A/N: The idea for this fanfiction has been boiling in my head for quite some time... I prepared the basic outline shortly after that, but I was waiting for the final blow of the inspiration before I decided to offer you the first chapter.

And here we are now! My first Harry Potter fanfic! :D

Enjoy ^^

Chapter 1: Dolores' Experiment

It was a terribly hot and dry day. His sight was blurry and his throat was soar. The words seemed stuck inside of his mouth and every attempt to make them audible required incredible efforts. Just like in a nightmare. A recurring nightmare. A real-life nightmare that Harry was forced to live every day since that woman appeared. Always dressed in the most disgusting shades of pink, having what seemed like a large fly on her head and a terrible toad-like face, she was the impersonation of everything ugly and grotesque. At least in Harry's eyes.

Everything that woman said made Harry feel uncomfortable, confused, and, even if he would never admit it, afraid. Her voice, which she unsuccessfully tried to render cute was sending chills through his spine and everything about her was so blatantly fake that she seemed inhuman. People like her could simply not be human. Maybe she was some sort of ghost, some specter who came to haunt Harry, maybe she was an evil being serving to the Dark Lord and sent to destroy him, maybe she was not even real, but just a segment of Harry's imagination... Anything... Anything but human.

Because such people couldn't possibly exist.

Every day she came to torment him and every day they ended up on the same subject. Every day he would find himself sweating in the unbearable hotness of the day and he would feel his throat going dry. Every day he would try to shout the same words and everyday something else would end up crossing his lips. But every day he would shout that one name, the one name he once felt proud and courageous to shout, the one name that everybody feared...

"VOLDEMORT!" Harry screamed, once again. "IT WAS VOLDEMORT! VOLDEMORT KILLED CEDRIC! WE WERE IN THE CEMETERY AND HE KILLED HIM! VOLDEMORT IS BACK! VOLDEMORT KILLED CEDRIC DIGGORY!"

And every time she would look around uncomfortably and try to smile at the overly-silent classroom. She would say "Voldemort isn't real", she would say "Cedric Diggory's death was a tragic accident!", she would yell on Harry whenever he would try to say otherwise, whenever he would prove her wrong, in brief, she was completely disrespecting Cedric's memory and was trying, for some shady reason, to hide the fact that the Dark Lord has returned.

If Harry only knew then that she was just trying to protect him... To protect him from the horrible truth, a truth much worse than even the return of the Dark Lord himself. If only Harry knew then...

Luckily, Umbridge's class did not last forever. Harry walked in the Great Hall looking for Ron and Hermione, but they were nowhere to be found. It happened more and more frequently... They would be with him in the class, they would talk with him, but then they would seem to have vanished shortly after that. And oftentimes, the rest of the class would follow. Neville's seat would suddenly become empty, then Dean's, then Seamus'... Sometimes, Harry would even see the classroom shrink, become smaller and smaller, it would appear as if it was closing around Harry, trying to choke him. Sometimes, the world would become so small and so oppressive... Harry would suddenly feel alone, alone with the teacher in front of him. To make things worse, that teacher would be Umbridge most of the times, but even then, sometimes the teacher too would start to change in appearance, their flashy colored clothes becoming bland, clear, whitish. During those nightmarish moments, Harry would try to scream, to jump out of his seat and to run away, but his body and his voice would not listen to him. Then he would close his eyes, trying to get the ugly images out of his head. When he would reopen his eyes after that, the world would have turned back to normal. He would no longer be alone.

Harry blinked a couple of times and then looked around him once again. Ron and Hermione were there, Hermione impatiently waving for him to come and sit with them. As soon as he saw his friends, Harry felt lighter inside. They were all right. They were there for him. All was well.

The Divination class was as boring as ever. And as if Trelawney's natural craziness was not enough, today, Umbridge was there too. Harry was already sick of her mug, sick of everything about her, her toad-like face, that giant fly or whatever it was that she tends to put on her head, and of all the sickening pink of her clothes. Not to forget her voice, that she forcefully tried to make sound like a voice of a little girl, that she unsuccessfully tried to render cute, and that she only managed to make so creepy and annoying that hearing her made Harry's blood boil every time that she spoke. Then there was the way she moved... How could such a small woman cast such a huge shadow? And then there were her eyes... She would always look at you as if you were mentally deficient, would always circle you when talking to you as if you were her pray, then would stop and stare at you until you feel even more uncomfortable, until you want to scream and throw something at her, just to make her stop. Sybill Trelawney seemed to feel exactly like that, Harry thought. She was visibly stressed out and Umbridge was purposefully making her even more uncomfortable by constantly interrupting her. At her natural, Trelawney already wasn't a very good seer (or so Harry thought), and when Umbridge tried to force her to make "at least a tiny little prediction", flaunting her incompetence, Trelawney snapped.

