Switched

Hermione Granger was an odd duck, in Harry's opinion.

He was aware that it might seem, on the surface, to be a bit hypocritical, him calling anyone else an odd duck, but honestly, that he was a bloody freak himself obviously meant he knew weird when he saw it.

And Granger was weird, so obsessed with following the rules and paying attention in lessons and volunteering to answer questions like she wanted everyone to know how smart she was, but also getting offended when her dormmates called her a know-it-all. In different circumstances, he thought they might actually be friends — she was definitely one of the cleverest kids in their class, and pretty much the only other person who really seemed to appreciate how freaking cool magic was and wanted to learn as much as she possibly could — but in their actual circumstances, he mostly found her annoying as hell.

Again, not something he really had any room to complain about, he annoyed people all the time, sometimes just because it was funny, but more often just by being too awake or asking questions they didn't know how to answer or being too good at shite without having to work at it like they did. But he was pretty sure he was as entitled to find certain things annoying as anyone else, and at the top of his list of annoyances was people who insisted that he was wrong about something he definitely wasn't wrong about, because they had read a book and thought that made them the bloody expert in the room.

Well, at the top of the list was people who accused him of lying when he wasn't, but people who were loudly wrong about objective reality, and insisted that demonstrably true and correct things weren't, were a close second.

He and Granger had gotten off on a bad foot, what with Harry preemptively ditching her and the rest of the Muggleborn Shopping Group, and then she'd been so smug about being Professor McGonagall's favourite, he'd decided he really didn't like her much, either. The thing that really decided it was her going so far as to attempt to lecture Harry and Danny about the importance of participating in lessons and respecting their teachers in the library after they walked out of their fourth Transfiguration lesson.

She hadn't taken it well when Harry informed her that lessons were for people who could actually learn something from them, and that he didn't think getting a specific job made one automatically worthy of respect, and especially not when they weren't even very good at that job. McGonagall hadn't actually taught anything in three quarters of their lessons to that point, and had just that day admitted that she was exploiting Hermione's desire to show off to get out of helping their peers figure out the lesson she clearly hadn't taught very well. She also hadn't appreciated him warning her that she was exactly the sort of person who would be one of Uncle Vernon's favourite employees — the reliable sort who would work their arses off for the occasional gruff good job, Granger, keep that up and you'll go far around here and a pat on the back, rather than a raise or a promotion or any actual respect.

("You'll go far around here" was middle-management-speak for you're going to die in a dead-end job you hate, doing three other people's work for less money than the bloke in the next cube and thinking that being valuable to the company means the company values you as a person. Dudders was under strict orders to immediately demand a promotion if he was ever told "you'll go far around here," and tender his resignation if they didn't give it to him. Harry really didn't think Dudley was really in any danger of becoming useful enough that someone could take advantage of him like that, but it had seemed worth remembering for himself.)

That had gone over almost as poorly as pointing out that he'd actually saved the Shopping Group two hours they otherwise would have spent waiting for him to be fitted for clothes and find his wand, even taking into account that they'd waited half an hour for him when they'd said they wouldn't. It wasn't his fault Hermione's new favourite professor was an unreliable flake who apparently couldn't follow through on her own plans.

After that, before Samhain, Harry had been fairly certain that Granger hated him. He didn't mind, it wasn't as though she could really do anything to him or even challenge him in any meaningful way. But he certainly hadn't expected her to start trying to talk to him after two months of disapproving glares and unsubtle attempts to show him up in Transfiguration and Defence (which were their only shared lessons other than History), which were sort of ridiculous, since Professor McGonagall hated him and Professor Quirrel never asked them questions or taught them spells or anything, just made them read the textbook one paragraph at a time, going around the room or lectured at them (which Harry refused to listen to, but he wrote all the important shite on the slate anyway, so it was fine), so all she could do there was try to look smart asking questions, annoying the professor as much as anyone else.

