Harry found himself in his bed, clutching at his scar, though he felt nothing from it, panting and sweating and wondering what that was. At the same time, he was extremely grateful that it was, in fact, just a dream, nothing more... though a part of him feared that there was some sort of truth to it. After a few minutes, Harry saw that it was still dark outside, and found himself drifting back to sleep in spite of his best intentions. Just before his eyes closed, he would've sworn he heard the voice from his nightmare, but then he was in a deep dreamless sleep.
When he awoke in the morning, he concluded he had been very tired indeed to see something from his dream while still awake.
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A week passed, and Hermione was indeed proved correct; after the first day, the guards ceased escorting everyone everywhere, instead focusing their attentions on entrances, exits, and, to the consternation and amusement of various students, even some of the windows. However, Harry paid little attention to these details, more concerned by other things. Classes were unusually short and none of the teachers, not even Snape, assigned any homework, and the work they did in the class was exclusively review of last year's lessons. Nor had they (Or anyone else, at least in the Gryffindor dorm) attended a Defense Against the Dark Arts class. They had actually entered the classroom (Harry had been unsure what to think of the enormous number of smiling pictures of Professor Lockhart), only to discover that no one was there except other, equally confused students. When Professor Lockhart had arrived, he seemed to not notice them until someone spoke, at which point he jumped as though stung, whirled around, and demanded to know what they were doing here. The conversation that ensued was very confusing to Harry, and ended in the Professor all but shoving them into the hall, and telling them not to return until notified by a teacher. On top of this all this strangeness, the first year students hadn't been seen by anyone. At least, no one was claiming to have seen them.
Draco didn't seem to respond well to the lack of work, something Harry felt was a bizarre irony, and was apparently intent on occupying himself by harrassing Harry, Ron, and Hermione. It was very frustrating, and also rather strange; Draco would often segue straight from antagonizing, insulting, and generally sneering at Harry and his friends right into odd, harmless sentences ("...filthy mudblood- and that is why Slytherin is better than Gryffindor.") or even acting in a manner suggesting one of the three friends had done something to him. It had taken Harry four entire days of this to realize that Draco always did these things when one of the guards was approaching hearing range. The realization had infuriated him, as it was suddenly clear that Draco had been attempting to get Harry and his friends into serious trouble, and yet it had also puzzled him, because the guards had never responded to these conversations. While it was nice to not be given detention for something he hadn't even done, it raised questions of just how trustworthy these guards were, if they were so willing to ignore what were, to all appearances, unpleasant altercations.
Hermione had read all the books for the year by the sixth day and began complaining about the light workload. A sarcastic comment from Ron had lead to her checking out books for third-years from the library, which had exasperated Ron ("You want to make work for yourself instead of relaxing while you still can!?"), while Harry was carefully neutral, entirely certain he wanted no part in this. Ron had focused his efforts on such things as chess games and napping outside in the sun, partly because there was no homework to fill his idle time, and partly because he'd wanted to do this sort of thing throughout the entire first year and had never really gotten a proper chance to relax. Even so, he began to get restless, too, and Harry found yet another reason to avoid his two friends for the moment. (The first being Hermione's behavior)
On that note, he'd been trying to reach Dumbledore, but had been thoroughly foiled at every turn. First he'd just searched the halls manually, since students were allowed to do pretty much whatever they wanted other than leaving the actual grounds during these strange half-days, when it wasn't bedtime or class time. That hadn't worked at all, and he'd had to do a bit of asking around to determine the location of Dumbledore's office, which had apparently been moved to someplace else. Once he'd gotten some directions (From a Hufflepuff girl who'd seemed very, very bored), it had seemed like an easy thing, but he'd been stopped by three of the guards before he was anywhere near the location! One of them had asked if he had any bussiness with the Headmaster, Harry had told them he needed to talk to Dumbledore, they'd asked what about, and when he hadn't been willing to tell them, he'd been turned away. Even so, this hadn't deterred Harry, and he'd set out on the next day with his cloak (The invisibility one, of course) to sneak past the guards. That, by far, was the worst failure of his attempts. He'd actually gotten a bit farther than last time, but then about a dozen things had come shooting at him, and he'd only avoided being hit by them by backing up very hastily. Instead, they'd hit the cloak and pinned it to the stone floor, where he was finally able to make out the features of the objects. To be blunt, they were knives of some sort, and that realization had made Harry very, very glad indeed to have not been hit, though he had little time to think on it, since his scramble to avoid being skewered had, in combination with one edge of the cloak being trapped, lead to him losing his balance. So he fell, and in fact fell out from under the cloak itself.
Of course, in a roundabout sort of way this did lead to him standing in front of Dumbledore, albeit not in quite the manner he'd intended. Apparently the knives belonged to the guards (Which lead to the question "What sort of wizard uses knives?", but Harry had more pressing concerns), and once they had ascertained he was a student instead of... whatever they'd thought he was, they had confiscated his cloak, retrieved their knives, dragged him before Dumbledore, and explained the situation in very few words. They were also rather unpleasant words, describing what he'd done in a very unflattering manner. This was, of course, all done while holding Harry at knife-point. Dumbledore had been understanding, however, and had asked for Harry's version of the events, which had lead to the explanation that he'd wanted to talk to the Professer, which had further lead to him explaining about his concerns of an assassin after him. From there, things got very surreal, with Dumbledore smiling like nothing was wrong, two of the guards chuckling for some reason or another, and the man-monster from Harry's dream waltzing in just, Harry suddenly felt, to prove that the universe hated him.