"You can't force the third eye! It can see only when it's ready!" belted Sybill Trelawney.

"Not even a tiny little..."

Prediction, Harry thought. Umbridge was supposed to say Not even a tiny little prediction? in her extremely annoying little voice. But then, in the time it took Harry to blink with his eyes, Umbridge jumped towards Trelawney. She was screaming at her. Her face deformed, her anger brushing out the colors surrounding them. The bright colors of the clothes that both Umbridge and Trelawney were wearing were fading with every next word that Umbridge said to the terrified Trelawney. Umbridge's make-up washed out, the fly-shaped bow in her head grew smaller and smaller, turned into an actual fly, and flied away in the blankness. Trelawney's bracelets and beaded necklaces broke and the beads scattered on the floor without making a sound. In front of Harry were now arguing two tired old witches whose clothes seemed to be eating them. It was terrifying. Harry looked on the desk in front of him and saw the crystal ball slowly changing its shape and turning into a simple glass of water. Seized by panic, Harry took his wand and waved it at the crystal ball, trying to remember the spell to maintain its shape. The crystal ball suddenly seemed the most important thing in his life. He never cared about divination, but this time, it felt as if that crystal ball was the only thing that could keep him safe, and if it came to break somehow, or change its shape, that Harry's entire life would spill like the beads of Trelawney's necklaces. Spill and disappear, as if swallowed by the floor, like Trelawney's beads...

"Hermione!" Harry whispered, thinking about one person who would know the necessary spell, forgetting for a moment that she wasn't taking the divination class with him and Ron.

But when he turned around to look for Ron, another horror struck him: the places occupied by his friends were now occupied by sickly-looking children, their vacant eyes fixed on the two witches arguing before them. Their black robes started to melt in what reminded of large puddles of ink on the floor. As their robes melted on them, they took all the colors away from the children's faces, leaving them pale. As one of the children turned his head towards him, Harry started to scream.

"See what your incompetence is doing?!" Harry thought that he recognized Umbridge's voice.

"Harry? Harry, wake up!"

Was it Trelawney calling? They seemed to be arguing just above his head. He was losing track of the voices, confusing them and not knowing who was saying what.

"Group remembrance sessions, what an idea!"

"We have to make them see the truth!"

"I'll get you fired for this!" — that could only be Umbridge threatening here.

"You want to hide the truth!"

"You want to shove the unpleasant truth down their throats! They're not ready for it! I'll get you fired!"

"Harry managed to see!"

"And you'll see what you will see!"

They never talked like that. Harry was holding his head. What they were saying was not natural to them. They never spoke like that... Harry's head was hurting.

"Harry? Harry, my sweet boy, open your eyes!" a voice said.

When Harry raised his head, he saw the face of his mother looking at him full of worry. When he blinked, above him was standing Trelawney, looking at him with curiosity. Harry straightened his back and sat normally.

"Well... You seem to have had a vision!" Trelawney said, getting her face closer to Harry's and looking at him with her enormous eyes "What did you see?"

Harry looked around him. The ill-looking children had disappeared, the room once again full of his Hogwarts classmates. He didn't see Ron though, but then he remembered that Ron had a double lesson with Snape today. Harry sighed with relief. He was going to see his friend there this afternoon and share some of his pain of having to deal with Snape then. Harry then realized that another person was missing from the room.

"Where is Professor Umbridge?" Harry asked.

Trelawney's face darkened.

"Oh..." she said grimly "She walked away because she couldn't stand someone having a vision. That old rag! Always trying to sabotage the lessons of honest teachers!"

Then she leaned in a bit closer and said.

"You know, I think that she's one of those people who are afraid of seers! And you might well be one of them, Harry! Do look into your crystal ball once again and tell me what you see!"

Harry lowered his head and looked into the crystal ball. At first, he saw only smoke and the inverted figure of Trelawney. Then the smoke dispersed and took with it the bright clothes and jewels that Trelawney was wearing, leaving her image once again bland, tired and scary. Harry backed away, frightened. He looked towards Trelawney — the real one this time, not the one in the crystal ball — and saw her looking as crazy as usual, her eyes inquiring behind her enormous glasses.