And honestly, if all she was going to do was tell him that he couldn't do a thing she'd literally seen him do, like sharpen a sword with the same totally-not-accidental magic he'd been using to sharpen pencils since he was eight and quills since he'd come here, he'd rather go back to not talking to her at all.

"That's not how anything works, Harry! That sword was made of steel, and it's much larger than a pencil, and it's been a week and it's still sharp so it can't have been a transfiguration, but the actions you would need to sharpen them are different!"

"So?"

"So, it's not a simple charm, either!"

He knew that, actually. Charms were pretty much all energy transformations when it came down to it, turning magic into heat or light or whatever. Even telekinesis was sort of the same, with physical force or kinetic energy or something. The sharpening spell felt different to cast. He probably could do it with telekinesis, shaping the metal deliberately step by step, but that would be slower and more complicated and easier to mess up than just...wanting the end product, and making the sword want it, too, and letting magic take care of exactly how to make it happen. "I was eight when I came up with that spell! I didn't know what charms or transfigurations were!"

"That doesn't mean you can just ignore— It has to have been one or the other! All wizardry can be broadly categorised as one or the other! It's in Magical Theory!"

"I didn't know what wizardry was, either."

"Well, I didn't see you brewing a potion at it! It had to be some kind of wizardry!"

"There are complex charms, Granger," Blaise volunteered, far too amused. "And spells which have both charm and transfiguration elements."

"I really don't think Harry managed to come up with an advanced spell like that, on his own, wandlessly, when he was eight, Zabini!"

"Look, I don't know what to tell you, Granger. Obviously it's possible, you saw me do it!"

"But how did you do it?"

"I already told you! I just reminded the sword that it was meant to be sharp! Look, have you read So You Want to Be a Wizard? It's sort of like that."

"No, I've never heard of it. What is it? It sounds like an introductory theory text. Does the library have a copy?"

"Probably not." Harry shrugged. "It's muggle fiction, so." The Hogwarts library did have a pretty solid muggle literature section, but it was mostly classics, things Madam Pince would have her study groups read, and similar stuff, not fantasy novels.

The girl looked absolutely outraged. "Fiction? You got a spell out of a storybook? And it worked?!"

"Er, no. The magic in the story is more like runes. I got the idea from the book, defining a thing and convincing it that it's something else or that there's something different about it, and made it work with...normal magic."

"Swords. aren't. sentient," Granger snapped, scowling. Harry would be shocked if there weren't sentient swords out there in the world somewhere — Hogwarts had a sentient, mind-reading Hat, after all — but that particular sword hadn't been, so he didn't bother making a point of it. "How can you possibly have convinced it or reminded it of anything?"

"Er...magic?"

Granger made a frustrated little growl under her breath. "Of course it's magic! Are you being dense on purpose?"

Harry glared at her. "I'm not being dense, you're the one who keeps asking stupid questions!"

"They aren't stupid questions, if you'd just answer them—"

"Hi, sorry to interrupt, Granger," Danny drawled, dropping into the empty chair beside Harry. They were supposed to be working on their Transfiguration essay for the week. Blaise didn't normally do homework with them, but McGonagall had marked them down for putting in shite that wasn't in the textbook last week, so he was here to stop Danny from putting in anything too advanced. "But I could hear you all the way down at the end of the history section, so maybe be annoyed with Harry a little more quietly if you don't want to get kicked out."

The girl looked around as though Madam Pince might jump out of the stacks or something — which was silly, if she were anywhere near here, she already would have told them off for being too loud. "Well, I'm sorry," she sort of...whisper-yelled. "But your friend is being ridiculous and trying to annoy me on purpose—" He wasn't, actually. "If you don't want to tell me, just say so!"

"I have told you! Multiple times, now! It's not my fault you refuse to believe me!"

"It's not my fault your answer makes no sense!"

"It probably is, actually," Blaise offered. "You've known about formal magic for what, three and a half months? And you've only read a couple of theory books — introductory theory books aimed at school kids. I bet you anything they're super over-simplified. Just because Harry doesn't have the words to describe the magic in technical terms doesn't mean that he's not answering your question."

