Chapter 3
The enjoyment that came from being back to seeing his two best friends every day, and the stress that came with classes helped Harry quickly forget the insecurity Malfoy had reminded him of. He was more than happy to spend class time goofing off with Ron, and being told off, then spending their breaks together playing quidditch or coming up with outrageous ways to reply to their divination homework prompts, spending the afternoon hours with Hermione when she finally finished her insane number of classes for the day. During that first week of school, she even let her friends pull her away from her homework to play wizard's chess or exploding snap or something actually fun.
She also helped Harry ‘tame’ his hair. The Sleekeazy’s she gave him worked so quickly and easily on his hair that Hermione almost seemed upset.
“Don’t be jealous, Mione,” Ron had said to her perplexed frown. He was lounging across one of the couches in the gryffindor common room, while Harry sat on the ground in front of a propped up mirror, Mione behind him, running her fingers through his curls with ease, inspecting the work of the hair potion. “You can have your signature look back. Now that Harry’s just got wild curls, you can have electrocuted mad alchemist all to yourself again,”
“I’m not jealous, Ronald. I’m just baffled at the fact it worked with so little potion. I have to use three times as much just to get rid of frizziness,”
“Sounds like jealousy to me,” Ron hummed.
“Hermione’s nothing to be jealous of. She’s way more beautiful than me,”
Ron snorted. Hermione ignored him and cordially thanked Harry, patting his shoulder as she got up to grab her bag. From it she pulled a muggle beauty magazine. “Page 13, there’s a bunch of styles for men with long hair, though, I think you can just leave it alone really since the Sleekeazy worked so well,”
“Thanks Mione,” Harry muttered a bit abashedly as he took the magazine from her and flipped aimlessly through it, only half looking at the pages. Ron was looking though, and he grabbed the magazine out of Harry's hands earning himself a friendly cuss from his friend.
Ron folded over the page to display to the other two a full-page photo of a man, long dark curls of hair pulled back from his face in a half updo meticulously styled to look effortless. He had heavy brows above a smouldering stare and a shadow of stubble defining his already chiselled jaw. His hair brushed dark brown shoulders, the bottom half of the page taken up by his bare chest glinting despite the dimness of the photo. “You should do your hair like this guy,” Ron said, grinning playfully at the confused looks on both his friends' faces.
“Is it really his hair you're looking at, Ronald?” Hermione raised her eyebrows.
Harry snorted, realising what she meant, and trying not to read too much into it. He couldn’t help but wonder if Hermione knew something about Ron that Harry didn’t, something about him liking shirtless men. It was a stupid pointless thought, because even if Ron liked men, there was little chance of him liking Harry that way after they’d been friends for so long.
Harry’s crush hadn’t gone away yet. It had only been a week since the start of term, but he’d still been hoping his heart would stop fluttering when he saw his friend smile in just such a way, that he’d get used to the feeling and the novelty would wear off, and it would go away completely like it had with Cho and Ginny. But his crushes on them hadn’t been nearly so bothersome. They hadn’t been as strong or as fluttering. How long had it taken those ones to wear off? More than a week, certainly, but not much longer, and Harry had been aware of his feelings for Ron since last year, way more than a week.
It certainly didn’t help Harry to look at the goofy smirk Ron flashed at him as he pointed to the model in the magazine. “Nah, see Harry you’d look just like him if you did your hair like that,”
Harry shook his head, forcing out a snort of laughter. “Yeah, and if I could grow a full beard, and if I took off my shirt and got all oiled up, and also transfigured myself to look like a model,”
“Don’t be a prat, Harry,” Ron said like Harry was the one being stupid right now. He smacked his friend over the head with the magazine before dropping it back in Harry’s lap. “If you think Hermione’s beautiful, you can’t think you’re not hot,”
Harry thought he might burn up if he continued looking at Ron while Ron called him hot. “Is he insulting you? I can’t tell,”
“Probably,” Hermione sighs.
“No! I’m complementing both of you. I wouldn’t have dated you if I didn’t think you wer eattractive Mione,”
“Nice to know you’re not shallow, Ron,” Hermione replied with sarcasm.
“How’d you manage to date him for three months?” Harry teased wryly, glad to have the focus off of Ron calling either of them hot. He’d been miserable when they’d dated. They seemed to fight even more often than they did in all the time of jealousy leading up to them getting together. Harry always felt like he was in the middle, and he never wanted to be, even when they weren’t fighting, because them being affectionate and couply had always churned his stomach. That was when he’d started to recognise the feelings he had for Ron.
