lomonaaeren

Part Two.

Title: Henrietta Among the Pigeons (2/2/)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: One sided Harry/many people
Content Notes: Crack, temporary genderbend
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 3500
Summary: A stray spell temporarily changes Harry into a woman. He promptly goes “undercover” by pretending the change is permanent—and purebloods fall all over themselves to make incriminating statements when they think he might marry into their families.
Author’s Notes: One of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics, and in some ways a parody of fics where Harry becomes a blood purist. There will be a second part tomorrow

Thank you for all the reviews!

Part Two

“I heard you went to my father, Henrietta. I don’t understand. That’s the act of a desperate woman. Why didn’t you come to me first?”

Harry turned his head. Draco Malfoy was standing right next to him, and had apparently just walked up to him in a pub with no indication that Harry would welcome the attention. Harry snorted into his hand.

Draco Malfoy had only ever been a reluctant Death Eater, but it appeared he was a first-rate prat.

“Well, why not?” Draco persisted, drawing out the stool next to Harry and siting down on it without an invitation. “I want to know why you wouldn’t come to me if you were going to marry someone and wanted that person to treat you right.”

Harry blinked, twice. Then he said, “But, Mr. Draco, we were rivals in school. And you’re gay.”

“That doesn’t matter! It doesn’t mean I don’t know a good thing when I see it.” Draco’s eyes went up and down Harry’s body, and he leered. Harry didn’t even want to imagine what had made him react that way. “Did you know that I’m separated from Astoria Greengrass now?”

“You were married, Mr. Draco?”

“I mean, not formally,” Draco said, and tried to wink. At least, Harry thought it was winking. It seemed as if he was closing one eye and half-closing the other. “Only betrothed. That is, promised to wed.”

“I know what betrothed is, Mr. Draco.” Not for nothing had Harry read all those romance novels in preparation for this act. He ducked his head and looked up at Draco from beneath the fluttering eyelashes. “But wouldn’t that mean that Miss Astoria is awfully upset with you?”

“What does it matter? I just saw what I really wanted.”

“Another Firewhisky?”

An amused, condescending look crossed Draco’s face. Harry managed to hold back a sigh. Yes, that was the kind of look he wanted to encourage from men, but Draco wasn’t a target. Harry doubted he had any useful information.

“No. A woman who could please me like a man can.” Draco firmly turned to face Harry.

Harry did sigh this time, since Draco would probably think it was just a sign that Harry was swooning over his muscles, and managed to resign himself to it.

*

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Rabastan Lestrange demanded, pressing his filthy face up against the bars of his cell.

“My name is Henrietta Potter,” Harry said, lowering his hood and glancing around. The Aurors and Kingsley knew he was here, of course. A confession that he’d obtained by sneaking into Azkaban wouldn’t be considered legal in any sense of the word. But the air of drama and secrecy would make it more exciting for Rabastan. “And I’ve come to tell you that I might be able to shorten your sentence if you give me some important information.”

“Potter had a sister?” Rabastan was staring at him with silent hunger. Harry had counted on that. Azkaban dimmed a lot of emotions, but not appetites or physical sensations.

“No. It’s me, Harry Potter. Transformed by a spell.” Harry took a deep breath, and watched Rabastan watch his chest in appreciation. “I understand a lot of things now I didn’t back when I was a man.”

“Like what?”

Harry had to give it to him: even with his mind half-destroyed by Azkaban, Rabastan was more suspicious than either Malfoy or Nott had been. He sighed. “Like the importance of pure children. It didn’t seem to matter that much when I would sire them with another woman, you know? But now, they’ll be leaving my womb.”

“Harry Potter would never believe in blood purity.”

Harry leaned a little closer to the bars and whispered, “You’re right. But Henrietta Potter does.”

Rabastan remained silent for a time, his eyes big and bulging in the darkness. Harry waited, although his wand was gripped in his hand. Despite the reduction of Dementors around Azkaban in the past few years, sometimes one still arrived, and he would have to drive it away with a Patronus if it did. It would derange Rabastan too much to be useful to him.

“No,” Rabastan finally muttered. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that you’ve changed that much by becoming a woman.”

Harry hid a grim smile. Maybe because he’d had a formidable woman as a sister-in-law, Rabastan seemed more inclined to respect women. Harry just nodded and said, “Then I can cross your family off my list,” and turned around to walk away.

“What list?”

“The list of families I might be able to get pureblood children from,” Harry said, stopping and looking over his shoulder. He made his chest bounce a little, so that Rabastan could watch if he wanted.