"Er. What exactly are we talking about?" Danny asked, eyes flitting around the table.

"How Harry used a pencil-sharpening spell to sharpen that sword," Blaise explained. "He says he just convinced it that it should be sharp, but Granger insists that makes no sense because it's not a charm or a transfiguration, and all wizardry is one or the other. Or both, sometimes, but that's probably too complicated for even Harry to have figured out on his own, without a wand, at the age of eight."

"Oh." Danny blinked at Granger for a moment. "I've been thinking about that, too. I wrote to my mum, and she says it probably wasn't wizardry. It was...well, a transformation ritual, basically. But without all the usual ritual window-dressing."

"Oh, right," Blaise said. "That makes sense." Harry...didn't think he was being sarcastic.

"I don't think it is..." The only ritual magic Harry knew much about was potions, and it hadn't felt like that at all. "I didn't think you cast ritual magic like that."

Danny shrugged. "I think whatever you cast was basically just you communicating your intent to Magic — technically speaking, altering the fundamental identity of the sword to define it as sharp. And the energetic cost of making that little alteration, I guess — ritual magic does still have some cost. But Magic followed through on that intent without you channelling the energy involved in...resolving the universal inconsistency, was the phrase Mum used, sort of like a transfiguration reverts on its own. Actually, pretty much exactly how a transfiguration reverts on its own: you just changed what it should be to make the unsharpened state it was in technically the altered state, and it reverted to being sharp. The energy of the spell, meaning the realisation of your intent — the reversion to sharpness, not the intermediate step of redefining the sword's identity — came from outside of yourself, which makes it witchcraft, not wizardry. Definitely the sort of thing an eight-year-old could discover accidentally, and from your perspective it would be practically exactly the same focusing it on a pencil or a sword."

"Oh. Well, there you go, then, Granger." Though that did raise the question of why people didn't just do that all the time instead of bothering with transfiguration. It seemed much more efficient, and didn't revert (re-revert?), so...

"But... But that's absurd!"

Danny scoffed. Blaise giggled. Harry glared at them, but that didn't stop his roommate pointing out, "Yes, this is Harry Potter, I could have sworn you'd met..." or his best friend drawling, "And here I thought you were clever, Granger — haven't you noticed, yet? Harry's always absurd."

"Oh, piss off, you wankers. I am not always absurd."

"Yes, you are."

"The fact that you actually believe that is only more evidence for your inherent absurdity," Blaise agreed.

"I hate you both," Harry informed them.

"If that were really a thing, I think we would just do that instead of transfiguring things," Granger said, somehow managing to sound superior and condescending basically asking a question Harry had just been wondering about himself.

"Oh, it's a thing," Blaise assured her. "It's just not a thing you can really teach. Look up wish-magic." Granger actually whipped out her day-planner and jotted down a note. "It's also called performative magic, blood magic, or a pre-Merlinean ritualistic expression of will. You won't find anything associated with those names, but there are probably some non-restricted books on childhood magical development that talk about it, because a lot of little kids stumble across it, but grow out of it the same way they grow out of imaginary friends. People who don't usually fall into communicating with a few particular aspects their souls resonate with — gods, basically — and end up being instinctive ritualists, or turn out to be Seers and develop personal aspects — more developed imaginary friends, essentially — to mediate between their perception and literally the entire universe."

"Yeah, okay, but I didn't really ask any sort of consciousness or aspect or whatever to do it, I just...willed it to happen."

"Well, the other option is that you actually invented a spell which somehow directly and permanently alters the fundamental identity of an object, and quite frankly, that's terrifying, so I'd go with the wish-magic explanation if I were you," Danny advised him. "Not that wish-magic isn't sort of potentially scary powerful, but it's much less likely to go wrong than explicitly fiddling around with fundamental identities yourself."

