Marauders' Legacy:

His first potions class of 1992 was a rather surreal experience for Harry. The snide comments and palpable disdain radiating from his teacher seemed to carry even more weight now he knew they were the product of personal history. Not only that, but history from what to him was a sort of mythological age when his father had been alive and the War was ongoing. His friends noticed his change in behaviour, but despite Susan, Padma and Oliver pulling him aside almost as soon as they were out of the door, he didn't spill. Eventually he managed to persuade them that while something had happened over the holiday, he couldn't exactly deny that, it involved things that weren't his to tell. While they finally allowed him to leave they weren't happy about it.

If there was one thing that could distract Harry from the revelations about Snape however, it was getting to play around with the invisibility cloak. Lily had finally acquiesced to let Harry take it to school. While she refused to take 'Potter Family Tradition' as valid justification, she managed to convince herself that Harry's promises to behave with it would get him out of more problems that he would be in anyway than new and worse ones it would create. After all, even without the troll the previous term, her trust in the Hogwarts staff to actually look after their students and keep them safe had died a death by her second year. It was frankly a miracle that the student body count was only about one a decade or so. What had tipped the balance however was Remus' supposition about using the cloak to improve magical awareness. Indeed, she was a mature witch and working for a decade on tricky enchantments and potions, both of which required high sensitivity and precision to manipulate the magic in them remotely. Yet despite this when she had tried using the cloak she would have not noticed it's power draw without being told about it beforehand. If it could really help Harry that much well, what was the worst trouble he could get in?

Of course, the fact that he had an invisibility cloak in school at all was to be a closely guarded secret. Even a 'true' one was a valuable and restricted artefact. Somehow there weren't actually on the list of several hundred banned items pinned to Filch's door, Harry actually checked out of curiosity, but that was probably because nobody had been caught using one before. If he was found out it couldn't actually be confiscated, too many instances of artefacts being 'lost' meant that there were a whole host of rules safeguarding family heirlooms, explaining that would draw too much unwanted attention. Although hopefully Dumbledore would smooth things over. After all, he had given the thing to Harry, so he must have been expecting him to use it. There were still stories of witches and wizards being found dead with priceless artefacts of theirs never seen again, Hepzibah Smith being a famous case from the 1950s. Only with the cloak there would be the added incentive that those who might go after it would look to keep it for themselves.

With this in mind Harry was instructed to only let Neville and Susan get even a hint about it without asking his mother first on pain of the cloak being confiscated for his entire time at Hogwarts. Them being in different houses made this slightly more tricky than it would otherwise have been. Remus came up with the solution to this problem. Even without the near open warfare in the corridors any good pranking team needed a safe home base. Whether it was planning, designing, potion brewing, equipment stockpiling, waiting for the right moment, hiding while the heat died down or celebrating a success, almost all stages of the process required a place that they could be sure wouldn't be disturbed. As early as their second year, they had colonised one of the many abandoned rooms as their own.

Almost all of the classes were clustered between the Great Hall and the Library on the second floor (the entrance anyway, there were a couple of staircases within). Unless a student wanted to go back to their common room, and for Hufflepuffs even then, they could stay within a fraction of the school all day. Especially back then when wandering around alone was asking for trouble. That meant there were entire tracts, especially deep in the dungeons or on upper floors which nobody ever set foot in, even prefects or teachers on patrols. Fortunately for Harry in order to be out of the way of the main routes to the Gryffindor common room, their location of choice ended up being on the sixth floor about halfway to the entrance to the Ravenclaw common room.

Over the years as their skills improved and the teacher had to at least pretend to care about the increased rule breaking, the room went from being protected by just its isolation, to being screened by complex layers of charms. Now only somebody keyed into them would be able to even see the door. Not only was it charmed to resemble the surrounding wall, but muggle-repelling charms had been extensively modified to work on magicals and animals (Mrs Norris specifically) so that it was impossible to even focus on the area or register somebody going in or out. One way soundproofing, a form of modified bubble head charm to absorb smells and smoke, spy holes in the walls to check the coast was clear and blacked out windows meant that there was not the slightest indication from the outside of its heavy use.