Rabastan swallowed and then said, “There may be—you can’t do anything for me as long as I’m in here.”

“That shortening of the sentence that I talked about? I can do something about that.” Harry bit his lip coyly and let a piece of his hair wind around his finger. “That was what I was talking about.”

“And what kind of promise would you want?”

“A betrothal promise,” Harry said firmly. “Along with confirmation that your family is powerful and Dark and old. Family secrets,” he added, because Rabastan was blinking at him in the glossy way that meant he didn’t know what Harry was talking about. “The kind that you would only tell to the woman you intend to marry.”

Rabastan swallowed. “I would have need of more persuasion to tell you those.”

“There’s limited persuasion I can do out here,” Harry said, even as he swirled the skirts of his robes and let Rabastan see a flash of leg. “But if I could get that shortened sentence with just a bit of persuasion…”

After that, it didn’t take that long to get answers from him. Azkaban didn’t dim appetites. Harry blew Rabastan a kiss over his shoulder as he left, and went straight out to write down some answers to unsolved murders and kidnappings that had taken place over the war. At least Florean Fortescue’s daughter would be relieved to know what had happened to him.

*

“But surely you shouldn’t have seen any man finer than me.”

Harry let Draco see him rolling his eyes. Draco stopped trying to take the table across from Harry’s in the restaurant Harry had chosen, off Diagon Alley, and looked offended. Harry took a long sip of his soup.

Draco wrinkled his nose at the slurping sound. “A lady should have better table manners.”

“That’s the kind of thing I’m hoping your father will teach me,” Harry said, and used his napkin to pat at his lips, just in case. He didn’t want to drive Malfoy away completely. It was possible that he still had some useful information.

“You’re still focused on my father?” Draco shook his head and leaned forwards. “You ought to know that he’s still in love with my mother.”

Harry let his eyes widen and shimmer in the way that he’d had to practice in front of a mirror, and which Lavender had told him still didn’t look exactly right, but “good enough.” “Are you saying that I’m not lovable, Mr. Draco?”

“Of course not!” Draco looked almost terrified as he held up his hands. Harry eyed him speculatively and wondered if he would get results this good if he pretended to cry in his male form. “I mean—I just said that since my father is in love with my mother, I doubt that he’ll fall for another woman that easily.”

“I’m hardly easy.”

“I didn’t mean that, either.” Draco sounded slightly impatient, but he was lifting his nose into the air again, evidently reassured by Harry’s seeming lack of intelligence. “I only meant that it’ll be more difficult to capture his attention and time, since he’s pining for his former wife.”

“Oh.” Harry sipped from his mug of butterbeer again. Draco eyed it and then nodded a little, maybe because it wasn’t actually alcoholic. Harry didn’t know him well enough to read all the signals yet, though. “But you said publicly that you were gay, so why would you be captured, either?”

“I appreciate the male form, but I know now that I simply didn’t appreciate the female form enough. You’re so much more beautiful than Astoria, Henrietta.”

Harry ducked his head and tried to give a girlish squeal without making it too loud. “Oh, Mr. Draco, you don’t know that. You can’t compare us. You’re not supposed to do that. I try to feel solidarity for my sister witches.”

“Try, but you don’t really?” Draco looked immensely pleased as he reached out and let one hand fall on Harry’s cheek. “That makes sense. You’re a little cat, Henrietta, you know that?”

“You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.” Harry made his voice breathless as he peered up at Draco from beneath the shade of Draco’s own spread fingers.

“A little cattiness never hurt anyone,” Draco said, and leaned in.

Harry promptly let himself fall backwards. His head hit the back of the booth painfully, but he didn’t care. He sprawled there, and heard Draco calling his name—well, his assumed name—frantically, and then calls for smelling salts and water.

Harry “woke up” just before the speeding footsteps of the server got there, and asked, “Draco?” as he opened his eyes.

“Henrietta! Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes. It’s so embarrassing…I’m so sorry!” Harry contrived to upset the water glass Draco held onto him, but Draco barely seemed to notice. He was staring at Harry with wide, upset eyes.

“No, don’t apologize. Just tell me what happened.”

“That would have been my first real kiss.” Harry worried his bottom lip with his teeth. “I mean, my first real one since I transformed. I—I didn’t want to—I fainted because I was so happy, you see. I—do you want to try again?”

Draco drew back and held very still. Then he leaned close, so near that his breath brushed over the lobe of Harry’s ear and he had to work hard to control a shudder of disgust. “Are you saying,” Draco asked, “that you’re pure of body as well as seeking a pure father for your children?”