"Er..." Honestly, Harry wasn't really sure what the difference would be, but willing a sword (or pencil or quill) to be sharp, reminding it of a quality which it used to have but had lost over time, didn't seem like it had that much potential to go wrong, even if he had done it 'directly' and 'explicitly' rather than asking Magic to do it for him...which he really didn't think he had? Maybe if he were trying to will it to have a quality that it didn't already 'know' or if he were trying to do it on an animate object, or like a person, or— Well, another person would probably resist it, like it was way harder to cast a transfiguration on another person, but on himself... "Is that how metamorphy works?"

Danny and Blaise exchanged a somewhat disturbed look.

"What's metamorphy?" Granger asked.

"Super awesome shapeshifting talent thing," Harry explained. "Danny's older sibling is a metamorph. What is that look? Am I right? Do you think I could will myself to be taller?"

"Probably not," Danny said, a little too quickly.

"How much you want to bet that's how Dru hasn't aged in like three decades, though?" Blaise sounded positively unnerved.

"Who?"

"Danny's estranged grandmother. So we have one vote I hope not, but probably yes, and one that definitely sounds like a thing people can do, is what I'm hearing?"

"Um, no, you're hearing one oh, gods, my roommate's going to kill himself trying to do something terminally absurd, and one that is definitely not a thing normal people can do. If Druella can, it's probably because she's actually a metamorph — she does have a grandchild who's a metamorph, it's not out of the question."

That didn't actually make it less likely that Harry could do it, though. Technically, Dora was his first cousin — if there really was a gene for metamorphy, he could have it too. Danny just didn't know that. "Okay, but setting the whole Druella thing aside, there theoretically isn't a reason I can't try to convince my body I'm not a midget, is there? Because being the shortest person in our year sucks."

Danny groaned. "Please don't fuck around with your own fundamental identity, Harry. You'll probably end up vanishing your femurs or something."

"Don't be ridiculous, trying to make my femurs longer would just make me oddly proportioned. I'd probably have to..." Well, he'd probably have to make all of his leg bones longer, and if he didn't want his torso to be weirdly short, all of his vertebrae, too, and then that would probably affect all of the muscles that were attached to those bones, and he didn't know nearly enough about human anatomy to try it, especially since tallness wasn't a thing his body was already familiar with. Like, not ageing, just reminding every part of himself of what it was yesterday, that would be easy — well, not easy, it'd probably be horribly complicated, there were probably billions, maybe trillions of cells in a body, but sort of the same as with the sword, it had been sharp — but trying to make himself taller would be adding something new...or maybe re-defining a lot of different things like lengths of specific bones instead of just one...or maybe trying to write in more cells where there weren't any already? or maybe they'd just appear like his current state was a transfiguration with integrated banishing? or would that end up like an integrated conjuration? Clearly this was why metamorphy was so cool, they just did this without thinking about it (they had to, Harry was pretty sure). "Actually, worst case scenario, I might accidentally disintegrate myself. I'll practise on squirrels or something first."

Granger just sort of stared at him like he was taking the piss. Blaise started sniggering uncontrollably.

"I'm serious, Blaise." ("I know, that's why it's funny...") "Danny, can you write to Dora and ask what happens to her mass when she grows or shrinks? Like, do individual cells vanish, or— Oh! Do they all just get smaller, like proportionally, increasing in density?"

Danny groaned again, letting his head fall to the table. "Can we just write that essay for McGonagall and pretend we didn't have this conversation?"

"If you promise to write to Dora for me."

"You could just write to Dora yourself," Blaise suggested.

"Yes, because it would be so very normal to write someone I've never even met out of the blue with twenty questions about their awesome shapeshifting superpower and how that actually works on a technical level, because I'd prefer not to look like a child until I'm thirty, thanks very much."

"Oh, don't tell me you'd leave out asking whether they actually got that rematch at Morgenstern's and at least three pages of gleeful fanboy-ing over their general awesomeness," Blaise smirked. "Harry has a crush on Danny's older sister," he told Granger, which wasn't true, he hadn't even met her and she was an adult, and his first cousin...she was just also quite possibly the most awesome person he'd ever heard of.

