Chapter Two

Joe's Note: This chapter merges the previous chapters two through four, so if you've read them, you're not missing anything if you skip over it this time around.


     Draco opened his eyes and groaned as he took in the large amounts of white that surrounded him. He was in the hospital wing. Oh joy. He momentarily wondered how he'd ended up there before the accident in potions came back to him and he groaned again. The… whatever… meant to sabotage Potter's potion had fallen into his instead, causing the concoction to turn pink and explode in his face. And now he was here. Oh, and he probably still owed Slughorn a make-up session after dinner tonight.

     Fan-fucking-tastic.

     Sitting up in bed, Draco ran through his usual post-disaster ritual. Wiggle the left arm. Check. Wiggle the right arm. Check. Left leg. Check. Left arm. Check. Okay, he could feel all his body parts, so he hadn't had anything blown off, melted off, or otherwise removed from his body. He could see, smell, and hear… so no deep damage to his face. Cosmetic damage could be repaired if one had enough money and his family definitely had enough money. Then he looked down and his mind came to a screeching halt.

     That was not his body. It wasn't. Couldn't be. His body was, while a bit on the lean side from a relatively posh life mixed with a bit of quidditch practice, decidedly male. His body did not have rounded, feminine hips that made his pants feel too tight. Or, for that matter, breasts that caused sizable bulges, pushing up against a shirt and jumper that had formerly been fitted to a flat, male chest.

     Half a mo. If he had girl hips, breasts, and… Draco rolled to one side and looked back. Yes, his posterior was definitely larger and rounder than it had been. So if he had girl hips, a girl's butt, and breasts… rolling onto his back again and grabbing the waistband of his trousers, Draco peeked inside. Scratch that, something HAD been removed by the potion. Something terribly important to him at that.

     Rolling off the bed he was lying on, Draco padded over to one of the privacy dividers and drew his wand, transfiguring the curtain into a reflective surface so he could get a better look at the damage. Strangely enough… he didn't look that different. Well, apart from the obvious change from male to female and the new body parts that came with such a transformation. But he still had his grey eyes, blonde hair, and pale skin.

     His eyes actually looked bigger and a bit more expressive in this form, though, and his hair had lengthened during the change; now it brushed against the small of his back instead of his ears like it had only a short time ago. And the potion had evidently retained its skin-clearing properties; he couldn't spot a single blemish anywhere on his visible skin.

     Moving on to the new body parts, Draco turned sideways so he could examine himself in the mirror-like surface. Merlin, was his ass actually that big now? Or was it the uniform pants? It looked like it was about to explode out of the grey slacks he was wearing… and felt like it every time he did so much as breath, too. There was a similar stretched sensation across his chest, where his breasts strained at his uniform top. He wasn't quite sure what size they were; his experience was limited to peeking at the tags on Pansy's bras and he was definitely bigger than her by a good margin. Huh. He turned to face the divider and then turned once more to stare at his profile again. He actually looked pretty damn hot like this.

     Then something occurred to Draco, putting a damper on the exploration of his new form. He didn't even know what he'd dropped into that potion and if it was an already-cut portion of a larger plant or animal, he might not even recognize it well enough to point it out to the professor. So he had no clue what he'd done to turn his simple skin-clearing potion into a transgendering one, and figuring it out would be a trial in and of itself.

     Draco tilted his head back and stared up at the ceiling. "How could this happen to me?" Oh Merlin. He even SOUNDED like a girl, all soft and higher-pitched than his regular voice. That was wrong on so many levels, he couldn't even begin to count them all. "I just wanted a little recognition back. Is that so bad?"

     "I don't think so, but I suspect the nargles disagreed." The new voice made Draco jump and twist to face the interloper, a hex already on his lips and just begging to be unleashed on… Loony Lovegood? Then he replayed the words in his head. ' I don't think so, but I suspect the nargles disagreed.' Of course it would be Lovegood. Who else would come up with tripe like that, much less offer it up in response to a rhetorical question someone asked?

     While he loathed Potter, looked down on the Weasleys for being blood traitors, was embarrassed for Longbottom, and Granger offended his pureblood sensibilities… Lovegood actually scared him a bit. He'd first met her when she wandered deep into the Slytherin dungeons, back in his second year during the Chamber of Secrets incident. Her spacey manner and odd eyes had unsettled him then; now that she was older and had fought Death Eaters at the Ministry, she was downright frightening in his opinion.

