The Fourth Unforgivable

Chapter 2:

Foiling the Fourth

"You know what, Malfoy?" said Harry-the-bratwurst. "I'm starting to really dislike this state of existence."

They were in Dumbledore's left robe pocket, because the Headmaster had decided it would be much safer for fragile little sausages there than on the table, and they were bumping against something that was starting to make Harry wish he had lost consciousness upon transformation. At first he thought it was Malfoy, but no bratwurst, no matter how slutty his reputation, was that hard.

Malfoy-the-bratwurst mumbled something incoherent from within the folds of fabric. Harry started to cup his hands around his ears, and then remembered that bratwurst did not have hands. "What was that?"

"I said," came Malfoy's voice clearly as Dumbledore gave something akin to a hop-skip, "for once you are right, Potter. And it really sucks ass."

"Nice try, Malfoy, but I'm about as wursted as I'm ever going to get."

"Worth a shot."

They fell silent and Harry once again thanked his lucky stars that bratwurst did not have eyes either, since it appeared he would not be graced with unconsciousness anytime soon. He also thanked whoever was in charge that nude Transfiguration between Dumbledore and Voldemort had been so... well, nude. Being in Dumbledore's pocket meant staying behind with the clothing piled on the floor, and he did not think it would have been too enjoyable to be in physical contact with either of them, especially considering what he had been able to hear from his place beneath the discarded robes. The Rectus Enlargeus spell had an especially distasteful ring to it.

"Well, then Potter, do something."

"I... what?"

"You heard me." Malfoy's little bent form rolled back and forth as much as the pocket fabric would allow. "You fought Voldemort before. Cast a spell or something."

"In case you hadn't noticed, I not only have no wand, but also no hand to hold a wand."

"Oh yes, I forgot," Malfoy snickered. "Holding wands is not Harry Potter's specialty."

Any reply of Harry's was cut short by a big hand wrapping itself around him and Malfoy and pulling them both out of the pocket. They were dumped onto a very hard, stiff surface that Harry took to be a table.

"Where am I?" Malfoy's voice snarled to his left. "Potter! What the hell have you done?"

"I didn't do anything, Malfoy, so shut your-"

A voice boomed down to them. "Now, now boys, no more quarreling. It has come to my attention that life as a sausage may not suit you, so listen up. I'm going to tell you how to resume your normal shapes."

Dumbledore took a deep breath and his voice began again. Harry listened earnestly. But soon, and for the third time in as many hours, he began to wish he was not just unconscious, but dead.

"Potter!" Malfoy hissed. "Is he... is he saying what I think he's saying?"

"Yes."

"Oh my - I don't want to hear about nude Transfiguration! It was all I could do to block it out in the first place!"

"Trust me, Malfoy, I have no desire to relive the experience either."

"Well, then, find some way to stop him, before he gets to the part where he transforms Voldemort into a-"

Alas, it was too late, and Harry was suddenly filled with visions of a very evil, very cackly, very Dark-Lord-ish bowl of chocolate Body Frosting. Draco's frenzied scream accompanied the image, and Harry only just realized he was screaming along with him when there was a piwf, and suddenly he had ears and hands and eyes again.

The first thing he saw with those eyes was a naked human Malfoy seated next to him on the table, blinking at him. Both of them yelped and covered their faces.

"Ah, splendid!" Dumbledore laughed heartily. "Glad to see you have not suffered any permanent damage, boys. If you would like, I can lead us all in a group stretch to work out the kinks."

Harry jumped down and hid beneath the table. "No thank you, Headmaster."

"No? How about you, Draco?"

A muffled whimper sounded from a cabinet behind Harry. Dumbledore sighed. "And I was hoping to get rid of this soreness. Oh well."

He waved his wand and conjured two sets of robes. As soon as Harry had his situated, he crawled from under the table. He looked up to see Dumbledore hunting around in an inner pocket of his robes.

"Thank you, sir. I was starting to think I would be stuck like that forever."

"Stuck where?" Malfoy said, emerging from the cabinet, brushing his robes off. He watched Harry sharply, and when nothing happened, his face fell. "Aw, damn..."

Dumbledore pulled his bag of Bertie Bott's from the pocket and grinned. "No dice, Mr. Malfoy. Harry is now immune, as are you."

"You said that before," Malfoy muttered, scowling. "If you knew how to turn us back, why did you only do it now and not earlier?"

Dumbledore shrugged. "I got bored."

The boys stared at him, mouths gaping open. The Headmaster winked at them.

"Now boys, there's no need for that. I got all my hijinks out already." He popped a handful of beans into his mouth.