"Piss off, I do not," Harry snapped, feeling his face growing red. "Don't tell people that."

"You do so. And being adorable when you're embarrassed is really not giving me any incentive to not tell everyone that."

Harry compromised on not dignifying that with a response and telling Blaise to do something anatomically unfeasible by flipping him off.

"I'm...just going to go," Granger said awkwardly, shouldering the enormous bookbag she'd let fall to her feet to take notes on wish-magic, and also probably because it was going to give her scoliosis if she kept carrying it. Honestly, he knew there were a lot of stairs between Gryffindor Tower and...practically anything, he got bringing all her books down with her, but learn a bloody Featherweight Charm, Granger...

"No, stay!" Danny offered, apparently impulsively.

The Gryffindor know-it-all paused, unwontedly surprised. "But you obviously don't need my help with your essay, so...why?"

"Well, see, I'm a selfish jerk. I just don't want to be left alone with these lunatics." That managed to tease a small, reluctant smile from the girl. "Unless you had other plans, I guess."

"Oh, well...I already wrote my essay, but I was just going to read until dinner. I guess I could do that here..." she suggested hesitantly.

"Or you could learn a Featherweight Charm. Well, I guess you can't do that here, but we can go find a classroom or something. But seriously, my back is hurting just looking at you."

"Isn't that a second-year charm?" she asked disapprovingly, though she did sit down, pulling a heavy-looking leather-bound tome out of her bag. "Professor Flitwick told us not to work ahead."

Yeah, well, he hadn't seen her complaining when he used it on the recently sharpened sword to make it easier to swing, had he? "Is it?"

Danny nodded.

Harry shrugged. "I found it in Spelman's over the summer. And Professor Flitwick advised us not to work ahead. I considered that advice and decided that the advantages of not being bored to tears and learning useful magic outweigh...honestly, practically any other factors."

"But what if you flub a spell and it blows up in your face? Or worse — magical backlash sounds terrible. I read that you can become a squib if you mess something up too badly!"

"Magical backlash sort of feels like getting a migraine and being slightly electrocuted," Danny informed them. "It's not fun, but it won't kill you. And burnout is a thing, but you'd have to be doing geomantic tapping or trying to harness lightning or something to accidentally overchannel that badly."

"And honestly? You'll probably literally immolate yourself first," Blaise added, making Granger's eyes go hilariously wide. "Flitwick just doesn't want us getting into bad habits we have to un-learn later."

"Well, that's a good reason, too."

"No, it's not," Harry scoffed. "The entire curriculum is learning bad habits and then un-learning them."

"What!"

"Volume, Granger," Danny reminded her. "Harry thinks it makes more sense to conceptualise the most advanced form of a spell even if you don't want to activate all of the functions at this point, rather than building up to the most complicated version of, for example, a Hover Charm."

"Why would anyone want a spell that only makes an object hover in place? It's completely useless."

"No it's not!" Granger insisted, before he could add that six directional forces was not the most complicated version of a Hover Charm by a long shot. "Understanding how a single physical force works on an object is a key first step in developing more complex motion charms! It was in Chapter Four."

"Exactly! Making people think there's only one force at work is going to make it really bloody hard to figure out how to move things around when we eventually get that far, because really we should be thinking of it as two forces — the spell energy and gravity working together to keep the object at whatever point — and since we exist in three dimensions, there's really no reason not to at least keep it in mind that there are potential directions we could apply force from all around it."

Danny glowered at him. "You are literally the only person who thinks that making things six times more complicated off the mark is easier than building up to it, Harry. Literally."

"I literally do not see how you can possibly think it's easier to learn how to do something in a series of successively less-wrong ways before finally having it explained what you're really trying to do. How can you try to do something without understanding it and how it relates to...everything else? I mean, I know how you physically do it, just follow the directions and a thing happens, but how does it not drive you insane just blindly following the directions and not really knowing what you're doing?"