Equipment had been smuggled in and combined with scavenged and repurposed furniture to turn what had been just a basic classroom with seats and desks into a veritable workshop capable of churning out potions, charmed items and modified spells. There was even a small library of reference books owl-ordered or swiped from the restricted section or, in a fit of inspired pique, stolen from the Black Family Library when Sirius had run away from home, although many had been cleared out when they had left. While they probably should have cleared the place up as they were about to graduate, they never go around to it. Several years worth of work would have been very difficult to take down and dispose of discreetly, even if they took several months during which they a) wanted to continue using it b) were studying furiously for NEWTs and c) were preparing to step into the big wide world into a full-blown civil war. Sirius and James also joked about wanting to leave it for the next generation to go through Hogwarts, as a sort of family tradition.

Obviously to make use of this amazing resource, the children first had to be allowed in. After a stressful meeting with Amelia and Augusta during the Christmas holiday where everything was explained and many assurances were given, Remus, being more experienced at this than Lily, snuck into the school with the children's wands and a drop of blood each to key them into the charms. This was only allowed once he had made extensive promises on pain of many horrible punishments to only use them for this then return the wands and destroy the blood immediately. The charms relied on recognising the individual's magic to work. As their primary focus, someone's wand quickly became saturated with it. While unlike what many theories posited, magic wasn't an actual substance carried in blood, but the substance did have strong enough sympathetic links to its source's magic and soul that it could be used as a physical representation of it. This was why giving away blood could be so dangerous.

On the first weekend back Remus snuck back in again to introduce the children to the room. He instructed them how to find it, what the various charms for security, safety and convenience did and how to check they were working, and what things, especially around the brewing area they should be very careful about. He also took the opportunity to swipe any pieces of equipment, notes, books and prototypes which he didn't want to leave around first years and/or wanted to use himself at home.

While theoretically they could have used the space to do other work, practice spells or brew potions and so forth it would be far more trouble than it was worth, especially if they didn't want to alienate most of their peers the way the Marauders had done constantly disappearing. Also, especially for Harry given his house, doing homework along with everyone else was a lot easier. Instead they slipped away there a few hours each week just to chat and catch up while doing exercises to try and sense the cloak with their magic and get a little bit of spellcasting practice in. Unfortunately the short period between the hatching of this scheme and the start of school had not been sufficient to teach the children the detection charms the Marauders had used, so instead Augusta had dug out an old sneakoscope that Frank had used in the Aurors. Its lack of use over the previous decade and several days of Amelia performing the an incredibly draining emergency recharge charm on it meant it was amazingly still working despite its age. One side effect of having none of their roommates in on the secret and having to keep the cloak in the room when not using it was that they couldn't afford to sneak out of or back into bed late, which the adults had realised and been happy about.

Of course even restricting themselves as they did, the three did still get some funny looks and pointed comments from their housemates. Unfortunately Neville was a lesser recipient of this, as he had not really formed a strong relationship with any of his, with the possible exception of Hermione who was more often than not lost in a book or studying with the Ravenclaws anyway.


Meanwhile at home, the revelations over the invisibility cloak as well as the windfall of old projects and musings had given Lily and Remus a second wind. While they had continued in their quest to try and create their own enchanted items from scratch, the wind had gradually left their sails due to slow progress and the increased demands of looking after, educating and generally keeping out of trouble up to three young children.

That was not to say that they had had no successes to their names. Harry's trunk was a masterpiece almost on par with the top ranges one could find in a specialist boutique, in function if not necessarily in elegance. A basic space-expansion charm wasn't that difficult and could be combined with a weight reduction charm to create an ideal carrier. This did have its flaws however. A charm only had as much power as was given during the casting, so would eventually run out. The more work it was doing, so the more stuff was carried in this case, the faster that would happen. In addition, as the charm would be placed over the physical object, almost any damage or alterations made to the receptacle would cause the charm to no longer recognise it and fail. This would be slightly compensated for by the amount of magic placed on it making the object more resilient, at least to normal wear and tear, but again at cost to the magic powering the charms. Space expansion charms were especially bad for this as they manipulated distances, so they were very sensitive to the exact physical properties and dimensions of their target.