"I think that this crystal ball frightens me as well," he muttered.

Trelawney didn't insist on making him look any longer. Minutes from then, the class was over.

If Harry thought that Trelawney's divination class would be bad, it was because the images he saw there made him forget about Snape. Trelawney sure was annoying, but Snape was downright evil. That was at least the way in which Harry saw him. Every class with Snape, Harry would feel sequestrated, as if in a torture room. The fuming potions around him, that Hermione took great pleasure in preparing and that even Harry could find interesting if the lesson was held by someone other than Snape, were in Snape's presence like thousands of bottles of poison, that he would probably force Harry to drink one day. Harry never understood why Snape hated /him/ in particular. He would automatically pick on him and on his friends. Neville, who already didn't have much self-confidence, was completely terrified of Snape. And Snape was enjoying it. Harry knew that Snape was the type of the person who would enjoy every second that someone spent feeling miserable because of him. Some people just seemed to have cruelty thrust upon them.

Snape was one of those people and Umbridge was one of those people too. And Harry would have to sit in the same room as the two of them, getting poisoned with their bad vibrations.

"Maybe they'll be opposing each other? Like a duel! That'll be fun to watch!" said Ron happily, noticing Harry's grim expression.

Ron couldn't know how right he was. At first, Umbridge was asking Snape some dull questions, not much different from those that she asked the other teachers. However, soon enough, what was supposed to be a simple interview turned into an argument. And the argument ended up turning into a duel. Did Harry start seeing things or did they really start battling? Their voices and moves became cloudy. The blur was certainly due to the evaporations coming out of the numerous caldrons with potions in this room. Harry tried to rub his eyes and try to understand better what was going on, but he couldn't move. He tried to approach his hands to his eyes once again and rub them, dammit, simply rub them, but his hands were strapped. Everything else he saw was but blur, yet the straps on his hands were clearly visible. Terror seized him. What was going on? As his breath was at the point of becoming quick and short yet again, he was startled out of his reverie by the slam of the door. When he looked up, the students were gazing in shock at the closed door, avoiding looking at Snape, who was getting up from the floor, trying to clean the dust from his robe. Harry crossed Ron's gaze and they both choke a laugh in their sleeve. Harry didn't exactly see what happened, but judging from the current situation, Umbridge had knocked Snape down. How is it possible that teachers get into such a situation?

"Everybody return to making your potions!" Snape ordered, in a voice that seemed slightly louder than his standards, "the fact that Professor Umbridge attempted to sabotage my class doesn't dispense you from doing your work!"

Everybody complied. Hermione, who Harry was sure wasn't sitting there a minute ago, nudged him to get his attention to the ingredients that he was putting into his cauldron. If it wasn't for her, Harry would have gotten scolded by Snape yet again, and after his recent face-off with Umbridge, it was really not a good idea to cross the potions master.

Harry tried not to lose Ron from his eyesight when walking to his dorm. Whenever Ron or Hermione were clearly visible to him, everything would be all right. But if he was left alone with his thoughts for too long, he would start experiencing those strange visions that were more and more frequent these last days. He would have the impression that he's somewhere else, that his body was no longer his own... When his hallucinations were at their worst, he would see Voldemort in front of him, laughing, twisting his head, reaching to him with his hand and his long, dirty fingers. Or he would see...

"Hello, Harry."

Harry turned around. There he was. Cedric. Standing here, in front of him. Smiling. Pale and young. The way that he looked when he died. When Harry couldn't save him. Harry tried to speak, to tell him that he's sorry, but his voice was stuck in his throat. Instead of words, big, warm tears that started flowing from Harry's eyes spoke for him. Cedric was dead and the one who stood in front of Harry was just an illusion. And the Cedric from his imagination would always wear that sad smile on his face, never being angry, never blaming Harry for what happened to him. Soon enough, just like every time that this happened before, the image of Cedric would disappear and Harry would be left alone in the silence of the corridor. In such situations, there was really nothing else to do but to dry his tears and continue his way to where he wanted to go in the first place.

A/N: Well here we are for the first chapter :)

I hope you liked it!

If you did (and even if you didn't), don't hesitate to drop me a review, it means a lot and it will help me realize whether I'm on good tracks with my fanfiction and where do I still have work to do... And besides, it always makes one happy to know that they brought a nice read to someone :)