Harry Potter and the Eyes of the Dragon

Disclaimer: all characters are property of J.K. Rowling, no copyright infringement intended.
This goes for the whole fic. I do not own any of the characters.

Chapter I: The Blonde Prick

It was a cold November morning at Hogwarts on Harry’s last year at school. He awoke from a disturbed night sleep with his scar burning. He instinctively touched his forehead trying to remember what his dream had been about, but couldn’t. He reached out for his glasses and got up from his four-poster bed a little dizzy. There was no need to look at his roommates to realize they were still asleep; they were all snoring, buried inside they’re own tired minds, especially Ron.

Harry walked toward a mirror to look at his light bolt shaped scar and noticed it was getting darker, somehow reddish. He didn’t like what that meant, that Voldemort was gaining more power, more followers, he was getting dangerous. He rubbed his knuckled onto it like he usually did to make the pain subside and said to himself, come on, Harry, think! What did you dream about? But it was pointless. He knew he wouldn’t remember, just like he didn’t the day before, and the day before that and so on for about a month.

Maybe Voldemort put a hex on you so you wouldn’t remember, to avoid giving you information he mustn’t reveal. After all, he knows about the connection the two of you have. He probably figured out a way to block it somehow.

Then he panicked, like he always did at the thought of Voldemort invading his most inner thoughts. It made him feel so freaking vulnerable! He thanked every day he didn’t have to take Occlumency any longer; it was already too much thinking that Voldemort had the key into his mind to have to add the fact that he was willingly letting Snape do the same.

He was brought back to reality by a loud snore from Ron. Harry paced around the room not knowing what to do before he got out of his pyjamas and got dressed. If there was something he hated was having nothing to do because it gave him too much time to think.

He went down to the common room, which was practically empty. The only ones there were the Creevey brothers, and suddenly found himself thinking how he wished he would have brought his invisibility cloak with him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them… yes, they were a little annoying sometimes, but they were still very nice. The thing was that today he wasn’t in a very sociable mood.

‘Hey, Harry!’, said Colin, who was holding the same camera Harry had seen him walk around with for over four years now. He had always wondered what his “collection” was like but never dared ask to see it; he could practically see himself staring at Colin’s album for hours while he explained each and every photograph he had, and that didn’t sound very entertaining.

‘Colin, Dennis’, greeted Harry without attempting to fake enthusiasm.

He crossed the portrait hole not knowing where he was going. All he knew was he didn’t want to stay in there. He could go to the Great Hall and wait for breakfast to begin, but then he’d end up pathetically sitting alone and once again thinking. Great Hall out of the question, then. He kept walking around and then headed out of the castle. The grounds. Always so quiet and peaceful. He walked around the lake for a while and then stopped at the sound of a hiss. He looked around but saw no snake or what so ever. Great! Now I’m hearing things!

‘I better go back inside’, he said to himself. Way to go, Harry. Keep talking to yourself and show the world how insane you’re getting.

***

Ron and Hermione were already at the Great Hall when Harry went in.

‘Hey, Harry! Where have you been?’, asked Ron moving aside to make space for him at the Gryffindor table.

‘Around’, answered Harry shortly as he put some waffles on his plate.

‘What’s wrong, Harry?’, asked Hermione with a worried face. ‘Scar?’

‘What else could it be?’ Harry sighed. He loved how Hermione always knew what was going on. It was in moments like this, when he had no wish to explain what went on in his head, that having her around was a blessing.

‘You had another dream, didn’t you?’, asked Ron.

Harry nodded, his eyes fixed on his food. ‘And, no, I don’t remember.’

Both Ron and Hermione noticed he wasn’t in a very talkative day and they’d better just leave it alone, so they changed the subject to the day’s activities.

After breakfast Ron and Harry parted away from Hermione. Since the year had started, Ron and Harry had a lot of spare time because there were a lot of classes that they no longer took. The Auror NEWTs weren’t many, but they were the hardest. Hermione, on the other hand, had decided to work in the Ministry after leaving Hogwarts, what mean she had to take almost every class there was (luckily for her, Divination was not one of them).

She entered the Muggle Studies classroom even before the bell rang and took her usual seat at the front. Professor Samantha Terepee walked in the room right behind her and stood in front of the class until everyone had arrived and settled down. She was a tall witch with long black nails that matched her straight hair. She wore green robes with golden little ornaments around the neck and had big brown eyes that were usually warm, but not always. The warm look vanished at least once a week, after a sarcastic comment coming out of Draco Malfoy. Why was he even taking Muggle Studies, Hermione didn’t know. Well, she was sure it was because he would try and work in the Ministry too, but this was an optional subject. There was something that just didn’t click.