“Why wouldn’t I be pure of body?” Harry made his voice hurt. “The Healers let me know that this body is virginal.”

“Henrietta…” Draco’s hand was trembling on his cheek now. He drew back and bowed to Harry. “Forgive me. Someone who is that pure should never be kissed until her wedding night. Forgive me for assuming that you were just like all the other half-bloods.”

“Like all the other half-bloods?” Harry had to admit he hadn’t run into whatever this particular prejudice was before, although he’d thought he’d heard everything anyone had to say about half-bloods.

“You know. They sleep around because their pureblood parent isn’t enough to infuse them with purity.” Draco was staring at Harry with an awed look. It made him look slightly drunk. “I never realized that of course you would have a new body when you transformed.”

Harry sighed a little. “Well, if I’m not going to give you my first kiss, then could you move back a little? Someone might think I am exactly like all the other half-bloods if you’re standing right near me.”

Draco jumped as though someone had pricked him with a pin—which Harry had to admit was hilarious—and hastily shoved back from the table. “O-of course, Henrietta. I’m sorry. I would never wish to dishonor you.”

Harry smiled back at him and made some more small talk until Draco went away. Then Harry looked at his watch and calculated the exact number of seconds until he went back to being Harry Potter.

Being Henrietta was getting fucking wearing.

He did notice, before he left the restaurant, that Theodore Nott was sitting at a back table, and he doubted it was coincidence. Harry made Henrietta’s big eyes at him. In response, Theodore raised his drink to him.

Hmm. Yes, I’ll have to turn in the Nott information first, just in case.

*

“I don’t believe you.” Lucius Malfoy’s voice was smooth and arrogant, Harry would give the bastard that. “I would never have confessed such things, and you cannot try me under Veritaserum if I refuse to grant you permission.”

“Actually, you did confess those things, to an undercover Auror.” Kingsley was as good at keeping his voice calm and cheerful as Lucius was at sounding smooth and arrogant. Harry, standing out of sight behind the corner that led into the courtroom, grinned.

“I demand that you produce this supposed Auror, Shacklebolt.”

“Here I am!” Harry chirped, purposely making his voice as high and feminine as possible before he walked around the corner and showed Lucius his—now decidedly male again—body, and the beard stubble on his chin, and the lack of breasts.

Lucius turned to face him, and then snapped his jaw shut so hard that Harry could hear it popping from where he stood, even though Lucius was all the way across the courtroom in the defendant’s chair. Harry nodded to all and sundry and went to stand at the witness’s podium, next to Shacklebolt’s own chair of dark wood.

Most of the time, the defendant and the witness and the Head Auror would have been the only occupants of the room, but of course everyone and their house-elf was interested in Lucius Malfoy’s trial, since he was Lucius Malfoy. Harry raked his eyes over the staring, peering, interested faces and held back his grimace with an effort.

The onlookers disgusted him almost more than the Death Eaters.

“This man is lying,” Lucius said. “Or under a glamour.”

“Why, Lucius,” Harry said, and he must have managed to make his voice sound enough like Henrietta’s, because Lucius turned a combination of green and pale that mostly belonged on sour milk. “I’m so sorry that you forgot a pureblood maiden of my modesty so quickly.”

Someone laughed in the crowd and quickly smothered it. Kingsley said, without turning, “We will throw any disruptors out of the proceedings,” but he was fighting hard to hold his lips in place himself.

“I still want to know how this happened.” Lucius looked an instant away from stomping his foot.

“My transformation wasn’t permanent.” Harry smiled at him.

“You tricked the confession out of me, then. It was obtained under duress.”

“No,” Harry said happily. “If you had asked anyone at the Ministry, or done any research on such transformations, you would know that it wasn’t permanent. You had the chance to find out. In fact, you had ten days to find out after I visited you. I’m afraid that your own eagerness betrayed you, Mr. Lucius.”

For that, he got a tight face and silence. Harry nodded to Kingsley. “Shall we begin?”

*

Rabastan Lestrange was in Azkaban for the crimes he had confessed to already, so Harry didn’t have to face him in a trial; the words he had obtained were simply confirmation of where, literally, the bodies were buried. But Heinrich Nott was being tried, since he had never been arrested after the end of the war, and he was interesting.