“I still don’t know,” Hermione sighed and shook her head as if disappointed in herself. “And I still regret every second of it,” She was teasing, or Harry was pretty sure she was. After they’d broken up and then mended their friendship, they’d settled into this catty sort of play-fighting, insulting each other whenever it was convenient, though they were always light insults, never any sincerity behind them.
“Screw you both,” Ron huffed, giving his friends a dramatic pout like he was an upset little kid.
***
Harry hadn’t successfully gotten over his feelings for Ron after a week, but he had done a great job of not giving Malfoy the time of day. He could, however, not completely ignore or forget the stupid mocking from the slytherin boy. Draco’s loud mockery at breakfast on the first day of classes had been heard by half the student body, so in traditional Hogwarts fashion, by the end of that day, just about everyone knew that Draco Malfoy said Harry looked like a girl and dubbed him Harriet. By the next day, other people were calling him Harriet, and saying he had a crush on Hermione. By the next day, the rumours had dubbed Hermione a lesbian and Harry transgender, though they used much ruder words than those.
And as outrageous as most of the school thought these rumours were, that last one rang too close to the truth for Harry, as far off as he still thought it was. Now, along with the hatred Harry felt for himself at having a crush on his best friend, he was also brutally reminded that there was another thing his friends of seven years didn’t know about him. He almost felt like he was lying to them. It made him sick with anxiety, and he couldn’t seem to hide it for long.
Most of the school had moved on from the rumours that sprung from Malfoy’s bullying; they’d either found something else to gossip about, or they had thought it all toxic to begin with, but a few had latched onto it, calling Harry Harriet exclusively and reminding him of everything about him that was remotely feminine, making him believe entirely that everything about him was girly, even when he knew logically that thinking that was silly and stupid.
He did his best to ignore it and to roll his eyes at the idiots who thought it was so funny to call a boy a girl, but he couldn’t keep it from getting to him forever. He could barely keep Ron from threatening to hex Malfoy and his gaggle of slytherins or the group of fifth year boys, nearly all of them tall and broad like athletes and all of them certainly taller than Harry, who kept purposely bumping into Harry in the hallway so they could smirk at him and say “Oh, sorry Harriet, didn’t see you there,” every time they even looked at Harry the wrong way.
“How do they still think they’re funny,” Ron wondered bitterly as the two boys left the fifth year group of bullies behind in the corridor, walking out into the clouding mid-morning on their way to care of magical creatures. “If you’d just let me hex them a few times, maybe they’d stop being such prats,”
Harry sighed, too emotionally exhausted from what had now been weeks of cat-calling to reply to his friend’s outrage.
“I bet Hagrid’ll agree with me,” Ron muttered as they walked up to the giant wizard in his outdoor classroom.
“Agree with ye’on what?”
As class started, the group handling a rowdy group of baby nifflers, Ron explained to Hagrid everything that Malfoy had said and the subsequent rumours and harassment from other students too. Harry tried to tune it out, wrangling up a niffler and attempting to get the fussy infant to drink. He wished Hermione was here so she could further distract him or at least scold Ron again for wanting to resort ot violence.
“Well I won’ say you should hex ‘em,” Ron’s face fell in disappointment. “But I will say I’m here fer yeh Harry if yeh wanna talk. You lot can come ‘round fer tea ‘n rock cakes anytime, but yeh know that I s’pose. An’ y’know yeh can go to Professor McGonagall ‘n she’ll deal with ‘em proper,” He turned to look at Harry, raising his voice to be sure he could hear him.
Harry’s face flushed with embarrassment, and he muttered, “Thanks Hagrid, we’ll come round soon,” He had no intention of telling McGonagall or any professor aside from Hagrid. He’d deserve a few insults from Malfoy if he ran to a professor like a little kid.