     Moving back to his bed, Draco tried to sit on the edge. He actually had to hop a little to get himself up there, which drove home something he'd absently noticed but not really processed while staring at himself: he was shorter as a girl. But there were more important things than his height to worry about, such as why Loony was there to witness his humiliation? And since his legilimency skills were about as well developed as the Weasley family's investment portfolio… "Loony? What are you doing here?"

     "Did the nargles take your eyesight as well?" Loony hopped down off the bed next to his and closed the gap between them, invading his personal space and peering into his eyes. "They're quite pretty. It'd be a shame if they didn't work."

     What the bloody hell? He'd known she was a few cards short of an Exploding Snap deck from the stories that went around the castle, but this was just ridiculous. "My eyes work fine, you little freak. Get away from me!" Draco put his hands on Lovegood's shoulders and gave her a hard shove, ashamed to notice that his new female form had even less upper body strength than his male body had possessed and that she'd moved back more from the single step she took than from the push he gave her.

     Then he noticed the Ravenclaw blue streaks in her pale blonde hair, likely the remnants of a spell gone wrong, and felt even more ashamed of himself for not noticing something so obvious. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath to calm himself, released it, and then opened his eyes. "I can see fine, Lovegood. You need to have your hair fixed, don't you?" Actually, he liked her better this way. Now that he thought about it, his new form and Luna's body were disturbingly similar looking and her blueness helped differentiate them a bit more.

     Loony shook her head. "Actually, I rather like my hair this way. I was hoping the Madam could tell me a spell to keep it from being reverted back to normal by my peers. They'd be petty enough to undo their own prank if they realized I liked it. I was even thinking of braiding it later." Oh good. She wanted it that way, meaning Draco would be spared the effort of trying to talk her into exactly that. She cocked her head to the side and stared at him. "You know, your hair is almost the same length now. Would you like braids too?"

     Draco pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned. Why him? "…sure, Loony. Why not?"


     By the time Madam Pomfrey finally emerged from her office, Professors Snape and Slughorn in tow, Lovegood had already tried two different styles of braids in his hair and had undone it again so she could make a third go at it. Honestly, his newly lengthened hair didn't bother him too much; his father had long hair and was considered respectable in pureblood high society. And letting Loony braid it kept her blissfully silent, giving him time to think.

     As much as he was panicking inwardly, Draco forced himself to look calm and in control on the outside. His father had beaten one lesson into him from an early age, sometimes literally when he failed particularly badly: he was a Malfoy first, and Draco second. Regardless of how badly being a girl freaked him out, he was still a Malfoy and nobody was going to see how much it affected him.

     The forced calm was also helping him sort through the events that had led to him being in the situation. He was fairly certain that the first step was figuring out how the bloody hell he'd managed it. Which meant figuring out what the hell the ingredient was. Maybe… maybe he could get his great-great-grandfather's pensieve out, drop the memory into it, and take it to an apothecary? And once he knew what potion he'd inadvertently created, maybe Severus could help him to reverse its effects, if Professor Slughorn proved incapable…

     Pomfrey looked them over but when Luna showed no signs of leaving and Draco didn't try to remove her, the nurse shrugged before launching into the conversation with the subtlety of a speeding bludger. "You have two choices, Mister Malfoy. Or should I say Miss Malfoy? Whatever you've done to yourself, none of us can think of an easy way to reverse it. So we can either summon the headmaster to discuss reenrolling you as a female student, or we can summon your mother to take you from the school until a solution can be found."

     Jaw working for a moment with nothing coming out, Draco grabbed desperately for some semblance of composure as his inner calm began to crumble. "I don't understand. Other students are allowed to stay enrolled while suffering from potion or spell damage. Lovegood here wants to keep hers. Why, if my father was still a governor…"

     "But he isn't, Mis…s Malfoy." Draco's eyes widened as his godfather sighed and did his best to avoid looking at him. "And even if he was, he would have no say and these would be your options. Your situation is unique because… well…"

     Luckily (or unluckily) for Draco, Slughorn was a bit less reserved and didn't mind saying what Snape was thinking. "What Severus is trying to say is that we have no choice but to separate you from your current peers for propriety's sake. Sending you back to your male dormitory and male peers in your new, very female, body could prove to be problematic, what with you all being old enough to…"

     Oh, eww! Eww eww eww! Draco hadn't even thought about that… or anything more complex than 'ooh, pretty!' in relation to his female body. But hearing from three different sources that he was well and truly female for the time being, inside and out, and people were now worrying about him as they would worry about a pureblood heiress rather than a pureblood heir…

     Draco's eyes rolled back in his head and he fainted dead away.