‘OK, people’, said Professor Terepee, ‘Last Monday we were talking about the muggle explanations to the unknown. Do any of you remember where we left when the class ended?’

Hermione raised her hand and heard a snort behind her back which she recognized as a certain unpleasant blonde’s. Professor Terepee didn’t seem to notice Malfoy, but asked Hermione to answer instead.

‘We were talking about the incident in Roswell in 1987. There was a Quidditch World Cup being held in the middle of the desert, and even though the stadium was magically protected from muggles, a group of campers saw a bunch of lights in the sky and thought they were extraterrestrial spaceships.’
‘Excellent, Miss Granger. 10 points for Gryffindor.’

‘Un-believable’, drawled Malfoy in a whisper.

‘Is there anything you’d like to say, Mr. Malfoy?’, asked Professor Terepee, her eyes changing completely.

‘As a matter of fact, there is’, he said with a arrogant voice. ‘I just can’t understand how, after so many years and so many incidents like the one Granger has kindly enlightened us with, muggles don’t figure out what’s really going on and keep making up moronic stories instead.’

‘The answer to that, Mr. Malfoy, is very simple’, she replied. ‘The reaction of human kind, and I don’t refer just to muggles, can be very dangerous if it’s not controlled. We are used to feeling scared of the unknown, especially when it’s something as powerful as magic, so we try to erase the possibility of its existence to hold ourselves together. That’s why the wizarding community is so strict when it comes to secrecy. If the non-magical world found out the truth about magic, they’d try to fight us with torches like they did long ago. Witch hunting luckily stopped, but it doesn’t mean it won’t reappear in the future.’

Hermione loved Muggle Studies so much because of Professor Terepee. She not only was bright and logical, she knew how to put Malfoy in his place.

‘Is there anything else you’d like to ask, Mr. Malfoy?’, she asked.

He didn’t respond.

‘Good. Next class we’ll watch a muggle movie called “Toy Story” to analyze this subject from a different perspective.’


***

Harry, Ron and Hermione went down to the dungeons for Potions class. The air inside the classroom was very dense making Harry feel like being in Divination. Snape was already in the room, waiting for the rest of the class to arrive. Unfortunately for them, they still had Potions with the Slytherins since it was one of the basic subjects and hadn’t suffered any modifications in the exception of its difficulty level. Since the year had begun, neither Harry nor Ron had made one decent potion and that was starting to worry them. What if they flunked Potions? The five years at Hogwarts they had been passing by bare luck and they feared they’d run out of it.

After a long hour and a half of mixing and heating, Snape walked around the classroom throwing nasty looks at the Gryffindor cauldrons.

‘You call this a Brain Speeding Potion, Mr. Potter?’, he said reprovingly. ‘Would you like to try it and see what happens?’

‘No, sir’, Harry replied with a knot in his throat.

‘Didn’t think so. And even if you had wanted to, I wouldn’t have let you because your brains would have stained the walls and you wouldn’t have been alive to clean them.’

A laughed escaped from the Slytherins making Snape grin in satisfaction.

‘I want you to write 20 inches of parchment for next class explaining what you did wrong and how to fix it, unless you want an F in this term’, he added.

He moved on and gave one quick glance to Hermione’s potion. Since there was obviously nothing to
criticize there, he examined the Slytherin work.

‘Outstanding, Mr. Malfoy’, he commented, and Harry heard Hermione grunt beside him and mumble something he could only figure out the words “unfair” and “favouritism”.

***

Hermione had been grumpy the whole morning. Ron cast a questioning look at Harry, as they sat at the Gryffindor table at lunch, who just shrugged. Neither of them knew what was wrong with her.

‘It’s something wrong, ‘Mione?’, Ron asked elbowing her lightly on the ribs.

‘What?... oh, no. Nothing’s wrong?’, she said in a not very convincing voice.

‘You sure?’, asked Harry.

‘It’s just Malfoy!’

‘Ahhhhhh...’, they both said in understanding.

‘Irritating prick, he is’, said Ron returning to his food.

‘You always tell us not to let him get to us. Wise advise. You should apply it yourself’, Harry told her, not in the nicest tone.

‘That’s easy for you to say, Harry. You don’t have to see the bastard in every single class you take.’

‘Well, maybe I don’t see him as much as you do, but we both know who he hates the most. Lately, not one encounter with Malfoy is peaceful. I think the only reason why he keeps insulting you and Ron is to annoy me.’

‘You. Everything is about you, isn’t it?’. With that said, she got up from the table, her lunch unfinished, and stormed out of the Great Hall.

‘What the bloody hell was that?!’, asked Harry.

‘Don’t know. PMS?’, ventured Ron grinning