Blaise sniggered. "I don't think you can blame the fact that you're insane on people expecting you to learn how to do basic, first-year charms without explaining NEWT-level magical theory first."

"It's a contributing factor," Harry groused.

"I hope you appreciate the irony of insisting on knowing how charms work, and not being able to explain how your sword sharpening spell works," Granger noted.

"It's not the same. I know what I want to happen, I don't need to know all the intermediate details. Not for that kind of magic, at least. The real problem with lessons is... It's that it's all supposed to be building up to bigger things, but they don't explain things with that in mind, or what specifically it's doing, and knowing what you want to happen isn't enough if what you want to happen is an intermediate step in something else."

The girl sniffed. "Well, that still isn't a good reason to go off learning spells on your own. You're only more likely to be thinking about them wrong if you don't even let Professor Flitwick explain them first."

"But if I'm learning spells that are useful enough to be an end in and of themselves, it doesn't matter if I'm doing them 'right' for some other purpose down the line, it just matters that I'm not going to grow up deformed because I dragged all my books down here too, but my bag doesn't actually weigh half as much as I do." Granger glowered at him, sort of hilariously. "If I have to learn how to think about it differently to build into another spell down the line, this wasn't a complete waste of time. Whereas learning a Hover Charm to start thinking about magic in the right way to do more complicated motion charms is the entire point, so oversimplifying it like that is a complete waste of time."

Granger was clearly tempted, and why wouldn't she be? There was no good reason not to learn the spell, and books were heavy. "I'll think about it."

Harry smirked. "The incantation is pondus plumae ad huic attribuo. That's just being poetic, it only halves the weight of the object, but you can cast it three or four times on the same thing without any interference. And you can drop the ad huic attribuo after you get it down."

"Great. Can we actually write our essay, now?" Blaise asked. "Because Daphne wanted to do something this afternoon."

Danny, who had been scribbling away for some minutes, looked up long enough to see and smirk at Harry's response to, "The trick to doing homework with Harry is to ignore everything he says. Otherwise you'll end up spending two hours talking about the bloody Philosopher's Stone or breeding habits of nifflers or something else that has nothing to do with astronomy," which was to stick his tongue out at him. That had only happened...okay, four times, now. With astronomy.

"I can focus! Look, this is me, focusing! Un-transfiguration. Two methods. Reminding the needle that it is in fact a matchstick—" Because even though they had eventually moved on to other spells, Harry still found it funny to refer to all pre-transfiguration objects as "matchsticks" and all post-transfiguration objects as "needles" in his essays. "—which causes the spell to revert faster, and— We are allowed to admit that the Basic Wand Movements are a thing now, right?"

"I think we sort of have to if we're going to talk about two distinct methods."

"Yes," Blaise confirmed. "But the two methods are supposed to be controlled reversion with the Basics, and re-transfiguring the object to the original form."

Danny glared at him. "That's not un-transfiguration, that's re-transfiguration. It's completely different and only works if you know what the object was originally. The second one is stimulating the fundamental identity of the object with a Reversion Spell, which creates destructive interference and causes the transfiguration to become unbalanced and revert immediately, rather than waiting for it to destabilise on its own."

"Hey, I'm just telling you what McGonagall said in lessons."

"Fine. Gods, I hate that woman." He crossed out most of what he'd already written.

Harry just sliced the inch he'd already written off his scroll. Yes, he would have to re-copy it anyway, trying to make it legible, but he might as well start from scratch, since he hadn't written anything correct yet. When he felt he'd answered the question (and now just needed to fluff out the compare-and-contrast part of the essay, which was honestly the bulk of the foot and a half, it didn't take that much page-space to define the two methods, even with handwriting as messy as his), he decided to take a break.

"So, what are you reading?" he asked Granger.

"It's been five minutes, Harry," Blaise groaned, as though that wasn't plenty of time to work on a bloody transfiguration essay before doing something less boring.

Danny, even as annoyed as he still very clearly was with McGonagall, let out a little puff of laughter. "See what I mean?"

(Harry flipped him off.)