"Daphne! Come with me." Slytherin's voice boomed around the hall.
John caught Susan's eye as he left by the side exit, giving her what he hoped was a meaningful look.
Dumbledore tried not to smile from the head table.
"My lord?" The Greengrass Heiress said meekly.
"Now!"
Daphne Greengrass rose from her seat.
Lord Slytherin shoved his wand under a trembling Harry Potter's chin and snarled, "You better not be sitting here when I get back, you little shit," before sweeping out of the hall with Daphne in tow.
Tracey Davis looked on in horror as Daphne walked out of the hall with as much dignity as she could muster and Harry Potter got up and moved back to the middle of the table. Everyone started whispering to each other. What the hell just happened?
"Are you sure about this?" Susan looked worried. The muffled dressing down Greengrass was receiving for whatever it was she'd done could just about be heard through the classroom wall.
John Potter smiled. "Susie, don't worry about it. I got this."
"You do know how bad it will be if you're caught?"
"We need to know!"
Susan bit her lip. "Well then, I hope you really are as good at this as you say you are."
John flashed her a bright smile. He wouldn't mess up. He had fate on his side.
Hermione stalked out of the classroom, leaving a visibly distraught Daphne behind her. She felt really bad about all that shouting. She'd been practically cringing herself at the sound her lord's angry voice and it had been her doing the shouting. She'd have to do something to make it up to her friend later, but not before she extracted every tiny detail from her on what those kisses with Harry had been like. For purely academic reasons of course. For research.
She turned a corner and a much smaller body crashed into hers. Anger flared through her. "You!"
John Potter Slytherin?"
looked
up
at
her.
"Lord
"Ah." Damn. Had Harry ever met John as Lord Slytherin? "John Potter." Her voice immediately took on that cool, calm vibration she'd so often heard her lord use. "For a moment, I thought you were someone else." Nice save.
John Potter nodded, bowed, and walked off.
Hermione watched him go, frowning. Why did she get the feeling she'd just missed something?
John ducked back into his own empty classroom, a massive grin plastered on his face.
"It worked?" Susan asked with obvious excitement.
John held up several hairs. "Wordless, 'accio loose hairs,' with wand up my sleeve. He never felt a thing." Susan's eyed the hairs in awe. "I can't believe it worked!"
He smirked. "Ready?"
"Wait." Susan held up her hand. "You're going to be stuck like that for an hour. We should do it somewhere safe.
Yeah, that was a good point, wasn't it? See, this is why he had Susan with him. "Down by the lake then? Where we can hide in the trees?"
Susan nodded.
Twenty minutes later, they were in the rapidly failing sunlight hiding behind a thick clump of bushes.
"Well," John flourished the now colour changed potion containing a single black hair. "Bottoms up." He drank.
Suddenly everything started to change, but the changes were not what he expected. His hair lengthened, his arms and legs thinned, a faint feeling of something pressed against the inside of his shirt, he even shrank slightly, and, most worryingly of all, everything down there, re-arranged itself, leaving him feeling strangely… missing. Missing and empty.
Susan had her hand over her mouth.
"What happened?" he said and his voice had changed too. It sounded like…
"You turned into Granger, John."
"What!" He ran out of the tree line to the lake's edge to gaze into its reflective surface. A brown wavy haired head of hair crowning an angelic face stared back at him. "I am Hermione!" He clutched at his new features. Oh Merlin, this was so weird, but…" His mind caught up with what had happened. "Hermione is Lord Slytherin!"
A sharp sting hit him on the back of the head. "Ow." He turned to see Susan looking at him with an unamused expression, her wand clutched in her hand. "Stop pissing about, John, and be serious."
He rubbed the back of his head where the stinging hex had hit and grumbled.
Susan tapped her foot on the slightly damp ground. "Obviously you just picked up Granger's hair."
John frowned. "But Hermione has brown hair, the hairs I picked up were black." Susan held out her hand and he passed over the small glass bottle in which he'd stored the precious hairs. "They look brown to me."
"What?" He snatched the jar back and looked again. The hairs did indeed look brown. "That's weird, I could've sworn…"
"Slytherin obviously has a defence against people accioing his hair from his clothes, and the only hairs your spell picked up were Granger's."
"But why would Slytherin have Hermione's hair on his clothes?"
Susan blushed.
"What?"
She looked away. "Nothing." John shrugged. "So, that didn't work out so well then."
Susan nodded, still not meeting his gaze.
A thought struck him. "But we do now have some of Hermione's hair. We could always go with plan B if we get the chance."
Susan finally looked back. "Yes," she said, slowly, "we could." She grinned. "Are you going to do that too? You seem to make a good witch — although first, I think I'd need to teach you to curtsey, and how to sit like a lady, and…"
John violently shook his head, causing his long hair to whip him in the face.
Susan giggled.
John grimaced. This was going to be a long hour.
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