Disclaimer * Harry Potter and all related characters and elements are the property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic, and Warner Bros.
 
 
 

hile Ron seemed to go wonky every time Phlegm entered the room, Harry himself felt that it was difficult to act normal when Ginny was around, which was a lot more than usual.  Not that Harry was complaining, but she could certainly be distracting at times.

    It had started the afternoon they went to the pond to swim.  Ron and Hermione were ignoring them, Ron far too busy trying to dunk Hermione, Hermione far too busy trying to keep her hair dry.  Ginny had simply winked at him and dove in, then suggested he come in, too.  The trouble was that it was cold, and while Ginny wanted to venture out into deeper areas, Harry was not at all confident about his swimming abilities.

    Fortunately Ginny was a patient tutor, though certainly attractive to the point of distraction at times despite her modest swimwear.  Harry didn't feel right about enjoying her figure, so he focused on his form instead.  She quickly showed him a few strokes, which boosted his confidence considerably.  By the end of the week Harry could even do a passible breaststroke and backstroke and they were moving on to the sidestroke and different ways to tread water.  There was nowhere that he didn't feel comfortable going now (at least, not after a little prodding from Ron or Ginny); Harry had never realized that simply moving around in water could be so fun... or so tiring.

    Every evening the four of them would stumble back to the burrow, noses and shoulders a little burnt, and enjoy one of Mrs. Weasley's insurpassable meals.  Harry's body was quickly filling out from the extra food and exercise, and he felt that the change was helping him on the broom, too, making it easier for him to perform some of the more complex maneuvers.  He certainly hadn't become a body builder, but Harry was pleased to note the overall effect on his muscle tone when he looked in the mirror, which no longer told him to comb his hair but made appreciative noises and compliments.

    Harry found it hard not to wonder if Ginny didn't notice, too.  She didn't seem to be thinking of Dean much, though he knew that she had written him once or twice.  Harry was beginning to wish that his dormmate had never heard of Ginny Weasley.  She was always saying something funny or running her fingers through her hair in just the right way to make it look invitingly soft to the touch.  Her new freckles brought out her eyes and he found that he enjoyed looking into them whenever they talked because they always said loads more than her words did.

    It had gotten to the point where Harry couldn't imagine not thinking of Ginny.  In fact, Harry found himself wondering why he had never noticed Ginny more and realized that it was must be because there were always so many distractions before.  The twins had always been blowing something up, or Hermione pulling her away for a giggle, or Mrs. Weasley would be trying to get him to eat more or whisk her beloved daughter away.  Ginny could have been talking about her mother that first morning:  she was overprotective.  He had noticed that on every trip to Diagon Alley he was pulled one direction and she another, always with her mother.

    But Harry knew that Ginny knew what she was doing with her wand and if she was mad it would be best to just get out of the way.  Oddly enough he didn't feel threatened or enraged by her temper as he did with the Dursleys or certain teachers who were gits:  he found it even more endearing.  Ginny seemed to stick up for him when no one else would.  
 
 

* * * * * *
 
 
 
    There was one night, however, in which Harry felt things might just be going a little bit too far.  Mrs. Weasley had planned a family picnic, and as luck would have it he got seated across from Ginny.  She was talking animatedly with Bill when Harry stuck his elbow in the butter dish.  He felt embarassed when she pointed out that he had corn in his teeth, then ecstatic when she pointed out his new look to Bill.  He'd taken to wearing his hair down in the evenings because his scalp was sore from sunburn and having it pulled back so tight for swimming and Quidditch.  Ginny was busy relating how even Mrs. Weasley had been unable to tame it, having tried to cut it with her wand once and a pair of shears from Mr. Weasley's collection twice.  It always grew back by the next morning and Harry was growing rather fond of the change.  However, he hoped that his sunburn would cover up the fact that he was turning slightly pink at Ginny's appreciative looks.  Tonks apparently didn't notice:

    "Your hair keeps growing back?  Not using your wand, are you Harry?" she butted in shrewdly and in an uncharacteristically adult manner.  Harry missed the old Tonks:  this was the first thing she had said all of dinner.

    "Of course not, Tonks," Ginny replied, "you know Harry only uses his wand in an emergency over the summer."  Harry's cheeks burned red again.

    "And you're the expert, aren't you, Gin," Bill returned.  It was Ginny's turn to be embarassed, but she made a good show of simply getting cross:

    "Of course not, I just know that Harry's not like Fred and George, trying to bend the rules, and being how he was raised by Muggles there's no chance that he even knows a hair growth charm."  She blushed suddenly, he eyes pleading for him to bail her out.

    "I was just telling everyone that the same thing used to happen to me back at the Dursleys," Harry announced.  "Uncle Vernon was always cutting my hair every other day, but their so-called-improved styles never would stick."

    "Aren't hair growth charms incredibly difficult?" asked Hermione, suddenly sounding scholarly.

