For the first time in decades Hermione stared at the uniform required witches hat with appreciation. Since it wasn't the first day of school it would look a bit odd to wear it, but it would be better than showing up to classes completely bald. She frowned ruefully, trying to remember any sort of potion that would help her. But she had always wanted her hair to be smoother or sleeker, so her knowledge of hair potions all ranged towards those types. When she had asked for a hair growth potion the nurse had looked at her like she had two heads, explaining that there was no such thing.

"Feel better Remus, think about the chew toys," Hermione said with a wink as she jammed the hat onto her head.

Remus shook his head, "Keep that up and I might not keep your hair thing a secret."

Hermione stuck her tongue out at him, "And if you don't keep my hair a secret I won't give my notes from the classes you're missing. And neither will Lily or Severus. Imagine trying to catch up from Sirius or James' notes?"

Remus stuck his tongue back out at her, "Fine, but you know that once we're done with Bellatrix you're going to be our favorite target again. And after that blackmail I might not try to talk them out of it this time."

Hermione gave a carefree laugh, "Can't turn my hair a different color anymore, now can you?"

She slipped out of the door as Remus was still laughing weakly. Hurrying down two corridors she slipped into a secret passage that shortened her trip up the the dormitory. Everyone else would be at lunch and she could grab her school supplies without anyone noticing. She hadn't really anticipated worried friends.

"Where have you been?" Severus growled at her as soon as she stepped through the portrait hole.

"You never came back last night, I was worried sick!" Lily said in a more friendly tone.

"And why are you wearing that stupid hat?" Snape looked at her like she as crazy.

"It's part of the uniform," Hermione said lamely.

"No one wears their hat," Lily responded, momentarily sidetracked from her worry over Hermione's being missing.

"My mother almost always wears hers," Hermione said.

"So now you're trying to be more like your mother?" Snape said with a cocked eyebrow. Before Hermione could react he had risen to his feet and advanced on her. He had the height advantage on her, and as Hermione tried to dodge his grab for her hat her sudden movement dislodged in anyways.

"Well," a voice from the stairs said mockingly, "I know your hair is horrible, but that's really a drastic remedy."

Hermione felt all the color drain from her face as she turned to look at the boy who looked so much like her lifelong friend.

"Why would I do this Potter?" Hermione said calmly, "I'm sure that you would have done it yourself in a few weeks. You're oddly obsessed with my hair. All of your little pranks seem to revolve around it. Blue and bronze one week, a hex on my brush to make my hair tangle the next, and that lovely little note about it that Severus had to remove from the boys restroom. If I didn't know who did this to me then I would have thought for sure that it was you." By the end of her statement Hermione's voice was so cold it was surprising that the common room fire was still burning.

"Who did?" Lily asked in a small voice.

Turning back towards her friend Hermione's voice was noticeably warmer, although she as somewhat saddened to see that Severus had gone somewhere else while her back was turned. "Bellatrix Black is what happened. She cast a few harmless hexes, but when I fought back she got pretty insane. She got a confundus charm off on me and I got to confused to fight back. I think I called her a bitch and things got really nasty. I blacked out and when I woke up I was in the hospital wing. I had to stay overnight. The jelly legs and backwards knees and other things were able to be sorted out, even allowing for the difficulty in taking off multiple curses. But there is no remedy for regrowing hair that has been forced to fall out at the roots. So, the uniform hat." Hermione pulled the hat firmly back on, but knew it wasn't really going to help her.

"You called Bellatrix a bitch to her face?" A new voice asked. Hermione turned to see Sirius standing behind James with a delighted grin on his face.

"I called her Trixie too," Hermione said with a matching grin.

"No wonder she went nuts," Sirius said, shaking his head in admiration. "I'll have to see if there's anything I can do to her. Subtly of course, I happen to love my hair."

"We're not helping her!" James burst out suddenly.

Sirius looked at his best friend in confusion, "Who said anything about helping her? I'm talking about getting my torturous cousin. Totally unrelated." When James calmed down her sent Hermione a wink while James couldn't see.

Hermione felt a smile starting to come back to her face, but felt it melt away when Severus came back. Before she could snap at him for running away he was speaking though, "Come on," he said brusquely, "There's no potions class right now so I should be able to use one of the cauldrons there, Professor Slughorn won't mind. I have an idea."

Snape's idea it turned out was to attempt to make the worlds first hair growth potion. A wild attempt for a first year. But Hermione had to admit that he had made a valiant effort as she scratched at the fuzz now covering her head.

"It's better than being completely bald," Lily said as she smacked Hermione's hand away from scratching her scalp. "And Severus says he as an idea on how to change it to work better. Since it's a new potion though he doesn't want you to try it until tomorrow. He said something about hair growing elsewhere if he wasn't careful."

"Hair elsewhere?" Hermione perked up a bit at that.

"Why would you want to grow hair elsewhere?" Lily asked.

"Not me," Hermione said with a slightly evil smile, "The Bitch."

It didn't take them long to find Severus and convince him to brew the modified potion at a strength where he thought it would cause excessive hair growth. It also didn't take Lily long to find Sirius and find out what Bellatrix liked for breakfast.

"Why breakfast," Severus asked as he and Lily followed Hermione as she led them through the halls. When she stopped in front of a portrait full of fruit he was even more confused. Lily stared in fascination as Hermione unerringly tickled the right spot and the portrait swung open to reveal the chaos of a giant kitchen full of house elves.

"Who here is able to help me with something?" Hermione said softly. Almost immediately four elves who hadn't been doing much broke away from the frenzy to approach them.

"What kind of help is miss needing?" The boldest one asked.

Hermione looked from side to side as if she were looking for someone following, "It has to be a secret, but it's nothing that could hurt anyone."