Instead Lily and Remus decided they wanted to create a trunk that could last Harry at least his entire seven years at Hogwarts without running the risk of suddenly exploding as all of the items stored inside suddenly tried to occupy the same space as each other and melded together into a ruined mess. Also they wanted to see if they could. Their angle of attack was to investigate 'wizard-space'. This was a widely apparent, if disappointingly unknown phenomenon by which areas of high magical density would essentially 'fall out of the world' creating a natural area of stable expanded space or sub dimension, depending on what theory you chose, leaving little or no trace behind in the mundane world. A bit like if the world was a soft substance like a beanbag or sponge. Large amounts of magic acted like a weight, which sank out of sight creating a 'bubble' while the surface closed up above it.

Lily had first stumbled upon the concept when trying to research how non-magical people never found Diagon Alley. Yes the pedestrian entrance through the Leaky Cauldron was protected by muggle-repelling charms, but that didn't explain how in an area where everything was mapped pretty much down to the centimetre, nobody noticed that some of the most valuable real-estate in the entire country, possibly the world, was utterly inaccessible. There were other irregularities as well. Wales and the Hebrides, both small sections of an already small group of islands, apparently supported a full breeding population of dragons each, the Common Welsh Green and Hebridean Black. Even considering much of these areas were sparsely populated, it beggared belief that 'muggle sighting of dragons' was a rare news story in the wizarding world, especially as even the emptiest areas would be occasionally used by farmers, hikers and in Wales RAF low altitude training.

Skimming through quite a lot of complex theory on the effects of magic in ecosystems, Lily thought she understood how this worked. With Diagon Alley where the work of witches and wizards with everything from everyday spells to magical construction techniques had quickly created a strictly bounded pocket of magic with a single physical connection to the outside world through the pub, probably assisted by deliberate design. Natural ecosystems on the other hand formed over thousands of years, or perhaps longer.

It would all start with a catalyst, maybe a magical anomaly, a settlement being founded or a group of highly magical animals moving in. This would release magic into the area, which would attract other magical species as well as be absorbed by the local flora and fauna through what they ate and drank, and just the very air around them. This cycle would be self-reinforcing with the births, lives and deaths of magical life feeding back into the atmospheric magic of the area, and certain magical species drawing others which relied on them. Eventually this would cause the entire area, in some rare cases truly vast, to separate from the mundane world, leaving a non-magical version behind. Hogwarts: A History claimed that the castle wards caused muggles to see it as a pile of ruins by altering their perception. Reading between the lines, Lily suspected that without magic and knowing the correct way in it would just be a deserted pile of stones. It also explained why despite the castle grounds having a vast perimeter which covered the forbidden forest, lake and some of the surrounding hills, it was only possible to get in through the gates and a handful of secret passages, which was part of what made the castle so secure during the War.

Even brilliant as she was however, Lily could not explore this without an example to analyse. For obvious reasons of security and productivity, wizard-space was highly prized, with individuals and families taking great pains to conceal the precise locations of their holdings. In fact, this was one of the reasons that the floo system had become so popular so quickly, you could give out the fireplace address and have people arrive directly inside or on your doorstep without giving even a hint of the actual physical location. Fortunately, Lily was the mother to the sole heir of one of Britain's older magical dynasties, which had picked up a few of their own over the centuries. They had wards to try and keep out intruders, and keep any valuable fauna inside which Lily didn't have the expertise to break even if she wanted to. But if you tried to overlay the boundary of the wards exactly on top of the edge of the wizard-space, they interfered with each other in horrifying ways, so she was able to perch on the doorstep, as it were, and take the measurements she needed.

Even with that advantage, the designing process had not been an easy one. It turned out to be an excellent idea to conduct testing in an empty field far away from the house, and importantly Harry. Most failed spells will just fizzle out, unless you push in so much power that it has to go somewhere. The bigger problem is if the magic takes, just not in quite the way the caster intended. Several times the test subject exploded outwards, fortunately the decision to practice with cheap canvas bags made this just amusing, and in a couple of instances it collapsed in on itself, pulling in the surroundings for a while like an inverse explosion. In a particularly alarming case the bag had started spraying out an apparently limitless amount of salt water, until the bag disintegrated under the massive pressure. While this was definitely not the result they were looking for, Lily took notes on how they had managed it anyway. The fact that they had not been able to permanently banish the water meant that it wasn't magically created and there could be potential uses for firefighting.