    "Yeah, Mum couldn't even do one the time Fred and George set my head on fire," Ron confessed glumly.  The conversation quickly descended into tails of the twins lunacy, something Harry thought was a welcome distraction from the pressure that suddenly seemed to be coming from every direction.  
 
 

* * * * * *
 
 
 
    Later that night Harry found himself unable to sleep.  While this hadn't been unusual the last few days of his stay at the Dursleys, it was unheard of during a stay at the Weasleys.  But Harry found that his mind was racing a pitch-length a second.  He had tried reading from the book Ginny had given him, but even plagues in Egypt weren't really enough to take his mind off of her, despite the fact that he really was interested in finding out what would happen next.

    And then there was suddenly a sound outside the door.  Harry--suddenly realizing just how late it was--pretended that he had fallen asleep reading, certain that it must be Mrs. Weasley in to tell him that it was time to turn out the light.  The door slowly opened and a familliar voice pronounced a spell that Harry had never heard before.  Harry bolted upright in bed, shocked to discover that his hair had suddenly fallen out and Tonks and Ginny were standing over him, looks of silent glee on their faces.

    "What the big idea?" he demanded.

    "Shh..." Ginny giggled.  "You'll wake the Dursleys!  Not that they don't deserve it..." she fell into silent chuckles, one hand over her mouth, one hand on her stomach.  Harry ran his hand over his now bare scalp, which was also tender to the touch because of whatever jinx they had used.

    "Wotcher, Harry," Tonks actually looked a bit happy for a change.  "See if you can grow it back."

    "Grow it back?" he asked.  "What on earth are you two on about?"

    "Think about how you wish it looked," Tonks urged him.  "Come on then, give it a go."  Harry shook his head:

    "Look, thanks to you I now look exactly like the Dursleys want me to and there's not a thing i can do to change it!"  Ginny looked at him serious:

    "Well if you aren't even going to try!" she retorted.  She straightened her pajamas as if preparing herself for something:  "I'll just have to have Tonks do me, too, so we match."  Tonks pushed up her sleeves, a look of concentration on her face.  Harry could not bear to even think of Ginny's long red locks joining his coarse black ones on the floor.

    "No, don't..." Harry stopped, having suddenly realized that he had red hair sprouting out his head.  It grew to the same length as Ginny's, then suddenly stopped.  Ginny's eyes grew near as big as they had the time she first realized that Harry was eating breakfast before her while she was still in her nightclothes four years earlier.

    "Wow, Harry, you've been holding out on us," Tonks gaped.  "Have you been practicing?"  Ginny burst out laughing; Harry stumbled out of bed and grabbed the mirror she was holding out to him (Fred and George having long ago been banned from having such a breakable item in their room).  His hair looked exactly like Ginny's, right down to the highlights.  He blushed, not too keen that Ginny looked ready to fall down on the floor, she was laughing so hard and holding a stitch in her side.  He then looked into the mirror and thought of how his hair had looked at dinner; it promptly shrunk to its former length and turned its usual raven-black shade to boot, wild and unkept as ever.

    "What does this mean?" Harry asked.

    "You're a Metamorphmagus, silly," Tonks wiped a tear from her eye.  "Wait until I tell Re..."

    "But I can't be," Harry interrupted her.  Right now he did not want this getting out, especially when he had grown Ginny's hair, of all things.

    "Tonks figured it out over dinner, Harry," Ginny told him.  "See if you can do anything else."  Harry thought very hard on Dumbledore's crooked nose; half a minute later Ginny started clapping.

    "Bravo, Harry," Tonks complimented him.  "You've been doing hair for years, so it comes easy to you, but that was brilliant for a first try at a facial feature.  I'll have to tell Professor Dumbledore."  
 
 

* * * * * *
 
 
 
    Harry spent the entire night trying to change various body parts.  Ginny and Tonks had cheered him on at first, but eventually he got so fast that he had tuned them out because he had to concentrate so hard.  He found that he couldn't do two or more transformations at a time, but if he thought about something small hard enough he could probably change it.  He refrained from changing into any girl parts, however:  he wasn't eager to get stuck with anything of a girl's and not be able to change it back.

    Harry got so focused that he was surprised when the rooster crowed particularly loudly and a glance outside told him that the sun was just starting to peek over the horizon.  He looked about himself to find that Tonks was asleep in a chair, her head tilted back against the wall, and Ginny was lying on the bed, her hair strewn out across the pillow that was still covered with black hair.  The air coming in from outside was cool, and he felt uncomfortable looking at Ginny lying like that, so he tried to pull the blankets up over her.  Ginny stirred and opened her eyes, gazing up at him in a way that let him know that she wasn't used to being up so early:

    "What time...?" she mumbled, allowing her eyes to slide shut again.

    "Sun's coming up," he stated softly.