Glancing over at Ron, he could tell his friend thought the same. Ron was grimacing as if the prospect of telling McGonagall actually physically hurt him. “But Hagrid,” He insisted, seeming to try to convince Hagrid to encourage his violence. “They’re dickheads. Hexing them is the responsible thing to do,”
“I’m gonna pretend I didn’ hear yeh say that, Ron,” He said, lifting a hand to stroke his beard, his twinkling eyes betraying a tinge of fond amusement at the gryffindor’s persistence. “But I will say, there ar’a few hexes that could show that lot how they’d look all dolled up an’ girly as they’d say, not that there’s anythin’ wrong with bein’ girly, or that men can’t get dolled up all manly. Y’know there’re quite a few creatures that don’ have anythin’ to show whether they're a boy or a girl. There’s some good ideas fer a few new lessons, I think,” He rubbed his chin, sounding excited at the prospect of giving his students a group of who knows what to wrangle with.
Ron made a face. “As long as they're not fanged or fiery or poisonous or any kind of dangerous,”
“Ah, well, I wouldn’ say any of ‘em are that dangerous…”
“…Well if you don’t think they’re that dangerous, they must be lovely,” Ron said sarcastically, flashing Harry another face at the light chuckle he heard from him. He had finally got the baby niffler to calm down a bit, and it was latched onto a bottle in his arms. It was rather adorable until it decided it was done drinking, and would much rather try to eat Harry shiny watch.
***
Talking with Hagrid didn’t seem to help Ron’s hex-hunger or Harry’s anxiety, and both of those things became rather evident when they had potions class with the Draco and his slytherin mates minus Crabbe and Goyle who had failed their potions OWLs miserably. It was a wonder to Harry those two made it to seventh year at all,, but sadly they had not flunked every class.
Harry wasn’t even sure what the slytherins were saying this time. He was too focused on ignoring them and trying vainly not to forget how many times he’d already stirred his cauldron or how many billywig stings he had already put in. Maybe if he had been focusing he’d have been able to stop Ron from retaliating. Hermione had been trying, hissing at Ron to ignore them as she glanced worriedly at Harry’s shoddy potionwork, but Ron rarely listened to Hermione, and all Harry knew was that one moment he’d been mixing his potion and the next, Hermione was pulling him down under the table as an ear splitting bang sounded, followed by the metallic tumbling of a cauldron, and the classroom filled with smoke which smelled like … old people?
“Oh my god,” Hermione covered her mouth with her hands as she slowly peeked up over the edge of the table, Harry looking at her confused. In answer to his unasked question, she cast a glare at Ron and hissed. “Ron! I said ignore them!”
“See I’d been doing that for so long though,” Ron whispered back, casting a victorious grin down at his two friends half cowering under the table.
Hermione gasped in shocked horror when she saw Ron’s face, and Harry gaped at him dumbfounded to see that his friend's skin was wrinkly and worn as if he’d aged forty years in the little time since they’d last seen him. “What?” He asked as Hermione burst into a fit of giggles, poorly hidden behind her hand. “Have I got something on my face?” He reached up to touch his face, feeling the loose skin and swearing loudly when he realised he should have ducked like his friends.
Harry choked back laughter, rising up to stand so he could better gape at his friend. Through a laugh, he said “What’d you do?”
“Don’t look at me like that, Harry. You shouldn’t be surprised to see I’m gonna age like a fine wine,” Harry snorted. “And I mean I didn’t think I’d get caught in the blast, but look,” Ron grinned as he nodded over to the table where Malfoy’s lot had been brewing their potions. Several cauldrons were upturned, and the smoke that filled the classroom ws thickest there. Slughorn was there along with … a group of people who looked twice as old as him. Harry choked on a laugh as he realised those wizened witches and wizards were the slytherins. They must have been working on an ageing potion when Ron got fed up with whatever they’d been saying or doing.
“I can’t believe you,” Harry said covering his own mouth now as he chuckled at the sight of wrinkly, bald-headed but grey-bearded Malfoy stumbling over Pansy Parkinson who seemed to be trying to hide herself from sight of everyone and everything as Slughorn tried to wrangle them all into some state of calm. Ron grinned proudly at his work. It was a strange sight to see that familiar grin on such an old face, a face so changed but still so very Ron. Harry hoped he could see that face again some day, long in the future, hoped he and his best friend could grow old together and make each other laugh at ridiculous wild little things like this. The thought wasn’t inherently romantic, but it did pull at Harry’s heart, a bittersweet twinge as he was reminded of the now several reasons he might not get to make it to that future with his best friend, because Ron would feel betrayed by what Harry had never told him all these years, or disgusted by how he felt for his friend, or weighed down by Harry’s lack of motivation to do anything great with his own future.
