."

"Huh. Well that's something to look forward to. Not," said Greengrass. "Is that why Madam Pomfrey could easily undo most prank transfigurations?"

"Well, yes, people knew they didn't have tentacles for hair," said Harry, "But also, she is pretty damn good. The diagnostic charm she casts on everyone with a few flicks of her wand ? Took me a year to learn."

"Why can she undo transfigurations with potions?" asked Daphne thoughtfully.

"They're different ways of doing the same magic. Though for her, a few flagons of potions in advance is like bottling time." said Harry.

"Huh. Snape wasn't all full of shit," she said. Harry sighed. No, Snape had been so much better at potions than the people teaching at St Mungo's that the little bits from 'Advanced potions making' Snape had scribbled had caused consternation when Harry had shared them. And those notes had been written up properly and submitted to the Journal of the Society of Potioneers, under Snape's name. The four papers had cemented Snape's reputation as a genius, and Harry had got just enough extra credit in potions to pass the course at St Mungo's. What gratitude he felt towards Snape was now tempered by having had to write up his inventions so Snape would get the credit. And Harry had a bitter suspicion that some of the alterations might have been invented by his mum, who got no credit at all. Not even for whatever she'd done to keep him alive, which was 'magic so old people don't even think of it as magic,' according to Professor Dumbledore, and Harry had copied it, sort-of during the battle of Hogwarts, but without what would normally be considered a clue. Or, just hypothetically, knowing what that kind of magic was even called.

"So no more stripping?" asked Harry. He really didn't like seeing her beaten up. Also, dignity and stuff. Harry had never seen her dance, and might have therefore considered it pointless.

"No," she said, "But I found an opportunity. The girls were taking payday loans at twenty percent per month. Which is atrocious – even the goblins charge less. I'll set up a shop in the general area, and loan at closer to what the goblins lend at."

Harry frowned "Aren't you worried they won't pay?"

"Word got round that I could break a bouncer's arm," said Daphne with a small smile, "I'll be fine."

Harry groaned in annoyance, imagining more injuries, "Greengrass, you have to stop taking the strength potion. It's going to damage your heart and eyes and brain."

"I'm not going to take it. I'll keep the stone-skin charm up, and just keep my wand under the desk," she replied.

"You do realize someone will come in with a gun to rob you?" asked Harry.

"There are spells for gunnes," she said.

"You'd better check they work before you get hurt, or killed" said Harry.

She frowned "Check? How?"

"I've no idea," said Harry snidely, "Certainly not by finding a muggle criminal with a gun and taking it while hiding behind a shield and the obliviating them. That would be muggle-baiting, I think."

Greengrass gave him a pointed stare, "You really are like that, aren't you?"

"Look, I'm just saying, don't trust a charm you haven't tested. Disillusionment, a stunner… obliviation," said Harry.

"You really are actually a bank-robbing master-criminal, aren't you?" asked Greengrass with a faint smile.

"That was mostly Hermione's plan," admitted Harry.

"Granger, for Minister?" said Greengrass. Harry shrugged. He was never talking about the way the bit he came up with, bribing Griphook, was an abject failure.

"Try not to masturbate too much to the idea of my naked body," said Greengrass casually, preparing to leave.

"I'll get one of the other staff to do a medical obliviation. Treatment successful, patient on the mend," said Harry. This consult hadn't been too traumatic really; it just wasn't as bad as chronic infected wounds.

She stopped by the door, "How dare you," she said, looking properly affronted, hands on hips. Harry felt quite pleased by that. Also, she had a nice waist.

"Well, really easily," said Harry cheerily. "You think we remember every anal fissure we treat?"

"You arrogant sod," she said.

"Well, and I've saved some poor bloke from being smothered to death by your deadly D-cups" said Harry.

"I got forty galleons per lap-dance with those, Potter." said Greengrass. "Saved my sister's life. And they were triple D's not D's."

"I thought you said you didn't do lap-dances?" asked Harry, with a due sense of dread. Another Greengrass revelation.

"Forty galleons and no touching was an acceptable trade-off," said Greengrass, "and… to be blunt with three of my erogenous zones engorged it wasn't hard to … show some enthusiasm." she blushed quite pink.

"Oh my god," said Harry, his imagination filling things in, "No wonder you were making serious money."

"A thousand pounds a night from the house, loads of tips – at least another five hundred a set, and two hundred pounds per lap-dance… I made my money and now I'll lend it out at interest." she said. "The other girls assumed I was abusing Viagra, of course. I wasn't, of course, it's … medically inadvisable." Harry did not raise to the bait. Well, most of him didn't.

"So like I said," said Harry, reviewing her notes, and not imaging that, or mutually abusing Viagra with Daphne Greengrass, really successfully, "Do consider getting some therapy. You do actually have a horribly traumatic relationship history, and it would result in you being happier in the long term, well, probably anyway." And Harry did not adjust his pants, regardless of any discomfort he might feel. He was a professional healer.

"Coming from you, that has no credibility," said Greengrass. "Going to date Susan again?"

Harry clamped down on an angry retort. It had, in hindsight been a stupendously bad idea to date Susan, who was an utter wreck of a witch, with a… well a big chest. He was fine. Honestly.

He did, however get all his notes in order, then got medical obliviation of the entire sodding shift, and just read the notes over. He still ended up in his loo at home with a skin magazine as it was. Because imagining Daphne Greengrass naked, having seen her topless, was quite enough for him.