    "...do hair again..." Ginny exhaled softly and said no more, comfirming his theory that she wasn't really awake at all.  Harry began to panic:  he had never been in such a compromising position with a girl ever, and he couldn't bear the thought of Mrs. Weasley coming in to find her youngest daughter lying in the bed he'd been sleeping in.  He could just imagine Mr. Weasley running downstairs at the sound of his wife's scream and getting hit over the head with toaster or worse.

    "Ginny," he called out softly but much more urgently.  He pulled his robe on over his pajamas and looked around the room, as if trying to find something that would help him wake her.  "Ginny!"

    Ginny's eyes opened a bit and she groaned before rolling over and burying her head under the pillow.  He took a step closer, was now standing over her, and reached out to wiggle her shoulder.  Ginny promptly elbowed him in a particularly tender spot.  Harry couldn't help it:  he gasped out a few choice words and started hopping up and down, hoping it would take his mind off the pain, holding his shin as if that would help stop the throbbing it now felt.  Ginny, thankfully, was finally awake:

    "Oh, I'm so sorry, Harry!" she jumped out of bed, her hair a mess, her housecoat untied, and seemed torn between bolting for the door and trying to pull up the leg of his pajama bottoms which covered the wound (though not by much).  She finally got him to sit down on the bed and sit still long enough for her to have a look at it.  Then she promptly started laughing.  "For heaven's sake, you're going to wake up the house, and all for a little bump!  With the way you're carrying on you'd think I'd have stabbed you with Gryffindor's sword but there isn't even a bruise!"

    "There is, too!" Harry promptly thought of the most nasty looking bruise he could imagine and was happy to find that his leg had turned a horrid purple-green color.  Ginny started to giggle:

    "Boys!" she retorted.  "They can't take pain!  It's no wonder God made us to bear the children, we're obviously the stronger half of the species!"  Harry had no idea how to reply to this:  the thought of babies being born made him feel distinctly uncomfortable and odd at the same time.  He tried to shake the thought of a pair of green-eyed, red-headed twins (fighting over a toy broomstick) out of his mind because it made him feel ecstatic and embarassed and full of dread all at once.  Fortunately Tonks chose just this moment to fall out of her chair:

    "Wowser, look at the time," Tonks mumbled as she picked herself up off the floor.  She wasn't wearing a watch.  "Your Mum would skin me alive if she knew that I was falling down on the job of chaperoning you two," she yawned loudly, closing her eyes and stretching.     Ginny stood up quickly and tied her housecoat.  Tonks did a little cleaning charm, making most of his shaved hair vanish, and then straightened her clothes:  "Let's get out of here, quick," she opened the door:  "Keep practicing, don't use the mirror as a crutch, bad habbit to form you know..." and she stepped out into the hall.

    Ginny picked up the book she had given him--it had fallen to the floor in all the confusion--and gave him a small smile.  "Start with the new," she whispered to him, and she promptly walked out the door, throwing a wink at him over her shoulder.  She softly shut the door at last and Harry allowed himself a long sigh of relief.  This summer was definitely turning out to be more dangerous and interesting than he had ever imagined.  
 
 

* * * * * *
 
 
 
    What Harry was looking forward to the most, oddly enough, was a trip to Diagon Alley.  He hadn't been allowed to go the year before, and secretly felt very much attracted to the idea of buying Ginny (and Ron and Hermione of course) an ice cream and seeing all the familliar sites that he knew so well from his stay the summer three years earlier.  Fred and George had also been very absent--he hadn't seen them since King's Cross--and he found that the summer was actually getting to be a bit boring without them.  There was only so many times that one could stand to hear the same jokes from Mr. Weasley and be trounced at chess by Ron.  Mrs. Weasley was also exceedingly agitated and starting to get jumpy about trips to the paddock or pond even.

    Truth be told, Harry's wardrobe was also in a mess.  He had finally given his trunk a long overdue cleaning out and was dismayed at what he found.  His school supplies were only a little low, but his clothes simply would not do any longer.  While Dudley had always been larger than him, this was no longer exactly the case:  he would never match his cousin's girth, but his height was another matter.  Wearing Dudley's pants was embarassing and near impossible; the clothes were forever threatening to fall off him, even with a belt, yet they were grossly too short.  No one mentioned this of course, but Harry was actually looking forward to getting some robes that would show off his new physique.  A chance to peruse the Defense Against Dark Arts section at Flourish and Blotts seemed an exciting proposition, too.

    However, until the happy date arrived, Harry was forced to wear George's old swim trunks, a spare pair of Ron's pants, his Hogwarts uniform shirts with the sleeves rolled up to hide the fact that they were too short, and go barefoot.  Mrs. Weasley didn't really approve, but she didn't seem to like it when he wore Dudley's clothes either.  She finally drew the line when it came time for his party and made him throw on some of the twins old things that had been left behind:  she said that it was important to be respectable for one's guests.  Harry agreed with her but wasn't at all certain that anything the twins had enjoyed wearing quite fit into anyone's definition of respectable.