Harry Potter and the Battle of the Sexes

Harry thought back to the meeting he'd had last night with 24 other boys. One boy from each year of each house had been selected to complete this most sacred duty. Harry himself and the other three "House Representatives" had performed the ritual for their year. The results would become quite obvious the next morning.

It served them right, Harry supposed. After that trick with the Poetry Potion-- he shuddered to remember his own horrid rhyming --the girls had it coming. Only four days had passed since Harry and his fellows had woken up spouting out what sounded like a bad imitation of Shakespeare, and the very next day (after the potion had worn off, of course), he and his Comrades-in-Arms Draco, Justin, and Terry had planned an apt revenge.

Harry lay awake at 5:47am, contemplating the turn of events. Ron had remained his steadfast friend, but though he was good at knowing what level of prank would be good to match that of the girls', Ron was horrible at thinking up a good and more importantly doable antic. Ron's strategy was more of a "don't talk to them until they apologize-- or you need help with homework" sort of deal.

No, the only other boy in his year who matched Harry's skill at pranking was Harry's own arch-rival, Draco Malfoy. All in all, this wasn't terribly surprising. Any GOOD pair of enemies would have fairly matching skills, or else one would just crush the other and there wouldn't be any point to being an enemy, right? So it made sense that Draco was quite good at pranking. What he was horrible at-- as had been proven time and again by Harry himself --was not getting caught. Ironically enough, Harry easily beat out the Slytherin when it came to this. And it wasn't just because of his Invisibility Cloak and wide, innocent-looking eyes, either; Harry proved to be quite good at coming up with alibis and people to verify them.

He had discussed this once with Draco, actually. In a rare moment of camaraderie (and slight intoxication, as they'd sneaked to Hogsmeade and gotten their hands on a large supply of butterbeer), he spilled his true opinion to his rival.

"Sometimes I think..." (you must imagine his words being somewhat slurred, here) "...that...Gryffindors aren't really brave...they're just Slytherins who hide better." At this point he'd hiccupped and stumbled as he and Draco had made their way back to the castle, stumbling through the tiny passageway that went between the town of Hogsmeade and Hogwarts. "And, ya know, sometimes I think..."

This was as far as Harry could remember of that night. He'd woken up in his own bed, however, still fully dressed, so he assumed he'd fallen asleep and....well, he wasn't sure if Draco had actually carried him to bed, or had found someone else to do so, or what. He chose not to worry about it.

His intent in allowing himself to become inebriated with the silver-blonde Slytherin was to get the boy to open up, but all he'd really learned about Draco was that he was one of those silent, brooding drunks. Quite disappointing, really. Working with Draco on ideas for pranks, Harry found that when he wasn't being an obnoxious, spoiled, racist (for lack of a better word for it) bastard, Draco was quite entertaining. He also had a highly amusing dead-on impression of Severus Snape, which had Harry in stitches for twenty minutes of their precious planning time.

Harry was working to justify this sudden change in opinion when he heard a scream. Followed by several screams. Followed by a loud roar of what sounded like a herd of screaming girls.

Harry grinned and jumped out of bed and quickly woke Ron, Seamus, Dean, and Neville up.

"Showtime, boys!"

* * *

"HARRY FUCKING POTTER!" Hermione stood at the bottom of the stairs to the girls' dormitory, still wearing her tanktop-and-sweats pajamas, her face a furious scarlet. "WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE?!" Without waiting for an answer, the calm, rational brunette jump-tackled her raven-haired best friend, who fell backwards onto the ground and nearly had the wind knocked out of him. Before he could gasp for breath, however, Hermione had put her hands around his throat, choking him. "WHAT DID YOU DO!?" she reiterated after a few moments, as Ron yanked her forcefully off of Harry, who gasped for breath.

"What are you talking about?" Fred popped into this room, flanked by his twin.

"Our REFLECTIONS!" Hermione shrieked. "They show...they show..."