This wasn't the only thing that they had managed to create, just by far the most impressive. Lily and Remus had good success with enchantments based on basic charms to use for clothing. Warming and water repellent coats, extra gripping shoe soles and that sort of thing. Unfortunately the attempt at self-cleaning tiles on the kitchen floor had made them so slippery that everyone kept falling over.

But now, with Harry safely ensconced in Hogwarts and an influx of inspiration to play with the adults felt up to attempting a large project again. Well, a second large project. Many of the Marauder pranks during later years, when the teachers were watching them closely, made extensive use of the Protean charm. This would link together identical small objects so that an alteration to the 'parent' would be replicated in the 'children'. This was used to convey simple messages across the castle, and once they were far more skilled with it, activate some pranks remotely. This charm had many problems that the Marauders had tried to solve: one-way-only, limited range, only coped with small changes, 'child' objects changed slowly. They hadn't got far, but Lily and Remus were older and wiser than they were then. They also could devote more attention to it and, most importantly, now had the books from the Hogwarts library or obtained by Sirius and James abusing their statuses. Their failure to make any progress had forced them to abandon their earlier attempts to recreate the communication mirrors, but this might just give them a new way to tackle it.


Other than that school continued as normal. Ravenclaw beat Slytherin in the first match back, then lost to Hufflepuff by just twenty points two weeks later, in the most exciting and hard fought game so far this year. While the Ravens were quite sore about it, they couldn't deny that it had been a well earned victory and it was hard to stay mad at the Hufflepuffs.

One day Harry was in the library with some of his classmates. While the Ravenclaw common room was good for most work, it didn't have the complete range of reference books that the main library did, and it was nice to have a change of scene and be able to chat, if quietly, with people from other houses. Also, getting there didn't require climbing all the way up to the common room. As he was doing Herbology homework, Harry was making good use of the walking resource that was Neville Longbottom. Asking for help to find a reference book on the properties of dragon dung fertiliser from different breeds and diets, they wandered past the section on magical creatures. There, who did they see but Hagrid, who seemed to be tucking a couple of books under his coat almost surreptitiously before walking off. On their way back to the table the two boys made a detour to where they thought Hagrid had been standing to try and work out what he was interested in. After all, from their teatime conversations it seemed that he should be the one writing books on magical creatures. As this part of the library was rarely used there were only a few gaps in the shelves so it was obvious what Hagrid had been researching.

"Dragons. Why does Hagrid want to know more about dragons?" Neville muttered.

"I dread to think. Should we ask him or just stay away for the moment?" Harry wondered.

"Ask him of course."

"Such a Gryffindor."


That Sunday afternoon saw Harry, Neville and Susan trooping down to Hagrid's Hut to try and solve the mystery. From the moment they knocked they knew something was up.

"Heyup. Who's there?" Came the voice from inside. The children grinned at each other. Anything that made Hagrid nervous must be interesting.

"Hey Hagrid, it is just us, Harry, Neville and Susan!" Harry shouted back.

"Oh, its jus' yeh guys. C'mon in." Hagrid cracked the door open just enough to let them sidle inside, only to run into what felt like a solid wall of heat. The fire was burning hotly in the grate despite it being the middle of the day and all of the windows were shut tight, trapping the heat in. Within moments they could begin to feel the sweat beading.

"Hagrid. Can't you let some air in here?" Neville gasped.

"Nah, needs to be nice an' toasty fer him. Makes him think tha' he's with his mum" Hagrid replied genially. Fang whined in protest from the floor, where he was sprawled out, futilely trying to cool down.

"Who is 'him'?" Harry asked with no small amount of dread. Even only knowing Hagrid for a short while, they had a good idea of what sorts of downright deadly creatures the large man considered 'misunderstood'.

"This little fella." Hagrid bustled over to the fireplace excitedly. "Come an' see."

With great trepidation, and not a little discomfort, the children forged their way closer to the blazing flame. Peering over the edge of the cauldron set in the middle, they thought they could see something sitting inside.

"Hagrid, is that an egg?" Susan queried. Fortunately Hagrid was looking away, so he couldn't see the expression of pure horror dawning on Neville and Harry's faces as they connected the dots.

"Yep. Got me very own dragon egg. Norwegian Ridgeback. Won it from a bloke down the pub yeh see." Hagrid confirmed proudly.

"A dragon egg?" Susan squeaked. "Aren't those, you know, very illegal."