"Bored? Bored??" Malfoy spluttered at the same moment that Harry asked "Where's Voldemort?"

"There was nothing for it. I wanted to continue our fun, but of course he had to wax all relationship on me. He got all whiny and cranky and wouldn't agree to be changed into a-"

"Stop. Please." Malfoy gave a small sob and hid his face in his hands.

"So," Harry said, "he's gone?"

"Nope. The old boy's wandering around the castle someplace. Wanted to take a walk. Some nonsense about cooling off, having time apart. As if we hadn't already had plenty of time apart. He said he'd come back when I was ready to talk sensibly." Dumbledore pocketed his beans and rubbed his palms together gleefully. "That settles it. I'll show him sensible."

Malfoy and Harry looked at each other worriedly.

"Right, then. We need to transform every bratwurst back into a student before he gets back. The nerve, coming into my home and telling me how to run my affairs..."

Harry cleared his throat. "Sir? How do we... do it?"

Dumbledore blinked at him. "Surely you don't need me to explain... Oh! Yes, yes, retransformation! Well, it works like this: everyone transformed by the Freudius Slippiticus is essentially too naïve on some level to fully consider the implications of the image or idea that transformed him or her. As a sausage, it is of course impossible to think of anything unrelated to being a sausage in detail. They must be brought to a head, so to speak, with the ideas that turned them into a bratwurst. That means" -and here he leaned in conspiratorially towards the two bys-"you must do what I just did."

Malfoy snorted. "What, rehash the antics of our Headmaster and the most evil wizard in the known universe? No, thank you."

Dumbledore shook his head, chuckling. "No, no, no. You must force them to picture something so utterly beyond them that their physical form reverts into what it was when it first transformed."

"That," sniffed Malfoy, "is hardly a realistic outcome."

"Of course it isn't, Mr. Malfoy," said Dumbledore, rolling his eyes. "This is Hogwarts, we're all fighting a magical battle with a wizard who is currently hopping around the trophy room like a big evil bunny, and everyone has turned into a bratwurst. What's realistic about that?"

The Headmaster sighed happily and clapped his hands twice. "All right then! Get to it, boys. And remember, stamina, stamina, stamina!"

* * *

Malfoy stared down at the slightly shriveled sausages on the floor of the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom. "I'm not entirely sure I want to transform all these whiny Gryffindors back into themselves."

Harry grunted, stooping to gather his former classmates in his hands. "Why, may I ask, are you doing this at all, Malfoy? Shouldn't you be fawning all over Voldemort right now, offering to lick his-"

"Don't even go there, Potter."

"-boots?" Harry grinned nastily. Malfoy fixed him with a glare.

"As a matter of fact, I have no desire to be Voldemort's tool if all he's going to do is run around Hogwarts playing illicit games with our Headmaster. I had much more lofty goals in mind."

"I'll let that 'tool' comment pass." Harry grimaced, depositing all but one of the sausages in the corridor outside. "We may as well just try one of them first, to see if this works. Wouldn't want to traumatize them anymore than necessary."

"If it were up to me..."

"Just think of something sexually explicit, please."

The two boys thought for several minutes. Then Harry turned to Malfoy expectantly. Malfoy sneered back at him. "News flash. I can't think of a bloody thing."

"Malfoy, why don't you tell him about your first time? That ought to be so deep in the gutter he'll transform before you finish the first sentence."

Malfoy fidgeted and clasped his hands behind his back. "Well, actually, there's not much to tell."

Harry frowned at him. Malfoy glared.

"Well, excuse me, Potter, for not living up to my reputation!"

"You mean you're a virg-Oh, for crying out loud... Here, step back, I'll do it."

Malfoy gurgled. "Y-You, Potter? You're not a v-"

Harry sighed loudly. "That is none of your business, Malfoy! I am simply going to tell him about something I caught my cousin watching on television late one night over the summer. Nearly killed me then, and I only saw half of it. Should do the trick."

Harry planted his feet directly in front of Neville-the-slightly-misshapen-sausage and proceeded with his narrative. Malfoy's eyes got wider and wider with each passing second.

"Wait, wait, wait, he put his what up the other guy's where??"

"Malfoy."

"At the same time as the two women were playing with his-"

"Malfoy! Would you stop interrupting? Neville's never going to change back if he doesn't get a solid picture."

"Good lord, Potter! Any more solid and he's going to choke!"

"Exactly, now if you please..."

"Wait, Potter... was it... stimulating?"

"Immensely. Now if I could just..."

"Do you think you could... describe it for me again? So I can recreate it sometime."

"Bloody hell, who'd want to recreate that?" said Neville, bursting back into his human form.