Two of the elves immediately turned and went back to the kitchen. The two left were younger than the others, and after exchanging looks one of them asked cautiously, "And what do you needs us to do?"

"There's a witch who attacked me," Hermione took off her hat to show her shorn locks, "She made all my hair go away. I just need this potion added to her stack of flapjacks that she'll eat in the morning."

"What will happen?" The other elf asked.

"Her hair will grow," Lily said simply.

"Then why doesn't miss drink the potion?" the first elf asked again.

"I already did," Hermione said, self consciously rubbing her fuzzy head. "But when Bellatrix drinks it it's not just the hair on her head that will grow. So will her nose hair and ear hair and arm hair." Hermione's grin was really starting to look vicious.

"Bellatrix?" One of the elves asked, suddenly standing up straighter. Without a word the other elf took the potion and walked away. The first one finished speaking, "Oh we's will do it. She deserves it."

"Well, that's some reputation," Severus said with raised eyebrows, "I thought house elves loved everyone."

Hermione was up early the next morning, scratching her new hair furiously as she sat outside the hospital wing. She smiled at a weak and scratched up Remus as he was assisted towards the door by Madam Pomphrey. She looked at Hermione with slight disapproval. "Wotcher Remus."

Remus looked at her and smiled weakly, "No wonder your hair is so hard to manage, look at how fast it's already grown."

Hermione ignored the jab instead to say, "If you think you're up to it you should come down to breakfast at the Great Hall. And watch the Slytherin table."

Remus glanced up at Madam Pomphrey and she shook her head and hmphed. "You need to come in here and take a pain potion and I need to at least heal up some of those scratches." She relented a bit though, "But you should be able to go down to the hall, you need some more meat on your bones anyways."

With a gleam in her eye Hermione got in a parting shot on her way out, "Meaty bones, huh? Might work better than chew toys." She ran before he could respond.

Hermione was a bit later than usual getting down to breakfast because of stopping to talk to Remus, but nothing had happened yet. She was surprised when Sirius was waiting for her at the door to the hall though. "Watch the Slytherin table this morning." He whispered to her.

"Oh no," Hermione said, wide eyed, "Please tell me you charmed or hexed her."

Sirius gave Hermione a weird look, "It's a charm. Why?"

"We gave her a potion," Hermione said with a sigh, "And multiple potions can have bad results. We promised the house elves that slipped it in her food that we wouldn't hurt her."

"You got the house elves to help you?" Sirius looked incredulous. "We are going to have to have a talk some time. But she should be here soon, don't want to miss the fun, now do we?"

Hermione nodded and went to sit at one end of the Gryffindor table with Lily and Severus. At the other end Sirius sat down with a foul tempered looking James. Apparently talking to Hermione was forbidden. After a few minutes a tired looking Remus came in and sat down with them.

Hermione just had time to load up her own plate of breakfast when she saw Bellatrix sit down at her table. The slightly older witch looked around the table with disdain before her eyes fell upon a stack of flapjacks. She grabbed them almost eagerly, but slowed down to take a ladylike bite. After the first bite though it was as though she were bewitched, and she devoured the whole stack.

"I drank the weaker version of that potion yesterday," Hermione said to Severus, "And it was truly horrible. I didn't think she'd eat more than a bite or two. Why'd she eat all of it?"

"House elf magic," Severus said, "They can make anything taste delicious with their magic. Generally they just use their skill with cooking to make food that is truly delicious, but if they want to they can use their magic to make things that don't taste good taste great. It was a big problem back during the Elf Wars, before the elves became bonded to families or locations like Hogwarts. The evil elves poisoned many good witches and wizards with their magic before the wizards and the good elves devised a way to stop them."

Hermione stopped staring at Bellatrix to stare at Snape, "What in the world are you talking about?"

"The elf wars that led to the elves eventually becoming house elves. The good ones turned their own magic against all of their kind to bind them to wizards to keep the bad ones from doing evil. That's why house elves are only happy being in service to a family or to Hogwarts, the Ministry and such. Of course good elves still hate being bonded to bad families. It was an unforeseeable glitch in the system. On the other hand, over the years house elves have changed to the point that there are practically no elves that could be considered evil anymore."

Hermione shook her head, trying to wrap this info around her ideas of SPEW from her childhood. To tell the truth she had never looked past the idea of the house elves being enslaved to wonder how or why that came to be. She'd have to do her own research on the matter. But she was broken out of her reverie when she heard some small laughter starting around the Great Hall.

Her eyes immediately turned towards Slytherin Table where she saw that people weren't yet laughing at Bellatrix's hair, they were laughing at what the Marauders had done. As Bellatrix reached for her goblet of pumpkin juice it skittered away from her. She tried again, making it only go further. With a growl she turned to try and snatch her neighbors pumpkin juice, but it to jumped away. Narrowing her eyes Bellatrix tried to pick up her fork so forceably that it flew almost to the Ravenclaw table. For the next few moments she tried frantically to touch anything, even the people around her, forcing everything to be pushed away from her before she could touch it.

"Look," Lily whispered through her giggles. It took just moments to see what Lily was talking about. Bellatrix's hair was getting noticeably longer, but as they watched hair started to grow out of her ears, her nose, on her arms, and most noticeably on her chin. At this point the laughter in the room stopped being giggles and became out and out laughter.

Hermione hopped up and ran over to Sirius, "You know what the best part is?" She asked him breathlessly, ignoring James' glare.

"All of it!" Sirius said gleefully.

"No, they won't be able to reverse the potion or cut or shave the beard until your charm wears off because she can't get near anything!"

The sound of Sirius' laugh could be heard over everybody else's in the Great Hall for the next few minutes.