"Well." Hagrid muttered gruffly. "Not mean' to have it meself, teh be hones', but I couldn' resist. I've always wanted me own dragon. Ever since I were a kid." A dream look came over his face, so he didn't notice the children steadily backing away to get as much distance between them and the hearth as possible.

"And someone you met in a pub just gave you one?" Harry asked incredulously. "Why did they have one anyway?"

"Dunno." Hagrid shrugged. "Didn't see their face. Kep' the hood on their cloak up they did. 'Couse, most people do that down the Hog's Head. Said he wanted to see it go teh a good home, couldn' raise it himself, he said. He asked me lots of questions, wanted to know if I knew what I was doing. I told him abou' all of the critters I have looked after. He was mos' impressed with Fluffy. 'Specially when I told him tha' all yer need teh do teh put him teh sleep is play him some music. He goes out like a light."

Now, while their families had told them to stay away from whatever was going on in the third floor classroom, that didn't mean they weren't going to keep their eyes and ears open about it. After all, they didn't get much of an allowance, especially as they didn't even have Hogsmeade weekends to spend it on, so the dozen sickles they had between them in the various school-wide betting pools around it represented a sizable investment.

"W-When is it meant to be hatching?" Neville stammered, still trying to process that he was standing in a small, wooden hut with a real life dragon. Not fully born yet, but still a dragon. Just at that moment a distinct tapping sound could be heard from the egg, and he started cursing his big mouth.

"Ohh!" Hagrid jumped up excitedly. He grabbed a set of thick gloves from a hook on the wall and reached into the cauldron. As he lifted it out the students got their first good look at the egg. The closest thing that Harry could compare it to was an ostrich egg, his mother had liked taking him to mundane museums and collections. There seemed to be a slight sheen playing across the surface, like a heat haze and while the light was too bad for him to say for certain, he could have sworn that it was glowing ever so slightly.

As soon as Hagrid had deposited the egg in the middle of the table, there was a sudden sharp crack, both audible and visible, and then another. A tiny claw poked out and a large piece of shell fell outwards, revealing the dragon … pup? hatchling? Cub?

It was surprisingly scrawny looking, and like many babies it would have to grow into its adult proportions and was currently quite ungainly with large head and wings. It was jet black, still wet from the amniotic fluid which was pooling on the table as it leaked out of the egg. It had a pair of stubby horns above its wide, orange eyes. It opened its mouth in a yawn to expose the tiny points of sharp teeth. Pushing at the edges with its claws it broke away more of the top, allowing it to bring its wings out fully, extending them to shake off their fluid coat.

Hagrid bent over it cooing and muttering nonsense. "Here's a good boy!" "Look at you beautiful!" and so on.

"Well, he has got the mother impersonation down." Neville muttered to Harry, who covered his mouth with a hand in an effort to disguise his snort of laughter as a sneeze.

Soon the creature was fully free of its shell and began to take interest in the world around it. As in it began demanding food. It couldn't quite manage a roar yet, so it had to settle for coughing barks, still surprisingly loud though for all that it was no larger than a housecat. Hagrid quickly grabbed a bucket full of chopped up meat that he had hung from the ceiling, probably to keep it away from Fang and began feeding it. The dog in question had perked up slightly from its 'sweating rug' impersonation to regard the new arrival with deepest suspicion. He was still too hot to actually try and do anything about it though.

Hagrid was cheerfully talking the three through all the finer points of caring for a young dragon, as they were rooted to the spot in a sort of horrified fascination. On the one hand seeing a dragon hatch first hand was an experience they had never considered having at any point in their lives, and especially while they were still in school. On the other hand, they were rather too close for comfort. The idea of dragons was relatively normal to witches and wizards, with several reserves that you could visit where they were almost farmed. While still considered high quality, dragon products such as potion ingredients and heartstrings for wands were common merchandise. Dragonhide gloves were mandatory for first years after all. Yet there was still something about flying, fire-breathing carnivorous lizards that spoke straight to your animal instinct. The part that said 'you are prey, run and hide and hope it goes away'. It also didn't help that they, and especially Susan, had an idea how spectacularly illegal this was.