Harry raised an eyebrow. "BBC Five, that's who."

"This tele- fishon thing sounds bloody crackers, if you ask me," Malfoy said, shaking his head.

Harry glared at him and Malfoy frowned. "I know, Potter, I know. Nobody asked."

* * *

It took about a half an hour to take care of the rest of the Defense Against the Dark Arts students, and then they opted to go up to the Gryffindor common room and tackle the sausages there. The Creeveys were incredibly easy to transform: Malfoy had only just begun his analysis of the joys of various farm animals when both brothers piwfed back into existence with extremely shocked looks on their faces. It was such a success that Harry allowed Malfoy to continue where he left off, this time on the Weasleys, who took so long to change back that Harry was seriously beginning to reconsider his friendship with the family. For his trouble, Malfoy got a slap in the face from Ginny and a wink and wiggled eyebrow from Ron, and Harry thought it best to head somewhere where there was less tension.

"Come on, Malfoy, let's go find Hermione."

Colin jumped up and waved his hand about. "Ooh, ooh she's in the library do I get extra house-points for this Prefect Malfoy do I do I do I?"

Harry stared at Colin, speechless.

"I'll handle this one, Potter." Malfoy sauntered up to Colin, leaned over and whispered something in his ear. Colin's eyes went so wide Harry thought they would fall right out of his skull and roll into the fireplace. He turned deathly pale, and gazed at Malfoy with such reverence that Harry blinked. Malfoy smirked and walked back to where Harry stood.

"What exactly did you say to him, Malfoy?"

"Oh, nothing that bears repeating. Just named a few ways to earn extra house points if he felt like swinging by Slytherin later tonight."

They headed out through the portrait, leaving the elder Creevey gaping like a landed bass.

* * *

"Holy... Hey, Potter, we're going to have a difficult time changing the mudblood back. Come here and take a look at this book she was reading."

Harry peered at the illustration and rubbed his eyes hard. "Yowsers. Wasn't that a form of Muggle torture, you know, in the olden days?"

"Who knows? I never took Muggle studies." Malfoy thumbed a few pages and shuddered visibly. "But that would certainly torture me."

"Malfoy, kindly have the decency to avoid putting images of you in those positions inside my head."

They were in the Restricted Section, standing over a small sausage with very bushy hair. Malfoy pursed his lips and snapped the book shut. "Well, how about something with house-elves? She hadn't reached that chapter yet."

"No good. She's always thinking about house-elves. What about my television show again?"

Malfoy shrugged and stepped back. Harry launched into an even more graphic description than he had given Neville. But after several minutes...

"Cripes, Potter, you suck at this. That's not nearly horrifying or surprising enough to combat this book."

Harry turned to the other boy and glowered. "Well, you should talk, Malfoy. At least I know something about it! People who pretend not to be the virgin they are should just keep their mouths shut."

"Malfoy's a virgin??" the bratwurst squeaked. There was a piwf and Hermione stood before them, brushing dust from her arms. She goggled at Malfoy. "Geez, what a spot-light hog!"

"Oh, go put some bloody clothes on, Granger."

* * *

It took at least a day, but finally, everyone was pretty much back to normal at Hogwarts... in the loosest sense of the word. Madam Hooch quickly developed an alarmingly obsessive interest in cleaning and polishing all the Quidditch broomsticks one by one out on the pitch. Divination was canceled permanently due to the fact that Mrs. Norris had eaten Madam Trelawney, but no one really blamed her, and the tower classroom was transformed into a therapy lounge for the first-years and Colin Creevey. People noticed that whenever Lavender and Pansy ran into each other in the halls, they developed rather glazed faraway looks and chuckled stupidly for several minutes. The house-elves had to be paid double just to return to the kitchens, and even then they refused to cook anything elongated or vaguely sausage-like. Professor McGonagall avoided Dumbledore as if he were a Blue-Ballooning-Doxy-Plague, and Harry and Malfoy were excused from Transfiguration for the rest of the year in the interest of their own mental preservation.

No one ever figured out how to transform Crabbe and Goyle back into humans. Malfoy tried for several days, and even Harry, Professor Flitwick, and finally Professor Dumbledore put their two cents in, but to no avail. Snape was called up from the dungeons to assist them but he refused on the grounds that "making potions in order to transform two dimwitted bovine sausages back into two dimwitted bovine humans is hardly in my job description and I will expel you all if you ever let Dumbledore come near me again." So that was that, and nobody in Slytherin House or anywhere else really noticed any difference in the conversations with Crabbe-the-bratwurst and Goyle-the-bratwurst anyway.