nightseer

A Flip of the Broom



“What’s your name, son?”

Harry’s jaw dropped. He was bloody famous. He had killed the bloody Dark Lord. There wasn’t a witch or wizard alive who didn’t know his name.

Keywords there being witch and wizard.

“Where am I? And why am I here?” Harry shot back, earning himself a frown from the muggle doctor. He looked around the small hospital room and twitched at the oh-so-happy pink and purple bunny wallpaper before his eyes zeroed in on the bathroom door. He hoped this didn’t take long; he had to go.

“Galbadia General,” the doctor snapped, and tapped his clipboard with his small flashlight Harry knew would be flashed in his eyes the first chance the doctor had. The man was tapping it the same way Poppy did when he had a concussion. “You were brought in yesterday with a concussion. Your name, please. I need to get in contact with your parents.”

Harry nodded absently, looking down at his small hands. A concussion explained why his head hurt…

‘Hold the Thestral.’ What parents? And why were his hands so small?

Harry lifted one hand and wiggled his fingers. Fingers that were missing the distinctive calluses from flying and wand waving. Fingers attached to hand that belonged to ten year old Harry Potter, not twenty-three year old Harry Potter at the end of his Auror training. And his feet, his feet were at least two feet away from the end of the bed, so he had either been shrunk or de-aged. Most likely de-aged—the doctor was asking about parents and he was in a child’s room with pink bunny wallpaper.

Harry scowled at the wallpaper. He hated pink bunnies. Rabbits were okay, pink bunnies in all their cute, cartoon glory were wrong. Not evil or gross, just disturbingly wrong. He blamed that toy Bill’s youngest liked throwing at him for the wrongness of pink bunnies.

“Your parents?” the doctor prompted irritably.

“They’re dead,” Harry snapped, glaring at the doctor. He had a crisis here. Couldn’t the man back off until he changed the bunnies into nice little yellow ducks?

The doctor sighed, looking up as if praying for divine intervention. Harry was tempted to tell him the clipboard he was using a shield ruined the image an exasperated adult, leaving behind the impression the man was scared of children. Or just Harry. Harry scared a lot of people, so it was entirely possible. “Your name then, if you don’t mind.”

Harry opened his mouth to tell the man, then snapped it shut. He was roughly ten years old, missing his wand, and in muggle hospital. Anyone with a grudge could find him and kill him before he figured out how to fix his problem and found his way back to the relative safety of the Ministry. There was also the small problem of not knowing exactly where he was, since the last thing he remembered was being with Kingsley in an abandoned warehouse in London trying to stop a ritual of some sort. If something had gone wrong, Kingsley wouldn’t have taken him to a muggle hospital; he would’ve taken him to St. Mungo’s.

Of course, if he didn’t know where he was, no one else knew where he was, either. And he was ten. The last time he was ten, it had sucked…

Huh.

‘This has possibilities,’ Harry thought with a small smile.

“My name’s Laguna,” he said, falling back on the codename Ron had jokingly given him during the war. A rather spiteful joke in Harry’s opinion, since it came from his fear of all forms of water short of showers and rain after encountering one too many lakes and ponds filled with Inferi.

“Surname?” the doctor said, as he tucked his penlight into his lab coat pocket and pulled out a pen.

Crap. He hadn’t thought of one yet. He made squeaky moan/whimper noise and did his best ‘deer in the headlights’ expression, trying to appear panicked and failing horribly. The doctor humphed, and his pen was instantaneously replaced with the penlight. Harry tried to squirm away as the man flashed his eyes with the thing, and then took his pulse. Harry had no clue how these two actions were supposed to help him suddenly remember his name. Then he heard the man mutter something about arranging a CAT scan.

“For now I’ll give your first name and description to the police. Maybe they’ll have better luck,” the doctor said to his clipboard once he let go of Harry’s wrist. He looked up and stared at Harry, obviously not believing Harry didn’t remember but willing to play along for the moment.

Harry just stared back. After Poppy Pomfrey and her Potions of Doom, this man was a negative twelve on the intimidation scale.

The doctor gave Harry another tight frown, before warning him not to leave the room and walking out.

The instant the door swung closed, Harry jumped out of his bed and quickly walked to the small bathroom, ready to burst and needing to escape the bunnies. Sure, he had a concussion and the world wobbled with each step, but it was a thousand times better than asking Mr. Grumpypants to hold the plastic jug while he did his business on front of the bunnies.

Considering how big the mirror was, Harry was later surprised he didn’t notice something beyond being thirteen years too young was wrong until he discovered the soap dispenser on the wall was empty. He was poking the stack of clean washcloths to see if a bar of soap was hidden underneath, when his too straight hair flopped into his eyes.

Harry blinked at it, lifted his eyes from the counter to the mirror, and squeaked. His trademark messy black hair was still black and messy, but it was missing the waves that gave it its poof. The mess it was now came solely from a bad cut. And it was shiny—not Snape grease-shiny, but sleek-shiny. It made a startling contrast against his pale skin.

His skin was another surprise. He had always been pale before Hogwarts, but it had been a sickly pale, as his olive-toned skin needed a slight tan to look healthy. After getting his letter, Vernon had started giving him all the outside chores in an attempt to keep his freakiness from contaminating the house further, and he hadn’t looked so horrid, but this kind of peaches and cream, burn-the-second-the-sun-touches-skin kind of pale had never been Harry’s.

There were other changes—no lightning bolt scar, no glasses or contacts (Harry’s inner child did the ‘no more eye pokey’ dance), his nose was a bit thinner, his lips a little plumper, and he didn’t have the near starved, pinched look he had always had during his younger years. If it hadn’t been for his too bright green eyes, Harry wouldn’t have recognized himself in the mirror. He was damn sure no one else would recognize him.

Harry had a brief moment of panic before he smiled at his reflection. Harry Potter was gone, and Laguna whatever-surname-he-ended-up-choosing was left in his place. Until he found a way back or his friends found him, he was going to have fun.

Giving up on ever finding soap by the sink, Laguna grabbed the small bar from the shower and used it, already plotting on how to convince the police and doctors he truly had amnesia. This was a second chance at childhood, and he was determined to enjoy it this time around.

But first, he needed to find some pants. If there was one thing Poppy did right, it was giving her patients pajamas. Muggle hospital gowns with their open backs were cruel.

Not that the breeze didn’t feel nice. It felt quite good, actually. Laguna was tempted to find an air vent and stand over it.

The nurse giggling as he ran back to the bed, blushing all the way, nixed the idea, though.