"So hopefully if I feed 'im enough of this he will think I'm his mum. They normally give 'em small animals for the firs' few weeks. Rabbits and such. Then they need to start huntin' for themselves. I am worried that he migh' get lonely. The mum normally lays a clutch of about a dozen, though not all will hatch. I am going to need to play with him so he learns the skills he needs. Oh, I nearly forgot." He stood up and reached into a cupboard for a bottle. As he opened it the students instinctively recoiled from the strong smell of spirits wafting out. "Dragons, yeh see, eat flammable material, wood and suchlike, in a sepr'te stomach. It gets turned inter this runny stuff, called dragon oil, which they keep in their flame glan' in their throat. Anyway, this little tike don' have any of that, so the mum gives some of hers. Darn difficult to get hold of. Useful stuff and can't get it from a dragon while it is still alive. Also don' travel well. To flammable, so I am trying with this stuff instead. Should burn nicely."

Finally screwing up her courage, Susan made a brave attempt to try and halt this forming disaster. "Um, Hagrid? What are you going to do with it?"

"What do yer mean?" The groundskeeper asked, perplexed.

"Well, you can't keep him here all the time. I assume he is going to get a lot bigger so you can't hide him forever. He will need space to grow and to make friends, and we are too close to the school here." She stated diplomatically.

"He won' hurt anyone. Look at him, he is so cute." Hagrid protested.

"He won't have to try and hurt anyone, he will grow to be the size of a house and can breath fire hot enough to melt stone." Harry attempted.

"He also has venomous fangs." Hagrid added happily, reaching over to open up the animal's mouth with one finger. "Look, they are already beginning to form." This just prompted signs of exasperation, and edging a bit further away. Still, they couldn't just leave this.

"You have talked to us about a lot of the other creatures in the grounds, like the Hippogryphs, and Kelpie in the lake." Hagrid nodded. "It is just like them. Even if they are not trying to hunt people, most people don't know how to handle them so they get hurt. It will be like that. But if a student gets hurt by-"

"Norbert, I am calling him Norbert." Hagrid interjected.

"-Norbert, then the ministry will blame him and you. They will send the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures after him and you could be sent to prison." Harry was sort of making this up as he went along, but Susan's frantic nodding from outside Hagrid's field of view reassured him that he wasn't too far off. "It is better to send him to the wild, or to a reserve where he will be among his own kind and with people who know how to look after him."

Hagrid looked so thoroughly miserable at this logic it was heart-breaking, but at least he seemed to have understood.

"I s'ppose. But I need to know he is going to a good home. An' he won' be ready to go anywhere soon, he is too small."

"Hagrid," Neville suggested, "if you have been helping out with the Care classes, surely you got to know some of the students, especially those who took it for NEWTs. Surely some of them went to work with magical creatures, and may be able to help, or know others who can."

"Maybe. There was that Charlie Weasley. Fascinated with dragons he was. Think he went to work in a dragon reserve in Romania or summat." Hagrid considered.

"Well, why don't you write to him then." Harry encouraged. "If nothing else he might know stuff about rearing a dragon that you might not find in books. There is a Weasley in our year, I don't know if they are related at all but if they are Neville could get him to get an address or pass the letter on if you need it."

"Ok, I'll think about it." Hagrid promised. Breathing a sigh of relief that they had at least made some progress, the three children beat a retreat back to the castle to recover from the severe shock they had just experienced. They agreed on the way not to mention this to anyone, not even their family. Even without Susan's Aunt being required by her job to arrest Hagrid if she heard, the fewer people who knew the better.


Over the rest of the term the three students managed to sneak away from the others, alone or as a group, to check up on Hagrid and his new 'pet' regularly. Once the initial shock wore off, there was something fundamentally thrilling about helping raise a baby dragon. They also told themselves that they needed to keep persuading Hagrid to send it away, although their protests did become less vehement over time.

Despite what one might think, hand-rearing a dragon was a surprisingly involved process. It certainly explained that most species only produced a clutch of eggs once a decade, if that. A dragon had almost no magic at birth, so it needed to develop all of its skills, flight and fire breathing being only the most obvious, as it grew. Normally the mother and tussles with its siblings would help stimulate these skills, so in her absence Hagrid and the students had to step in.