He stared over Harry’s head at the wall the entire time Harry retold their conversation, corroborated with Pensieve memories the Wizengamot had already watched. He remained silent when Kingsley asked him if he wanted to defend himself. His barrister was the one who spoke, sweating now and then, as he tried to argue that the words Heinrich had told Harry were given “in confidence,” and that some archaic law declared that husbands and wives could not testify against each other.

“Well, perhaps that would be true,” Harry said, “if I had married him. And if I was a wife.”

The barrister’s face drooped. Apparently he hadn’t considered that different laws applied to marriages between men and women than would to a marriage between two men. He tried to argue some more after that, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Heinrich Nott turned his head when he was sentenced to life in Azkaban for some of his murders, and looked at Harry then. Harry raised his eyebrows. “Good try at the bloodcurdling gaze, but I’ve seen worse,” he said.

“Harry,” Kingsley chided under his breath. But he was smiling too broadly to make the scolding stick. Harry knew he was just as pleased as Harry himself was about the convictions here, and the justice that had been long-delayed but at last brought home.

“Someday I will eat the flesh from your bones, Harry Potter,” Nott said, his voice heavy and doom-laden.

“Threat! Cannibalistic threat!” Harry called lightly, and some of the various note-takers started scribbling frantically.

“No, no, you don’t understand,” the barrister began.

“What don’t I understand? Does Mr. Nott perhaps mean that he does not want to eat flesh from my bones?” Harry widened his eyes the way he would have when he was still Henrietta.

“Without sauce,” said Nott, in the kind of low voice that made it clear he wanted to be a Parselmouth.

“Mr. Nott just means—”

“Or seasoning.”

Harry shook his head sadly, while Kingsley explained the procedure for laying the new charges without blinking an eye.

*

Harry had to encounter two people as he left the courtroom. The first was Draco Malfoy, who was waiting with a bouquet of lilies and the most perplexed expression on his face, as if he was still trying to work out how Voldemort had lost the war.

“Where is Henrietta?” he asked Harry, his eyes searching over Harry’s head.

“Right in front of you.” Harry did the high, breathless voice again, and Draco spun to face him, his expression drooping when he saw Harry stand there, being himself.

“But I thought…” Draco’s voice trailed off, and he thrust the bouquet back and forth for a moment. Harry watched with a critical eye. He was lucky he hadn’t stayed a woman forever, if that was Draco’s technique.

Well, no. Really he was lucky that he hadn’t been desperate enough.

“No,” Harry said, shaking his head. “The transformation was never permanent. Just an unlucky accident.”

“I thought it was a lucky one.”

Draco sounded so forlorn that Harry worked to keep his smile sympathetic. “Sorry. But I do have to go about my business. Did you have any nasty words for me? I got your father arrested. You must have some.”

“Um, no.” Draco blinked and then turned and stumbled away. Harry sighed and continued walking down the corridor. He could literally see the light at the end of it. He hoped someone would help Draco resolve his sexual confusion, but he wouldn’t be that person. He was going to walk right out of here and—

“Potter.”

Oh, great. At least he would probably get his quota of nasty words now, if he’d been salivating after them. Harry managed to settle his face in a smile and turn around. “I’m afraid I can’t call you Mr. Theodore anymore.”

“I never wanted you to call me that in the first place.” Theodore Nott lounged against the doorway the way he had against the doorway in his father’s house, his gaze raking Harry up and down. “I know that people gave you compliments when you were a woman, but I much prefer you in your natural form.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “Okay.”

“For example,” Theodore went on, blithely, “if someone less confused by all of existence than Draco were to ask someone in your natural form out to dinner and exchange questions on the ethics of what you did…that’s something I would be extremely interested in.”

His gaze was direct, and Harry studied him for a second. “You’re not angry about what happened to your father?”

“The answer to that question is one of the many things you’ll gain if you come to dinner with me, Potter.”

Harry started smiling, and found that he couldn’t stop. “Well, I could consider it, I suppose. Some other night when I’m not so tired.”

“I could be persuaded to wait,” Theodore said, and while he wasn’t smiling and there was nothing about him that was relaxed or easy, he did have a certain light in his eyes that said he was going to be a challenge. Harry enjoyed challenges. “Let me know when you’re ready.” He tossed Harry a wave and kept walking.

Huh. Harry admired Theodore’s arse for a second—something his father certainly didn’t have going for him—and then walked on his way, out into the light and towards the dinner that was waiting for him at home.

Some other night, when things weren’t quite so pressing, then perhaps he’d take Theodore up on his offer. It would be a relief not to have to flutter his eyelashes and simper, at least.

Unless Theodore was into that kind of thing, of course.

The End.