“You’re going to be in so much shit,” Hermione poked in between Harry and Ron as she rose from the ground, the corners of her lips still twitching as if suppressing laughter.
“No one saw it was me,”
“Everyone saw it was you,”
“Not the professor,”
“Well, I think he knows now,” Harry chimed in as he watched Malfoy point a bony hand towards the three of them, Slughorn turning around to see where it pointed.
“Alright!” Professor Slughorn raised his voice to cut through the noisy chaos Ron’s stunt had caused. “All my, uh, senior students off to Madame Pomfrey to put you back to normal, before anyone passes from old age” He was clearly put off at having his class so rudely interrupted, but his tone was jovial as ever. Even Slughorn seemed amused by the situation. “Everyone else … If you could please help clean up this mess a bit, that’d be lovely. No point in trying to salvage your own potions. Once everythings nice and tidy, you’re dismissed,” Slughorn shot out an arm to grab Malfoy as he teetered precariously on his time-worn legs. The student, looking older than his teacher, shrugged off the man’s aiding hand and wobbled slow and unsteady towards the door. The potion had aged his body so many years that it seemed he needed to relearn how to walk on his new old legs. “Okay, actually seniors, maybe wait outside for a moment and I’ll help you up to the hospital wing. Don’t need any broken hips on top of all this,”
Ron, not nearly as aged since he hadn’t been right next to the toppled cauldrons grinned and cracked his back as he called to Malfoy. “I see why you haven’t embraced the balding, Malfoy. You definitely don’t have the head shape for it,”
Malfoy glared back at Ron and spoke in a crackling worn voice. “At least I’m not a ginger, doesn’t look like you’ll ever be free of that painfully orange hair,” Harry looked to Ron to see what Draco meant, and indeed, his friend, despite having been aged decades by the potion, still had his flaming head of hair, marked here and there by some grey streaks.
“Like a fine wine,” Ron repeated, running his hand through his hair with all the confidence of a man who had zero clue what he looked like right now. Harry and Hermione both stifled laughs, Harry nodding in agreement before their attentions were pulled to Slughorn who was pointing at Ron now.
“You … young man, help your … elders to the hospital wing, and wait there so I can have a few words with you,” It seemed like he was attempting to sound threatening, but his pauses made it difficult to take him all that seriously.
“Yes sir, fellow young man,” Ron nodded oh so seriously, flashing a grin at his friends before swaggering off like He hadn't aged himself as well in his payback of Malfoy.
When Ron rejoined his friends at the gryffindor supper table a few hours later, he was back to his normal age and still smirking proudly.
“Why’re you smiling like that? Don’t tell me Slughorn let you off,” Hermione greeted him with a stern frown.
“Well, I do have detention for a month,”
“Good,” Hermione nodded.
“But it’s just helping Hagrid with groundskeeping so it’s hardly a punishment. Maybe Hagrid’ll even let me groundskeep on my broom, so I can get my quidditch practice in,” He looked at Harry for approval at that idea.
“You’re never gonna learn are you?” Hermione sighed.
Ron grinned proudly in reply. “And I get to help with the giant pumpkins for Halloween. I’ve always wanted to do that. You two should come to join me in my terrible punishment,” Hermione shook her head in disappointment once more, though a glint of excitement lit her eyes at the suggestion. Ron looked to the side then, at Harry sitting next to him frowning at his friend’s lack of response. Nudging him gently with an elbow he said. “What you say? join me in detention? Turning giant pumpkins into scary jack o’’lanterns? Maybe hide inside some so we can jump out at first years?” He nudged Harry again.
“Yeah, sounds good,” Harry replied, without looking up from his plate. He was bogged down in thought and anxiety. After the initial amusement of Ron’s stunt in potions had worn off, he’d started to feel bothered by it. He didn’t want his friend to get in trouble over defending him, especially when he felt like such a bad friend. What’d he do in return? Shrink into himself and hide away aspects of himself that his friends had a right to know. It felt like he was lying to Ron by letting him defend Harry from idiots calling him feminine, because well they were right weren’t they.
His friends had been silent for too long. It snapped Harry out of his own head, and he looked at them quietly eating. They were worried about him. Shit he didn’t want them to worry. They’d be better off if he left. They wouldn't be weighed down by his sour mood. He hadn’t finished his plate, but he stood up anyway muttering something about wanting to get a headstart on a transfiguration paper before heading out the great hall with his head down.