Hence why Harry was spending a cold February evening wrestling the small lizard. Well, not quite so small any more. Fed on a steady diet of meat soaked in industrial alcohol, Hagrid had been finally persuaded that brandy wasn't actually necessary and very expensive, Norbert had grown significantly. Within a month he had doubled his weight and was surprisingly strong given his gangly physique. It needed constant stimulation to build up the muscles in the right places, especially in the wings. While dragons, like thestrals, hippogryphs and gryphons were far too heavy to fly without magic, that magic was channelled through the wingbeats, so they had to be strong before he could ever leave the ground. Obviously as Harry was not another young dragon covered in tough scales, and he didn't want any hard to explain bite marks, he was wearing thick leather protective gear borrowed from the Care of Magical Creatures student supplies.

"Ah! Get off!" Harry yelled as the excitable bundle of scales and talons leapt onto his shoulder and sent him tumbling to the floor. "Help me!" He implored to Susan, Neville couldn't come that time. However she was too busy laughing at Harry's predicament. Hagrid wasn't there, making best use of his eager 'dragon sitters' to catch up on the backlog of his actual job. Eventually she relented and grabbed the tip of one of the wings and stretched it out. As well as being one of the exercises they were meant to be doing, this caused Norbert to rear up and screech, allowing Harry the room to scramble to his feet.

"Ooh, don't mind him. He is just a big baby." Susan cooed, shooting Harry a smirk.

"Alright them. Have him jump on you and see how you like it. I swear he gets heavier every day." He protested, grabbing the other wing and forcing Norbert to fully stretch and flex its muscles. At least until an unexpected jerk tore the wings clean out of the first years' grasps, causing them to stumble backwards. Then spinning with surprising agility it lunged for Susan's hand, clamping its jaws around a couple of fingers. Even through the thick dragonhide gauntlet she could feel the strength and a couple of defined points of pressure from its newly grown venomous fangs. She was suddenly very glad she was wearing them, otherwise she might have had to go to the hospital wing and answer some very awkward questions. When you are asked how you received a dragon bite on school grounds, there is no good answer.

This time it was Harry's turn to be utterly unsympathetic. He reached forwards and tickled Norbert under his chin. "Who's a good boy then. Come on, bite down nice and deep." He encouraged it.

By the time Hagrid got back from whatever he had been doing in the Forbidden Forest, all three youngsters were thoroughly exhausted. He cheerfully slapped them on the shoulder, offered them rock cakes, which they quickly declined, and sent them on their way. Much as he was grateful for their help he didn't want them missing their friends or homework on his account.

Besides, they were not the only students to know Hagrid and as Harry and Susan left they exchanged brief greetings with a couple of sixth year Care of Magical Creatures students who were just arriving for their shift. Next up was giving Norbert a bath, which as it was a dragon consisted of putting it in a specially designed giant cauldron and covering it in magical fire. Not only would this clean away any dirt and dead scales, but it would help temper its hide so by the time he was grown it would be highly resistant to magic and fire.

Interestingly it seemed that anyone who bothered to visit Hagrid by definition liked him and were enthralled enough by young Norbert to just join in, making this a near unique case of something at Hogwarts staying a secret. Sure, a lot of people knew something was going on at Hagrid's cabin, including almost certainly Professor Kettleburn, the Care of Magical Creatures teacher. However, given the fervent requests of their friends and what they knew about Hagrid, they evidently decided that ignorance, or at least feigned ignorance, was bliss.


Eventually though, as the term was drawing to a close, even the most enthusiastic was forced to admit that Norbert's time at Hogwarts would have to be drawing to a close. He was fast approaching the point when he could first breath fire, and once that happened any pretence as subtlety would be gone, probably along with Hagrid's hut.

Hagrid had been keeping up correspondence with Charlie Weasley for a while, who had been positively eager to be involved with a conspiracy about a dragon. The first plan was that Charlie and a few of his friends would fly into the country on brooms and pick up the dragon from the Astronomy Tower. Harry was even willing to volunteer sneaking Norbert through the school, although he didn't mention his invisibility cloak. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed as one of the sixth years pointed out that this plan was utterly insane and entirely unnecessary. Rather than try and sneak a crate full of dragon through the entire school at night, patrolled by teachers, prefects and ghosts, to the top of the one tower that was in regular use at nights, it was decided that Hagrid would wait for the start of the Easter Holidays when the school would be quieter and make the exchange at a secluded place in the grounds, out of sight of the castle.