"Show what?" George asked innocently. "Your lovely visage?"

"They show...they show monsters!" Lavender had stomped into the room. "I looked into the mirror and saw a god damn BANSH--" Parvati cut her off before she could finish.

"Consider yourself lucky, Lav! My reflection was a hag!" Parvati was horribly offended by this.

"Mine-- well, never mind, but tell us what the hell you did to us!" Hermione demanded, flushed red to match the decor of the common room.

"We transformed you into your true inner selves!" Seamus's Irish lilt broke into the conversation, quickly silenced as about ten girls-- they were all pouring into the common room at this point --threw pillows at them.

"You didn't tell us what you did to make us spout poetry, we figured it out on our own. So should you. What's the matter, Hermione, don't any of your books tell you anything?" Harry smirked as Hermione's eyes widened in fury. The smirk was rather a defense mechanism, however; Harry was slightly terrified of Hermione when she got this mad. The last time it had happened, Malfoy had been slapped quite badly-- had a slap mark for about a week. And there was that one time when she turned Ron's hand into a turtle (he'd been teasing her, as usual, and said that he bet she couldn't turn his watch into a turtle. She had 'missed'.) And Harry's throat had yet to forget the feeling her her hands stopping his air supply. Most fortunately, the tense moment ended, her eyes narrowed and she backed off. Harry was inwardly feeling relieved when Hermione finally spoke.

"Fine. We'll figure this out. And you'll be sorry!" At this point, she turned to the other girls. "Get dressed and meet me in the library. Parvati, alert the other houses. I assume they've been hit by this...this..thing too?" This last bit was directed at Harry, who allowed his smirk to grew into an evil grin in response.

The Gryffindor boys waited in the common room in complete silence. They waited for the girls to get dressed and waited as they all left through the portrait hole. They waited another ten seconds. And then they laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

Unfortunately, they laughed so long and so hard that they were still laughing when they arrived-- late --for Transfiguration. McGonagall gave them all detention. But it was worth it. Harry was certain that Hermione would figure the whole thing out. He just hoped that it wouldn't be for a couple of days. The girls were forced to go through their entire day makeup-less and without their usual meticulous hair styling for lack of mirrors. Even the mirrors in the prefects' bathrooms showed horrible monsters. Rumor had it that Pansy Parkinson actually saw herself in the mirror as she normally was. She was quite humiliated, as were all the other girls. Of course, even the girls' rather pathetic attempts to not be seen without their usual pound or two of makeup wasn't as funny as their initial reactions had been. Reports were the same throughout all the four houses: the girls had all thought they had actually been changed into the monsters. It took them five or ten minutes to calm down enough to notice that they looked perfectly normal when they looked down at themselves, and that all the other girls looked normal despite their reflections too.

Most of the girls were most eager to talk about what their reflections had been. They decided that the most attractive girls were being given the ugliest reflections, which was why Parvati saw a hag-- notoriously the ugliest female creature out there --while Pansy saw only herself. Only Hermione seemed to keep it a secret, and none of the other girls would tell it, clearly out of a newfound sense of gender loyalty. Even the chatty Lavender refused to divulge her roommate's secret, which caused Harry to wonder on it even more.

Hermione had spent the rest of the day locked in the library. She even skipped her classes, which was something she never did, to search feverishly for a cure for whatever hex, curse, or potion had been used on them. Harry had peeked in on her before going in to tell her that it was almost after hours and she needed to come back up to the dorm. She'd gotten permission from McGonagall to go through the Restricted section, and she was finding no spell or potion that could alter only a person's reflection.

Yes, this had been a brilliant plan, Harry thought to himself that night. Even under Veritaserum the boys would be able to say that they had done nothing to the girls directly. Yes, Draco's idea had turned out to be perfect. Harry had dreamed up the list that started the war, but it had been Draco's idea to hex all the girls' mirrors.